The Mousebed

Hello, my name is Miki Kinomoto. This is what I look like :3

2011-12-07T08:52:00.000-08:00

I moved to Los Angeles six years ago, and I have never owned a car the entire time I've lived here. I generally don't mind – the Metro system isn't nearly as bad as everyone would lead you to believe. Plus, I get to ride a mobile people-watching station to work every day. I'm a huge fan of despair, misshapen people, poor decisions and odors of every stripe. The bus is a natural place for someone like me. It's a veritable Carnival of the Damned. Oh, and me. I'm not one of the bus people. I'm above the fray, right? I couldn't possibly be one of them. (I am totally one of them.)

When I get on the bus, I usually put on my headphones and zone out. It's me and my podcast. I make it a point to never interact with the people around me. If I do, I could change the outcomes of their lives. I need to remain neutral and observant. I am Uatu the Watcher, everyone around me is the Fantastic Four. This all changed on September 17, 2011, when I found a note from Miki Kinomoto.

Hello, my name is Miki Kinomoto. Thank you for reading this. I hope you will agree to my task. There are five element stones that has (sic) been scattered around the Land of Treasury. The fire stone, the ice stone, the water stone, the poisin (sic) stone, and the grass stone. Meet me at Lankershim Magnolia to learn more about the task.

This is what I look like. :3

So as I'm sure you could guess, this is just a drawing and a note that was probably left on the bus by a lonely teenager. Maybe even younger. I mean, the poor penmanship and spelling are a dead giveaway. I had fun making fun of “Miki Kinomoto” on Facebook, with her permanent blush and weirdly segmented legs. I think the biggest giveaway was on the back of the note, which was a drawing of a grid with the caption “Golden wafflez!!!” I went home and went on with my life.

((Hey.))
((Yeah?))
((What if Miki Kinomoto is real?))
((That's ludicrous.))
((I know, but come on. She's probably not real, but you live like, a mile away from Lankershim and Magnolia. You should at least check it out.))
((Ugh. I don't want to walk that far.))
((That's a terrible excuse. What about the adventure you could be having?))
((Adventure? What adventure? The adventure where I walk down there and there's no Asian girl and no Element Stones and just a Carl's Jr. and a Radio Shack? That adventure? I could have that adventure any day, thanks.))
((Yeah, but it could be real.))
((You are such an asshole. I'm going to bed.))

Like I said, I went on with my life. More or less. I thought about it every once in a while, but come on. It's not real. It's a page out of some idiot kid's notebook.

((Or is it?))
((Seriously, shut up.))

I was out just a few days later, walking down to the grocery store when I came across-

((The one at Lankershim and Magnolia?))
((Yes, and I'd thank you to stop interrupting me. I'm trying to tell the story here.))

Okay so I came across a pizza box with some writing on it, just discarded on the sidewalk. A note. For me.

I can't wait to see you.
I'm around
Carl's Jr.

((Oh, Carl's Jr? Like the one over on Lankershim and Magnolia?))
((Okay, okay. You win. I'm going there anyhow, what's the worst that could happen?))
((Fun and adventure!))
((Ugh.))

20 minutes later.

((Okay, I'm here. Look, there's nobody here. No Miki Kinomoto, no Element Stones, nothing. Just a Carl's Jr. and a Radio Shack, like I said.))
((Wait, what's that over there? It's a tiny Asian girl. Ask her if she's Miki!))
((Are you kidding? That's the world's worst idea.))
((Just do it.))
((Fine.))

- Uh, hi. Miki?
- Yes?
- (!!!) I found your note, I think.
- You did? Oh thank God. You're the last hope of my people. The Land of Treasury needs you.
- Really?
- Take my hand. We're going on an adventure.

((I told you so.))
((Okay, you win. Here we go.))

Josh Grimmer, last known photograph.

Literacy --> Mortality --> Dieting

2011-04-29T01:13:00.000-07:00

[NB: This essay was written a few nights ago. It's a little disjointed. My wife told me to edit and rearrange things so that they make more sense, but I'm having trouble with that. It all makes sense when I read it because, well, I wrote it.

About two years ago I posted something on Facebook about how I was sad that I wasn't a very good reader. I got a few suggestions, most of which sounded absolutely wretched as soon as I researched them. The one author that stood out was Joan Didion, some of whose essays I had read and enjoyed. Two years later, about a week ago, I found a couple of her books at a used book store on Franklin in Hollywood. Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Year of Magical Thinking. Seeing as these were the two most consistently praised Joan Didion books, and they were pretty cheap and both in great condition, I bought them. My wife works at a library and suggested that she could have just picked them up from work. She tells me that she is usually more likely to read a book from the library than one she has purchased; it has a deadline. I'm far more likely to read a book that I've bought because while I buy very few books, I feel like I must read them cover-to-cover to justify the expense.

My plan worked. I flew through Slouching Towards Bethlehem which, along with the last Harry Potter book, is now one of two books I have read in the past five years. I'm not particularly proud of the shallowness of my literary knowledge. Apparently if you want to write, the best thing to do is read. I'm not a great reader and, as you can see, I'm not a very prolific writer. Having finished Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I figured I should try to keep my reading momentum and start reading The Year of Magical Thinking. While Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays, mostly about California in the 1960's, The Year of Magical Thinking is presented as more of a diary, detailing the year-long period of extended grief surrounding the death of Joan Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne. He died of a sudden and (relatively) unexpected heart attack at dinner, sending his wife into a very understandable grief spiral. The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award, as well as getting nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. I'm a little more than halfway through and it's already the best-written book I have ever read, topping an admittedly short list.

The problem with reading a book like this is that now I am convinced that I will drop dead at any moment.

My wife will be left alone. We are currently childless, but that will, I'm sure, change. I'm not afraid to die because it might hurt or because I have a million regrets or because maybe there isn't a Heaven and maybe I won't get there if there is. I'm afraid to die because I love my wife so much. I love the children we don't have. The idea of them dealing with my death ruins me. I remember a few years ago my wife told me that she always wished I would die of something sudden, but not instantaneous. Something that would allow her time to mourn while I was alive, but not for too long. I feel like this is reasonable.

I still don't want to die.

I'm not old. I'll be 26 in 10 days. Everyone always tells me that I'm not old, that they're old. I understand that you're whatever age you are, and that's great. I've never been 26 before, so that's still scary for me. I'm not in great shape. My wife tells me she thinks I'm attractive, which is certainly possible. The problem is I can't really run anymore without nearly having a seizure. I don't play sports anymore. Frankly I was probably healthier when I was 20 and I smoked a pack and a half of Camels a day. At least I rode a bike. My wife and I don't own a car, and occasionally she makes waves about how we need to get one. While I agree on principle, I'm afraid that I'd gain 40 pounds in a month if I didn't have to walk everywhere. One day I'd park a little to far from the entrance to the supermarket and collapse during the walk up to the door.

John Gregory Dunne was 71 when he died. 71 is a pretty good time to go, if such a thing exists. That's a full life for most people. That's enough time to go to school, fall in love, have a career, accomplish a lot. I'd be happy to make it to 71. Still, a heart attack can happen to anyone, they say, at any time. My work pants are fitting a little tighter than they used to. I'm just getting older, right? With age comes expansion. No, I'm gaining weight. I eat like shit. The only “restaurant” within a mile of my apartment is a Taco Bell. The only delivery options are pizza and Chinese food. Not a lot of places are willing to deliver a Cobb salad. (My love of Cobb salads will probably also kill me. So what if it's got bacon and a hard-boiled egg? It's a salad, right? I'll live forever.) I need to get used to cooking my own meals, but if I'm in charge of what I eat, it'll probably just end up being a lifetime of pasta and microwaveable dinners and home-made Egg McMuffins. Those are the three things I'm good at making.

I'm trying to diet. I'm counting calories, a task made much easier by whatever law (municipal? state? federal?) requires restaurants to post caloric values. As it stands I only drink Diet Coke. When I do drink coffee or (increasingly often recently) tea, I never add milk or sugar. I've even started drinking more water. Apparently the healthiest weight for a man my height is about 80 pounds less than I weigh right now. I'd have to lose a limb, but if that's what it takes, I'm willing to give it a shot. I'd rather my wife be married to an amputee than become a widow before age 40. I'm trying really, really hard. It shouldn't be this difficult, though. I even like eating healthy foods. I was able to remain a fairly strict vegetarian for years. I just want my wife to have a healthy husband. I want my kids to have a healthy father. I would at least like to outlive my cat.

This endeavor is, at its base, vanity incarnate. I want to be attractive. I want to be healthy. I want women to find me desirable, even though I'm not available. I want to be a good looking, if venerable, corpse. I want to look better in five years than I do now. I want the second number on my gravestone to be as high as possible. I want to have to buy smaller clothing. I never want to be as fat as I was in my (hidden from view, tucked away in a closet, face down) wedding photos. I don't want to outlive my wife, though, because while I worry for her, I am ultimately selfish. I'm doing this for me. So that I can look in the mirror and at least see an attractive, if not particularly well-read person.

I have not even begun to discuss the health issues that their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, battled for that entire year.

I should know by now that I don't read for a reason.

God, Science and Narcissism

2010-08-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

Here's an actual conversation I've had with a co-worker.

--- So do you believe that possums are lucky?
--- No. What? No. Wait, what?
--- Y'know, possums. Do you think they're lucky? Because I saw a possum – the same possum, I think – in my yard three different times and my Chinese mailman tells me that possums are lucky.
--- I believe possums are gross and carry disease.
--- Well what animals do you believe are lucky?
--- Uh... none of them, I guess.
--- You... DON'T believe in Power Animals?

No, because that's ludicrous. I don't believe in ghosts or curses or luck or leprechauns or any of that dumb stuff. That's dumb stuff. For dummies. You idiots. Sheesh. I do, however, believe in God. Despite doing everything that people do that lead to atheism – being raised Catholic, majoring in physics, going to a state school in Massachusetts, I was even an altar boy for eight years in the molestiest area of Christendom – I'm still a believer. I'm no longer Catholic.

I'm terrible at meeting new people. My wife's solution is for me to start going to church. There are people at church, and we already have something in common. That'll serve as a nice starting point. Right? Yeah! I guess. Not really. No. Not even a little. I don't really like talking about my faith with other people. It's distasteful. It lies somewhere between “how much do you make?” at the dinner table and a dick-measuring contest at a funeral.

Sharing a common faith also seems like it's not exactly fertile ground for conversation, either.

--- So uh, how 'bout that Christ, huh?
--- Yeah. How cool was he?
--- Right!? Dying for our sins! Just for us!
--- I know! What a mensch!

*****

I resent being lumped in with other believers. I'm not one of those weirdos who things the Earth is only 5,000 years old and the Jews buried dinosaur bones in 1922. I think gay marriage should be legalized. I abhor the idea of prayer in schools. I hate – HATE – the Boy Scouts. I refuse to vote for somebody if their platform has anything to do with God.

I hate the constant shoving match between Religion and Science. Nothing gets my blood boiling quite like Kirk Cameron and company talking about bananas and how they're proof of God's endless love because they're the perfect food for humans. Aaaaaagh. The bananas we eat are engineered in a Godless laboratory by scientists. And they're delicious!

[Sidenote regarding engineered food: I love naturally engineered food. If you can plant a tree that naturally yields lemons and limes, I'm all for it. Although it'll be tough to figure out what's a lime and what's an unripe lemon. Or the other way around, I forget. It's the scary, creepy Monsanto genetic engineering that bothers me. It's evil and it's icky. My wife's mom's husband (you figure out the relation to me, I don't care to) once suggested I could move to Fresno and work for Monsanto. His heart was in the right place, I guess. I'm still not sure if I'm more repulsed by the idea of working for Monsanto or living in a city whose only major attraction is a bunch of underground trees. Which, to be fair, has a lot of naturally engineered miracles of science. There's a tree that bears like, six different kinds of fruit. Maybe there you've got a crossroads of God and Science. Kirk Cameron ought to look into that.]

*****

What it really comes down to, the more I think about it, is narcissism. What kind of narcissist are you? Are you the kind of narcissist who believes that there is a Benevolent Creator who watches over YOU and cares about YOU and every stupid thing that YOU do? Are you the kind of narcissist who believes that YOU are able to say with absolute certainty that YOU are able to say that there's nothing?

Truly, scientifically, intellectually, the place to start is agnosticism. I started off as an agnostic, then started leaning towards believing, then I became a believer. [Note: I was always a narcissist.] I'm not sure how or when or why. A lot of it came from my love of science. The massive, expansive universe. The same cold, unloving, randomness that most atheists say is the absence of God is the reason for my faith.

There was a discussion a couple of years ago with theoretical physicist Brian Greene. His belief is that, given an infinite universe, using a finite number of unique atoms, there must be an infinite number of exact duplicates of everything. There are an infinite number of Josh Grimmers out there, and an infinite number of Brian Greenes, and an infinite number of everythings and everyones and all kinds of stuff. It's like a cosmic version of the monkeys and typewriters theory. In this talk, he allows for the possibility of something, somewhere, being able to create and control its own miniature infinite universe. (Fucking noodle on that phrase. Miniature infinite universe. Amazing.) He acknowledges the fact that we – our universe – may be controlled by such an entity. This, more than anything, affirmed my faith. Not bananas. Hard (theoretical) science. Maybe I'm tailoring the facts to fit my beliefs. That's what everyone does. We're all narcissists here, we're on the Internet.

A real imaginary conversation with an imaginary real person.

2010-08-05T18:57:00.000-07:00

The Internet, as we all know, is now little more than porn, email and social networking. Well, guess what – those are the only three things I used it for anyhow. Recently Prince declared the Internet dead. Over. Passe. Yesterday's news. Old hat. Six boats – whatever your preferred expression might be. I disagree, if for no other reason than Twitter. Twitter has given me so much over the past few months. Firstly, foremostly, and mostly importantly, Twitter has given me htwoshop.

Three or four months ago, htwoshop started following me. I'm not sure where he came from. I mean, Japan. He came from Japan, and he's probably still there. I'm just not wholly sure how he came to find me. He speaks – at best – horribly broken English. Maybe he's just reading my posts in order to work on his English? He's always tweeting about language. Anyhow – here's what's important: I love htwoshop, and I'm pretty sure he loves me, too. Whenever I'm sad, I like to read his tweets. They keep me sane and grounded.

---

@htwoshop Good morning! My name is htwoshop!,,How are you?

@JoshGrimmer Not great, htwoshop. Not great. I just feel... I dunno – empty. You know how sometimes you're eating something super hot and you burn your tongue, and for the next few days you have trouble tasting things? I've had that feeling for a few weeks now, off and on. I know I should be happy – things are going well. I'm just feeling sort of dead, you know?

@htwoshop Rebarezzi is teko~~! On fx! I want to bictoriy.Becouse happy?

@JoshGrimmer Exactly! Happy. I want to be happy. Speaking of “Rebarezzi is teko~~!,” FX has some pretty solid shows right now. Big fan of “Damages” and “It's Always Sunny,” and “Louie” is really coming into its own. *sigh* I don't even really feel like I have time for TV anymore, htwoshop. If I don't have to go to work, I seldom get out of bed before noon, and if I do it's only to eat or go to the bathroom. I just feel like I've hit my nadir, man. I'm about 90 percent miserable.

@htwoshop 10pa-sent! no no no.

@JoshGrimmer I suppose you could look at it that way. I'm 10 percent happy. You've got a point. I think maybe I should write more – writing usually makes me pretty happy.

@htwoshop Today blog title is 「every day 芋」

@JoshGrimmer Every day seems like a bit much. Maybe a couple times a week?

@htwoshop End result is 30 pa-sent plus!!

@JoshGrimmer Exactly! I'd be well on my way at that point.

@htwoshop Net cafe now! I am hangry.But but but sleepy~~~＆buzy!...

@JoshGrimmer Well, I won't keep you, htwoshop. Thanks for being so friendly.

@htwoshop Tomorrow is mode change! dedede~~.But no change's good action! ok?

@JoshGrimmer Right! Starting tomorrow, I'll write more. Hey, htwoshop? Uh, I don't know how to say this, but... Uh... I love you.

@htwoshop..........なう。and I love you 弾き終わった

You'd think I'd love a play about hanging yourself to get an erection. Hm.

2010-08-02T22:43:00.001-07:00

I feel like I should begin by saying that I love my wife. I love my wife, she's a great actress, and she's not the problem here.

I spent my Saturday night watching the worst play I've ever seen in my entire life. Ever, ever, bar none.

My wife is the type of person who acts. This is fine. I mean, without actors, movies would be, you know, boring and stuff. And I mean, who'd be on TV? I guess there'd still be sports and stuff, but I need my Two Point Five Men (I believe that is the name of the show.) My wife is a pretty good actor. I feel like the more I say it, the less true it sounds, but she really is great.

My wife is so good at acting, she was just in two plays at once. Both at the same theatre, and with the same director. Good for her, right? She likes acting, and she gets to act. A lot. She also doesn't have to see her husband, which is a nice little side effect. It was nice for me, too. Not having my wife around really gave me a lot of time to sit down at the computer and get writing, you know? Just be really fucking prolific. Wait, what? I've only written two things in the past couple months? What the fuck have I been doing then? Oh, right. Work and Twitter. Well, you know, those 140 characters add up.

Anyhow, back to the play. Waiting for Godot. For weeks and weeks, my wife would come home from rehearsal and shout something along the lines of “I HATE MY DIRECTOR AND THE OTHER ACTORS ARE TERRIBLE AND THIS PLAY IS FUCKING AAAAGRHARHARHRHGH.” Pretty much every night. She would eventually regain her composure and ask me when I was planning on coming to see the play. The answer is never.

Some fun facts about this particular production of Waiting for Godot.

--- Waiting for Godot was written for a cast of five men. Apparently Samuel Beckett so loathed the idea of women being cast in this play that he attempted to make it illegal to do so. Since my wife is a woman, it can be safely assumed that he failed in this particular legal endeavor. This did not, however, stop the Beckett Estate from contacting the director and trying to put a stop to the production. Didn't work. Too bad. According to my wife, there was one night where only two people showed up. Apparently the director and Vladimir (using character names because I don't know anybody's real name) decided that somehow the Beckett people went around and started a whisper campaign against this particular production, scaring crowds away. Or, it got no publicity and sucked. Either way.

--- The young lady who played Pozzo is a vegetarian. There's a pretty important part in Act One where Pozzo eats some chicken and Estragon eats the bones. After days of jerking the cast around, deciding whether or not she could even do the play at all, Pozzo finally found out that she'd have to eat chicken. She flipped out and almost quit the play. Now, I was a vegetarian for eight years. I totally get where she's coming from. She doesn't want to even handle the meat or the bones or whatever. I'm back to eating meat, but I still don't like handling meat or bones or whatever. I'm not going to crucify her for having convictions. She's still an idiot for not reading the play before auditioning. Or, you know, being familiar with a famous play. More on Pozzo later.

--- I have a feeling nobody went to the show because of the flier. The image they use is atrocious:

It looks like an ad for the discount Pink Floyd laser light show over at the Hollywood Laserium Cybertheater. The other major problem I have with the flier is the horrible selection of quotes. “The greatest play of the 20th Century ignites the 21th!!!” and “A mind-expanding experience!” Sorry guys, but Inception was easily the most mind-expanding experience of the Twenty-Oneth Century.

I really, really didn't want to go see this play. At least my wife knew it. My only hope was to work every Friday and Saturday night for five straight weeks, that way I'd have an excuse. Things were cruising along nicely until Saturday night. I had the night off, and it was closing night for the play. I couldn't not go. My wife gave me directions from work to the theatre, and even pre-bought me a ticket. No escape.

By the time I got to the theatre, I was exhausted. Waking up at 6am, working nearly nine hours at the Dream Factory, never, ever sleeping – all of these things add up to a very tired Josh Grimmer. By the time I made it into the theatre, found my seat and began to wait for the play to start, I had fallen asleep. My hope was I'd be the only person to show up, and they'd cancel. Sadly not the case. I was startled awake by the director, Ross, making the pre-show announcement. He comes out, tells everyone they're there to see Waiting for Godot. Good start. Then he tells everyone where the bathroom is. It's behind the stage, and to the left. More on the bathroom – and Pozzo – later. Instead of telling everyone to hold their pee until intermission, he said “If you need to go during the show, that means you'll have to walk through the stage! Maybe our actors will interact with you! The magic of theatre in Los Angeles!” This, apparently, was not what he was told to say. Luckily nobody got up during the show to pee. He had to be reminded from backstage to tell everyone to turn off their phones. It was like a visit from Arclight Petey, but somehow even less funny.

---Act One---

Lights off, curtain drawn, all of that. Lights up, and holy shit Vladimir is loud and bad at acting. He's shouting, mugging, prancing and gallivanting about. At one point he leans forward, into the first row and shouts in the face of the people right in front. Like, three inches away, if that. A few minutes later, they walked out. Then Pozzo and Lucky make their grand appearance. The most tragic kind of overacting is when the actor decides to go over the top in an attempt to disguise the fact that they don't quite understand the material. Pozzo was very, very guilty of this. Oh, and she was dressed like a Droog. That still wasn't the worst thing about her. I was sitting in the sixth of eight rows. I was tired and weary and glassy-eyed. I could still clearly see her nipple piercings beneath her shirt.

Now, I'm not the mayor of Squaresville, Daddyo. I like a good nipple piercing. (Nothing bigger than a B, by the way. Looks kinda weird.) I like tattoos, weird hair, crazy make-up, whatever. If you alter your body in a way that makes you more interesting to look at, then I'm game. However, I assure you that your character doesn't call for pierced nipples. I'm not saying you should take them out, just, you know, wear a bra.

Side note: One of the problems with Ross telling the audience that the play might take a turn for the interactive if someone went to the potty was it gave me a nigh-irresistible urge to heckle. I didn't, but boy did I want to. “We could hang ourselves!” “PLEASE DO.”

In addition to Vladimir screaming at the people in the front, Lucky has a giant screaming monologue that he delivered to the last person in the front row. It was awful. Just awful. Nobody else walked out, but it was really fucking uncomfortable. Apparently Vladimir and Lucky were asked by the other actors to step back a few feet for their screaming, but they refused. THIS IS THEATRE, MAN. THEY JUST HAVE TO FUCKING DEAL WITH IT. Yeah, except they paid you money.

---Intermission---

Lights off, lights on, intermission. I made a bee-line for the bathroom. As I got there, Pozzo was leaving. She had the same look on her face that you get when you hit a seagull with your car. She had shit this bathroom up like nobody's business. After I had done my business, I made it a point to leave the seat up so that it was perfectly clear that I wasn't the source of that horrifying stink. Back to my seat. Back to sleep.

---Act Two---

I woke up about five minutes into Act Two, when Vladimir started screaming again. No rest for the patron of the arts, I guess. The thing that bothered me the most about this particular performance was the remaining audience member in the front row. He was laughing and guffawing with with an intensity normally reserved for Gallagher shows. He was loving this shit and snapping pictures with great joy. I spent much of Act Two drifting in and out of sleep, checking text messages (bad patron!), and sighing loudly. I have no idea how women fake orgasms – I can barely fake watching a play. As Pozzo and Lucky roll around blindly on the floor, Vladimir screams and Estragon makes snide remarks, I could do little to keep myself from screaming and running out.

Finally, the play ended. Turns out, the guy who loved the play was a repeat customer. He spent a lot of time talking to Pozzo after the show, looking at her nipples. To be fair, I'd do the same if given the chance. The people who walked out during Act One, right after Vladimir shouted in their faces? Personal friends of Vladimir, who came at his behest. My wife thanked everybody for a singularly awful experience, and we left. On the way home we talked about how bad the play was, how much she hated Pozzo's stench, how Vladimir spits when he talks, and how much of his spit landed on my wife's face. She was given a check in the amount of fifty dollars for her efforts. Whoooo.

---

I really do love my wife. I think she's just fantastic, at pretty much anything. Maybe not dancing. Okay, she's a terrible dancer. But she is – she really is – a great actress, and I'm willing to support her in any way I can. Unless it involves going hours out of my way to see a play that we both know is going to be awful. I don't know how many more plays I can take. I really do try to care, I just have such a hard time. When she did A Company of Wayward Saints, I saw that probably five or six times. It was a great play, she was great in it and – most importantly – it was six blocks away from our apartment. I just honestly can't remember the last time I went to one of my wife's plays and had a really good time. I want to be a good husband, I just don't think I have the energy to see another shitty play where some guy screams about his prostate.

At least it was revealed afterward that I had been snuck in, and my wife didn't have to give Ross eight dollars. Gotta feel good about that.

They've gone and taken him away, boo-hoo

2010-06-21T22:50:00.000-07:00

Today, just now, like 20 minutes ago, I learned that the Dr. Demento Show went off the air on June 6, 2010. You may recall from a previous post that I grew up listening to the Dr. Demento Show every Sunday night. It was like church, but funnier. That's not to say that church wasn't funny, it just wasn't “ha-ha” funny. I haven't listened to the Dr. Demento Show since I was probably 14. It hasn't been syndicated anywhere I've lived since then. For all intents and purposes, this show died for me over a decade ago.

Still, I'm crushed.

Radio is a personal medium. It's piped into your head. You can experience it with your eyes closed. It becomes very intimate, especially late at night. It's you, the DJ, the music and the static. Sorry if I'm getting a little purple in my writing. I love radio. I'm a product of the radio. I was barely parented, and I didn't get a TV in my room until well into high school. Radio was all I had. Radio and books – but I can barely write, nevermind read.

The death of a radio show is something that affects me deeply. The thought that another two hours of broadcast time can be chewed up by a glorified iPod Shuffle makes me really miserable. Losing a radio show is like losing a friend. A friend who talks to you – You – every night before bed.

Podcasting has taken the place of the syndicated radio. I listen to podcasts before bed, on my commute, when I'm cleaning. Even when Adam Carolla had his nationally-syndicated morning radio show, I'd wait until the show was over, download the podcast and listen to that. No commercials, no breaks, no interruptions. Sadly, I'm fairly certain that that behavior is what's killing terrestrial radio. I listen to the podcast of Tony Kornheiser's Washington DC local radio show. They pay the bills by doing live commercial reads and incorporating them into the show. Next time I'm in the DC area, I plan to stop at Bagel City at 12119 Rockville Pike. I can call them at 301 231 8080. I've heard that address and phone number every weekday for about three years now, and damned if it doesn't make me want to eat their home-made rye bread and beautifully decorated smoked fish or deli platters.

---

I learned about the passing of the Dr. Demento Show from an interview I heard today on NPR. It was really, really, really fucking depressing. Dr. Demento sounded, at best, defeated. I was listening to a nearly 70-year-old man being interviewed about how he was more or less forced into retirement. It was like watching the clip of Groucho performing Lydia the Tattooed Lady on the Dick Cavett show – it looked like it took Groucho a week to gin up the energy to perform a song that was basically muscle memory. Similarly, at the end of the interview, Dr. Demento signs off with his standard “Stay deeeeeeeee-mented!” But it wasn't the same. It was sad.

The Dr. Demento Radio Show is dead, but the Doctor is still in. He will continue to record a weekly show, more or less a podcast, available to stream for a fee. I'd like to encourage everybody to do that. Stream the show, give your money to a quality product.

Sadly, I don't think I'm going to do the same. It's not a matter of being cheap or broke. I'll pay to be entertained, and the price is low enough that even though I'm kinda-sorta broke, I can certainly afford it once in a while. The real problem is I just haven't got the inclination to sit at my computer and stream the show. I've been spoiled by the convenience of podcasts. I want to listen to it WHERE I WANT TO BECAUSE I AM UNREASONABLE.

The other thing is... well, I'm... a grown up. I'm not sure the wacky noises and squeaky horns and Whimsical Will's Demented News speaks to me like it did when I was in middle school. In fact, I know it doesn't. I still love the music. I still love the Doctor. I'm just not sure I love the show.

Fuck, I'm old.

Stay deeeeeee-mented.

Dr. Demento's interview with NPR can be heard here. The written article can be read here.

Everything in its Right Place

2010-06-07T12:40:00.000-07:00

I'm awful at keeping my apartment clean. Things pile up – laundry, garbage, dishes, empty Diet Coke cans, old magazines. I'm pretty sure I'm not a hoarder, as I'm not against throwing stuff away. I just never really get around to throwing stuff away. More accurately, I hate cleaning. I hate the act of gathering all my crap in a pile, deciding what to keep, what to throw out, what to put on the bookshelf, what to put in the closet, what to put in the desk. This is made doubly difficult by the fact that I live with another person. I'm okay with putting my stuff away, but for some reason I'm loathe to put my wife's books back on the bookshelf – what if she can't find them? What if she doesn't think to look for Catch-22 on the bookshelf? I have stupid anxieties, right? This week I decided I'd had enough, by which I mean I had enough time off of work that if I didn't clean the apartment, I'd probably kill myself from the boredom.

---

Dollars and Cents

The incredible thing about cleaning – we'll say once a year, maybe? - is that you find a lot of spare change just hanging out all over the place. Buried under papers on your desk. Underneath your kitchen table. Batted under the couch by your fucking cat. All kinds of places. In the time it took me to clean my apartment, I became probably about seven dollars richer. I'm going to head down to a Coinstar machine tomorrow so I can trade all of that money in for a soy latte or something. I feel that I have earned a moment of idiotic spending.

Like Spinning Plates

Things I have too many of: Cups, pots, pans, coffee mugs (we don't own a fucking coffee maker!).
Things I only have two of: Full-sized plates. This needs to be changed. (What I am saying is send me your plates.)

Scatterbrain

I live in a really small apartment. Granted, it's a pretty big really small apartment, but still. It shouldn't take me eight hours to clean it, even if I only clean it once a year. The problem is I have so much other shit to do instead of clean. Important shit like check my email then my Facebook because I got an email saying somebody commented on something I said on my Facebook page and then since I'm looking at that I may as well check my Twitter to see if somebody said something funny because I don't want to miss that and hey since I'm already here I should check out espn.com to do some scoreboard watching boy I hope the Yankees are losing and hey you know what would help me clean is if I made an apartment cleaning playlist in iTunes what should I listen to I've been listening to a lot of Sonic Youth lately maybe I should put something else on but what else is there oh forget it I'll just go and clean again hey look there's a book underneath this pile of clothing and oh man I was using a movie ticket as a bookmark boy I remember when I saw the Brothers Bloom man that movie is really good I wonder when Rian Johnson's next movie is coming out I should check Wikipedia (and then I pass out.)

Go to Sleep

My wife always tells me that the first thing you should do when you get out of bed is put on a pair of shoes. That way, you won't be tempted to go back to bed and waste the rest of your day. Guess what – it takes me less than six seconds to kick my shoes off, and about half as long to fall asleep. The real key to not going back to bed when I start cleaning is to do some laundry, and make a big pile of it on my bed. That way, if I want to take a nap, I at least have to fold my laundry and put it away first. It's like that move that people do where they set their watch five minutes fast so they trick themselves into thinking they're always running late so they'll show up to things earlier. For some reason that never worked for me – oh wait, that's because I'm not so stupid that I don't remember that I set my watch five minutes ahead. Sheesh.

Fake Plastic Trees

One of the many benefits of having a nice, clean apartment is I can really take a look at things and figure out how I want to decorate it. I probably should have thought of this three and a half years ago, when I moved in. Whatever. Right now, there are four living things in this apartment. Me, my wife, Peepopo the Unhelpful Cat and a nice little bamboo plant named Julianne Wiebalk. Now that the whole apartment (minus the two boxes of Goodwill stuff and the area underneath my wife's bedside table) is clean, I'm thinking it would be pretty nice to have some more plants in here. I'm thinking maybe some kudzu.

My Iron Lung

My mom smoked when she was pregnant with me, so I was born with asthma. I more or less outgrew my asthma, but I missed not being able to breathe, so I started smoking cigarettes. I quit smoking a few years ago, but luckily I can recreate the feeling of smoking all the time without the fun of actually smoking. All I have to do is clean anything in my apartment – a cloud of dust, hair, pet dander, old thumbtacks, dirt, whatever, shoots high into the air, filling my lungs with horrible death - all without any of the nasty side effects of smoking, like relaxing, consuming nicotine, or getting to set something on fire three inches away from my face.

---

Apparently the easy part of cleaning your apartment is actually getting it clean. The hard part – according to my crackpot wife – is keeping it clean. I figure if the easy part is cleaning it, and the hard part is maintaining, then why not just forgo keeping it clean? Skip the hard part, go right back to the easy part? I'm sure if I explain this to my wife, she'll see things my way.

The Great Big Mousebed 2010 Summer Movie Preview!

2010-05-26T17:29:00.000-07:00

I work at a movie theatre, and as such I'm expected to have thoughts about the upcoming summer movie schedule. I don't.

---

MAY 28

Sex and the City 2 – Unpleasant women crowing shrewishly about shoes and dick length. An instant classic.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – Is nice movie, bro? Action movie?

JUNE 4

Get Him to the Greek – Finally, a vehicle for Jonah Hill to do some gross-out humor.

Killers – See, Ashton Kutcher uses guns and Katherine Heigl doesn't. Hoping for a Brandon Lee in The Crow style incident.

Marmaduke – Sorry, I'm holding out for the live-action adaptation of Heathcliff.

Splice – [INSERT JOKE ABOUT FAILED GENETIC EXPERIMENT VIS-A-VIS ADRIEN BRODY'S NOSE]

JUNE 11

The A-Team – Steven J. Cannell presents: The Losers!

The Karate Kid – Pat Morita's still got it, and I heard he's doing all his own stunts in this one.

JUNE 18

Jonah Hex – Josh Brolin in a western, eh? I knew No Country For Old Men was missing something, and that something was Megan Fox.

Toy Story 3 – Promises to be the best Tim Allen movie since Wild Hogs.

JUNE 25

Grown Ups – David Spade, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, Adam Sandler, Kevin James – So who plays the title character?

Knight & Day – See, Tom Cruise uses guns, and Cameron Diaz doesn't. Hoping for a Katherine Heigl in Killers style incident

JULY 2

Avatar: The Last Airbender – Sheesh, it took James Cameron 15 years to make the first one, and he's crapping out a sequel in six months. Can't be as good as the original – avoid.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse – I'm pretty sure in this one the sad girl gets tag-teamed by a sad Frankenstein and a sad mummy. Look for a cameo from Abbott and Costello!

JULY 9

Despicable Me – The Sarah Palin Story. [NOTE TO SELF: REPLACE SARAH PALIN PLACEHOLDER JOKE WITH SOMETHING THAT ISN'T FUCKING HACK]

Predators – Finally, the definitive documentary about Nashville's unlikely appearance in the 2004 Stanley Cup Playoffs.

JULY 16

Inception – A psychological thriller featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. All I know is it's a mental hospital. For the criminally insane.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice – The kid from She's Out of My League gets a bunch of buckets to mop his boss' house. The guy from Knowing is unhappy.

JULY 23

Dinner for Schmucks – Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis, Steve Carell – why, I haven't seen so many sure-thing comedians were in a movie together since Year One!

Ramona and Beezus – Double Fudge this.

Salt – Starring Angelina Jolie as a shitty joke about Lot's wife.

JULY 30

Cats and Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore – Not sure if I should spend my talking CG dog movie money on this or Marmaduke. Aw, hell – I'll splurge on both!

Charlie St. Cloud – Zac Efron in a surprising role as the weather girl on the DeKalb Channel 4 Action News team. Is that Oscar buzz I hear? (Yes.)

AUGUST 6

The Other Guys – The long-anticipated return of Anne Heche to the Silver Screen! Also, Will Ferrell uses guns.

Step Up 3-D – I'm hoping this will serve as the death knell of either dance movies or 3-D movies. Since it probably won't be both, I'll settle for dance movies.

AUGUST 13

Eat Pray Love – The remarkable true story of a bunch of shitty platitudes.

The Expendables – Should I wear my ill-fitting TAPOUT thermal or my ill-fitting AFFLICTION t-shirt? Oh wait, I'll just jack off into my own mouth – less humilating.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – Michael Cera can finally spread his wings as an actor in this role, an unassuming iGeneration 20-something who falls in love.

AUGUST 20

Lottery Ticket – Any day that I don't watch Ice Cube act is a good day.

Nanny McPhee Returns – Here's the cast, first names only: Emma, Maggie, Ralph (pronounced “rafe”), Maggie, Rhys, Ewan. Mon dieu! So many French people!

Takers – This is the companion piece to that film where Liam Neeson tries to find his daughter in France, told from the perspective of the kidnappers.

Untitled Vampire Spoof – I'm thinking they'll just settle on “Vampire Movie.”

AUGUST 27

Going the Distance – Cake documentary, right? Gotta be.

The Last Exorcism – I'm hoping this will be half as good as The Final Sacrifice.

Piranha 3D – It took what, nine months for the sequel to Avatar, but 29 years for James Cameron to make the follow-up to Piranha 2? What gives?

---

Tune in three months from now, when I'll be reviewing the holiday lineup. Until next time, this is Josh Grimmer saying see you at the movies. (I'll be the one in the uniform.)

And I thought I didn't like him!

2010-05-21T18:33:00.000-07:00

Now it's over, I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want
Or I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do.

They Might Be Giants - Dead

The other day I got a call from my wife. She told me that one of her friends had died. Later, we found out it was suicide. She took it fairly well, suffering only a minor, semi-unrelated breakdown the next morning when her boss told her she needed to buy new work shoes. She and another friend who knew the deceased decided they ought to go out tonight and have dinner and discuss his life, and maybe try to figure out why he killed himself. This, on its own, is fine. The real problem is that she wanted me to come too. I'm okay with death – it's strangers I'm not great around. Social anxiety isn't a huge problem with the dead.

While listening to my wife and her friend talking about a guy I met one time – and am unlikely to meet again – I was stuck with my own thoughts. Chief among them is the fact that nobody close to me has ever died. No suicides, no freak accidents, no overdoses. Only a couple grandparents with whom I was never actually close. I think maybe the two deaths that really got to me were George Harrison and Mitch Hedberg. George had cancer, so it was a matter of time, but Mitch Hedberg came like a hammer to the skull. It was easily the nicest day Bridgewater had seen in months. Everybody had taken their couches out of their dorm rooms and put them on the lawn. People were tossing around frisbees and footballs, there were a couple of Wiffle Ball games being played. Somebody had turned their stereo speakers out the window so we could listen to the radio broadcast of the Red Sox game. I got the call from my friend (later girlfriend, then fiancee, then wife), who told me that Mitch Hedberg had died. I had the unenviable task of telling everybody else in my dorm. Party over.

That's basically it, though. I've never had to deal with death. Not the deaths of people, at least. I've had a few pets die on me, in various sad ways. Not a lot of fun, but I can't imagine it's worse than the death of a friend or loved one. Again, I got to thinking – whose death would really fuck me up? Really nobody in my family. Maybe my dad or brothers, but more because if my dad died, that would mean my mom would have to take care of them, and that's too awful to contemplate. My brothers, of course, are just so young that their deaths would be sad and tragic.

Who else though? My wife, certainly. A few of my friends, sure. Probably a dozen or so? If that? I feel like I should care more, and about more people. Is my problem that I'm too much of a solipsist for the deaths of others to affect me? Then again, if I were truly a solipsist that would serve to explain why nobody I know has ever died. I'm keeping all of you alive through sheer force of self-absorption. I'd like to think that my relative calm about death comes from faith in an afterlife, but I never really think about that. I figure I'll worry about the afterlife when I'm there. If my friends and family are there too, then great. I want to be affected by death. I feel like there's something inside every truly good person that aches as a result of a loss of life. If I don't feel that ache, does that mean I don't care for my fellow man? Does that mean I'm fundamentally broken?

Yeah, probably.

---

For the first hour of the dinner, my wife and her friend talked about the deceased. I picked at my shepherd's pie, making a point of eating slowly so I wouldn't run out of food, my excuse to not talk. Later, I was chided into joining the conversation. We talked about other stuff. Living people. Twitter. Anything but the dead guy. The fact came up that neither my wife nor myself own a car – or even a bicycle. My wife's friend told us that her boyfriend sells bikes, and even recently sold one to the dead friend. I refrained from exclaiming “Hey, free bike!” and my wife decided not to make a joke about how he killed himself because he couldn't make the payments. I'm happy to know that if somebody close to me does die, I'll be able to write some really solid material for the eulogy.

The Magic Number

2010-04-15T03:38:00.000-07:00

First and foremost, I'd like to thank all of you for coming here tonight. When I sent out the e-vites, I was sure that I'd get quite a response – but I'm so thrilled that nearly five hundred of you came out to this parking lot on such a cold night. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It warms my heart to know that even in this electronic age, that so many people – many of you strangers to each other – are all so willing to meet up in order to find the definitive answer to one of life's oldest questions.

Now before I get too caught up in my own ego, I know we're not exactly curing cancer here. Regardless, I think that our findings here tonight will put an end to decades of speculation. Years from now, March 23, 2004 will be remembered as the night that they – and in this case, “they” is us, you, me, all of us – the night that they finally figured out EXACTLY how many Arby's roast beef sandwiches can fit inside Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Memorial Skating Rink.

I know that this project will come to fruition through a significant financial cost to all involved. Obviously it's not a coincidence that this was planned concurrently with Arby's new “40 roast beef sandwiches for six dollars” ad campaign. I figure between the lot of us, it shouldn't cost more than a few hundred bucks each to get this done. Now, before we get started here, I'm sure you've all got a few questions. Please, raise your hands and when I call on you, state your name so that we can all get acquainted. Yes, you – sir. In the green knit hat. Your name and your question?

--- Uh, yeah. Well, my name is Chip Dipson. My question is this: are we planning on filling the entire rink with delicious Arby's roast beef sandwiches, or do you have a plan to say, cover the entire floor with them, and figure out exactly how tall the rink is at its highest point and do some calculations?

Excellent question, Chip. And quite a name, I must say. Well, you've nailed it on the head. We're going to cover the entire surface of the floor with sandwiches, and then yes, we'll stack the sandwiches from center ice to the ceiling. It shouldn't take much more than a basic understanding of geometry and algebra to puzzle out the rest. Next question? You, miss, in the partially-charred ski parka.

--- Hi there! Soooo, I'm Megan O'Halloran, and I was wondering what, exactly, we plan to do after getting the sandwiches in there? Are we planning on eating them? Or donating them to charity or something? Maybe transport them to a nearby soup kitchen?

Good question, little lady. Most of the sandwiches we'll be using will end up being more or less inedible, due to the buns soaking up the water from the ice. The remaining sandwiches will be auctioned off for charity, with all proceeds going to Arby's House. A couple more before we get started. Yes, sir. You appear to be an albino. Your question?

--- Well, first of all, yes. I'm an albino. Second, my name is Alabaster Stitz, and I'd like to know if we plan on using the sandwiches as they're given to us, or if we plan on unwrapping each sandwich before adding them to the count.

Another good question! Well, Mr. Stitz, we're going to be unwrapping each of the sandwiches. You'd think that those wrappers wouldn't make much of a difference, but they'll add up and alter our calculations. After we're done, I plan to take the collection of wrappers and auction them off for charity, with all proceeds going to Arby's House. Last one before we begin. You, in the stripey shirt.

--- Hello, my name is Jean-Claude Impormable. I had one question, but I think I have another now. First, what happens if the police arrive? How do you plan on dealing with the long arm of the law? My second question is, well, what exactly is Arby's House? I've never heard of such a charity.

Two good questions. I'll answer them in reverse order. You ever heard of Ronald McDonald House? Well, Arby's House is very similar. They're devoted to making sure that the less privileged children of North America have access to roast beef sandwiches. And second, how easy do you think it'll be to get Johnny Law off our backs when we offer them delicious Arby's roast beef sandwiches in exchange for turning a blind eye on tonight's activities? Now without further ado, let's get to it!

~SIX HOURS LATER~

Phew! I can't believe we did it, guys! Things were a bit touch-and-go in a few parts, but damned if we didn't get all those sandwiches in there! Now before we gather up the remaining edible sandwiches and the thousands of wrappers to be auctioned for charity, I'd like to give thanks where thanks are due. First, of course, to our main engineer, Professor Dip Dobson. Without your efforts, I'm certain we'd never have been able to determine our asses from our elbows, nevermind calculate how many Arby's roast beef sandwiches could fit in the Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Memorial Skating Rink. I feel a round of applause is in order! Professor Dobson, you've helped us all immeasurably, and you deserve great thanks and gratitude.

Now, a few other people I'd like to thank for their efforts and support before I reveal the final number. All the thanks in the world to my beloved wommyn lifepartner Donna. Without her support – both emotional and financial – I'd never have been able to draw up the plans for this project. Other people who helped include Kerrin Durrigan, Sheila Johnson, Graham Larceny, Kennir Dunnigar, Blixa Bargeld and of course, Hapax Legomenon. Now, without further ado, the moment you've all been waiting for. Dip, the envelope please... the number... of Arby's roast beef sandwiches... that can fit inside the Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Memorial Skating Rink... is...

Three million, five-hundred and fifty-six thousand, two-hundred forty-eight!

Missed connections, crossed wires and total delusion

2010-03-22T16:26:00.000-07:00

The famous person wears the same size water skis as me
She's got three cars, as many years I've lived in this city
Her hair is blonde and mine is brown, they both start with a “b”
But when the phone inside her ribcage rings, it's not for me.

They Might Be Giants – The Famous Polka

The other day I went to Amoeba Records over on Sunset and Cahuenga. This wouldn't be particularly notable but for the fact that the cute girl behind the counter totally started flirting with me. She told me she liked my shirt – a Boston Celtics shirt, if you were wondering – and I told her she was wearing a very pretty dress. It matched her strawberry blonde hair. She gave me a particularly lurid look as she was taking the anti-theft devices off of my CDs. I couldn't help but notice the slight remnants of a regional accent. She told me she moved to Los Angeles from Austin about five years ago – I told her I moved from Massachusetts four years ago. We talked about how we preferred the weather out here over our native climates. After a few brief but blissful minutes, the transaction had ended. She put my CDs in a bag and met me at the end of the counter. I took it from her, and she held it for what seemed like ages. I thanked her, left the store, and in an instant our romance was over.

Let's look at the facts:
1: She was really cute.
2: She told me I was wearing a nice shirt.
3: When I told her she looked good, she didn't recoil in horror.
4: She's grew up in Austin, I grew up about an hour and a half south of Boston. Those two cities rhyme.
5: We were talking about the weather, and you know the old saying – Talking about the weather leads to talking about breakfast.

These five facts provide absolute proof that this girl wanted more than anything to run away with me to a place where we could sit and drink coffee and gaze longingly at each other. I've been combing the missed connections sections of LA Weekly and Craigslist in an effort to find true love.

Except not really. This girl wasn't flirting with me. She was being a pleasant person. She was probably interested in me in the most basic sense. I wanted to make a purchase, she was being paid to facilitate that. We will probably not be friends, we will certainly never be romantically involved, and quite possibly may never meet again – nevermind the fact that I'm married.

The barista isn't flirting with you. Neither is your waitress, the librarian or the gal at the DMV. These people are all being nice. Especially the barista and the waitress – they work for tips. I know this. I've known this for years. Every guy knows this. Academically, we're all very aware that more than 99% of the women we meet have no interest in us outside of a social context. Regardless, I'm convinced - convinced - that every time a woman is being nice to me, she must be flirting. I'm not alone.

It seems like some time around age 12, guys develop this hypersensitivity to the actions of women. They study every word, every physical cue. We're trying to gauge how interested they are in us. We take in all of the data, crunch some numbers and check the readouts. More than half the time the result is “Very Interested.” It's a confusing ouroboros of low self-esteem and narcissism. The thought process goes a little something like this: “Hm. She's talking to me. Girls don't talk to me unless they want something. I don't have anything. What does she want? Oh man, it must be me. She's totally into me. This chick totally wants me. Awesome.” Between friends, co-workers, service industry employees and complete strangers, this happens anywhere between three and a thousand times a day. It never leads to anything, but every time the cycle repeats itself. Like I said, it starts right about age 12 and ends when you die. I'm sure I'll be in my death bed, covered in my own drool thinking, “Man, this nurse brought me soup AGAIN. I still got it.”

I was talking to my wife about this the other day, and she told me that it's not just men who assume that everyone is flirting with them. “You know, when guys hold the door open for me, I sometimes think he must think I'm cute.” First of all, who the hell is holding doors open for my wife? I'll hunt them down and kill them. SHE'S MINE. Also, “he must think I'm cute” is fleeting. I'll spend hours deconstructing conversations I have with strange women – usually right up until the next time it happens. One night I was doing laundry, and it happened that another girl in my building was doing hers at the same time. We kept meeting each other in the laundry room and talked a few times while moving our clothes around. The next day, I got an email with the subject line “I NEVER THOUGHT IT COULD HAPPEN TO ME,” which, for the unfamiliar, is how each letter begins in Penthouse Forum, a magazine where guys write about their sexual encounters with strange women – usually in the laundry rooms of their apartment buildings. A few minutes later, there was a knock on my apartment door. My first thought was, of course, the girl from the laundry room. She must have found me so fascinating, so interesting, so viscerally attractive that she had to track me down. We were destined to run off together, hand in hand, into the sunset. Living on a thin budget would be hard, but the love that we undoubtedly had for each other would be more than enough to keep us warm and sustain us. Turns out it was the maintenance guy, checking to see if our bathroom sink had been fixed.

He was a terrible lay.

We're BAAAAACK!

2010-03-16T15:57:00.001-07:00

Yes, Mousebed is coming out of retirement on this most important of days. For the love of Franzblau, chime in!

Play-In Game Live Blog II!

Ignorance and Want

2009-12-10T00:58:00.000-08:00

This may come as a shock to many, considering my famously rosy disposition, but I don't really care for Christmas. I'm not a huge fan of any holidays, really. This most likely comes from having had to spend miserable dinner after miserable dinner with my miserable family. Luckily, I suppose, I'm all but estranged from 90% of my family. I'm not particularly proud of it, but I really only ever talk to my dad and brothers anymore. With the exception of the week I spent in the same house with her, I haven't spoken to my mom in well over a year. I don't speak to her partially because I hate every single thing she says and does, and partially because I just don't want to bum myself out. Sadly, this doesn't mean I don't hear from her. She leaves me voice mails every few days, the content of which just serves to bring me down. She's a depressing person, especially around the holidays. Every message is the same.

“Joshua, it's mom. Um, just wanted to know how you are. How's Beepobo [my cat's name is Peepopo]? I hope you have a good (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, New Year's). I can't wait to come out to Los Angeles to visit you again. Call me right back. (Then, she gives me her phone number, like I don't already know it.)”

I just can't do it. I'm not even sure why I bother listening to the messages at this point. The worst is when she hijacks my dad's phone and tries to trick me into picking up. This just means I never answer when my dad calls. Incidentally, his voice mail messages are just as formulaic, but they vacillate wildly between hilarious and depressing. They usually contain information about my brothers' athletic prowess and my mom's shitty life. One particularly disconcerting message began with “Don't worry, there's no reason you should call me back about this, but your mom just got driven to Mass General Hospital.” Awesome.

Anyhow, now that I'm out of the will as far as most of my family is concerned, the holidays are a little less painful. A “family holiday dinner” for me now usually means my wife and I order food from Kung Pao Kitty and give Peepopo a tin of wet food. I don't go out for Halloween, I don't really do New Year's. I still, however, hate Christmas with a passion envied by the Grinch himself. I hate the music, I hate shopping, I hate crowds. I also hate being compared to Ebenezer Scrooge. By the way, why did everybody need to shit on Scrooge for hating Christmas? It's not like he went around lighting pine wreaths on fire or anything. What's really rough for me is how much I love crass commercialism.

I, personally, wish no ill will upon anybody who wants to celebrate Christmas. I mean, I have a fairly strong faith in God and the Bible, and even if I didn't, I wouldn't begrudge people their right to observe the birth of Christ in whatever way they see fit. I just don't want to be a part of it, is all. I like the idea of giving presents to my wife, although it almost always happens that we're too poor in December to even think about gift-giving. I'm also not one of those people who feels the need to get their pets Christmas presents. A girl at work asked me a couple weeks ago if I was going to give my cat extra cat nip for Thanksgiving. This would have been a lot more appropriate had she asked me on 4/20 - which, as we all know, is Peepopo's birthday. I told her no, I wouldn't be giving the cat extra cat nip on Thanksgiving, because that doesn't make any fucking sense. She's a cat, she wouldn't understand the significance of the gesture. Also, we need to renew her medical cat nip license before I feel good about giving her anything more potent than one of those dingle balls.

One of my biggest dreads is the idea of raising children. It wouldn't be fair to project my hatred of Christmas onto my child - although the idea of raising him 1/12th Jehovah's Witness has crossed my mind. If his birthday is in December as well, then double score. Christmas really ought to be the best day of the year for kids. Presents, family, Jesus, it's all there - the idea of taking that away from my progeny is unconscionable. I fervently hope that I'll be able to provide for my child an environment only half as shitty as mine was growing up. Hopefully by then I won't loathe everything as much as I do now, but let's face it, that's a long shot.

---

With only a little over two weeks until Christmas actually happens, I still hold out hope that this year will somehow be different than every other. It can't be as bad as two years ago when my wife had an asthma attack so bad that she nearly died on Christmas Eve. It also probably won't be as bad as that Thanksgiving when I woke up covered in pepper spray. The thing that will be most different about this year is my job. I'll probably end up working both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I'm okay with this. It'll provide me with something to do on Christmas besides sit around and wait for my mom to leave me a sad voice mail and then spend the next six hours moping about my apartment wondering why the family I refuse to talk to didn't send me any Christmas presents.

More than anything it'll give me something to do instead of hate myself for getting my wife nothing for a second consecutive Christmas. Three years ago I bought her Primatene caplets from the Long's Drugs on Hollywood and Sycamore, which ended up saving her life. That's almost as good as a card with 20 dollars in it.

10,000 Word Vacation, Day 10

2009-11-02T00:24:00.001-08:00

Sunday, November 1
Day 10

I cannot begin to tell you how happy I am to be home. I know that when people bitch about their vacations it's tough to relate, so please understand that I didn't have a bad time. Far from it, in fact. I ate a lot of good food, I spent time with my brothers, I got to drive around the Cape and look at the leaves change colors. Hell, I even had a genuine Field of Dreams moment last night when I played wiffle ball in the back yard with my dad. It was pretty sweet.

I feel the worst part of being on vacation is having to be away from home. I can't stand it. I thrive on familiarity - my wife basically needs to trick me to get me to eat at a restaurant we haven't been to yet. I really like the idea of having fun, eating out, spending money, not working - I just like the idea of doing all of that stuff, then going back to my home to curl up in the cozy covers and watch TV. I don't see what's so bad about that.

Some notes on the vacation, the flight home and the whole business:

Today wasn't so much of a vacation day as it was a travel day. I'm still enchanted with the idea of flight - by the way, since when did “flight” get changed to “plane ride?” That really makes it sound way less important. You know what you describe using the word “ride?” A haunted hayride. Orville and Wilbur Wright deserve better.

Anyhow, today's flight was way better than the one we took on the way out to New England. First of all, we only spent about six hours today on a plane, and we didn't have to go 1,500 miles out of our way just to get home. Magnificent. There's a lot to be said about flying into Los Angeles after dark. As you approach the city, you see billions and billions of tiny lights below you - they seem to go on forever, past the horizon and, conceivably, into the Pacific Ocean. You fly over the lights for a few minutes, then the pilot gets on the PA system and tells you that you're about 30 minutes away from landing. For those 30 minutes, you continue to fly over billions and billions of tiny lights. It's breathtaking, but not in the way that Elaine meant when she looked at that ugly baby.

---

As happy as I am to be home, I wish I had more time in Massachusetts to spend with my friends. I made plans and promises all week to see people, and I never had the time - or in the case of Julianne, I got a new phone and didn't her number saved on my SIM card so I couldn't call her when I was in Boston. It sucks. For the first time in my life, I put my family ahead of my friends, and I honestly feel awful about it. Not only did I not get to see my friends like I wanted to, I didn't even manage to do any of the shit I told my wife we'd do this week. We didn't go to Salem, we didn't go to Provincetown, we didn't go to the New England Aquarium. I'm a massive disappointment as a husband. I'm sorry, everybody.

---

I wish my mom would decide whether or not she wanted to be the type of person who gives good gifts or not. This week she bought me new glasses, which was awesome. She also gave the following items to me and my wife: a Cape Cod sweatshirt that was at least 20 years old, a broken lamp, a book that she alleges to have read about some woman getting murdered and three high school yearbooks. With the exception of the yearbooks, none of these things turned out to be even remotely useful. If only she would choose to give only good gifts or shitty gifts, I would know whether or not to get my hopes up when she says “Joshua, I got you something nice.” Although the nicer she thinks it is, the worse it usually turns out to be.

---

The great unsung hero of this vacation was one Mike Strauss. He stopped by our apartment a few times this week to feed the cat and let her know that we haven't just abandoned her to waste away and die of starvation. In addition to feeding the cat, Mike took some truly terrifying photos of her and put them up on facebook. It warmed our hearts to see pictures of our cat's brightly glowing eyes on the internet - that way we knew that she was alive, or that even if Mike had killed her, he had the decency to stage an elaborate, Weekend at Bernie's-type ruse. Weekend at Peepopo's.

---

The best part of going on vacation is coming home with souvenirs. My wife got some nice fluffy socks and a few nice books. I got a Larry Bird t-shirt and a cold. The nice thing about our souvenirs is that we both got one that was only for us, and the other we can share with all our friends. Most importantly, I found out that, given enough time, I'm capable of writing over 1,000 words a day, every day. I'm considering blocking off a couple of hours each day to write. I figure as long as I keep doing that, somebody has to publish it, right? I mean, it's a blog. A blog on the internet, guys. That's what people publish now. All I need is a literary agent. Ironically, before I start writing every day, I feel like I need a short break from writing. Much in the same way that a writer writes - always, a procrastinator procrastinates - always.

Thanks for reading. It's been fun.

10,000 Word Vacation Day 9

2009-11-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Saturday, October 31
Day 9

I'm officially sick. I'm not sure what I've got - maybe it's swine flu, maybe it's regular flu, maybe I'm just plain sick. I haven't felt this sick in a while - not since February when my brothers came out to visit. What I'm saying is, they're Patient Zero and Patient Zero-A. It sucks. A sick Mousebed writer can mean only one thing - Clip Show!

---

I went to another of Tommy's football games today. He was the long snapper, which is a noble position. My wife and I showed up about a minute into the game, and Barnstable High scored just as we got there. It was really quite exciting. Just as the fourth quarter started, my mom showed up and sat next to my wife. She just started talking, like she does, and never stopped. My wife, in one of her more spectacular efforts, offered to give my mom a dollar - one American dollar - if she could pick her own son out of the crowd. Not only did she guess wrong, but she picked out a kid who wasn't shaped like either of her football playing sons.

---

One of the great story lines of this week with my family is my mom trying to find out how old my wife is. I'm not sure why she's curious - I guess maybe she thinks my wife is older than she is? Who knows. First she just came out and asked her how old she was, to which I wish my wife had replied “28. Now how much do you weigh?” Later, at the football game, my mom asked my wife what year she graduated high school, in an attempt to trick her into revealing approximately when my wife was 18. Slick, mom. Real slick.

---

One of the things I do when I'm sick is make horrible puns. I mean, one of the things I do when I'm not sick is make horrible puns, but it's way worse when I'm not feeling so hot. Most of the time I end up changing the name of a celebrity to describe something my wife or cat is doing. Tonight I called my wife Yawn-Claude Van Damme. Sometimes when I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, my cat will jump up onto the bed and sit directly in the center, making it so that nobody can lay down in a comfortable position. When this happens, she is known as Bed Middler. Just say it out loud, it's pretty fantastic. When my wife goes to the bathroom I call her Mario Van Pee-bles, and when I go she calls me Pee-a Zadora. The cat's name often turns into something along the lines of Francis Ford Peepopo-la. We're seriously the coolest people we know.

---

My dad is great at telling long rambling stories that go nowhere and mean nothing. I guess this is something that everybody's dad does, as evidenced by the Shit My Dad Says account on Twitter. Today, as we were driving past the West Barnstable Animal Hospital, he offered up this story: “See the animal hospital over there? It's bigger now. You know why? It blew up. It just blew the fuck up. Some idiot lined up the electrical right over the gas main. Started leaking and bam! The whole place blew the fuck up. They had 20 minutes to get all the dogs out. I was driving by when the second explosion happened. Blew the roof clean off. You know, a hurricane happens and people are homeless, but the fucking animal hospital blows up and UNICEF comes in to build them a new one overnight. Sheesh.” The best part of this story is that I have no reason to believe that it is a lie, other than the extreme improbability of it. Some day, when I'm a dad, I'll tell all kinds of pointless, horrible stories that involve exploding dogs. My kids will love it!

---

Remember how yesterday my mom was going to take me to LensCrafters to get new glasses? And remember how she told me that I had an appointment at 8am? And remember how, for some reason, I believed her? Well, believe it or not, most of that turned out to be a lie. After what could be best described as a horrible night's sleep, my mom decided to wake me up at 7:10 this morning. I, in a textbook “too little, too late” moment, checked the LensCrafters website to see that not only did they not open until 10am, but you needed an appointment to get your eyes checked. I made the earliest appointment I could, which was at 1pm, a mere five and a half hours away. I was pissed. My wife and I went downstairs to find my mom in the living room. When we told her that she gave us the wrong time, rather than just saying “Oh, sorry, I should have checked,” my mom said “Oh, did I say eight? I meant nine,” WHICH WOULD STILL HAVE BEEN WRONG.

---

As my vacation winds to a close, I'm beginning to worry - as I always do when vacations end - that I've forgotten how to function as a member of normal society. Have I forgotten how to work? Do I no longer understand how to take public transportation? Can I still go grocery shopping without freaking out? I suppose I'll find out on Monday. Until then, all I can do is hope my flights are on time and my pilots don't have their laptops with them. I seriously can't wait to just get home, sit around with my wife, cook some dinner and watch something on the TV. I think we still have this week's Dancing With The Stars elimination show recorded. That'll be a nice little taste of normal after a week and a half of “fun.”

10,000 Word Vacation, Day 8

2009-10-31T00:06:00.000-07:00

Friday, October 30
Day 8

This vacation is starting to wear me the fuck out. It's not the writing, it's not having to deal with my family, it's not even the rigorous travel schedule. I hate having to spend so much time away from my life. I haven't seen my cat in four days, I haven't slept in my own bed for four days (because that would be way too long), I haven't been to work in over a week. I enjoy being on vacation, I just wish it were over already. When I saw that I had a day off next Wednesday, I became positively giddy. I actually get to have some time off of work that I'm not forced to enjoy - how great is that?

Tomorrow will be my last full day on Cape Cod, and it's going to be packed to the rim with activities. My day starts at 8am, when I'm heading over to LensCrafters with my mom (blugh) to get some new glasses, then it's down to Barnstable High to watch some Tommy play junior varsity football, then back home for lunch, then my wife and I are going out with Tommy and Billy to spend some Good Old-Fashioned Quality Time together, then back home again, then dinner, then Halloweeny shit, then dinner with the Cabrals, then I have to do laundry, then I have to pack. Oh, and then I still have to sleep in a tiny, uncomfortable bed with my wife. That might be the worst part of the trip so far, having to share a twin bed. Any of those things separately would be great, but as a day, it seems pretty shitty.

The thing I'm least looking forward to is going to LensCrafters with my mom. Spending time with my mom is like being in one of the traps in Saw, but sadly, unlike in the movies, death is not an option. We were all having dinner tonight when my mom asked me if I needed new glasses. I said yes, but I don't want her to buy them for me. This was an immediate, gut reaction fueled by years of hate. I really, really hate my mom. So much so that the thought of her doing anything for me - even something that needs to be done - is like being force-fed ipecac. Fortunately/unfortunately my wife was there to say that yes, it would be very kind of my mother to buy me new glasses. This is fortunate because, let's face it, I really need new glasses and I don't have the $400 to get them. However this is unfortunate because now, I'll be forced to spend the first few hours of my day with my mom. Worse yet, I'll be beholden to her. That's the worst feeling in the universe, being beholden to somebody you hate.

Conversely, the thing I'm most looking forward to is spending time with my brothers. Tomorrow's won't be the first high school football game I've been to this week. Yesterday Tommy, Billy and the rest of the Barnstable High freshman football team beat North Plymouth's freshman football team 12 - 8. Since then - in the past two days - Tommy got called up to junior varsity. Hopefully they can beat North Plymouth's JV team, too. It's nice spending time with the kids now that they're finally old enough to joke around with. Tommy's 15 now and he's getting to be pretty funny. Billy's on his way - he's not much of a talker, but when he does speak, he usually manages to zing my mom. For all the chaos that has gone on since I moved to Los Angeles, the kids have somehow managed to turn into pretty good people. It's seeing stuff like that leads me to believe that if my wife and I turn out to be even kinda sorta remotely almost halfway decent parents, our kids have a shot at contributing to Western Society in a positive way.

This isn't to say that both of my parents are doing a horrible job. My dad, for all his faults, is doing an amazing job with Tommy and Billy. He runs his own law firm - up until very recently, he was the family's only source of income. He does the grocery shopping, he does all the cooking, he makes sure the kids do their homework, he takes them to and from football and baseball practices/games - and most importantly, he makes sure to get the kids to do a lot of stuff for themselves. Tommy and Billy do a lot of cleaning, they do their own laundry, they're able to cook their own meals if they need to. Although it took him a while - he didn't do half that stuff for me - my dad has turned into a pretty great dad. Although I must say that I'm pretty jealous that this seemed to happen about three hours after my plane touched down in Los Angeles.

---

Like I said earlier, I can't wait to get back to my life - more than anything I want to be sleeping in my own bed again. I will, however, miss spending time with (most of) my family, just as I miss spending time with (most of) my wife's family. I hate the fact that I have to take time away from my life to see them - I want (most of) them to be a part of my life. The chances of my wife and I moving to Massachusetts any time soon are slim and the chances of us moving to Fresno are even slimmer. The obvious solution here is for everybody to move to a mutually agreeable place so we can all just hang out and do whatever. Since Fresno blows and Massachusetts is super cold, I feel the solution is obvious: We'll get everybody - my wife's family, my family and all of our friends - to move to a compound in Texas. That way, everybody is equally miserable, but at least we'll have each other.

10,000 Word Vacation, Day 7

2009-10-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

Thursday, October 29
Day 7

I graduated from Barnstable High School in 2003, but I never really thought of myself as a true Red Raider, mostly because I went to a different high school for two and a half years before transferring to Barnstable. I never even met principal Pat Graves. I don't think she even exists. I mention this because today, my mom gave me the Barnstable High yearbooks for the years 2002, 2003 and 2004, so I could look through them and find my old friends. I'm not sure why she thought I'd want to do this, seeing as my biggest anxiety right now is running into people I knew in high school and having to pretend I'm happy to see them. This means I should be avoiding places like the Cape Cod Mall, Sam Diego's, most Dunkin' Donuts (although that doesn't stop me) and Cape Cod Community College.

If I had my druthers, I'd have not been at my own high school graduation. My wife tells me she didn't go to hers, and I'm insanely jealous. It's tough to say this without sounding like an asshole, but here goes: Why the fuck would anybody want to go stand out on a field for three hours and watch a procession of people you don't like and - God willing - won't ever see again get congratulated for doing something that the state forces you to do, like a prison sentence? How many times have you been asked for your high school diploma after you filled out your college applications? Never? Less than never? Exactly. That said, you can imagine that I wanted nothing less than to be in my high school yearbook. I went to Barnstable High for a total of 14 months and, while I had friends, it wasn't like I was going to drop $75 or whatever in order to have access to photos of them from when they were 18. That just doesn't sound like a good investment to me.

I was all ready to not be included in the yearbook - mostly as a political stunt, which was something I liked doing when I was 17 - when my mom called to tell me that she had booked a photographer in order to take my senior portrait. She even bought me a new sweater to wear, which was awesome because I never wore sweaters. That's the best part of senior portraits - for the most part, they're pictures of people you never want to see again, posing in ways that are utterly unnatural. “Oh, hello! Didn't think anybody would find me here - though I know not why, as I spend most of my time sitting cross-legged on a sand dune, reading a book. Yes, this is me in my element. Soak it in, boys!”

So there I was, in a park that I'd never been to before, sitting cross-legged in the grass, looking up at trees, leaning on tables, laying flat on my stomach and writing long-hand in a journal - name something I don't do, there I was doing it and having my photo taken. Finally we settled on one where I was just sitting in the grass, which more or less looked like something I'd do at some point. My mom had a billion copies of it printed up and shipped to various relatives - many of whom I have not met to this day. She hung one up in the living room, put one in my dad's office and finally sent one in to the yearbook committee so that they could put me in the yearbook. I kindly asked them to keep me out, but they said they “could not, in good conscience, leave a student out of the yearbook if a photo had been submitted.” What utter bullshit.

The worst part about being in the yearbook is having to do all the extra work that goes into being remembered. The yearbook committee wants you to put together a brag sheet about yourself - what clubs you were in, what superlatives you won, et cetera. When they were passing around the superlative ballots in my homeroom class, I got everybody to write me in for “Most Likely to Hide From the Law in a Graveyard.” Despite being the top (only) vote-getter, they didn't add my awesome superlative to the yearbook. I didn't even get “Most Likely to Have a Five-Star Podcast on Soundlantern.com,” which I eventually would succeed in doing.

Anyhow, the thing I hated the most about doing the yearbooky stuff was having to do my senior write-up and my yearbook quote. While mulling it over one day, I found a stack of old yearbooks in the school library. I immediately pulled out the year my mom graduated and looked up her entry. There was no senior write-up, but her yearbook quote was “I get high with a little help from my friends...” which she attributed to Ringo Starr. I figured there was no way I could top that, so I just decided to leave my entire entry blank - just a photo of me.

This turned out to be a much better decision than I could ever have guessed. Looking back, every senior write-up reads like a bad Scrabble hand. A lot of initials, a lot of acronyms, not a lot of cohesive thought. There are, however, a lot of people pledging their undying love to somebody they would dump less than six months later - some couples didn't even make it to the yearbook's publication before they broke up. The yearbook quotes are pretty sweet too. There are a few “Life isn't measured by the breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away,” a couple “Dance as though nobody's looking,” some “Live each moment as though it's your last” and even a “Life is short and hard like a bodybuilding elf.” My personal favorite was Andy Beard, who - and I shit you not - claims to live his life a quarter of a mile at a time, just like Dom from The Fast and the Furious.

Here, for posterity, is what I was thinking of using as my yearbook quote:

My poor generation, we're on for the ride. An ocean of choices, pulled out on the tide. We're handed a beach ball and told to pick a side. Drowned in information, my poor generation. - Moxy Fruvous

Song lyrics always look trite when you write them out - I swear it sounds deep when they sing it.

10,000 Word Vacation, Day 6

2009-10-29T01:49:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, October 28
Day 6

I totally get it now.

After living on Cape Cod for 21 years, I finally realized why people like it. I drove around aimlessly for an hour or so with my wife, pointing at things and saying “ooooh!” That's the appeal! Looking at shit! There are all kinds of things to look at. We looked at trees, old cemeteries, quaint storefronts, things made of wood. Everything on Cape Cod is there to be looked at. I'm pissed that I didn't realize this earlier.

Seriously though, after spending upwards of three years in Los Angeles, America's Home of the Fake, it was refreshing to see so many natural things at once. It's nothing like Fresno, a town where all the natural things are immaculately planned - planted in rows, pruned precisely, geometrically designed to look right - and everything else is either a barren wasteland or a Target. Things in Massachusetts are all over the place. The trees just grow where they grow and the roads wind around them. The gravestones at the cemeteries look like crooked teeth popping out of the earth, all of them pointing in different directions and none of them matching. The plots are in a vaguely grid-like arrangement - hell, the graveyards themselves are hilly and bumpy. It's almost like this stuff is super old and they didn't plan it as well as they could have.

(By the way, a discussion up in Fresno between my wife's mom and her husband brought to light some of the hang-ups that people have about their deaths. Cindy and Steve were talking about their plots, where they want to be buried, how they want to be buried, et cetera. Cindy made a joke about Steve buying the plots on either side of his so that she could be buried in one, and Steve's ex-wife couldn't be buried on the other side of him. Why do people give a shit about where they're buried, and more specifically who's next to them? Just donate your body to science and maybe you'll help the living. It's not like you're going to piss off the God you don't believe in. If your religion forbids you from doing anything with your corpse other than burying it, then by all means do so. But again, why does it matter who you're next to? It's not like when you're in Heaven you're forced to sit in chairs relative to your how and where you were buried. At least, I hope not for the sake of my many pets who are all buried next to each other. I have a feeling they wouldn't all get along.)

Another thing Cape Cod is good for is breakfast. On the trip from my parents' house to the restaurant where we ended up eating, we passed by about two dozen breakfast places. In fact, we ate at The Egg and I, which is right next to The Gourmet Brunch, which is across the street from Perry's, which is down the street from Percy's Place, which is less than a block from Cafe e Dolci, although that's more of a coffee/pastry affair - not to mention the hundreds of Dunkin' Donuts establishments peppering the landscape. The fact that all of these places stay in business leads me to believe two things: first, everybody on Cape Cod who knows how to prepare eggs has opened a restaurant and second, I need to move back to West Barnstable and start investing in omelette futures.

After breakfast, I suggested to my wife that we check out some of the local mom-and-pop-type businesses, like Best Buy and the AT&T store. We futzed around Hyannis, stopping in at the mall and a couple of record stores before grabbing a hot chocolate at Dunkin' Donuts and heading home. By the way, for my California readers, Dunkin' Donuts is like In & Out, but in reverse. It's a way of life in every state in the fucking union but California. If the Starbucks on the corner of Hollywood and Las Palmas could be replaced with a Dunkin' Donuts on the condition that I get my wife pregnant and sell the child into slavery, I'd hope for twins so I could also trade the Starbucks at the Sherman Oaks Galleria so I could go there on the way to work.

Being on vacation, I find myself asking questions that I would normally find appalling. “I wonder if I can find a t-shirt with an outline of Massachusetts, but with Cape Cod being an arm, and instead of Provincetown and Truro, maybe it could be a hand giving you the finger. What? They don't have it in navy, only red or green? Forget it.” The urge to buy t-shirts on vacation is amazing, by the way. I'm barely on vacation right now - I grew up here and I'm staying at my parents' house, for God's sake - but regardless, I need to come home with shirts. I'm thinking about getting a Red Sox road alternate shirt with either Jon Lester or Jason Bay's number. Oh, and I saw a sweet Milan Lucic throwback Bruins shirt. I pity my poor wife.

The only bad thing about today was having to spend time with my mom. She came out of the gate strong by opening the door to my bedroom, then knocking, then asking if my wife and I were taking a nap. Well, we were. Not anymore. There will be a lot more on my mother coming in the next few days, but here's a taste of what's to come. This happened at dinner tonight.

Me: Yeah, we're thinking of driving up to Salem this week.
Mom: Oh? Well when you're up there, you can learn about Lizzie Borden. She was in the witch trials, you know.
Aurora: Kathy, you know she was born 200 years later, right? [ed. note: She also lived in Fall River, MA - over an hour away]
(Stunned silence)
Mom: You know that place is a hotel now, right? A haunted one?

10,000 Word Vacation, Day 5

2009-10-27T22:21:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, October 27
Day 5

I've already been to Paris, I've already been to Rome
But what did I do but miss my home?
Oh, New England
I've been out west to Californ'
But I miss that land where I was born
Oh, New England

- Jonathan Richman

Considering the many millions of things I'm afraid of, air travel surprisingly doesn't make the list. In fact, I rather enjoy it. I find a certain amount of comfort in knowing that if I die some time in the next six hours, I'm pretty sure I know how I'm going. Six hours, of course, being the amount of time it takes to fly coast-to-coast, provided of course that your pilots don't fly an hour and a half out of the way like those pricks for Northwest Airlines. I got to experience the unparalleled joy of flight today for nine hours today because my itinerary made a retarded stop in Ft. Lauderdale, FL today. It sucked.

I'm in Massachusetts now for the first time in about eleven and a half months. Unlike my last trip, which was for my great grandmother's funeral, this one was planned a lot farther in advance. Despite that, my wife and I still managed to get the shittiest flight in the history of America. A few thoughts about flying:

---

I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that nobody seems amazed every time a plane takes off or lands. Like, I understand that that's what's “supposed to happen,” but really. 200 people are being lifted off the ground, just by virtue of the fact that you're going super fast, and then a few hours later you just put down some tiny wheels and you stop completely, and ANYBODY CAN DO THIS FOR LESS THAN $100. Insanity. I feel that this miracle of modern science needs to be met with a round of applause every time it happens. It's so cool.

---

I'm not a superstitious guy, but do you think people get super nervous if they see William Shatner or John Lithgow get on a plane? Like, would you want them sitting in a window seat? I wouldn't. Then again, I also wouldn't want to be anywhere near John Landis if flight is involved. Or any members of the New York Yankees.

---

Southwest Airlines has discontinued their policy of accepting cash for alcohol on their flights - credit or debit cards only. This is a bad idea for so many reasons. First of all, I assume this lowers the number of people who buy alcohol. It just does. Not accepting cash is just a horrible policy for any business. And secondly, how do you expect a teenager to catch a buzz on a plane if he has to wait for his dad to fall asleep and steal his credit card? Sheesh.

---

What is it about traveling that makes it okay for people to be either super-conversational or a total asshole? I hate both ends of the spectrum, and you seem to encounter both in equal quantities. At the airport this morning, my wife took her iced tea out of her cup holder for about as much time as it takes to take a sip and put it back, during which time a woman who was probably in her 50's just came over, sat down and put her coffee right in my wife's cup holder. She even made that noise that you make when you sit down to let everybody know that you're burdened and world-weary. “Ough.” It's very important for everybody to know that her life is tough, and it's a wonder that she makes it through each day, but she perseveres.

On the trip from Ft. Lauderdale to Providence, a guy sat next to my wife and me, and God bless his little heart, he wanted nothing more than an audience. He just wanted people to talk to him. He told us that he “basically lives on planes now,” and that whenever he goes to a new town, he makes sure to eat at whatever place they told him to eat at on the Travel Channel. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but I just didn't want to talk to him. I'm sure this says something about me.

---

Flight crew breakdown:
Los Angeles, CA to Austin, TX: Three women, called everybody on the plane “customers,” all cunts.
Austin, TX to Ft. Lauderdale, FL: Three other women, called everybody on the plane “passengers,” all more or less okay. Recognized the youngest one from my last trip. Weird.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL to Providence, RI: Three men, called everybody on the plane “guests,” all super-competent and polite.

---

Now that I'm back in Massachusetts, I'm trying to figure out what to do with my time here. The only thing I really have to do is go to my brothers' football game Thursday afternoon, and I even kind of want to do that. Tomorrow the plan is to futz around in Hyannis, Friday I'm taking Aurora and my brothers up to Salem for some witch trial fun, and Saturday is Halloween. Really, the one thing I need to make sure to do every day is text Mike Strauss to make sure he feeds my cat and avoid interacting with my mom in every possible way. That's the only thing about this trip that really scares me. It's not the flying, it's not being away from my cat for a week (although I'm not thrilled about that), it's having to avoid seeing my mother as much as possible. I haven't talked to her in eleven and a half months, and I'm hoping that streak can continue. I feel like an alcoholic with 50 weeks of sobriety taking a vacation to wine country. She's really the only thing I can think of that could possibly ruin this trip, with the possible exception of a gremlin on the wing.

For good measure, here's a clip from Sesame Street, with the music once again provided by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. Enjoy!

10,000 Word Vacation, Day 4

2009-10-26T23:57:00.000-07:00

Monday, October 26
Day 4

I suppose the phrase that best encapsulates the Fresno Experience would be “terrifying sameness.” In one of her many unfortunate attempts to convince the two of us that Fresno was The Place To Be, my wife's mom decided to drive by the apartment where Aurora's sister Sarah lives with her husband. “It's cheaper and way nicer than your place,” she told us. When we got there, we were presented with a series of identical House Pods, arranged neatly in rows. “There's her place!” Cindy yelled, pointing at one of the many residences. “No, wait, there it is! No, wait! It's that one, I think. Anyhow, they have a pool!” The apartment was so nice, you couldn't tell it apart from its brethren. Oh, and they weren't that nice - certainly not as nice as our building. They were actually kind of shitty.

Everything in Fresno is exactly like everything else in Fresno. Up the street from the Stronghold is a large shopping center with a Target, a Petsmart, a Starbucks, an In & Out, a Best Buy, a Gamestop and a Joann Fabrics. About two miles away is a large shopping center with a Target, a Petsmart, a Starbucks, an In & Out, a Best Buy, a Gamestop and a Joann Fabrics. Three miles from there is a large shopping center with a Target, a Petsmart, a Starbucks, an In & Out, a Best Buy, a Gamestop and a Joann Fabrics - and a Barnes and Noble. A ways away from there is - well, you get the point. It's not just within the city limits, either. On the train ride home you pass by a row of houses that have the following items in each backyard: Pool, satellite dish, two old bicycles and a rusted tool shed made of corrugated tin. The only thing that differentiates each house from the next is the graffiti on the side of the sound barrier that faces the train. “Which house do you live in? Is it the 'Fuck Bitchez' house or the 'South Side Is Fagz' house?”

This terrifying sameness is, among other things, what keeps me from moving up here. I mean, that and the people. Aurora and I were at one of the many Targets in Fresno. I was in the dressing room when one of the employees got on the PA and said “Can we get a little help with go-backs here at the fitting rooms? We're ooooooverflowing!” A woman in an adjacent booth loudly proclaimed “All your stuff here is ooooooverpriced!” Where the fuck do you shop that Target is overpriced? The point of Target is to undercut everyone in town. In what universe is eight dollars for a polo shirt unreasonable? Sheesh. Anyhow, back to the sameness. One of the great things about Los Angeles is that nothing is the same. There are distinct neighborhoods, different cultural influences, millions of people, all of them different. Even the McDonald's are different. Within a five block radius, there are three McDonald's, each of them completely different. Different customers, different employees - even different prices. It's a sociological study just waiting to happen.

---

9:01 PM
Day 4.5

I'm finally home. I was thrilled to get off the subway train and see different things everywhere. Neon lights, street performers, a giant ceramic dinosaur, people who aren't white - all sorts of things. One of the things I did to combat the sameness of Fresno was, ironically, listen to the same album over and over. According to iTunes, I have listened to Someone to Drive You Home by the Long Blondes eight times in the past three days. I made an attempt to eat the same foods that I eat when I'm in Los Angeles, too. We stopped at one of the many Starbucks Drive-Thrus in one of the many identical plazas and I got my usual black iced tea/lemonade. I'd also mention that I ate the same things I always do when I went to In & Out, but that's not hard to do considering that their menu consists of three things.

As I pack to get ready for the second leg of our two-legged journey, it must be noted that I do look forward to the familiarity of my hometown. Even though when I lived on Cape Cod I did the same thing more or less every day, it didn't have that same-y feel that covered every inch of Fresno. No two houses look the same on any given street. The 7-11 over by the mall is totally different than the 7-11 off of exit six - the one by the mall is attached to a Dunkin' Donuts, while the one off of exit six is attached to a Burger King and a Dunkin' Donuts and has way higher prices because it's the one that the tourists go to when they're on the highway. Don't even get me started on the obvious differences between the Dunkin' Donuts across the street from the Cape Codder and the one at the end of Main Street - I think we all know what they are.

That's the thing - all I really want is variety, even if it's to be found in minutiae. Luckily, I live in a neighborhood that doesn't really allow for sameness. There's always a new piece of discarded furniture on the sidewalk, there's always a movie being shot on the sidewalk, there's always a new feral cat hanging out in the vacant lot on the corner of Yucca and Cherokee. Tonight, a fistfight broke out in the courtyard of the apartment complex next to that vacant lot. Two people were leaving the building, yelling at a group of people smoking pot on the patio, threatening to call the cops. One of the pot smokers told them to relax, and the antagonistic couple screamed “CALL THE COPS! DRUG DEALERS ARE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD!” So naturally, one of the pot-smoking chicks punched the other girl in the face. It spilled out into the street and turned into a full-out melee.

And that's why I'm not moving to Fresno. Sorry Cindy, sorry Steve.

10,000 Word Vacation, Day 3

2009-10-26T02:02:00.001-07:00

Sunday, October 24
Day 3

I've been here in Fresno for two and a half days now, and the one thing I've learned is I'm not a huge fan of families. Not specifically my wife's family, but the concept of familial bonds forcing you to tolerate another person, no matter how angry they make you. I'm already on - at best - shaky terms with most of my family. No thanks to this blog, I suppose. You write what, only a dozen or so unflattering essays and people start to turn on you. Anyhow, today was family day here at the Stronghold. By the way, have I mentioned that my wife's mom remarried a few years ago, and when she did she married a guy named Strong (last, not first)? Well she did. Have I also mentioned that they're the type of people that think it's hi-larious to call their home the Stronghold? Well they are. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

---

The house was pretty packed today. Packed and noisy and full of children. My wife's parents have been watching three small children for the past few weeks. Their mother just died, and their dad is taking it pretty hard, so Steve and Cindy have been helping take care of the kids while their dad is at work. They've all - the kids and their dad - have become honorary members of the family here. It's very sweet. When we took family photos yesterday (don't think I won't be complaining about that at a later date, by the way), they were included. There's a boy and two girls - twins - and none of them can be older than eight or so. The boy is a question asker, which is great. He sits, he plays on his Game Boy, and he asks questions.

- Do you like video games?
- Yeah, I play a lot of vid-
- Did you know GI Joe was old?
- Yeah, I used to watch the cart-
- No, like really, really old?
- Yeah, back when I was a kid I-
- What video games do you play?
- I like sports ga-
- Do you like Mario?
- Yeah, I have all his-
- Do you have friends?

And so on. I wouldn't mind his inquisitive nature if he would just wait for me to answer before the next question. By the way, the answer to “do you have friends?” was “yeah, kinda.” The twins - not my wife's sisters, but the young ones - were a lot tougher to deal with. They didn't ask questions, they just screamed. Not the standard “kids are having fun” screams - those are screams of joy. No, these were raspy-voiced, blood-curdling screams of terror and fear, except they weren't afraid of anything. They just made that noise. Sometimes when I walk around the house, searching for a book or a pen or something, I like to mutter “puff puff puff” under my breath. Not sure why, it just seems like it helps me find things. I'm like a very quiet steam engine. The twins just go around screaming. The problem with this - aside from the obvious problem of having these two klaxons blaring all day - is that when something actually goes wrong, it takes a while for anybody to notice. The girls were outside, not wearing shoes, when one of them stepped on a pricker or something, and screamed a terrible scream. My wife was the only person in the house who could differentiate this scream from one of the normal ones, and rushed out to help her. Everybody else just kind of sat around for a second, trying to decide if this was a good scream or a bad scream. If this girl had fallen into a well, we may not have moved for days. What I'm saying is, that's why you don't yell.

---

Later in the day, my wife's sisters came over for dinner. Celeste and her husband Brad, and my wife's twin sisters, Excalibur and Excelsior. Those aren't their real names, the twins. Their real names are Athena and Alethea, but I can't tell them apart, so rather than get it wrong and feel guilty, I get it wrong on purpose and I feel just fine about it. Tonight's theme was “Salad Night.” We were presented with the following non-salads: fruit salad (closest thing to a real salad), potato salad, macaroni salad, chicken salad, Jello salad, and a six-and-a-half layer dip, which isn't really a salad so much as it is a bunch of yummy shit in a bowl. It's a six-and-a-half layer dip because it didn't have black olives, and that's just criminal. Black olives are delicious, but I digress. The point I was trying to make was that there wasn't a single leaf of lettuce eaten at “Salad Night.” How positively Fresno.

After dinner, everyone just kind of puttered around, talking, making noise. I hate noise. Sometimes I feel like the Grinch. Noise, noise, noise! My wife's sisters got up to make peanut butter squares - really good, by the way, and no lettuce in them anywhere. While this was going on, Celeste was pontificating loudly about what foods her husband - who was sitting next to her - wanted at his birthday party. By the way, the reason for tonight's gathering was to belatedly celebrate Celeste's birthday. It was like, a month ago, but whatever. As she was going on about what kind of frosting Brad did and didn't like - by the way, she didn't want any of her cake because it had the kind of frosting he didn't like - somebody asked her why Brad didn't speak more. Her response? “Bradley likes to let me shine.”

“Bradley likes to let me shine.” Just let that percolate.

Concurrent with Celeste shitting out of her own mouth was more screaming from the (younger) twins, and more questions from their brother. It got to the point where I couldn't take it anymore. I went into the guest bedroom and closed the door, but it was no good. The noise bled through, and I wanted to die. I couldn't read, I couldn't write, I couldn't think. By the time everybody left, my brain was so cooked that, even now, I still don't feel quite right.

---

I wrestle with the idea of having a family. My wife wishes her family lived anywhere but Fresno, by which I assume she means somewhere in Los Angeles. She likes the idea of being able to go to her parents' house, eat their food and enjoy their company, which I must admit, is a pretty sweet deal. Deep down, she may even like the idea of being able to spend time with her sisters. I, on the other hand, just want to be left the fuck alone. I'm much more into the idea of seeing my family once a year, hating every minute of it, and praying that maybe I'll be able to write something interesting about it.

10,000 Word Vacation, Day 2

2009-10-25T01:20:00.000-07:00

Saturday, October 24
Day 2

There are a lot of men I look up to. My childhood hero was Larry Bird. As I grew older, I fell in love with the music of Bob Dylan. Now, in my early 20s, I have learned to embrace the greatness of Huell Howser. Huell, for those who don't live in California, is the host of PBS' California's Gold, a documentary show featuring the lesser known aspects of California's rich cultural tapestry. Unfortunately, the reason most of the places Huell goes are unknown is that they suck. Not only do they suck, but he sucks. He's a terrible, terrible host. There was a fantastic clip they used to play on the old Adam Carolla morning show where Huell spends 20 minutes interviewing an 80-year-old man about a bucket of rocks he has collected over the years. Some of my favorite episodes include a trip to the Colossal Colon, an interview with a woman who makes sculptures out of laundry lint, and a ride-along with a ladybug hunter and his oft-ridiculed son on their weekly ladybug hunting excursion.

Huell goes to other, more mundane places, too. These are the episodes where he truly gets to shine. Huell exhibits the same amount of excitement when presented with a pizza oven as he would if you told him the meaning of life. My favorite pizza place in Los Angeles is the Hollywood Village Pizzeria, on the corner of Yucca and Ivar. First I fell in love with their pizza, then I met the owner - then I saw the photos on the wall of Huell tossing some dough with the owner.

One of the more interesting places to be featured on California's Gold is the Forestiere Underground Gardens, in Fresno. The Forestiere Underground Gardens is tailor-made for somebody like Huell. It has all the indicators of a fantastically boring episode of California's Gold. First, it needs to be in a boring shit-town in the middle of nowhere - Fresno. Second, it should have a backstory that on the one hand is interesting, but on the other is kind of pathetic (more on that later). Finally, it ought to be a family-owned operation, which means the terribly boring shit is generational!

---

My wife found the website - www.undergroundgardens.com - and was immediately smitten. She called her mom and declared that the moment we set foot in Fresno, we were to head to the Underground Gardens. When I asked what it was, she explained that about a century ago, some guy moved to Fresno from Sicily - major downgrade, by the way - and couldn't stand the deadly hot summers. Because there was no air conditioning, he started digging holes to live in, and eventually he started planting trees in the holes. Sound awesome, right? I can see the headline now - Crazy Loner Digs, Lives In Holes. Fascinating.

Sadly, as it turns out, the Underground Gardens was pretty interesting. Baldasare Forestiere, working alone and using only a shovel and wheelbarrow, spent his entire life digging an elaborate system of tunnels and rooms underneath the hardpan layer, and eventually moving underground. Now, you may ask why he needed to be underground, but the answer is obvious - it's too fucking hot in Fresno. Once down there, he began planting fruit trees, leaving holes in the ceiling so that sun and rain could get in. He grew hybrid trees - I saw one today that grew both oranges and lemons - and even defied the laws of God Himself, creating a strawberry tree. In his later years, Forestiere decided to open the Underground Gardens to the public, and created an entire underground resort.

Everything about this place was interesting. In addition to showing us the crazy underground trees, our tour guide took us to Forestiere's living chambers, including his two bedrooms - one with a stove to keep warm in the winter, while the other was an open air room to keep cool in the summer. There was a kitchen, a beautiful outdoor bathing area with a cast-iron bathtub and even a small altar, at which the Roman Catholic Forestiere could worship. There were various religious symbols throughout the gardens, and even an aquarium that sadly wasn't part of today's tour.

The only thing that bummed me out was Baldasare Forestiere's personal life. Although the tour guide insisted this wasn't true, Forestiere seems to have been an insane loner who started digging holes to get away from people, like the episode of Seinfeld where Dana Gould dug a hole in Central Park because Jerry didn't want his van. Anyhow, he never married, and as such never had any children. When he died in 1946, his brother took over his work, finishing the grand ballroom for the resort. To my knowledge, Forestiere's plans for a resort were never fully realized. Today, his family keeps the property, harvesting the fruit. We couldn't figure out if the two tour guides we saw today were volunteers or employees, though my inclination is to go with employees. I mean, they had name tags.

The real problem I had with the Underground Gardens was that while it wasn't life-changing, it also didn't suck enough. It was only pretty cool. There was nothing there to make fun of. I know it says very little about me that the most important attribute something can possess is mockability, but it's how I get through life. I suppose it kind of serves me right that what I was hoping would be a massive suck-fest turned out to be a nice day with my wife and her family. I even signed the fruity guest book. I even even took a small amount of pride when I took the pushpin and stuck it in the part of the map that said “Hyannis,” signifying that I was the first person from Barnstable County to have set foot in the Underground Gardens, despite the fact that I haven't lived there in years. What they don't know won't hurt them.

I even even even bought a bumper sticker. Maybe someday, I'll have a car.

10,000 Word Vacation, Day 1

2009-10-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

Friday, October 23
Day 1

Most of the English speaking world goes on holiday. They take time off of school, work, whatever. They leave town and go somewhere nicer. They go to Lake Something-or-other, where their family has a cottage. They take a lot of photos. It's pretty cute, I guess. Americans don't go on holiday, we go on vacation. They don't take time off of school or work, we escape. We don't just look forward to going on vacation - we count the days until our release, like prisoners. When we go on vacation, we have Fun Regimens. Day One: Explore the hotel. Day Two: Tourist attractions. Day Three: Theme parks. It's no wonder that people come back from vacation more exhausted than when they left. I have trouble planning my normal life - the idea of putting this much thought into recreation is mind-blowing.

Right now, my wife and I are vacating our lives. We're going on what I'm calling the “Transcontinental Whirlwind In-Law Tour 2009.” Ten days, two coasts and about 25 or so hours of actual travel time. From October 23 - 26, we're going to be in Fresno, California, where her family lives. From the 27th through the first of November, we'll be staying in West Barnstable, Massachusetts with my family.

---

1:15 PM
I'm of two minds. For the most part, I like my wife's family. They're pretty okay, as far as people go. I mean, they were kind enough to pay for our trip up to Fresno. The problem is that they live in Fresno. For those who are unacquainted with the Fresno/Clovis area, it's the crown jewel of California's Meth Belt. I feel like I'm being pretty fair when I say that anybody who elects to live in Fresno is one of three things: a meth-addled hillbilly, a migrant worker, or Mormon. The one thing those three groups share is a common love of shopping at Target and eating at Chick-Fil-A. To be fair though, I can sort of get behind that myself.

The real problem I have with the trip to Fresno is the trip itself. It's not that I hate travelling - quite the opposite, really. What I hate about going to Fresno is taking the train up there. The first time I traveled by train, I went from Providence, RI to Akron, OH. What could have been a two hour flight ended up being a ten hour train ride. An old guy even shit his pants next to me. I decided to take the train to Ohio because I foolishly thought I wanted to See America. If for some reason you're a high school senior, do yourself a favor and avoid Seeing America. There's not much to see. Well, not much that a train can show you at least. The Philadelphia to Pittsburgh leg of my journey went a little something like this: field, cows, field, cows, fields, Mennonites, giant bales of hay. Fantastic. The one thing I learned from Seeing America is that America is mostly shit. It really was a bummer.

Anyhow, as much as I hate trains, we're pretty much fucked until we get a car or her parents move to civilization. Trains go where pilots fear to tread. The American Midwest is often called “flyover country,” but even in California there's not a lot going on geographically between Los Angeles and San Fransisco. I can say without hyperbole that when I look out the right side of the train, I'm presented with nothing but dirt for as far as the eye can see. Running along the left side of the train are power lines. I feel like every time the train stops, its mere presence doubles the population of whatever town we're in. Right now we're stopping in what is supposed to be a town by the name of Corcoran, although it's less like a town and more like a wide spot in the road. I'm surprised the train isn't besieged with local children selling tchotchkes and Chiclets to the passengers. Sometimes I feel like the anti-Steinbeck. There is a disdain for rural America that flows through my veins. The idea of romanticizing this lifestyle is so strange to me. Oh, also unlike John Steinbeck I'm a piece of shit writer.

---

2:24 PM
We're about 40 minutes outside of Fresno right now. We're in the town of Hanford. Things are looking a little more metropolitan now. I just saw a gas station and a stop light, which is a lot more than I can say about Corcoran. Some of the farms even have livestock. I'm seeing restaurants with names I've heard of. I even saw a woman that some people would even call “attractive,” though she was wearing a NASCAR shirt.

Every time I bitch about having to take a train to see her parents, my wife tries to convince me that Fresno has an airport. Bullshit, I say. If Fresno has an airport, I will eat not just my hat, but the hats of any pilots in the area. (2:29 PM Interjection: Holy shit, I just saw a Long John Silver's restaurant. It took me upwards of 24 years, but I've finally seen one. All I need is a Waffle House and a Steak and Shake and my Obscure Restaurant Chain Bingo card is full.)

---

2:36 PM
We're passing by houses now. All of them appear to be about the size of my studio apartment, all of them have matching swimming pools, and all of them have rusted-out sheds made of corrugated tin. I always wonder what people in these Podunks do when they're not cooking meth or painting signs that say “OBAMA + HEALTH CARE = WHITE SLAVERY.” The only thing I can think of is towns like Modesto and Bakersfield work as a feeder system for carnival workers. Recruiters come through every few months, setting up folding tables with signs that say “TRAVEL THE WORLD, BECOME CARNIE TRASH.” That's really all I can come up with.

Hypercritical Mass

2009-10-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

I'm not one of those misanthropes who only hates people on Christmas and Easter - Dorothy Gambrell

Apparently I've gained a reputation at my job for hating everything. For some reason, everyone thinks I'm a heartless, emotionally empty jerk off. I guess I earned this by making puke noises every time somebody mentions something I don't like. There's my taste and bad taste, and I like to make it clear what category certain things fall into. This makes me a huge asshole. This isn't just for movies or music or books or whatever, this covers everything. If you like ranch dressing on your pepperoni pizza, I will call you a mongoloid. If you think I give a fuck about which cartoon is on your metal lunch pail, you'd best believe I do not. I know that this behavior doesn't make a lot of friends. Frankly, I'm amazed that I have any friends at all. I'm sure I'm one more “I don't think you understand why you're retarded for not listening to Tom Waits” tirade away from everybody I know abandoning me.

This horrible behavior is compounded by the fact that I'm a huge cynic. I'm sick of everything being super-sincere, saccharine-sweet sing-songy bullshit. I'm sick of adults who act like it's okay to watch television made for children despite not having kids of their own. Anybody who goes out of their way to watch Yo Gabba Gabba needs to be shot out of a cannon and into a bag of glass. While I'm not opposed to adults liking things made for kids, I just can't get on board with the idea of grown-ups blindly loving things meant for children, especially when they suck. Personally, I'm incredibly excited to see the Toy Story/Toy Story 2 double feature this week, not because of some sense of nostalgia or a desire to feel like a kid again, but because those two films are really, really good. This isn't like when guys eat Luna bars because they're yummy, despite being marketed towards women. This is like when college freshmen sleep with their blankies. Guess what - if your age doesn't end in “teen,” it's not acceptable to like the Jonas Brothers. It just isn't.

I work in a movie theatre, and the theatre industry makes all its money off of hype. Where the Wild Things Are doesn't come out for another two weeks, but I'm already fucking sick of it. I've seen previews for this movie for going on five months now, and it makes me want to smash my head against the wall every time I so much as hear the song from the trailer. I want to enjoy this movie, and I probably will - it's directed by Spike Jonze, after all. The problem is every time I hear somebody talk about the soaring sensation the feel in their chest when they watch the trailer, I have to suppress my urge to vomit. To be fair though, I'm sure I'd feel the same soaring sensation in my chest if they made a film adaptation of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Anyhow, the incredible hype that surrounds virtually every Friday at work has started to wear me out. Every week a new group of movies get released, and every week everybody I work with tells me how much they can't wait to see whatever movie. Smash cut to 72 hours later, their Facebook status reads “Movie X was okay, but not as good as I had hoped.” I'm not saying I'm above this. Believe me, the same thing happens to me every fucking week. I can count using one hand the movies that lived up to the hype this summer: Star Trek, Inglourious Basterds, Up, District 9 and uh... that's about it.

I'm pretty sure I'm broken. I have so much trouble honestly enjoying things these days. Maybe I'm sick of my life and everything in it. Maybe I need to move away from Los Angeles, a city full of frauds, hype machines and - forgive my Holden Caulfieldness - goddamn phonies. With each passing day I find myself hating a higher percentage of the people I see on the street. Maybe I'm drawing from a pool of people predisposed to being miserable - public transit users in LA - but fuck me, if I have to sit near somebody else on a subway platform playing music on his iPhone for everybody to hear, I'm going to jump in front of the next Union Station train. Remember the goop from Ghostbusters 2 that fed off of all the anger in New York? I wouldn't be surprised to see it start bubbling up out of my bathtub sometime soon. The worst part is I'm starting to hate myself as a result of this - loathing goes hand in hand with self-loathing. Walking around being an asshole to everybody isn't as much fun as it seems. When you spend enough time thinking about what other people do that you hate, you realize how loathsome you truly are.

At the end of October, my wife and I are going on a ten day vacation during which time we're going to visit our respective parents. I'm hoping this time spent with both of our families will serve to recalibrate me. If nothing else, by the time we get home I hope to hate enough things about Fresno and West Barnstable that some of the wide-eyed, Oz-like wonder Los Angeles once held for me will be restored to this squalid shithole of a city.

If not, then fuck it. I'm moving to Australia.

More stand up, this time it's even less funny

2009-09-18T15:57:00.000-07:00

I swear I'm writing still, but these past few weeks have been devoted to writing one long essay. Hopefully I'll finish it some day. Here's more shitty stand up for you. Sorry.

Tune in, stand up, cop out

2009-09-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

You'd think that with all the time I spent not working this week, I'd have a killer essay for you today. Sadly, this is not the case. Instead, please accept this chunk of mediocre stand up comedy. If you like it, let me know. If not, also let me know.

Thanks for listening, see you in a week.

Things that scare me

2009-09-04T22:01:00.000-07:00

I live a life of constant fear and paranoia. Everybody's afraid of something, I'm afraid of most things. Worse yet, I'm afraid of things that aren't material - my fears are nebulous, my fears are mostly intangible. Sometimes these fears paralyze me. I curl up in a ball late at night, worrying that someday, I may have to deal with these fears. In an effort to reduce the number of nights I spend weeping myself to sleep, terrified of something that probably won't happen or isn't true, here is a list of my fears, complete with rationales for all of them. To be fair, some are more rational than others. The goal of this essay is to gauge how reasonable each neurosis is, and rank them on a totally not gimmicky or arbitrary scale, where the reasonableness of each fear is given a score from one to five Woody Allen films. Shall we begin? Let's shall.

Abandonment!

I'm afraid that one morning, I'm going to wake up and everybody I love will have left me. My wife will disappear, my friends will stop answering my calls, even my cat will have run away. I'll be alone, with nobody left to love me. The only thing worse than being alone is the knowledge that once left to my own devices, I'd probably end up living in a pile of filth and eating shoe leather to survive, periodically shuffling back to civilization to weep in front of the local DSW in the hopes of receiving some old adidas Gazelles to eat.

This fear, the armchair psychologist might say, comes from the fact that my biological father did, in fact, abandon me and my mother when I was very young. The fact that I somehow managed to survive being raised by my mother tells me that I'd at least be able to carve out a decent life for myself, even after the wheels fall off. More importantly, I know that while my wife may leave me for an orthodontist some day, my cat will love me forever, or at least until she sees a squirrel in the tree outside our apartment.

Neurosis score: 2 out of 5 Take the Money and Runs

---

Being a bad parent!

I have no children, thank God. Someday, my wife and I plan to buy a couple of daughters from China and raise them as our own, and when that day comes, I'm sure I'll be a terrible parent. Not “keep one of them in a Rape Shed in the back yard” terrible, but bored, disinterested and selfish. This comes from the related fear that I could never love anything as much as it truly deserves to be loved.

Luckily, my wife is a wonderful person. She'll take care of our children while I spend my time with a worthless hobby that distances me from my family. I'm guessing building ships in bottles or something.

Neurosis score: 2.5 out of 5 Hannah and Her Sisters

---
Losing my mind!

Another wonderful fear of mine is the inevitable day that I will be sitting in my bedroom with, as the great Tony Kornheiser would say, “a rat in my mouth and drool running down my chin.” Not that I'm 100% with it all of the time as it is, but I fear that at an advanced age, my faculties will fail me and I'll eventually slip into a stupor, forcing my loved ones - assuming they haven't abandoned me yet - to care for me.

This comes from a tangentially related fear of mine - the fear of someday having to take care of my own mother, despite the fact that I hate her with a passion that burns like 1,000 dying suns. However many times I told her as much, I know that there's no way I would be able to put her in one of those crooked homes you see all the time on 60 Minutes, if for no other reason than I probably won't be able to afford it. Then again, if my kids hate me as much as I hate my mom, hopefully they'll kill me in my sleep like the Menendez brothers.

Neurosis scale: 4 out of 5 Bananas

---

I'm bad at my job and all of my friends and coworkers secretly hate me!

I work at a movie theatre, and apparently I'm good at my job. At least my bosses think I'm good at my job - they want me to train other people, which is super-weird to me. I think I'm terrible at my job. This is a vestigial fear dating back to the days when I really was terrible at my job. I'd fuck around at the supermarket all the time, catching Peanut M&M's in my mouth that people would throw from ten feet away. At Olympia Sports, I'd take ten breaks a day to smoke cigarettes in the parking lot with a drifter named Chaos. I can't go into what I did to fuck around at adidas, because one or more of my accomplices still work there, and I don't want to get them into trouble. That's all at my old jobs though, and if my new bosses think I'm good at my job, then I must be good at my job. Similarly, I'm sure all of my friends secretly don't like me. Not in a Mean Girls/The Hills kind of way, but more like they spend time with me because they pity me. They know I'm fragile, and without their approval I'll break like a Fabergé egg. They're doing me a favor. Goddamn I'm a wreck.

Neurosis score: 3.5 out of 5 Broadway Danny Roses

---

Snakes!

Pretty self-explanatory. Every snake in the world wants to kill me, and will stop at nothing to do so. They hide in bushes, piles of leaves, trees and ponds, just waiting for me to let my guard down and then bam, I'm fucking dead. Luckily, I live in the city now and all the snakes I see have been turned into belts for assholes.

Also, to save Dave Mahan some time, I'll just add this: Aaaah! COBRAS!

Neurosis score: 5 out of 5 Purple Rose of Cairos

---

Immortality, the death of my pets and secretly being the source of the destruction of everything I love!

This one's kind of a doozy. I lump them all together because they all involve the death of the things I love. First, there's the idea of living forever, while watching my friends and family waste away and die. I'm not sure how I first developed this fear, and it's not like it dominates my every thought or anything. It's just that I worry that although it's never happened before, there's a chance that I'll be the first person to live forever. This is one of the reasons I stopped smoking pot.

Secondly, the death of my pets not only frightens me, but the mere thought of if eats me up inside. I feel a gnawing inside my chest, right around the xyphoid process, that once I think about my cat dying, I can't shake for days. This is one of the many reasons I have yet to buy a turtle. This fear is so bad that it's tough for me to get new pets, because I know that someday they will have to die, and the idea of having to cope with that - despite the fact that it's probably over a decade away - is usually enough to deter me from getting an animal companion in the first place.

Then there's the most insidious, most nebulous, most incredibly weird fear of all. I'm afraid that somehow I will end up ruining everything I love. All the things that are important to me, all the friendships I have, my marriage, my impressive collection of old Loveline episodes, all of it will be gone, and I'll have nobody to blame but myself. And there's nothing I can do to cure this one. Well, maybe therapy, but fuck that.

Neurosis score: 5 out of 5 Love and Deaths

A blowhardy Mousebedaversary to you!

2009-08-28T20:38:00.000-07:00

So a few weeks ago, my wife and I went to see Julie and Julia. Aside from some minor problems with the presentation, the movie was pretty good. In it, Amy Adams decides she's going to start blogging about her quest to cook every recipe in the Julia Child cookbook. Her blog leads her to (spoiler alert!) a happier life and a better understanding of who she is. Oh, and a book deal. Oh, and then that book got turned into a movie. This movie. True story.

I started this blog a year ago this week. I've written far fewer entries than Julie Powell, although I've had a less solidly defined goal than she did. I started writing because my boss, my best friend and my wife all told me to start writing within about 24 hours of each other. They told me to start writing about my horrible dating life, my horrible home life, my horrible job at adidas, whatever. Just start writing, and people will enjoy it. For the most part, they've been right. I know my friends enjoy my writing for the most part. Since I left adidas, I've written ten stories about my tenure there, which have gotten great responses from my former coworkers. I've even gotten my wife and John Cabral to write a few essays for me, which I enjoy because that means I have an excuse to write less.

I suppose the best thing to come out of this blog - a word that still makes me retch, by the way - is the stuff I've written about my family. A lot of families suck, but mine sucks in a way that entertains people. I've managed to take the experiences I had living with them and parlay them into a collection of pretty solid essays, and through that I've worked out a lot of anger that I was building up for years. The person who helped me the most with this was my wife. She's really great.

Before this turns into a cock sucking exhibition, here's the point of this entry: I'm a big enough narcissist that I think I could maybe turn Mousebed into something that could make me money. Over the next few months, I'm going to work my ass off trying to rewrite some of my older posts, taking them from 800 word essays and turning them into long form pieces. Maybe even chapters. I think I could seriously turn this thing into a book. I really feel like I could combine all the essays about my family into a few thousand words. I could take all of my exes and make them 15 or so pages in OpenOffice. Hell, I could write an entire book about my fears and neuroses.

What I need is an angle. Julie Powell used her love of Julia Child. What do I love that I could write about that could tie into each of my essays? Let's see, what do I do with my life? Work, play video games, listen to old episodes of Loveline, work, hang out with my wife and cat, listen to music, work. The only one of those things that might be even remotely interesting is my love of music. Nick Hornby already wrote High Fidelity, but I think I could maybe take this a different direction. Each of my themes - sad girl stories, gallows humor, brutal honesty - could be turned into about 60 pages each. Each of those 60 page chunks could then have music worked into them. Maybe a play list for each chapter? Not quite sure yet. I swear this all makes sense in my head, despite how much I'm rambling here.

In the coming weeks, I hope to have rewritten enough of my stuff to start posting some old stories, written with a more cohesive structure. I'm hoping you're willing to put up with me doing this, rerunning old material. If you're not, I suppose that'll be too bad. I'm going to limit myself to 2500 words per essay, as I expect this might turn out to be a little wordy. I'll also mix in some of my other projects, specifically some of my stand up material. I'm going to start rehearsing my stuff more, writing new material and I may even end up doing a few open mic nights.

In a final act of cocksuckery, I'd like to thank some people. To all my fantastic coworkers at adidas, thank you for not being the miserable pricks I wrote about. To my friends here in Los Angeles, thank you for actually reading this shit and giving me fairly instantaneous feedback regarding my work. And finally to all the people I'm still friends with from back in Massachusetts, where most of the horrible shit that happened to me actually happened, thank you for making me a better person. I love all of you. Except for my cat Peepopo - you can eat a bag of dicks.

Listen to me, I'll show you the light of the mind!

2009-08-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

So I finally sat down with an audio recording program and fucking recorded myself talking. I'm a blowhard, I know, but please be kind enough to give it a listen and let me know what you like, don't like, et cetera. The file is a little over 11 minutes long. Please love me.

Knock, knock. Who's there? I dunno. I dunno who? No seriously, I don't have an end for this fucking joke.

2009-08-14T16:57:00.000-07:00

Here are some half-formed jokes. They don't really have endings yet, but they look like they could be solid. Any input would be nice. Thanks again. I swear I'll write a real essay again someday.

Sex toys sometimes bother me. There's one I saw called the “Clone-a-Pussy.” What it does is it makes a mold of your girlfriend's vagina, and you can make your very own latex clones of her vagina in whatever medium you feel suits her. Latex, chocolate, hamburger meat, whatever. Now, this really creeps me out. Just imagine Jodie Foster stumbling onto a burlap sack full of pussy paperweights.

The lack of utility is what really gets to me. You can't even fuck this thing - that's what really creeps me out. I could see maybe if it had an attachment, like a tube you stuck on the end that was full of lube and stuff. That sort of makes sense. I figure then you can fuck your girlfriend when she's out of town. So you start going at it, but then you remember the time she left the butter dish uncovered and the cat got to it and there was a cat tongue-shaped groove in the butter. Then the mood is broken. Or, you could use it when she's not in the mood. That seems healthy, right? Just going at it in the other room, occasionally shouting, “Man, this is waaaaay better than the real thing!”

---

You know, in every third retarded teen movie in the 80's there's a scene where the nerd goes on his first date, and his goofball buddy tells him to take her to the movies. Once there, he should buy a bucket of popcorn, cut a hole in the bottom and stick his dick through the hole. I suppose the thinking is that once his date reaches into the popcorn, she finds his salty, buttery cock and decides to go to town on it. This thought process fails on so many levels. First, and I suppose most importantly, when do you find time to cut the hole? Then, let's face it, this is basically sexual assault. Like, nothing you'd go to jail for, but expect to introduce yourself to your neighbors when you move to a new town. Most importantly, has this ever fucking worked? For anybody? I work at a movie theatre and I've picked up my fair share of popcorn buckets. Not a single one has had a cock-sized hole in the bottom. I did once find a bucket full of urine, left by a parent who decided that their movie-going experience was not to be interrupted by having to take their kid to the bathroom. This is already a dick move, but not throwing away your pee bucket is the icing on the asshole cake.

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I've always had trouble with dating. When I was in sixth grade, I was going to ask a girl out in science class. I wore my nicest pair of pants to school - green corduroys - because they made me look like hot shit. Before I could even begin talking to her, my pants fell down. Now I can't go on dates if I'm not wearing a belt. Before that, though, things were just as bad. In fourth grade, I went to my first boy-girl sleepover party. I was stoked. I didn't know exactly what to expect - it's not like nine year olds have tits or anything - but I knew if I played my cards right, I could at least kiss a girl, which I was hoping I could later parlay into a blowjob.

Late that night, we all decided to play spin the bottle. This was it, I thought. I'm going to kiss a girl, and like I said, hopefully score some oral. We sat in a circle, put the bottle in the middle, and selected the first person to spin. Before the bottle was spun, though, one rule was laid out. If the bottle lands on Josh, you don't have to kiss him. This was made worse by the fact that there was only one other guy at the party, and everybody knew - even in fourth grade - that he was gay.

Any ideas on how to end these jokes would be greatly appreciated. I'm turning to you, loyal Mousebed reader, to be funny where I simply cannot.

So a joke walks into a bar and,

2009-08-07T19:32:00.001-07:00

NB: Anybody who knows me already knows I'm super-stoked about working on my stand up act. Once again, instead of actually writing an essay, here are some of the bits I've been working on. Hope you like them.

I fucking hate babies. Just hate them. The worst are the babies who wear the “hilarious” onesies. I saw one the other day that said “Back off daddy, her boobies are mine!” Great. You can't even piss in the toilet but you can cockblock your old man? What an asshole. Seriously though, this comes from the “cool parents.” Mom thinks it's adorable for their tow-headed kid to wear a dopey Mohawk, dad has the weird pierced ear even though he's 38 and he dresses the kid in a Ramones shirt. There's this place in Sherman Oaks that purports to be an “alternative kids boutique.” On the door, written in what can only be described as “kid font” is the phrase “PUNK LIVES!” Not anymore, it doesn't. Once that phrase is painted on the door of a store that sells clothes for three-year-olds, punk is officially dead, and you have killed it.

---

I used to be an animal rights activist, back when I used to care about things. I used to care, then I stopped, and then I was happy. Weird how that works, right? Anyhow, back then I used to do a lot more drugs, and sometimes I have flashbacks. It always ends when I throw a bucket of paint on the cat and shout “FUR IS MURDER! FUR IS MURDER!”

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When I get my hair cut, I like to go to the gay neighborhood, because I assume they'll do a better job of cutting my hair than the fat unemployable chick down at the Fantastic Sam's. I extend this theory to clothing. I like going to the thrift stores on Santa Monica Blvd because I assume that if a gay guy used to own it, it has to be stylish. That's why my closet is full of leather train conductor hats and t-shirts that say “Boy's Town Bear Fest '97” (Alternate endings to this joke are “Bears Do It Better” and “Future Mrs. Timberlake.”)

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I grew up in the village of West Barnstable. Not the town, the village. You may ask yourself what the difference between a village and a town is. It's easy to remember - villages have idiots, while towns have drunks. If we lived in a town, I'd be embarrassed by my alcoholic dad, but instead, I'm embarrassed by my retarded mom.

---

The place I grew up in had no black people. Like, at all. There were 200 people in my town and 190 of them were white and the other ten were Caucasian. I didn't meet any black people until college, and I didn't really hang out with any until afterwards. My first black friend was named Doug, and he had a lot of other black friends. It was pretty cool. He called me one day and invited me over to a barbecue at his place and told me to bring some beer. Now, I was used to hanging out with my honky-ass friends and going to their Graham Wellington-ass box socials, not barbecues with actual black folk. So when I get to the party with my six-pack of hefeweizen, I was shocked to find that it didn't fit in with the other beers in the fridge. Steel Reserve, Olde English, Colt 45, more Steel Reserve. About an hour into the party, somebody from the patio yelled “Who the fuck brought this shit?” Obviously he wasn't a fan of hefeweizen. I told him it was me, and that it was wheat beer. He told me that it smelled like a gorilla's dick, and that my new nickname would be Gorilla Dick. Now, when you're the only white guy at a bar with eight black guys, there are certain advantages to having a nickname like Gorilla Dick. Women would always ask where I got my unique name, and I'd offer to show them. By which I mean buying them a shitty beer.

So yeah, there's some more stuff. What did you like? What didn't you like? Any feedback would be great. Thanks for putting up with this shit, and hopefully something noteworthy will come out of it. Have a good week.

So we're talking about practice? Not a show. Not a show that I give my life for, but practice?

2009-07-30T21:20:00.000-07:00

NB: So I'm writing a lot of material for a stand up act I'm doing at the end of next month. I'm working out a few of the beats right now, and I thought I would use this time to post some of the stuff I've been writing. If you're not exactly a fan of the idea of reading jokes that could be deemed incredibly offensive, I'd advise skipping this one. I work particularly blue when I write jokes, as it turns out. However, it's all I got this week, so I hope it's good enough. Enjoy!

So you know how at the beginning of the porno movie there's a disclaimer that reads “This film does not necessarily depict a healthy sexual relationship?” I'm not a huge fan of that. The last thing I need before beating off is a guilt trip. I know it's not a healthy sexual relationship, that's why it's a good porno. Also, what if the subject of this particular porn is how you actually live your life? Calling my lifestyle choices into question as I'm about to jerk off isn't exactly a turn on.

---

So I'm married, and when people find out about it they're always surprised. I'm pretty sure I should be offended, but whatever. Anyhow, everyone always asks, “So what's your wife like,” which is tough for me because I can never remember. I always end up saying something like “I dunno. I guess she's 5'5”? Mid 20's?” It's like I'm describing her for a police sketch artist. I've just learned to give the people what they want to hear. For women, it's “She's my best friend and the greatest thing to ever happen to me.” For guys, it's “Red hair, nice tits, good in the sack.” I suppose the truth really lies in the middle.

---

I hate people who need to volunteer super-personal stuff about their lives. This girl I know is telling me how she's going to graduate from high school in October because she had to be home schooled. I say “Why home school? Do your parents hate the government or something?” She says “No, I couldn't be in regular school,” and before I can say another word, she blurts out “Because I tried to kill myself there.” Total downer, right? But she was all cavalier about it. “Oh, yeah, you know me! I'm the girl who's unbalanced! Doesn't that make me fascinating?” I fucking hate people like that. You know what needs to come back? Shame. Used to be you didn't go around announcing to the world that you're a fucking nutcase. Now it's cool. Makes me sick. By the way, have I mentioned that I tried killing myself twice? Because I did. Please like me.

---

I like to think of myself as being very similar to John Lennon. Not in that I'm a great songwriter, or an iconoclast, or a genius or anything. I'm a lot like John Lennon in that I spend a lot of my time in bed and none of my friends like my wife very much.

---

I used to be afraid of two things. I'm afraid of snakes, and losing my mind to the point where I become a burden on the ones I love. Those two things used to terrify me. Recently, however, I was listening to an interview with Dana Gould, a comedian who is funnier than I could ever be, where he revealed his two biggest fears. First was snakes, just like me. Seems reasonable. Second however, was getting trapped in an elevator and having to take a shit. When I heard this I laughed and didn't really think about it. The other day, however, I was at work and I got into the elevator. As the door closed, I realized I had to take a mammoth shit. Like, urgently. It was then that I realized the validity of Mr. Gould's fear. Now, the elevator at work pauses for like, a one-and-a-half Mississippi before the door opens and friends, that felt like fucking ages. As the door opened, I pushed one of my coworkers out of the way and shouted “MOVE, OR I'LL SHIT ON YOU.” From then on I couldn't even look at the elevator if I had eaten in the past hour. Needless to say, I am now afraid of three things, and if you're anything like me, you are too.

---

So yeah, that's some of the stuff I've been working on. It's still a little raw, and I still need to say it out loud more so I can get used to my own speech patterns. If you have any input, please leave it in the comments section. Thanks for putting up with my non-writing these past few weeks.

So procrastination decides to walk into a bar later...

2009-07-23T23:21:00.000-07:00

So it's Friday and I haven't really written anything. This isn't because nothing has happened - a lot has, really. Some of it even noteworthy. The reason I'm not really posting anything this week is I have a stand-up gig in about a month, and I've focused all of my writing time on banging out crappy jokes, and neither John nor myself was available for podcasting. I'm sorry. This (probably) won't happen again. In recompense, here is a photograph of my cat, taking a well-deserved nap after tearing apart a roll of paper towels.

Have a good week, everybody.

Born Under a Yield Sign

2009-07-17T01:52:00.000-07:00

The other day I caught four teenage girls trying to sneak into the movies. When I caught them, they freaked out and started explaining their scheme to me faster than a Bond villain. What they would do - and apparently they did this all the time - was they'd pool their money, go through box office and buy one ticket. That way, they could see which seats were available. They would then go through the upstairs entrance to one of the theatres, and all four of them would sit in the section that had the most empty seats. A pretty brilliant plan, considering the various checkpoints they managed to avoid. Honestly, I caught them by accident.

I'm a fairly cautious individual. I don't drive particularly fast, I don't run red lights - left turn arrows not included - and I certainly wear my seatbelt when I'm driving. I never snuck into the movies as a kid. At least not without paying. I would routinely buy tickets for one movie and proceed to sneak into an R-rated movie, but everybody does that. I never really stole either. My friends would often steal stuff from record stores and Best Buy and whatnot, but I was always too timid. I knew that the moment I tried, I would get caught. I had a friend get banned for life from Newbury Comics for trying to steal Magic cards once. His lifetime ban was lifted as soon as everybody who worked there forgot who he was, but it was pretty rough for him, and I couldn't bear the thought of not being allowed into my favorite store.

---

There used to be a Strawberries record store in the same plaza as the Staples I used to work at. I would go in there before work to kill time and maybe buy some CDs. One day I found an empty case in one of the racks. It was a copy of Closing Time by Tom Waits, and somebody had taken the disc out of the case. I brought the empty case to the girl at the counter and told her what I found. She thanked me, and I left the store.

I went to the bagel shop up the street to get some lunch, and the store clerk followed me. She demanded I return to her store to be searched. She had decided that I stole the CD and she called the cops to search me. Naturally, I freaked out and started crying. She asked me for some ID, which I had in my car. She followed me to my car and wrote down my license plate number, I suppose in case I tried to make a speedy escape. I got my license out of the glove box and dolefully returned to the store. It was pretty awful.

When the cops finally showed up, I was searched. At this point, I was so rapt with guilt that I had forgotten that I hadn't actually done anything wrong. When it was discovered that no, I didn't actually steal anything, the manager of the store wanted my car searched. The cops said they not only didn't have the time to fuck around in my station wagon, but that it was also a violation of my rights as an American. That was a pretty cool moment for me - I thought the Constitution was just there for show. Anyhow, I was let go without charges, but the cops sent a letter to my house telling me that I had been banned for life from the store, and I wasn't allowed to park my car in the lot there. This was tough, considering I worked next door. I worked at Staples for three more weeks, and my car managed to not get impounded.

---

As I've grown older, I've become less timid. I still don't run red lights, but I jaywalk. Often. I find it freeing. It's the walking equivalent of not wearing underwear.

Adidas Story 10: From the Basement to the Dream Factory

2009-07-09T13:45:00.000-07:00

My mom is a depressed, delusional paranoid schizophrenic. All her life she has been convinced that everybody is out to get her, especially her various employers. She once famously quit a job because she was convinced that her boss and his wife were hacking into her email account. It's all she could talk about for months. It came as quite a surprise to everybody around her when her boss was arrested for writing prescriptions for painkillers illegally. My mom had decided that she was right all along. From then on, she decided that every one of her bosses was out to get her - to destroy her for bringing down one of their colleagues.

I spent the last year I worked at adidas trying to convince myself that my boss wasn't out to get me. It started when my hours were being cut. At first I was scheduled for shorter, seven hour days. Then I started getting only four days of work every week. This came as a direct result of Sal being put in charge of scheduling. Sal, you may recall, was the closest thing I've ever had to a mortal enemy. If anybody were to be out to get me, it would be Sal. Just having my hours cut was bad, but every week, my paycheck would end up a couple hundred dollars short. Not shocking when you realize that Sal's retarded ass was in charge of submitting the payroll reports. Another thing Sal liked to do was make me do his job. His favorite move was telling me to tell other people to work, and then to blame me when the work didn't get done. What a great guy.

One day I just snapped. I screamed at Sal for what seemed like an hour about how he was a terrible manager, how he's an awful human being, how he doesn't deserve to be allowed outdoors in polite society. It was quite a show. I then locked myself in the stock office and sobbed for a while. At most jobs this would be a fire-able offense, but this was fairly commonplace at adidas. Once a week somebody would start screaming and crying and slam the stock office door behind them. Usually it was my boss, Laura. When I came back the next day, it was like nothing had ever happened. I went back to work and everything was normal again. I'm surprised I kept my job.

Things got even weirder when a few weeks later I found out Rico, the manager, wanted to give me a promotion. Apparently he thought I would make a good team lead; all I had to do was pass the credit check and job was mine. I didn't have great credit to begin with, so I was a little worried. To make matters worse, getting shorted on paycheck after paycheck resulted in my wife and I having to take on debt, and we fell even further behind on our bills. On top of everything else, I had a unpaid medical bill from when I fell off a ladder at work and adidas made me go to the emergency room. They still haven't paid that bill, by the way, and it's been nearly three years. I pretended that my credit might be high enough to get the promotion, but I knew it wasn't. Ironically I couldn't make more money at adidas because I never made enough money at adidas. Not to sound like my mother, but I'm sure I can sue for lost wages at this point.

One week, the managers' schedule came out with my name on it. Well, at least it said “Josh.” I came in Monday morning, expecting to be showered with praise and given my shiny new name tag. Turns out, it was a different Josh. This Josh was the manager of the Camarillo adidas outlet, and he was training a new manager at our store for two weeks. I was humiliated. This is why I hate having a name like Josh. This never happens to Dweezil Zappa or Picabo Street. Anyhow, if there was one good thing that came out of this awful situation, Sal got fired shortly after Josh's visit, and Josh replaced Rico as manager a few months later.

When Josh came to adidas, he brought with him an Obama-like level of optimism. I was wary of his corporate doublespeak and his overly cheerful demeanor. Everyone told me to lighten up and give him a chance. Turns out I was right and he's a snake, but that's not really the point. In Josh's first week at the helm, he found countless financial problems in the adidas books, the biggest of which being that none of the store's bills were paid in the time Rico was in power. Apparently, having Sal monitor the finances of the store was a mistake. Who knew? There were also dozens of repairs that needed to be done. Josh decided it would be best to have the staff make these repairs, so we did. It was mostly the stockroom team that did the building and cleaning, including a complete overhaul of the stockroom shelving system. We spent nearly a month restructuring every fucking shelf. Thousands of dollars spent on tools, supplies, wood and payroll resulted in new shelves on which to put our shoes.

Good thing we had new shelves, because none of the stock was moving. The shitty economy, combined with a lack of quality product - we had some ugly, ugly stuff for two straight seasons - resulted in record lows for our store. On top of that, we were over hours as a result of the stock team being used to build shelves. Naturally, hours started getting cut. First we all went from 45 hours down to 40, then 32, then 20. Every time a new schedule came out, we were told things would be getting better soon. As soon as the economy turned around, we'd all get more hours. By the end of my tenure, many people were getting eight hours or less.

After years of threats, I finally went out and found a new job. I applied at Arclight Cinemas and was hired in under a week. I put in my two week notice at adidas and said goodbye to everyone who mattered there. It was sad. I really didn't want to leave. I had made so many friends, I loved working with the stockroom team. I loved my boss - Laura, not Josh. Honestly, I loved the manual labor. It gave me eight hours a day to be alone with my thoughts, and I even got paid for it.

My wife says my new job is better for my development as a person, and she's probably right. Since I started at Arclight, I'm a happier person, I've made more friends, I make a little more money, and I've even become a better writer. That last part is probably a result of writing more than I used to, but still. In all likelihood, I'm going to work at Arclight longer than I probably ought to, just like I did at adidas. I'm also probably going to have a few dozen awful stories to tell about it. Rest assured that as soon as I get a new job - or fired, whichever comes first - I'll start hacking away about the worst of times at Arclight. I've already come up with a title - Tales from the Dream Factory. Thanks for reading.

---

If you would like to read more adidas stories, here are the links:
1 Seth and Yanira
2 Area Leads and the NBA Event
3 Sweatshirt Folding and Orwellian Mindgames
4 (I Don't Want to go to) Chelsea
5 Stockroom MADNESS!
6 Santa Monica T-Shirt Boulevard
7 Shitwater Canyon and Fruit Flygueroa
8 Slowpoke Rodriguez and the Adidas Cavalcade of Stars!
9 How to Lose Friends and Influence Nobody
10 From the Basement to the Dream Factory

State of the Union II

2009-07-03T19:14:00.001-07:00

NB: I didn't put together one long-form essay this week. All I could really put together was a string of angry sentences. Here are some of the better ones, followed by a handful of photos from the Michael Jackson shrine that's accruing over by the Chinese Theatre, or as Julianne would call it “The Chinaman Theatre.” It's not exactly my best stuff, but what are you gonna do, right?

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I'm through with irony. Specifically, I'm sick of people liking things ironically. If you like Billy Joel, just fucking say you like Billy Joel. Don't act like it's hilarious that you own a copy of 52nd Street, because it's really not. You just like Uptown Girl. There's nothing wrong with that. Personally, I love the Carpenters.

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An addendum to last week's rant about cool dads: My dad is not cool. He's about as uncool as dads get. He wears t-shirts with the sleeves cut off, he wears tall socks with sandals. He eats sautéed mushrooms as a meal. He's a bald guy with just a mustache. Not exactly Lou Reed. However, he's a pretty decent dad. Of the two dads I've had, he's far and away the best one.

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I have a lot of First World Problems. My life is constantly plagued with difficulties like having too many podcasts to listen to or deciding which NPR affiliate to donate to. Last week I went out to brunch with my wife and we had to send out eggs back because they were undercooked. When they came back, they were half undercooked, half overcooked. Then they had the nerve to undercook my steak. I realized afterwards how ludicrous it was that this ruined my day. It really ruined my wife's night when she realized she had food poisoning.

---

I wish people would act like fucking adults once in a while. I spend a lot of my time listening to people at work bitch about their 40 hour work week and how difficult it is to get time off so they can make their student films. Pay your bills first, then Make Art. Also, please, grown-ups, unless you've got kids of your own, stop watching TV shows intended for children. If nothing else, don't tell me about how awesome you think Yo Gabba Gabba is. I don't give a fuck.

---

Michael Jackson just died, and I live up the street from his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I thought I would go see what kind of shit was happening over there. As somebody whose life was not touched in even the slightest way by Michael Jackson or his work, I figured I would make a good objective observer of the kind of weird stuff that was going on over that way. Sadly, not a lot of interesting stuff occurred, but here are some pictures anyway.

Out of frame: About 35 of those tall candles that they sell at the supermarket with Mary on them.

Out of frame: A smelly guy in a denim jacket with gold puff paint on the back that spelled out the phrase “The Chicago Kid.” He was looking for acting work. Apparently a lot of Hollywood big-shots hang out by the Chinese Theatre, handing out Rich and Famous Contracts like the one Orson Welles gives Kermit at the end of The Muppet Movie.

I can't tell if the single black glove is supposed to signify mourning or if somebody had never seen a photo of Michael Jackson before. I guess it could have also been there to signify that he played the Scarecrow in the film version of The Wiz.

After a short wait in line, during which I was offered many hastily made Michael Jackson RIP t-shirts at exorbitant prices, I made my way to the star itself. I was asked to take a picture of the family in front of me, which I gladly did. I was also interviewed by a Japanese newspaper, a Korean newspaper and Telemundo. They were all disappointed when their respective translators told them that I wasn't there because I loved Michael Jackson, but because I wanted to observe how people mourn the death of an idol.

Why can't they dance like we did, what's wrong with Sammy Kaye?

2009-06-26T14:41:00.000-07:00

I'm not a huge fan of kids. I have no use for anybody under 18. Don't get me wrong - I'm not in love with the middle-aged or elderly either. Frankly, I have little use for my contemporaries. Honestly, I don't like anybody, but it's kids I like least of all. I know I'm not the first person to string these words together, but what's wrong with kids these days? It seems that all of the kids I see at my job have a general attitude of “Fuck you, old man,” but I'm not sure what they're so angry about.

I work at the cinema, so I often have to deal with packs of douchebag teens. The other day, my friend Kevin and I were approached by a group of 12 year old girls. Their leader angrily shoved a bottle of water in Kevin's face and yelled “I paid $4.25 for this. Do you have anything to say about this?” Kevin replied “Oh, that's not water. It's unicorn tears.” When she told him that unicorns don't cry, he said “They do when you lock them up.” In addition to being the funniest thing Kevin is ever going to say, this exchange hopefully taught this girl that adults are probably smarter than she is.

My hatred for the young is far from a new development. I couldn't stand kids even when I was one. This came as a result of switching school districts between second and third grade. All the kids in my classes had already made their friends and weren't looking for new ones. They were all dicks, even back then. Maybe I had it coming - I can't remember if I had turned into such a huge asshole myself yet - but that helped kick off a lifetime of misanthropy. I didn't make a single friend until the fifth grade, and by that time I had developed the fool-proof strategy of pulling my last few baby teeth out during class just to get sent to the nurse's office, which had the unintentional benefit of making all my teeth grow back at about the same time, so they're fairly straight.

As a 24 year old crotchety old man, I find myself constantly disgusted with everything young people do. I hate the way they dress. The girls all wear bags from American Apparel and the guys all wear super tight purple jeans and neckerchiefs. Seriously, I'm angry about neckerchiefs. I took an informal poll of all the gay guys I know, and apparently neckerchiefs were declared too gay for the gay community. I don't understand the statement that these clothes are supposed to make. All it really says to me is, “We'll buy what you're selling us.” I don't think any generation before this one has so eagerly bought what they were told to buy. Then again, history is written less about the masses and more about those who defied the masses, so perhaps I just lack perspective.

My biggest fear, aside from snakes and losing my mind, is that I will grow to hate my progeny. The worst part about having kids is that no matter what you try to do, they're going to be young. You just can't stop it. I know there's no way to combat the shittiness of youth in my own child, but I know what I won't be doing, I sure as fuck won't be dressing them up in my favorite band's t-shirts. Every time I see a kid wearing a shirt that says “This Machine Kills Fascists” I want to ask him what it means, and if he's ever heard a Woody Guthrie song. I just saw a kid walk by wearing a shirt depicting the cover of Sandinista! by the Clash. There's no fucking way that kid knows what the Sandinistas were and he certainly doesn't understand the social impact of the Clash. I think it's really unfair to use your kids as a billboard to show the world that you're a cool dad. It's just as bad as living vicariously through their Little League success.

I hope that my kids will end up being productive members of society. I know that being a shitty, snot-nosed fuck is just part of growing up. Maybe some day I'll outgrow that stage myself. Really I just want my kids to grow up happy, but if my son wears a neckerchief at any point, I'll kill him and then myself.

Life as an apartment

2009-06-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

I live in a small, messy, overpriced apartment. A studio, no less. I have a bathroom, a walk-through closet - as in you walk through the closet to get to the bathroom - and almost a kitchen. The almost a kitchen has a stove top, a sink, a mini-fridge and a microwave. Oh, and a Foreman Grill. My bed and my dining room table are less than three feet away from each other, and even closer to the study. On top of that, I share all of this with my wife and cat. It's a lot nicer than it sounds, and frankly I don't want it to change.

---

I grew up in a nice house. Well, niceish. Looking back, my parents' house is a weird amalgam of things that should make a nice house, but they never really came together to make anything good. There's central air conditioning and a jacuzzi, a balcony and a basketball hoop, but things never really seem to fit. It's almost as if aliens looked at a book about houses and used their replicators to construct what ought to be the platonic ideal of a house. Everything seems nice, but with a strange veneer. I'm sure the fact that my mom is completely incapable of keeping anything nice plays a huge role in this.

As a kid, I was led to believe that the pinnacle of coolness was living in an apartment. I've always been attracted to city living. Everyone I saw growing up was either a townie loser or a retarded tourist. I wanted to go to where the tourists were leaving. That, combined with my love of Woody Allen, the New York Times and taking the subway, formed me as a city-dwelling-lefty-left-eggplant-eating-bleeding-heart-homo-liberal-douchebag. It naturally followed that if I were to live in the city, I would be living in an apartment. Nobody owns a home in the city, after all.

When I got to college, I lived in what could be considered a simulated urban environment, shoehorned into a small cow-town in rural Massachusetts. I got my first taste of real city living -- I lived in a dorm, which is an apartment with alcohol poisoning. I had my own money; everything I could ever want to do was minutes away. There was even a Taco Bell, which seemed exotic at the time. I took up smoking, which is something cool people do in the city. When I failed out of school, I had to move back in with my family. It was a horrible return to my old, boring life.

A series of unpleasant events provided me with the opportunity to once again move away from home, and this time for good. After living in a nice, big apartment with three other guys for a year, I got married. Before the wedding, my wife and I found a nice, decent-sized studio apartment in Hollywood. Now, I had always been led to believe that living in a studio was hip and glamorous. Every romantic comedy has the scene where the guy brings a girl back to his stylish, Pottery Barn apartment with the exposed beams in the ceiling and the pinball machine over by his wet bar. He lives here, alone, and pays for everything on the salary of a freelance reporter for a men's magazine. This is one of those Hollywood Lies you hear so much about. Not only does that apartment not exist, but I have yet to see a single apartment that's nearly as nice. You can imagine my shock to find that not only do apartments cost more money than you can make as a freelance anything, but they're usually run down and shitty. Oh, and your neighbors are all assholes. Who knew?

For all my complaining, I really like my apartment. I have all I ever really wanted - video games and a cat - all under one roof, with no dividing walls. I don't like the idea of owning a bunch of useless shit, just for the sake of owning it. I don't need a front yard, I don't need any kind of huge swimming pool, I don't even really need a car. I just need a place to live, with my wife and cat. I've found a lot of joy in a compact life. I've even learned to cook full dinners without an oven. Real food, even - not just Pop Tarts and scrambled eggs.

The only thing I can't really do in my apartment is raise kids. I'm pretty much okay with this, and my wife isn't too unhappy about it either. I'm certainly not opposed to having kids - Cindy, if you're reading this, don't freak out - but it's just not something I really need right now. I'm 24, I'm not exactly financially secure or even close to out of debt. As you may recall from last week, we barely pay our bills - the idea of forcing a baby to live like I do is unpleasant. Luckily(?) the chances of accidentally having a kid are fairly low for my wife and me. This may or may not be due to any or all of the following conditions that may or may not exist: malformed pelvic bone, low sperm count, shimmying ovary syndrome, delayed ejaculation, lazy uterus, and upside-down testiculitis. Odds are, we're going to be adopting – and that can wait until we at least have a couple of bedrooms.

---

I guess having a nice apartment is a good thing. It can certainly become a trap, though. The idea of never having to change my life is enticing, especially for someone as terrified of change as I am. Maybe some day I'll inherit my parents' house, and I'll be able to put the work into it to make it feel like a real home. Then I'll adopt a dozen Chinese babies and my wife's mom will finally shut up.

I thought 20 dollars was a lot of money

2009-06-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

I went to the bank yesterday to deposit my paycheck. The woman, looking at my account information on her computer, asked me how I pay my bills. In those words exactly - “How do you pay your bills?” I thought this was kind of rude, but I told her barely. I am barely able to pay my bills. Turns out she wanted to know if I paid online or the old fashioned way. I told her that I paid online, and that she ought to re-word her question in the future.

I don't exactly make a lot of money, but I make enough. I pay my rent, I eat, I barely pay my bills. My wife makes about enough too. Together, we live a perfect life of relative comfort and ease, and will continue to do so forever, as long as nothing ever changes, which it shouldn't. This leaves very little money to spare, however, which brings me more or less to my point. I have never, in all of my days, given so much as a dime to the homeless. This mostly comes from my utter contempt for everybody, but part of it is the fact that no, brother, I cannot spare a dime. We're poor. This doesn't just apply to money, mind you. I have a “no” chambered at all times for any of the following solicitations:

Spare a dollar for pot?
Would you like to take a tour of movie star homes?
Pases de descuento para los Estudios Universal? (For some reason I always get this one in Spanish.)
Buy some flowers for her? (I usually don't say no, I just tell the guy my wife doesn't deserve flowers.)

I'm seldom apologetic about not helping people. The only time I feel bad is when I don't have a cigarette or a lighter, which is always. When I worked at Olympia Sports, I would smoke on my breaks. One day there was an old punk sitting on a retaining wall, picking through the ash tray to see if there were any partially-smoked cigarettes left for him to take. Other than being covered in regrettable tattoos, this guy seemed pretty clean and fairly sane. I gave him a few of my cigarettes and we talked for a while. He told me about his travels across America as a real, live punk rock drifter. Apparently he knew Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics, and claimed to be friends with Lemmy. After talking for about 20 minutes he realized that he hadn't introduced himself and told me his name was Chaos, and I believed him. I mean, I had no reason not to. He is, to date, the coolest person I've ever met.

There was a point where my wife was homeless. She drifted around in her station wagon from couch to couch, living off of what little she had. Eventually, though, she managed to find a job and a permanent place to live. She never went out and begged. One of the jobs she eventually got was working at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. This is a hotel for the rich and famous, and the rooms are priced accordingly. Within a week of working there, she found a sign in one of the rooms that read “I AM HOMELESS AND HAVE NOWHERE TO STAY. PLEASE GIVE ME MONEY. GOD BLESS.” Finding that sign was the last straw for her - she too refuses to give money to homeless people.

The worst homeless of all are the young, able-bodied homeless. There was a girl who would sit outside of the Barnes and Noble in Santa Monica with a sign that said “Visions of a cheeseburger.” The best was when she sat next to the sign that said “Now Hiring!” There are dozens like her in Hollywood. Roaming bands of teens holding signs like “Fuck money, give me pot” and yelling at people to give them their change. One of them has a Nintendo DS, which my wife famously told him to sell instead of asking us for money.

What it really comes down to is I'm not opposed to helping people who need help. Well, I, personally, am opposed to helping anybody. Effort, right? But I'm not opposed to the idea of helping people who need help, especially if I have to do nothing. What pisses me off is the idea of helping somebody who is either lying about their inability to get off the street or are perfectly capable and just fucking lazy.

Doheny, Cahuenga, La Brea Tar Pits

2009-06-05T16:04:00.000-07:00

My mother has nothing that even remotely resembles a sense of humor. She doesn't understand subtlety, irony, timing or anything like that. She's just not funny. Frankly, it amazes me that I can string a joke together. To her credit, she recognized my love of hilarity and always got me joke books from the library. Sadly, she was my only audience, so the jokes were never laughed at. She didn't even have the decency to fake a laugh. I'm not sure she knows what a joke is.

---

At or around age eight, I discovered the radio. Not like Marconi, but as a fantastic medium. The greater Barnstable area used to have many good radio stations, but they're all dead now. I'm not sure what 96.3 WRZE is anymore, but I'm sure it's the Cape and Islands' number one source for ranchero music or something. The best radio station of my lifetime was Rock 104.7, who played modern rock most of the time. Four hours of their week was devoted to the two things that shaped me most as a kid. From 9:00 to 11:00pm, they'd play a show called The Cheap Seats, which was devoted to giving local bands some radio play. This was instrumental to my development as an insufferable hipster fuck. After that came the Dr. Demento Show. This was, without a doubt, the single most important radio program of my life, with Loveline coming in a close second and Dan and Damon in the Morning failing to place.

For the uninitiated, the Dr. Demento Show is a two-hour syndicated radio show that plays all manner of weird, outsider, left of the dial type music, as well as comedy sketches and stand-up routines. Since the show was so late at night, listening felt like being a member of a super-secret club. The lessons I learned from the Good Doctor are many and varied.

Nothing hurts quite like a boot to the head

AKA: There are comedy groups not named Monty Python. Dear nerds, please shut the fuck up about Monty Python. You make me hate them. Please listen to anybody else. The Frantics, The Dead Alewives, Firesign Theatre. Please. All of these groups are really funny, but you insist on telling me about my dead parrot and how you'd like to eat something with very little spam in it. Please go jump off a cliff. Also, there are parody song writers not named Weird Al.

Intro to Dadaism for fifth graders

The most popular song in the history of the Dr. Demento Show was Pico and Sepulveda by Felix Figueroa and his Orchestra. It was requested so often that once a year, Dr. Demento would play it non-stop for two full hours, which I thought was about the ballsiest thing you could do on the radio. He also introduced me to weird music like Wild Man Fischer, Tiny Tim and of course, They're Coming to Take Me Away, by Napoleon XIV, which I would later learn was released as a single with the b-side being They're Coming to Take Me Away played backwards. It was an introduction to the bizarre and the truly awful.

Take my wife, please!

Another thing I learned about was stand-up comedy. Every week I would listen with a blank tape in my radio so I could record the stand-up segments, for the purpose of memorizing them later. I would stay up late mouthing along to old Henny Youngman and Woody Allen routines. My favorite tape had 20 minutes of George Carlin on one side and all of Who's On First? on the other. Finally, I had some jokes in my life.

---

The first day of ninth grade, 104.7 changed its format to classic rock, effectively killing the Dr. Demento Show on Cape Cod. When I moved out to Los Angeles - the original home of the show - I was excited about finding a local affiliate to tune in every week. I found out, much to my chagrin, that the show has lost advertisers and as such, most of its funding. It plays on nine affiliates across the US and Canada, and not a single one in LA. The closest one to me is in Fort Bragg, CA. I have no idea where that is. The shows are available on his website for a nominal fee, and I managed to get one the other day. Some things weren't as funny as I remember - I'm looking at you Whimsical Will and your Demented News - but enjoyed the experience thoroughly. Unfortunately, this is an experience that few others will have in the near future. The show is still on the air, but the mics may be going cold by the end of the year. It saddens me to think that the man who gave me so much - Shaving Cream, the Dungeons and Dragons sketch, the dirty poems of Shel Silverstein - will be going off the air. My plan is to stockpile a bunch of his shows and hold on to them for my kids. Stay deeee-mented.

What ever happened to all the fun in the world?

2009-05-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

So the other day I burnt my tongue on something. I don't remember what it was, but that's not really important. What is important is the fact that I can't taste anything. I just ate what might have been a delicious lunch, but I'll never know. I'm sure that within a few days I'll be able to taste again, so I'm not that concerned. Unfortunately, I've had the same sort of (lack of) feeling about life lately. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with being overworked at my job or anything, but I just feel like the fun of life has been kind of drained. I'm sure this is just another spate of depression, and just like my burnt tongue, things will be back to normal in a few days. There are some shitty side effects though. My wife asked me what I enjoy doing and I honestly couldn't remember. I think I like pinball, but I can't be sure.

The reason I mention this is I think I don't like writing anymore, at least writing about the horrors of my life. It's been nine straight months of writing about 1,000 words every week or so. This really isn't much , but it's more than I've ever written in my life. Frankly, I think it's pretty impressive considering the fact that I no longer know how to read books. When I started this blog - a word I still hate using - I was going to use it as a cheap form of therapy and just write about all the bad things that have happened to me. The one guideline I tried to set for myself was no writing about current events, whether they're political or personal. Unfortunately, this means that at some point, I would run out of stories. I've only been dumped by so many girls.

Luckily, bad things still happen to me. Starting next Friday, I'm going to start writing about other stuff. I'm not sure what yet, but I'm sure it'll be just as mediocre as everything else I've ever written. The one promise I will make to you, loyal Mousebed reader, is that this space will never turn into a standard “woke up, ate a sandwich, went to bed” blog. I'll be putting out different content than I otherwise have been, but it will be content nonetheless. Thanks for reading about my life.

Frankly, I feel better already.

If You Need Internet, Don't Head to Californee

2009-05-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed, Mousebed Friday went by without a post. On Saturday, Josh texted John in a panic with some story about the internet falling victim to last week's earthquake or something like that. Based on intelligence gained from recently posted facebook statuses, Josh has become a library computer creep and Aurora is about to jump off a cliff. It's cool - that's why they pay John the big theoretical dollars. He happened to write a handful of stories for his Stylistics class this semester that kinda work for Mousebed. Sort of. Here is one that he never intended to have anyone read, let alone a couple of his friends who are either named or implicated in less than flattering fashion. He hopes that A) they don't read it and B) if they do, they aren't offended. What could possibly go wrong?

NOTE: If this post seems especially pretentious, it is. This story is supposed to be modeled after the style used in Wolfe's Las Vegas. Yes, John knows that it is far from a perfect adaptation. Please spare him whatever comments along those lines that you were considering making.

----

Birthday parties. They're an incredibly strange concept for people beyond the age of twelve. When young, you've got a fairly solid and established social script for what such an event should be. Let mom and/or dad give the kids some sugar, some trinkets, and let them smack Spongebob around with a stick until he bursts and yields even more sugar and trinkets. A strange ceremony, yes, but also mind-numbingly simple and practically impossible to screw up.

Young adults and birthdays have always had an undefined relationship. Some use their birthday as a means of excusing themselves from that day's obligations of everyday life, such as work or school. Many use the date to drink at an abnormally high clip for a weeknight. Others have been known to use them as a passive-aggressive litmus test of their social network to see which of their friends actually prioritize their friendship. OK, maybe that one only applies to me. Often times, however, young adults decide to throw themselves a birthday party. Some of the more bizarre social cauldrons have sprung up from such events.

For an example, look no further than the cultural Mecca of Fall River, Massachusetts, a 19^th century boomtown left behind by history. Remaining are the scores of mill buildings and hundreds upon hundreds of three-decker tenements in various degrees of disrepair. Everyone who inhabits one of these has their reasons, with many of them being students at nearby colleges looking to save a buck. Jenni was one of these, and she was friends/roommates with similar characters, but all of them were no longer college students, for reasons ranging from debt to graduation to failing marks to the allure of online gambling.

The four inhabitants of the house had an internally-fractured social web, and each branched out to their own odd assortment of colorful characters. Many of these people converged upon the same apartment on the night of October 11^th. You had your Greek letter emblazoned frat boys. Primped and fashionable collegiate volleyball players. The entire morning shift from the local Target. Former college basketball players struggling to adjust to a world in which women did not care about the proficient nature of their jump shot. Young men playing by their own rules, on their own schedules, convinced they were riding the wave of the future by clicking at computer screens in their underwear all day. Self-interested men, including former, current, future, and mistakenly prospective boyfriends of the birthday girl. On top of it all, you had a sixteen-year-old younger sister with absolutely no business in the presence of these other characters, and especially not on a school night.

Like any large gathering in Fall River, there was booze, and quite a bit of it. It was consumed in bulk by dozens of fractured human beings trying to forget their problems for one night. The only problem was that many of these people were coming face-to-face with the sources or subjects of their problems. There were enough love triangles in the apartment to build an Egyptian pyramid. The results were not pretty. Broken furniture. Spilled beverages. Loud arguments. Confrontations. A stolen cell phone.

Remember the high school girl? She referred to a white, roid-raging basketball player as a racial slur commonly reserved for blacks. All 92 pounds of her. The recently much larger basketball player responded the only way he knew how: by indicating an overwhelming desire to fight the offender, in this case a cheerleader from Seekonk High School. Thanks to an unexpected dose of good fortune, it did not happen. But it was precisely the type of night which made eventual eviction an inevitable formality.

All of this transpired under the premise of celebration on Plymouth Avenue. As the ill-fated year went along, some of the roommates moved out for various reasons. Stopgap roommates were plugged in. Old friends, ex-boyfriends, mercurial strangers from Craigslist. Eventually, an invitation was extended to me. I thought about it, but I declined.

It didn't seem like the right fit for me. After all, I had a birthday coming up.

Adidas story 9: How to lose friends and influence nobody

2009-05-14T15:45:00.000-07:00

I worked at adidas for two and a half years. The last 12 months there were pretty weird, as far as management changes went. It started when, after about two years of declining sales, our general manager got fired. Alon wasn't a bad manager per se, but he always played these strange, cut-throat Orwellian mind games. He used his assistant managers to manipulate the staff, to varying degrees of success. You may recall he used Sal as his bulldog, his enforcer. This was a natural fit for Sal - he was a natural born asshole, and he loved approval from his superiors. He also had a light dusting of Downs Syndrome, which made it all the more insulting when it was made clear that I wasn't management material at adidas. I could write 2,000 words about Sal and how he is a pathetic, awful, wretched human being who had dirt caked into every crack, wrinkle and crevice on his body, but I won't. That's a different essay for a different day. Anyhow, Alon liked to use Sal as a villain so that he wouldn't look so horrible in comparison. It didn't work - we all hated Alon, too. Luckily, there was a manager who unified the staff and truly cared about us. Jared acted as the staff therapist, taking people aside and making sure they were at least not miserable - and sometimes almost happy - at adidas.

The day Alon was fired was a day of celebration at adidas. I was working in the stockroom that day, like I did everyday, when he stormed out of the managers' office, bumping into me and scampering upstairs. It was confirmed a couple hours later that he would never again darken the sliding glass door of adidas. After the initial jocularity, Jared gave us a terrifying warning - be careful what you wish for. He told us that chances were that whoever was to replace Alon would probably be an even bigger asshole than he was. We didn't believe him, but it turns out he was right.

For the next three or so months, Jared ran the store. Employee morale was the highest it had been since Alon took six weeks off to help his wife take care of their newborn daughter, whose name rhymed with an unflattering part of the male anatomy. Jared's rule at adidas was fantastic. The stockroom ran about as efficiently as it ever had, there was a chicken in every pot, and nobody was afraid of playing loud rap music. It was fabulous, Jared had even managed to stifle Sal. Sadly, it didn't last very long. Even though he had rejuvenated the store, Jared was deemed unfit to run the store by our new district manager, Nick. Nick, by the way, was a fat, queeny Mexican who claimed to be married. None of us were too sure of that. A few weeks after it was revealed that Jared would no longer be the heir to the adidas throne, Nick installed a new manager, Jose Rico.

Jose Rico came into a very good situation. He was replacing Alon as general manager - Heinrich Himmler would have been an upgrade - it would have been very easy to play the nice guy card and win the hearts of his staff. Naturally, he decided not to go that route. For the first three days at adidas, he didn't speak to a single employee who wasn't a manager. He quickly sized up his situation and decided it would be better to be feared than loved. Sal was used once again as an enforcer, but now it was ten times worse than anything he had done for Alon. He had to cover up for Rico's mistakes. By the way, he wanted everyone to call him Rico, not Jose. Jose sounded too Mexican, and he was really ashamed of his ethnicity, a move that scored him a lot of points with our predominantly Hispanic staff. Anyhow, during his first week of work, he decided to leave five hours early on a Friday to go watch some sporting event. He would do this every week, then a few times a week and eventually he'd do it almost daily. He made the managers' schedules, so he was seldom scheduled to close and when he was, he'd make sure to schedule somebody else to close with him so he could leave early. The person who would have to pick up his slack was usually Sal, who secretly resented him for it. This, combined with a terrible relationship with a woman who was using him for his money, sent Sal into a state of melancholia, with wild spikes of rage. Naturally he took it all out on the staff.

Eventually, the staff had just about enough of Rico's shenanigans, so we took our complaints to Nick. Shockingly, our complaints fell on deaf ears. Nick would stick up for Rico and defend all off his shortcomings, explaining that he was the best man for the job. Rico, by the way, was a fat, queeny Mexican who claimed to be married. Sound familiar? Yeah. He and Nick were butt buddies or something. Sheesh. After we complained to Nick, Rico turned the screws even harder on the staff, becoming aggressively dickish to all of us. He was cruelly sarcastic with all of his employees, making some of the managers cry, which he obviously took a great deal of joy from. What an asshole. Who takes pride in making women cry? I hope he's on fire somewhere. Anyhow, we all decided to make a concerted effort in trying to get him fired. This effort was spearheaded by Jared, who was promptly fired by Rico and Nick for some bullshit, made-up technicality. Sal was the one who ratted Jared out, believe it or not. Sal, by the way, is another guy who I wish was on fire too.

Sal, in his newfound position as Rico's Secret Police, was the scourge of adidas. Rico liked this because he thought there was somebody the staff loathed more than him. Not true, you fat, man-tittied fuck. We hated them both equally. Sal, in an attempt to get in good with Rico, got Tamara, another beloved coworker, fired through trickery and skulduggery. The trouble was that Rico really hated Sal, too. After using Sal for months, he had Nick come by one day when Rico wasn't scheduled so he could fire Sal. Poor fuck didn't see it coming. Now, I hate Sal. A lot. I don't think this can be overstated. I really can't stand him. I, for one, was thrilled to hear of his firing. Objectively, though, it was really sad. Sal had worked at adidas for eight years when they finally shitcanned him, and he didn't have any kind of prospects anywhere else. Adidas really was all he had. He even got a job offer from David, one of the former team leads, to work at the Brookstone up the street from adidas, but Sal never showed up for the interview. He just wanted to work for adidas. To my knowledge, he's still unemployed and it's been nearly eight months since he got fired.

This story, like so few of my stories, has a happy ending. After months of building piles and piles of evidence against him, the higher-ups at adidas finally saw fit to fire Rico. It was a joyous occasion, but with the joy came the bitter realization that if they wouldn't fire Rico for leaving early every day, being totally incompetent and never doing any work, he must have been fired for something even worse. It would be revealed by Josh, our next manager, that Rico had plunged the store into deep debt and stopped paying all of our bills. It's amazing they didn't just pack the whole store onto a flatbed truck and impound it.

---

If you would like to read more adidas stories, here are the links:
1 Seth and Yanira
2 Area Leads and the NBA Event
3 Sweatshirt Folding and Orwellian Mindgames
4 (I Don't Want to go to) Chelsea
5 Stockroom MADNESS!
6 Santa Monica T-Shirt Boulevard
7 Shitwater Canyon and Fruit Flygueroa
8 Slowpoke Rodriguez and the Adidas Cavalcade of Stars!
9 How to Lose Friends and Influence Nobody
10 From the Basement to the Dream Factory

Faustian Bargain, thy name is Turtle.

2009-05-08T23:41:00.000-07:00

About six weeks ago I was riding the bus and on that same bus was a family of Mexikids, each one holding a small clear plastic container with some ugly rainbow gravel at the bottom and a turtle about the size of a silver dollar. I immediately thought of my husband, not because I associate him with Mexican children or gravel, but because he loves turtles. He had a birthday coming up and I thought that one of those turtles would be the perfect gift, and he'd never see it coming. I was the smartest wife around!

Time passed. Josh's birthday fell on a Monday this year, and the Friday before that, I started making calls. I didn't want to show up at a pet store only to find that there were no turtles in stock, or that the store I had chosen was not a turtle-selling type of place (we don't have a car, so traveling hither and yon to various stores in search of the perfect gift can be a daunting idea). I soon found out that it was a good thing I checked ahead of time. I called six different Petco locations, and it turned out that most of them sold tortoises but not turtles, which seemed even weirder when I learned that tortoises are “out of season” right now. Apparently, there is a tortoise season. This is not it.

The good news was that the one Petco that did sell turtles would be fairly simple to stop by on my way home, so I did. But to my great chagrin, the turtles that Petco had were much, much bigger than silver dollars. They looked about like slightly flattened half-cantaloupes but darker in color, and they didn't come in adorable containers with ugly gravel--you had to buy the container separately. And a filter for the water, and a fake log for the turtle to be on when he didn't feel like swimming, and a whole bunch of other crap that was definitely overpriced, but even worse, it wasn't what I wanted! I couldn't commit to a full grown turtle! I wanted a turtle that would think of me as its mother! Okay, not really, but you see what I mean. Also, everybody who works at Petco is an asshole. I went home that night empty-handed.

During my pre-birthday reconnaissance work, I had found a website that would actually deliver turtles to your house, and I decided to re-check it, to see how their prices compared to Petco's. They turned out to be pretty much the same, so I decided to come clean. I hated to not have it to give to him, but I told Josh that I meant to get him a turtle for his birthday.

Now, since you read Mousebed, I am sure you know Josh. But I can assure you, you don't know Josh the way I know Josh, because you aren't married to him. So you probably don't know that whenever cute animals happen, Josh turns into a six-year-old. He got so excited about the idea of getting a turtle that I thought he might cry. I knew I had picked exactly the right gift, and I couldn't wait to be able to actually present him with a real live turtle. Everything was awesome.

I still wanted to take one last shot at finding the kind of turtle those Mexikids had been carrying, so at work that day I put in a call or two to some actual aquarium supply stores, and they told me what apparently everyone else in Los Angeles already knew: Chinatown. I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of that. Everything cute and cheap and plastic comes from Chinatown! What was I doing calling reputable pet stores? Did I actually think that a Mexican family was able to buy four pets in one day from a major retail corporation? Any child from Los Angeles could have figured this out quicker than I had. I thanked the aquarium guy for the tip, and told him I had just moved to LA from Iowa.

And then I got excited about the fun date that Josh and I were going to have in Chinatown. In the nearly three years since he's moved out here, we still haven't found time to go over there, which is a shame because I used to go all the time when I was growing up and it was always a blast. This was the perfect opportunity for an awesome cheap day: we'd find a tiny turtle, I'd buy a couple of four-dollar pairs of shoes and maybe one of those awesomely racist pointy-topped rice paddy hats, we'd eat something unidentifiable for lunch and pretend to be Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway--it would be the best day ever.

Unfortunately, while I was thinking all of this at work, Josh was at home doing internet research. You know how I just told you you don't really know him? Well, did you know he loves to panic about things he makes up? He spent the day finding out about every bizarre uncatchable disease turtles can possibly get, and how the Ph levels in their water need to be perfect, and they only have like, a six degree window for the temperature of the water that they can swim in, and all kinds of retarded bullshit to frighten him about how the turtle we don't even have yet has less chance of surviving than a Faberge egg hatchling.

Have you ever met a turtle? Those little fuckers are rocks with legs on. Let me tell you a story about a real turtle that I actually knew. My cousin Jonathan had a turtle (probably got it in Chinatown, now that I think about it) named Ted when I was about in junior high. Jonathan lived most of the time with his dad, but Ted definitely lived at Jon's mom's house. One day they noticed that Ted wasn't in his aquarium, which means that somehow, he had managed to climb out. We did a search of the apartment and nothing turned up. Jonathan was pretty upset about losing his turtle, but his grief was softened by confusion about how Ted had gotten out of the tank in the first place. Jon went back to his dad's house and about five days later, his mom found Ted under the sofa, looking pretty dried out. He was obviously dead, but she wasn't sure about the appropriate way to get rid of turtle remains and she thought Jonathan might like to have some sort of small turtle funeral, so she dropped Ted back in his aquarium until she could think of something better and went to work. When she got home, Ted was swimming around like nothing had happened. It was a turtle miracle. Eventually, through circumstances I'm not really clear on, the aquarium disappeared altogether and Ted ended up just living in my Aunt Rebecca's bathroom sink for upwards of three years--and by the way, she only had one bathroom, so if you were washing your hands, the turtle was going to be getting soaped, which is proof that all the temperature and Ph and calcium and taking them outside for “real” sunlight bullshit is exactly that. The turtle was always fine, and he lived in a sink for the last half of his life. And it's not like we're trying to take anybody to Turtle Winchester.

My entire family's long-standing attitude towards all living creatures is as follows: if you like it, give it food until it goes away or dies. This policy applies to everything from houseplants to children. It's how we dealt with Ted, and it's how my sisters and I were raised. It's how my dad and his seven siblings were raised too, and five out of the eight of them turned out mostly okay. My sisters Excalibur and Excelsior still own two cats that my family picked up as kittens in 1994. The cat that Josh and I currently have has the softest coat and the sweetest disposition of any cat I've ever met, and all we really do is not hit her on purpose. So the idea of spending a huge amount of time worrying about the welfare of a creature that hasn't evolved since before dinosaurs were born drives me crazy. I don't care if people say Chinatown turtles don't live very long. Do you know who buys Chinatown turtles? Six-year-old Mexicans. They don't take care of things, so they die. We do take care of things, so I'm not concerned.

Josh will read this himself pretty soon, and by now he's probably pretty close to a heart attack. So let me be clear: we are still, absolutely, getting a turtle. We are probably getting two turtles. I look forward to having them, and I'm sure that we will be purchasing them from someone more reputable than an anonymous Chinaman. But I really, really, really don't want to be a person who sinks all their money into their retarded hobby (in this case, aquariuming) instead of, say, living in an apartment that has more than one room in it. So I ask you, dear reader, as a friend of Josh's--please tell him that the turtles will be fine. They'll be just fine.

As long as the cat doesn't eat them.

More Procrastinated Bullshit That Isn't Writing

2009-05-08T18:36:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know the podcast is very late. But trust me, this one is pretty cool. You demanded that this be shorter, and your wish has been heeded. Here's what we cover:

Aurora's appearance on the Adam Carolla Podcast and the Ace Man's subsequent ripping of Josh as a "lazy, no-account husband"
A lightning round of comically dated discussion of the Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins
That time John went to see Ben Folds by himself. What a champion.

Please stick with the mousebed. We know we haven't put out much in the way of enjoyable prose lately, but we're working on it. There are bills to be paid, semesters to be finished. I guess what we're saying is give us money.

Another photographic tour of the six or so blocks to the immediate east, west and south of my apartment

2009-05-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

In case you somehow missed it, here's a link to the first photo entry from a few months ago.

It's no secret that I love the hobo life. I think it's pretty funny. Recently, though, people have been dumping their fucking couches on my street and hobos are sleeping and peeing on them. I'm not too happy about this. Also, you'd think somebody would have locked down that shopping cart. I imagine it's a pretty hot commodity.

This picture features only one, but recently this alley has been the hot spot for the feral cats of my neighborhood. Last night there were literally a dozen of them just hanging out and licking each other, sort of like that episode of South Park with the cat orgy, but quieter and with less feline cocaine.

The spacing, spelling and punctuation make this sign a feast for the eyes. I like that the periods were added as an afterthought.

I've been saying it for years - birds hate Ann-Margret.

It must have come as quite a shock to many in the Republican party when they realized that voting for John McCain was in direct violation of the Word of God.

What exactly are “pagan goods?”

Oh of course. Halloween decorations and tarot cards.

Nothing says “what the fuck is a business model?” quite like filling 25% of your sales floor with a giant urinal.

This mosaic of Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins can be found at the Chase Bank on Sunset and Vine. Did anybody consider the fact that the antagonist in Mary Poppins was the father, a stuffy, misogynistic banker who treated his kids and servants like shit?

Within 48 hours of Nike unveiling this ad campaign, Lance Armstrong managed to crash his bike and break his collarbone.

For only $1,000 you can own the actual scooter used in Big Momma's House 2. You'd be a Goddamned fool not to buy it.

For the past few weeks, “9/11 HA HA HA” has been tagged on dozens of street signs and construction sites in my neighborhood. I'm not thrilled with whoever has been doing this, but you could have at least found something funnier or more offensive to write than just “HA HA HA.” What are you, the fucking Joker? Sheesh.

Times are tough, even for rental companies. They converted from gated parking to gated entry, then they had to raise their deposit and fire everyone who spoke Spanish. Bad times, indeed.

So I made you this tape, I hope you like it

2009-04-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

Before I start this essay, you need to go see Adventureland. It's the best movie I've seen in a long time. I liked it more than Slumdog Millionaire. Adventureland takes place in 1987, and at one point, the main character gives the girl he has a crush on a mix tape. I know I'm like, the millionth person to say this, but I really miss mix tapes. I miss making them, I miss giving them to people, I miss writing on the card inside with really small letters to fit every song on. I recently got a message from a girl who found some tapes I made her a long time ago. The first thing I did after reading her message was dig out the old tapes that I made for my wife, years before we even met. She was making a series of long drives at the time, and I wanted more than anything to make her some tapes. This gesture was meant to show that not only did I care about her, but more importantly that I had really cool taste. When she caught wind of this, my friend Teresa demanded that we start a Bridgewater State College mix tape club. We were the only two members, but we made a lot of mix tapes, so that was cool. I know that while they're not exactly the same, mix CDs have more or less replaced the mix tape. Less effort means they're not as impressive, but these are the times we live in. As a service to the Mousebed reader, here are some songs to put on the mix tape that you will be giving to your summer crush six short weeks from now. John Cabral, I'm doing you a favor. (Album titles in parentheses.)

Side A

The Modern Lovers - Roadrunner
Please do yourself a favor and start every mix tape with this song. It's a killer opener, and it gets the listener ready to drive down the various highways connecting their small Massachusetts town to the next. (Modern Lovers self titled)

Elvis Costello - High Fidelity
This song belongs on your mix tape so much that Nick Hornby wrote an entire book about a guy who makes mix tapes and called it High Fidelity. Another upbeat classic, this is a good sing-along song for road trips. (Get Happy!!!)

Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man - Tom the Model
Beth Gibbons, formerly of Portishead, carries this slower song with a powerful vocal performance. Every mix tape needs a torch song, and this is probably the best torch song that doesn't involve Dusty Springfield. (Out of Season)

Ben Folds Five - Stephen's Last Night in Town
The horns from the last song carry over into this track. So what if it's from the Ben Folds Five album that everybody bought? Nobody listened past the fourth song. (Whatever and Ever, Amen)

The Cardigans - Love Fool
No girl can resist this song. Everybody sings along, and it shows you have a fun side. It provides a decent buffer before the next song, which is kind of a bummer. (First Band on the Moon)

The Eels - Last Stop: This Town
This is an upbeat song, but it's about a dead person. A better choice than the Eels' biggest hit, Novocaine for the Soul, because it's easier to sing along with. Let's face it, most mix tapes are for driving, and you need to be able to sing on long trips. (Electro-Shock Blues)

David Bowie - Heroes
A song that everybody knows, and it's a powerful song to end your a-side with. Be sure to use the longer version from the Heroes album, it doesn't get its due. (Heroes)

Side B

Violent Femmes - Blister in the Sun
*clapclap clapclap* Just as every tape needs to begin with Roadrunner, every b-side needs to begin with Blister in the Sun. It's another song that everybody can sing along to, even if they don't know the words. Another plus for this song is you don't really need to be a good singer to nail this song. (Violent Femmes self titled)

The Stone Roses - I Wanna Be Adored
Every mix tape needs a shoegazey-type song. Luckily, this song is deceptively fast-paced, so even though it's a bummer, it doesn't slow down the flow of the playlist. (Stone Roses self titled)

The Pixies - Hey
This song is kinda sexy, and it works really well in the context of this pretend tape that I'm putting together. This is for when you've pulled over to a rest stop to make out. (Dolittle)

The Velvet Underground - What Goes On
Another song for making out, this one is nice and long and has a hypnotic organ solo. It also holds the distinction of being the only song Lou Reed ever wrote that isn't about sucking a tranny's cock, heroin, or sucking a tranny's cock for heroin, so it won't ruin the mood. (The Velvet Underground self titled third album)

The Who - I Can See For Miles
Now that you're done making out, you need to hit the road again, and this is another great driving song. If you'd like you can substitute it for this version by Lord Sitar. (The Who Sell Out)

This slot is a little tricky. It's the second-to-last song on your mix tape, and the best thing to put here is something personal. Here are a few things to avoid: First, don't use any song about the girl being in love with another guy. As much as I love 96 Tears, it doesn't belong on this tape. Second, avoid using songs with the girl's name in the title, especially if it's Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town by Kenny Rogers. Finally, just don't use Young Girl by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, because that song is about fucking underage girls, and that's not exactly the best way to get in her pants. If all else fails, use Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. (Fever to Tell)

Frank Black and the Catholics - If it Takes All Night
If there's a better way to end your mix tape, I'm not sure how. It's about driving all night, it's about going to see your lady and most importantly, it gets you ready to turn the tape back over and start all over again from Roadrunner. (Dog in the Sand)

There you have it, everybody. All you need now is a couple of stand-up routines to put between songs to pad out the time. A couple good ones include Mitch Hedberg's bit about Smokey the Bear and Smacky the Frog, Woody Allen's bit about the damaged pet store or Emo Philips' joke about the heretic. If this doesn't get you laid this summer, I don't know what will. Try booze, though. That seems to work.

We Podcast on Guard For Thee

2009-04-23T07:43:00.000-07:00

As promised, we bring you this week's podcast during the same week in which we recorded it. This week's podcast is all about the Bruins and their domination of the Montreal Canadiens. If that doesn't interest you, then don't listen. There's nothing else to be had here. Well, except for this picture:

But yeah, that's mainly it. Here's a breakdown of everything that was discussed:

John congratulating Josh on his unwavering lifelong Bruin fandom
John explaining his decade-long sabbatical from the Boston Bruins
Lots and lots of laughing at the Canadiens for their performance
An explanation of how, in fact, Canadiens fans are the worst people alive
Josh trying to sell the casual hockey fan on the Wales Conference Division Final or whatever they're calling the next round these days.

Related and recommended YouTubage:

Come to think of it, check out that whole Hockey Canadiens site for all the sweet, sweet French language video schadenfrude you can handle. It's awesome.

Enjoy the podcast, everyone. We'll talk about normal things again next week. I think.

Don't call me guy! I'm not your guy, buddy!

2009-04-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

If you haven't already guessed, Josh, Aurora and I have all hit hideous ruts in our jobs this month that are sapping us of our will to live. And our will to blog. And our will to upload podcasts.

This week's craptacular podcast is already a week old. It came after procrastinating recording for two days, and procrastinating uploading/posting for several more. It didn't occur to either of us to talk about the Bruins, who are kicking Hab ass right now, we might add.

Here's what's in this one:

A taste of what Josh sounds like when he first wakes up
John dissecting the Oakland A's for much longer than you could possibly be interested
More confrontations at Arclight Cinemas
Dicky Barrett love

We'll be recording another podcast tomorrow night, and hopefully my sorry ass will get that posted much sooner.

Enjoy.

My Poor Generation

2009-04-09T20:22:00.000-07:00

One generation got old
One generation got soul
This generation got no destination to hold

Jefferson Airplane - Volunteers

I know I'm a little late in saying this, but happy sixth anniversary to the war in Iraq. They said it would never last, but you showed them. A little over six years ago, my high school orchestrated a student walk-out to protest the Bush administration and its international thuggery. I joined the Campus Greens organization for the sole purpose of helping put this walk-out together. Well, that and to get laid. Everything I did in high school was to get laid. Oh, and get out of class. I wanted to get out of class, too. In college I would combine my two loves and skip class to have sex. We were warned by the school staff that if we were to skip class to attend an anti-war rally, our actions would have dire consequences. Possibly ten days of suspension. I couldn't have been happier. This was back when I was a lot angrier about politics than I am now. To be fair, I had a lot to be angry about. The summer after I graduated high school, if you had asked me what the proudest moment of my life was to that point, I'd have said when I registered to vote under the Green Party. If you asked me now, I'd have to say the time I drank ten rum and cokes in three hours and managed not to die.

My friends and I put together signs, wrote some good, old-fashioned chants and made our way to the sidewalk in front of our school for the protest. There were about 45 of us standing out in the drizzling rain that morning, our arms linked and our voices loud. An hour later, we peacefully made our way back inside, greeted by applause from the more liberal members of our school staff. Believe it or not, there were a lot of super-lefty types teaching at my small high school in rural Massachusetts. We were led into the auditorium where a prepared statement was read to us by our principal, Pat Graves. This marks the first and only time I ever saw Pat Graves in my two years at Barnstable High. She congratulated us on being able to peacefully assemble and exercise our First Amendment rights. Our punishment was a one-day suspension, to be served the following Monday. The next day, our country went to war. I was an American citizen, and all I got was this lousy three-day weekend.

All my life I've been fascinated with counterculture. I read Naked Lunch when I was 13. I'm well versed in the works of the Beats. I had an Andy Warhol day planner in fifth grade. One time I even drew in one of my textbooks and didn't pay for a replacement. Deep down though, I know I'd be a horrible counterculturist. First of all, I'm terrified of hallucinogens. The real problem, though, is that I just don't have the energy for it. Being opposed to things takes a lot of fucking effort. I used to know a guy who broke up Klan rallies. He and his friends would find out ahead of time where the KKK was to meet, then they'd go in disguise and start beating people with baseball bats and brass knuckles. I'm just not that good at making plans. I'm going to the movies tonight with my wife and we don't even know what we're going to see. There's no way I could orchestrate an entire anti-whatever march.

I'm a month away from my 24th birthday, and I feel like my generation doesn't have a voice. Remember when generations had voices? Bob Dylan was the voice of a generation. I don't expect there to be another Dylan any time soon, but I wonder who will fill that void. Regardless of when punk died, it's very dead. There are no more punks. Where is the counterculture? There's no dearth of stuff to be opposed to, so where the fuck are the people who oppose it? I feel like there hasn't been anything of substance since grunge. Kurt Cobain is dead and Thurston Moore is old, so that leaves us with nothing still. I suppose the closest thing the entertainment world has right now to real, live revolution is Jon Stewart. The Daily Show has finally decided that it is mad as hell and it's not going to be taking it anymore. By now, everybody knows about Jon Stewart verbally shitting on MSNBC and exposing their hand in helping to create the events that shaped our shitty economy. I know people are angry, but they don't have a unifier. There's nobody to spearhead this anger. Is it just that people are too concerned about doing what's best for themselves to allow themselves to be led? The Internet has allowed too many people to become producers as opposed to appreciators. Is it that there's too much shit being thrown at the wall that it's impossible to see what has stuck?

The truly terrifying thought occurred to me this morning that the unifying voice of our generation could be our President. I have nothing against the President - I'd even have voted for him if I didn't vote for Nobody this year at the suggestion of former trip tent operator Wavy Gravy. I'm just concerned that too many people have decided that there's nothing they can do for themselves anymore and that the government is just going to have to suck it up and fix everything. Are we that lazy and narcissistic that we expect The Man to solve our individual problems? If so, what does that say about us? I can't believe we're just going to sit around and wait for the Deus Ex Machina in the form of a welfare check or a phantom stimulus package. I work a piece of shit job that pays me $8.75 an hour. You know how my wife and I are paying our bills? We're going to end up working six or seven days a week for the next five months. I mean, I work at a movie theater and she works at the library, so we're not exactly digging ditches, but it takes a physical toll.

Maybe my mom had it right after all. When I was five, we were on welfare. I asked her why she didn't get a job, so we could have more money. She told me that if she got a job, the government would stop sending her free money, so what's the point?

And the winner is...

2009-04-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

If I do say so myself, this is the finest edition of Taking A Fifteen in quite some time. This is a monumental episode, since this podcast contains the announcement of the 2008 Octavio Dotel Closer of the Year Award winner! No spoilers, folks; you'll have to listen to find out who won. Tease!

Other things included in today's podcast:

Josh pissed
Josh re-meets Emo Phillips
Juvenile baseball chatter (expect much more of this in the future)
John fretting over the possibility of family elders listening to him talk about lesbian sex
Justifiably less alliteration than this list would lead you to believe

We also referenced a YouTube video during the podcast. When we reach that point, I recommend that you pause and watch this:

Finally, we have some more internets to promote this week. I've been "hired" to continue expanding my blogging empire at John Bell's The Last Wave By, a new baseball blog. Most of you don't know John, but he's got a great baseball mind and he's a tremendous writer -- much better than anyone who has ever written here.

And oh yeah, we found that creepy acting coach from last week's podcast on the internet. He has a website. Of course he does.

You's a Wimp, She's a Shrew

2009-04-03T20:56:00.000-07:00

Of all the things that could be blamed for me failing out of college, I suppose the biggest problem was what I learned. Two things I got really good at in college were smoking cigarettes and fucking, but Bridgewater State didn't offer degrees in either of those fields. Before I failed out, I had fallen pretty hard for a girl named Alison. We spent a lot of time together, and one night she confided in me that things weren't exactly going well with her boyfriend, and that she was thinking of breaking up with him. She even went as far as inviting herself over to my dorm room for a night of sweet, girly booze.

I made the necessary preparations for her arrival. I bought two bottles of peach schnapps, some iced tea and made sure my roommate and his incredibly dumb girlfriend had a place to be that wasn't my room. (Side note: one night my roommate and his girlfriend sexiled me for five whole hours. After staying on the phone with Aurora as long as my phone battery would let me, smoking multiple cigarettes and walking around campus at what some would consider an unsafe hour, I finally decided to reclaim my half of the dorm room. They pretended not to be fucking, although when I was dozing off, I could hear her say “no, slower. Go in circles.” Fantastic.) I made sure to clean my half of the room before Alison was to arrive, and once she got there, our evening of romance began. We got pretty loaded on fruity girl drinks and played computer solitaire. It's much nicer than it sounds. At one point, we decided it would be funny if I were to lie down in the hallway and have her make a homicide victim outline of me using masking tape. We even almost made out. I felt like a lot of progress had been made.

She and I barely spoke for the rest of the semester, but I decided to blame that on finals, which I had decided was something I just wouldn't be a part of. A few weeks after finals were over, I got the letter in the mail saying I had officially failed out of college. Even though I didn't want to go to any more classes, it made me really sad that I would never again eat the shitty food at Tillinghast Hall or smoke pot on what was affectionately called The Rape Trail. I wouldn't get to smoke cigarettes with Julianne every day. Most importantly, I wouldn't be able to spend any more time with Alison. I managed to keep my mind off of my miserable love life by working three jobs that summer, leaving me no time to fuck around - either literally or otherwise - with women. I focused on smoking a lot of pot with my friend Nate and playing video games in my spare time. I had resigned myself to an Alisonless life.

The worst of it came when all of my friends went back to school and I was stuck living in my parents' house. Two of my jobs - the summer camp and the fake internship with the Cape League - were seasonal, so I was down to one regular job. I spent all of my free time smoking cigarettes and bumming around. One week, there was a carnival in town, and one of the carnies decided to hang around the mall where I worked. I gave him cigarettes in exchange for tales from his life as a drifter. His name, by the way, was Chaos. He wasn't sure what his real name was - it had been too long since anybody had used it. What a cool, cool guy.

About three weeks into the school year, I got a call from Alison out of nowhere. She tells me that all summer she's wanted to spend time with me, but all she did was work. That sounded pretty reasonable, I did the same thing. She wanted me to come visit her as soon as I could, which I gladly did. I managed to find an old friend who would let me crash in his dorm, on the off chance I didn't end up spending the night with Alison. We sat down at a restaurant and she immediately called somebody on her cell phone. She started telling her friend about this guy she had a date with, and how excited she was about it, which I thought was strange, seeing as she was on that very same date. Or so I thought. When she hung up the phone, she told me she had just met this awesome guy and she wanted to tell me all about him. I couldn't fucking believe this shit. She called me up from the Cape to tell me that she wanted to date somebody who wasn't me? When I told her that I came all that way just to see her because, you know, I figured we'd be fucking or something, she was taken by surprise. She always just thought I was a good friend. Apparently one of the privileges of being her good friend was feeling her up after drinking large amounts of peach schnapps. What's weirder is that night, we ended up going to a party where we got loaded and I felt her up on a couch in a basement.

I stumbled my way back to the dorms, tipsy and dejected. I got a hold of Julianne and asked if she was around. We had a few cigarettes and headed up to her dorm. We talked for a while, and I told her what happened earlier that night. I felt pretty guilty about the whole situation. I wasn't sure why - I mean, if anything I should have felt used. Julianne figured - and she was right, by the way - that the reason I felt so guilty was that I knew, deep down, that I didn't belong with Alison. Everybody who knew me knew one thing for certain - I needed to marry Aurora. I spoke with her for hours every night. I talked about her whenever the occasion arose. I had a girlfriend dump me because she was jealous of how much I liked Aurora more than her. To be fair, Vicky dumped me because she was jealous of how much I liked the following girls more than her: Aurora, Julianne, Ty, Rin, Alison, my roommate's cat, Phyllis, the nice lady who worked at the commuter cafeteria who always made me vegan meals and the calm woman who reads the options for my voicemail menu.

That night when I spoke to Aurora, I told her how much I loved her. I told her about the whole situation with Alison, even the part where I felt her up in the basement. I was pretty drunk. We started making plans for me to move to Los Angeles, which, much like a baby conceived during a night of misguided drunken passion, came to fruition about nine months later. Within a year of my move, I married Aurora. There were a lot of good reasons to leave Massachusetts - and there are just as many reasons to move back there eventually - but the one that really lit the fire under my ass was Alison. Thank you, you fire-crotched skank.

Taking A Fifteen 3.31

2009-04-02T20:15:00.000-07:00

Hi, folks. John here. It's been rough out there in the podcasting world these last couple of weeks. Josh and I recorded a pretty damn entertaining one last week, but due to a Garage Band snafu, only five minutes of it was actually captured.

We actually recorded this one on Monday night, despite all kinds of connectivity problems on my end. I've been on the go ever since, and haven't had a chance to get this baby online until now. But at long last, here it is.

Finally, a couple of interweb notes. Friend of the Mousebed Kyle Cwynar is up and blogging his musical recommendations. We recommend his work, and not just because he put us in his Blogroll. We swear.

Also, this week's podcast is dedicated in the memory of SoundLantern.com, a woefully inept audio upload site memorable for once declaring us its top comedy podcast. It won't be the same without you, SoundLantern.

SoundLantern.com
Requiescat in pace
February 2009-March 2009

Adidas Story 8: Slowpoke Rodriguez and the Adidas Cavalcade of Stars!

2009-04-02T01:08:00.000-07:00

Retail is the realm of the lazy, the useless, the pathetic, the listless and teenagers. Teenagers are usually most, if not all, of those four things. Adidas hired a lot of people who fit into all of those categories. Since I don't have a cohesive story to present this week, here's a clip show of shorter stories about some of my less than stellar coworkers.

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The kid who had no hair: A few months after I started, adidas hired a kid with no eyebrows. It took everybody two whole weeks to notice, so good for him. He had alopecia, a condition that makes it impossible to grow hair. He hid this by wearing a wig, which he had convinced people was his real hair. I'm not sure how; it was styled exactly the same way every day. Once it was higher up his scalp than it ought to have been, which I thought was pretty funny. Also, I'm pretty sure he managed to steal a new article of clothing from the store every day, but I couldn't prove it. That was a little less funny.

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Bradley: This kid was hired to work in the stockroom, and I couldn't have been happier. With Bradley around, nobody noticed how bad I was at my job. Bradley was so utterly and willfully incompetent. It was amazing. In his first eight hour shift, he talked for nine hours and did negative one hour of work. He spoke so much that shirts pulled themselves off of hangers, folded themselves and slipped back into the boxes from whence they came. He tried to impress everybody by bragging about the History of Rap Music class he claims to have taken at USC. By the way, nothing against rap music, but I can't imagine anything less than 50 years old needing an entire semester-long class devoted to it. You hear that, professors who teach classes about Star Wars? Eat my cock. By the way, did you know the Survey of American Jazz class at Bridgewater State doesn't cover anything by Frank Zappa? What a fucking joke. Anyhow, Bradley drew the ire of everybody in the stockroom because of his lack of effort, and was sent upstairs to the sales floor, where the gift of gab may have actually helped, if anything he ever said was interesting. He quit in less than a month, and left believing that nobody liked him because he was black. I don't know about anybody else, but I didn't like him because he told me that Kingdom Come was better than every other Jay Z album. What are they teaching in these History of Rap classes?

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Slowpoke Rodriguez: One of the team leads, David, had a friend named Mario. Mario was a fat Mexican guy with a creep mustache. Mario used to work with David at his old job, and wanted to get a job at adidas so he could work with his buddy. David didn't want Mario working at adidas for fear that his personal life and his work life would not mix, which they did not. Mario told me about the women that David wanted to hook up with, which wouldn't have been a problem if he didn't have a wife and ugly baby at home. By the way, adidas people who are reading this, his baby is ugly. Period. I'm sick of arguing with you about this. Anyhow, in addition to selling out his buddy, Mario also liked talking. The problem with Mario was the way he talked. Remember Speedy Gonzales, the Fastest Mouse in aaaaaall of Mexico? Well, he had a cousin, Slowpoke Rodriguez. Look him up on YouTube. That's how Mario spoke. He spoke like a cultural stereotype from the late 1950's. It was really tough listening to him talk, but it was usually pretty funny. Once, at an after-closing Norms meal, he asked my wife if she had ever eaten “apple pie, but with like, ice cream, man.” She said yes, that she had seen that once, while traveling.

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Frankie: Frankie was hired right after [SPOILER ALERT] Alon got fired. He, like so many people who worked for adidas less than a month, was a bigger fan of standing around like a douchebag and talking than doing actual work. He apparently was friends with Katie, who worked in footwear, and when they met up in the stockroom, it was retarded magic. I felt less intelligent just being near them. Frankie also had that weird snakebite piercing that's so popular with the femme crowd these days. He also used to date Patty, which made for even more weirdness. This kid just reeked of weird. What a weirdo. He got fired for not showing up to an all-store meeting. His excuse was that he had a bruise on his leg. I went to exactly one all-store meeting in my career at adidas, and was never punished. Just goes to show that being a total douchebagel will get you fired for the smallest things.

---

If you would like to read more adidas stories, here are the links:
1 Seth and Yanira
2 Area Leads and the NBA Event
3 Sweatshirt Folding and Orwellian Mindgames
4 (I Don't Want to go to) Chelsea
5 Stockroom MADNESS!
6 Santa Monica T-Shirt Boulevard
7 Shitwater Canyon and Fruit Flygueroa
8 Slowpoke Rodriguez and the Adidas Cavalcade of Stars!
9 How to Lose Friends and Influence Nobody
10 From the Basement to the Dream Factory

A Modest Proposal (in place of a book review)

2009-03-31T10:59:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Richard Branson,

My husband works for the Arclight movie theatre chain here in California, which means that despite the fact that our combined income would be what you would consider starvation level, we are able to distract ourselves from our hunger by going to all the free movies we can make time for between Monday and Thursday, and after 6pm on Sundays.

This is how I was able to see the first two hours of Watchmen. You may not be aware of this film; I realize that you have little time for frivolous time-wasting, what with traveling around the world in hot air balloons and marketing space travel to tourists. So in case you don't know, Watchmen is a movie based on a comic book about people who put on costumes and go fight crime without being solicited to do so. I don't call them superheroes because only one of them actually has any super powers, and he received those powers through exposure to deadly levels of radiation (radiation may, in fact, be a direct conduit to the acquisition of superhuman abilities, but I feel that at this time the research has been inconclusive and the necessary testing would take much too long for our purposes).

Anyway, I hated the movie, but it did get me thinking: why hasn't anybody ever put on a costume and run out to fight crime just for shits and giggles? It seems to me that there's definitely a market for it. I mean, you probably couldn't expect to get paid directly for services rendered, but there are endorsement deals, marketing tie-ins (toys, cereal, etc.), one could possibly sell one's life-rights for book and movie deals--you see what I'm getting at. On the other hand, being a successful costumed crime fighter would also require a rare combination of specialized abilities and start-up capital, and there are very few people in the world who could realistically hope to adopt such a lifestyle.

Which brings me to you. You obviously have money to invest; it's not a secret. You've also made a name for yourself as something of a maverick and a risk-taker, so I figure if anyone would bite on this pitch, you'd be my man. You could put our plan into action, probably faster than anyone else in the world, because you already have homes and offices all over the globe, some or all of which could be converted within a few months to top-secret hideouts. You also seem to be in pretty good physical condition, so I thought maybe you'd view this as a bit of a lark. I mean, you've done everything else there is to do. How long has it been since somebody came to you with a new way to get that adrenaline flowing? I thought so.

On the other hand, although you would be my first and only choice for our ringleader, I realize that as a man with a lot to lose you might not want to get your own hands dirty out on the street. Even if you are willing to fight the bad guys face to face, it's always better to have backup than to be out on your own in dangerous situations. So I have also compiled a list of people we could ask to join our crime-fighting league:

MICHAEL PHELPS- It hasn't been so long since Michael Phelps won all those Olympic medals, so even if he's been chowing the pot brownies night and day for the last year, it would be the work of a couple of months to get him back into top physical form. Swimming is a seasonal sport; it doesn't translate well into entertainment and the truly major competitions are infrequent enough that Phelps has a lot of downtime to pour into cleaning up our city streets. Another big advantage he has over most of the rest of the list is that in another year or two, nobody will remember who he is, so keeping his true identity a secret won't be too much of a challenge.

KEN JENNINGS- This is another guy who has a lot of downtime these days, and sure, you know his name, but could you pick him out of a lineup? I doubt it. He has “mastermind” written all over him, but he's nebbishy enough that he won't challenge your authority. This is a double-sided coin, however, as he lacks the sheer physical abilities of the other gentlemen I am proposing. I believe that Jennings' best course in crimefighting would be to use his incredible brain to invent a number of wacky gadgets and vehicles that will do his work for him. I am confident in his abilities to do this. Also, as a Mormon, he will add that straight-edge moral fiber that we want the kids to be emulating.

DWAYNE “THE ROCK” JOHNSON- Down side: he's pretty recognizable. Up side? He's practically a super hero already! He's got the abilities, he's got access to costumes--he's even already got his moniker picked out. He could be very useful in forming our group and helping his fellow costumed heroes sort of “get their stride” in fighting crime. However, due to his busy schedule and high level of recognizability, we should probably only call him in for special jobs after the first few months. Another possibility along these lines: Shaquille O'Neal.

MADONNA- As another huge celebrity, Madonna would constantly run the risk of her cover being blown, but I feel that she deserves this opportunity not just because she's in practically bionic shape, but also because she's angry. What is she angry about? I don't know for sure. But according to Sean Penn and Guy Ritchie and Alex Rodriguez and her brother Chris and her daughter Lourdes and her other kid whose name I don't know, she's got a lot of anger to burn. I feel that we could help her channel this anger in a direction that would benefit mankind, instead of killing her therapist.

MICHELLE OBAMA- Recognizable for now, but also in great shape, and with the government connections we may find ourselves needing in order to clean up any unfortunate residual mess. She's in good shape and we could easily get her into better, and of all our heroes, I can most easily see her grooming her daughters into a second generation of bigger, better, badder heroes (maybe by that time, we will be able to harness radiation to our super-power generating whims). She will be difficult to approach discreetly, but I feel that the effort will be worth our while.

Please look over my proposal and let me know what you think. You have been an entrepreneur far longer than I have, so I know that you will have invaluable input, and together we can smooth over whatever details I may have overlooked. As soon as you would like to schedule a meeting, please contact me by shooting an orange butterfly-shaped flare over the Hollywood sign between 11:39pm and 12:04am on any night between Tuesday and Saturday, excepting Friday. I look forward to doing business with you!

All the best,

Monarchia

The Most Fun I've Had Without Laughing

2009-03-28T02:37:00.000-07:00

I'd like to start this post by apologizing, because I'm going to start blowing pretty hard. Expect 1,000 or so words of blowhard, starting as soon as the italicized words end. When I started this blog, I really wanted to not be the guy who bitches about his everyday life, because there are a thousand blogs like that. I really want this blog to not be one of them. I hope I'm succeeding. That said, I'm really fucking angry, and I'm sick of Art Nerds.

When I left the warm, friendly basement of adidas for the dimly lit confines of Arclight Cinemas, I entered a world of Art Nerds. I deal with four types of people now. Old people, who I usually don't mind. The other day, I met one of the greatest old people of all time, Shirley MacLaine. I also deal with asshole teenagers, and people on dates. These are people I can deal with. Art Nerds, on the other hand, are completely goddamned insufferable. I hate them. They look down their noses at people with common taste. Don't let an Art Nerd know that your favorite movie is, say, Toy Story. They'll berate you for swallowing the swill that the Disney corporation has shoved down the throat of the consumer for nearly a century, and tell you that the only animated film worth watching is The Thief and the Cobbler, which, by the way, was the movie Disney ripped off to make Aladdin, IN CASE YOU DIDN'T KNOW.

To be fair, I'm an Art Nerd, but for music. I'm willing to admit it, and I'm not even that ashamed of it. I'm willing to spend hours fighting over which Velvet Underground album is the best one. It's White Light/White Heat, by the way. That's not what this post is about, though. This post is about my favorite movie, Annie Hall. Everybody I encounter knows this, because one of the things that Arclight Cinemas makes all of their employees wear is a lanyard with our names and our favorite movies. Believe it or not, a lot of the name tags say Pulp Fiction. Mine, as you no doubt have guessed, says Annie Hall. Here are actual reactions I've gotten from people regarding my choice of Annie Hall:

Old People: “Oh, look honey, Annie Hall! You know, going to see that movie was our first date!” (Awwww.)

Asshole Teenagers: “Uh, what the fuck does Annie Hall mean? Oh? I've never seen that. Who's Woody Allen?”

People on Dates think it's hilarious to try and stump me with their favorite Woody Allen quotes. Luckily, they only ever quote from the same two movies, Annie Hall and Manhattan. I always tell them to watch Take the Money and Run. It's way better than Manhattan.

Finally, there's the Art Nerds. Last week, a pair of fat Art Nerds wearing Buddy Holly glasses indignantly groaned “Annie Haaaall?” when reading my name tag. I asked them what was wrong with Annie Hall. I mean, it's really funny, it's got great characters, and hell, it even won the Academy Award for Best Picture. They gave me a look like I had punched them in their shared cunt.

“Uh, you know, another film was released in 1977. A little film by the name of 'Star Wars.' Maybe you've heard of it? Annie Hall isn't as good as Star Wars.”

Normally, I'm willing to accept somebody not liking Woody Allen. I know his jokes aren't for everybody - only smart people. I even like the first three Star Wars movies. Like, a lot. I don't like them enough to own Star Wars bedsheets or anything, but I really liked the three movies, and even enjoyed the Knights of the Old Republic video games. I don't like to talk about Star Wars, because once I do, I become One Of Them. Once I become One Of Them, there's no going back. I make jokes about AT-ATs and Lando Calrissian. I explain to people why I think Boba Fett sucks. I go into a nerd fugue state, black out, and wake up three towns over dressed like Emperor Palpatine with a sore jaw and $85 in my wallet.

I wouldn't have picked a fight with these Art Nerds, but they really wanted one. They told me that Diane Keaton wasn't a good actress. I lost it. I told them that Star Wars was a movie for children. I told them that George Lucas has done more harm than good. I told them that A New Hope isn't even the best Star Wars movie, which it's not. Empire Strikes Back is waaaaay better. If they had stuck around any longer, I'd have told them that John Candy as Barf in Spaceballs did a better job than Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca.

As they left the box office area in disgust, I heard one of them loudly bellow “Annie Hall! What a fucking idiot. Star Wars got fucking robbed.” Fuck that, dude. Uh, you know, another film was released in 1977. A little film by the name of 'The Goodbye Girl.' Maybe you've heard of it? Star Wars isn't as good as The Goodbye Girl. Okay, maybe it is, I don't know. What I do know is that Julia, another film that was nominated in 1977, is a drama set in Nazi Germany. The Academy loves Nazi movies. Schindler's List and The Sound of Music, just to name two. It's amazing Triumph of the Will didn't at least get nominated. Now that's a film.

Adidas Story 7: Shitwater Canyon and Fruit Flygueroa

2009-03-26T01:51:00.000-07:00

The adidas store in Santa Monica was on the 3rd Street Promenade, which was located right near the Pacific Ocean. Because of this, our sewer system was beleaguered by many horrible problems, the least of which not being a devilish liquid known as shitwater. Shitwater, as one might glean from its name, was black water which would rise out of the floor drains in the stockroom. There was one such drain adjacent to the break room, and another in the closet where we kept all of the shopping bags. Usually, the shitwater would bubble up, stink up the stockroom for a day or two, and mysteriously seep back down the drain.

One summer, the shitwater decided to stick around. Not for a few days, mind you. For two whole weeks. The horrible, rancid, headache-inducing stench of the shitwater finally rose up out of the stockroom, and wrought its noxious wrath upon the poor adidas customers. The combination of the oppressive heat and the stench actually drove customers away. They could smell it from outside the store and refused even to enter. You can imagine the toll it took on the employees. The worst part was adidas corporate dragging their feet in funding the necessary repairs. At first, the stockroom team was expected to clean up this mess, using mops and buckets. Believe it or not, this didn't work. We even sprung for a bag of some kind of super absorbent gel, which just managed to make it smell worse. We dumped bleach into the puddle to try and disinfect it, hoping to kill the stench. Nothing worked. Eventually it smelled like a puddle of rancid, scummy, moldy shit, with top notes of bleach.

When adidas corporate finally decided we were losing too many sales to the shitwater, they paid for a cleanup crew to come in and assess the damages. No regular plumber would take the job, so we had to employ the use of a fucking disaster relief company. It was amazing. Apparently the damage was to the tune of over $10,000. Not only would the shitwater need to be pumped away, but the tiles would have to be ripped up to kill the possibly carcinogenic mold, the walls would have to be re-painted, the entire septic system would have to be gutted and re-assembled, the break room would have to be re-floored, and the entire area would have to be quarantined. They taped thick mylar sheets to the walls, ceiling and floor, complete with an airlock system that involved zipping and unzipping the plastic to get in and out of the contaminated area. If you were to enter, you'd need to wear one of those all-white plastic body suits, making you look like a hilarious combination of Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and gigantic sperm. Brian or Laura may still have a picture of me wearing one. I liked to call it the sperm suit, but the hood made me look like a Klansman. Many hilarious white supremacist jokes were made. Oh, there were also high levels of asbestos in the walls.

Like so many things at adidas, this situation wouldn't have been nearly as bad if some foresight had occurred. Nobody had any reason to go into the contaminated area for a few days after it was set up. Then we realized that all of the toilet paper was on the other side of the mylar walls. Now, I'm not going to mince words here. I really like getting paid to shit. It's a great feeling. I wasn't going to let the threat of mesothelioma prevent me from shitting at work, so I volunteered to go get more toilet paper. I was sent off like a local boy going off to war, and was heralded as a hero upon my return with my 2-ply bounty.

The shitwater wasn't the only unsanitary situation at adidas. The summer before the shitwater, we were presented with a more insidious beast: millions of fruit flies. They congregated in the elevator landing at first, buzzing around the garbage bags that were left out from the night before. Then they started appearing around the floor drains that would later be the source of the dreaded shitwater. Then they moved into the break room, spawning in the Sparklets water bubbler. Once again, the stockroom had to deal with the problem. We were armed with cans of Raid and bug bombs. We were to determine the best places to set off these bug bombs and do so safely, at our discretion. This, of course, meant that we fucked around with them. My favorite move was pulling the trigger on the bug bomb, rolling it down a hallway, then diving away just as it started to spew its deadly payload. Khaleeah took a much more direct approach - she decided to cover her nose and mouth with one hand, and with the other she just held the bug bomb next to a lighting fixture as the smoke poured out. Thousands of tiny black eggs dropped out from inside the lights, falling like a sick rain. This wasn't a great plan, as a bunch of them landed in her hair.

The other bug bombs were used the way they were supposed to be (BORING), and the next morning we showed up to work and were greeted with a sea of dead gnats. We swept up millions of these things. A few of us uncovered a bucket with about 600 or so gnats floating around in a pool of scummy chemicals. It was quite a sight. Normally, I don't like to end my posts with a bummer, but I got paid $9 an hour for this shit, and I got paid more than most people. It's a wonder there hasn't been a fucking revolution yet.

PS: If your name is Brian or Laura and you have a picture of me in the Klansman/Stay Puft/Sperm Suit, please email it to me. It's josh.grimmer@gmail.com. I'll be sure to post it here as soon as it arrives.

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If you would like to read more adidas stories, here are the links:
1 Seth and Yanira
2 Area Leads and the NBA Event
3 Sweatshirt Folding and Orwellian Mindgames
4 (I Don't Want to go to) Chelsea
5 Stockroom MADNESS!
6 Santa Monica T-Shirt Boulevard
7 Shitwater Canyon and Fruit Flygueroa
8 Slowpoke Rodriguez and the Adidas Cavalcade of Stars!
9 How to Lose Friends and Influence Nobody
10 From the Basement to the Dream Factory

And I skipped breakfast, so it's off to Burger King!

2009-03-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

Since we began podcasting, we have heard positive reviews from as many as four people. We at the mousebed have taken this to mean that what you want is THREE TIMES AS MUCH PODCASTING!

That's right folks. You get not one but TWO podcasts this week, adding up to roughly eight thousand total minutes of awesome.

Podcast #1 is our special edition Taking A Fifteen Basketball Spectacular. We talk about day #1 of the NCAA tournament, our play-in liveblog, and my post on the first day of the NCAAs.

Podcast #2 features a pissed off Josh ranting about Physics. It's even more awesome than it sounds.

Enjoy the podcasts, everybody!

At long last, Ahmad Bradshaw is a free man, and apparently for good this time. Thank you for your continued support of the mousebed's commitment to justice in 21st century America. Pray that neither you nor anyone you love is ever subjected to the egregiously whimsical and utterly reprehensible application of the law from which Mr. Bradshaw has suffered for the last several years. This is why we cannot allow Redskin fans and/or racists to continue working in our courts; please vote accordingly.

Adidas Story 6: Santa Monica T-Shirt Boulevard

2009-03-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

One of the problems our store began to face at the end of 2007 was a steady decline in t-shirt sales. For some reason, adidas decided that their stores would be judged on how many t-shirts they were selling, so in a misguided attempt to cash in on the tourist market in Los Angeles, decided to start selling shirts with “Santa Monica” emblazoned on the front, with various retarded designs. They were 100% cotton, came in styles for both men and women, and were all totally fucking ugly. One of the men's shirts had a weird cartoon drawing of the famous Santa Monica Pier. For those of you who saw the South Park episode about homeless people, this is where the homeless were depicted swarming the beach in Santa Monica. One of the women's shirts had a fruity seahorse on it. These shirts were seriously ugly. Ugly, and $20.

The worst part about these ugly, unsellable shirts was that every employee was forced to wear them. We were all given one shirt, and one shirt only. This was to be worn every day for what turned out to be about three months. By the end, we all smelled like rotting cotton. The real problem wasn't how the employees smelled, it was the sheer volume of shirts delivered. I don't remember exactly how many shirts were delivered, but I seem to remember by the time they left the store, it was over 4,000.

Before they got shipped, they took up so much space in our stockroom that when we received more cases of them, we didn't even bother to open them. Nobody bought these fucking things. Earlier that year we had received something along the lines of 5,000+ pieces of David Beckham merchandise, but at least people were interested in that shit to begin with. Between the mountain of unwanted Los Angeles Galaxy gear and the massive heap of unsold Santa Monica t-shirts, we were in quite a bind. There was no way for us to move all of these shirts by the end of the year, and it's not like we could ship them out to one of our outlets. If a bunch of ugly shirts that said “Santa Monica” on them couldn't sell in Santa Monica, then they certainly didn't stand much of a chance in Camarillo, Cabazon, Park City, Carlsbad, Gilroy, either of the Las Vegas outlets, or anywhere else for that matter.

We decided for Christmas that for each $100 purchase, each customer would get five dollars off their purchase and a free Santa Monica t-shirt. This seemed like a great deal for the customer. What actually happened was adidas was running a promotion where if you made a $100 purchase, you got $25 off. We decided to throw in a $20 t-shirt, making it look free. This was the work of our fearless leader Alon, and I must admit that this strategy was diagoddamnedbolical. Tom Hanks even got one.

If you Google the phrase adidas Santa Monica t-shirt, you unfortunately do not get any pictures of these hideous shirts. What you do get is this link to a forum for soccer fans. This wouldn't be remarkable except for the fact that the thread linked here details the Chelsea, England soccer team's first visit to our humble store, where hundreds of fans were not allowed into the building due to poor management of the line, bad security and a misunderestimation of the size of the crowd. Luckily, this took place the day before I started working at the store. To avoid such an embarrassment the next year, adidas made sure to let fewer people in the building, managed the line better, and made it a point to order too much Chelsea apparel. This wouldn't have been a problem - Chelsea gear usually sells year-round at adidas - but the team decided to grodify their jersey designs.

This was the home jersey:

Not hideous. Pretty nice, actually.

This was the old away jersey:

Also pretty nice. Same as the blue, but in white. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, when we received the order of 4,000 pieces of Chelsea apparel, this was the new away jersey:

GRAAAAAAAA! ELECTRIC MADNESS!

It was really bad. It actually hurt people to look at these jerseys. Like, it put physical strain on the eye. And we had thousands of them, in both adult and kid sizes. At one point we had these horrible jerseys, the mountains of Beckham gear and the scads of Santa Monica t-shirts. None of this shit moved, and they always wondered why the stockroom looked cluttered.

---

If you would like to read more adidas stories, here are the links:
1 Seth and Yanira
2 Area Leads and the NBA Event
3 Sweatshirt Folding and Orwellian Mindgames
4 (I Don't Want to go to) Chelsea
5 Stockroom MADNESS!
6 Santa Monica T-Shirt Boulevard
7 Shitwater Canyon and Fruit Flygueroa
8 Slowpoke Rodriguez and the Adidas Cavalcade of Stars!
9 How to Lose Friends and Influence Nobody
10 From the Basement to the Dream Factory

A Little Runner in the Lane

2009-03-19T12:27:00.000-07:00

All this is is another story about the dumb shit Josh and John used to do when Josh lived on Cape Cod. This time, it happens to be related to college basketball. If you are looking for something that will actually get you excited about March Madness you have come to the wrong place. However, we highly recommend the coverage provided by Friend Of The Mousebed Brian Doyle at Deadspin and SportsJudge.

----

For college students attending public colleges and universities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this week is their SPRING BREAK! WOO! Typically, the popular, irresponsible, and comparatively well-heeled students at such institutions fly south to warm, exotic locations to poison themselves and contract sexually transmitted diseases from strangers giving false names. They later return to the Bay State to publish damning and undeniable photographic evidence of their week's debauchery in extreme states of undress for classmates and future job interviewers to secretly inspect. Participants later refer to this as the time of their life during coffee breaks from construction work.

For the less fortunate, less popular, financially incapable, or (GASP!) temperate, Spring Break is a pointless interruption of life as they've come to know it, forcing them to return to their hometowns to deal with their parents and the continued crappy weather. Mousebed writers Josh Grimmer and John Cabral each fell squarely within the latter demographic. Fortunately, this week often coincides with the beginning of the NCAA Division I Men's College Basketball Tournament. We join our heroes in the Town of Barnstable in March of 2004. This is their story, as told by the Podcaster General.

Appreciating my tale will require some historical perspective. In 2009, any schmuck with a high speed internet connection can watch any game under the sun on ncaasports.com, provided they can withstand the barrage of advertising by Pontiac and AT & T. As Alex Rodriguez knows, it was a different world in 2003. In this world, the Southern New England tourament viewer was at the mercy of notoriously incompetent switchboard operators at CBS national, WBZ Boston, and WPRI Providence. These people crafted a science of keeping the most competivive games in the dark, cutting away from live look-ins at the worst possible time, and sticking with games of supposed geographic interest for much longer than anyone cared to watch. Is there a big upset brewing out west? Tough shit, Hyannis! You're supposed to care about UConn's 35 point lead on Radford -- they're practically right next door!

From 1999-2004, one of the only nearby locations that was immune to this crap was the Cabral household; remember, this was before the NCAA was smart enough to bundle these games on Pay-Per-View like the NFL Sunday Ticket. As the only non-Brazilian Hyannis home equipped with Dish Network, we were able to receive over the air broadcast TV stations from New York and Los Angeles in addition to Boston. New York made sense. My dad is an avid Yankee and Giant fan; at the time 50% of Yankee games and over 75% of Giants games were on New York's Fox affiliate, making it well worth the $5 per month. Why did we get the Los Angeles channels you ask? My cousin is and was a Los Angeles police officer. In the event that he was ever participating in one of those live, televised high-speed chases, and we somehow found out about it as it was happening 3,000 miles away, then the Cabrals were going to see that shit live. But the LA affiliates also had other secondary benefits. Quick show of hands: were you watching Vin Scully live on KTLA when Fernando Tatis took Chan Ho Park deep to become the only player in baseball history to hit two grand slams in the same inning off the same pitcher? Looks like my hand's the only one up. Also, if you missed a good show at 8, you could always catch it at 11 on the LA affiliate. It was like a retarded version of TiVo.

But the most important asset provided by these LA affiliates, by far, was the immunity to regional coverage of major sporting events. I haven't missed a big NFL game or a March Madness barnburner in over a decade. In 2004, I decided to share this embarrassing wealth with my good friend Josh. I was on spring break from UMass Dartmouth, as he was from Bridgewater State. I had just gotten my driver's license earlier that week (sad, true story), and I was looking for excuses to hit the open road. As luck would have it, my parents had to go to Boston that day, leaving me with a vacant living room AND a vacant vehicle for the afternoon. The plan was simple: go pick Josh up in West Barnstable, bring him back to my personal Mecca of the hardwood, and watch as many college basketball games as possible. Phase three is profit.

Too bad it was snowing that day.

I arrived at Josh's house without incident, keeping slow and steady on the snowy roads. But upon arriving, I made a fatal mistake: navigating Josh's driveway in a low-to-the-ground sedan. An experienced driver would've recognized such a car's inability to climb a steep, comically inconvenient driveway in crappy weather. An idiot who had been driving for two days thinks he's invincible, and goes right on down. Josh hopped in, and we headed up the driveway to leave. As you've probably already predicted, we got stuck at the top -- inches off the road, but miles from our destination.

We tried pushing. I tried flooring the gas pedal. We tried each of these methods many times, with me pissing through over half a tank of gas in the process. Eventually, we gave up and called AAA. Of course, the number of requests for tow trucks spikes in a snow storm. This came as a surprise to us, but helping two dumbass freshmen move their car three feet from a place where it was in no danger to a place where it will be in more danger is not a high priority for any Cape Cod towing services during a storm. We were told to wait for two hours.

Shortly after this occured, the incomparable Kathy Grimmer arrived home from work. She couldn't get in her driveway, of course, since it was blocked by some car she'd never seen. In this situation, a normal person would put their car in park, get out, and try to ascertain what was going on on their property. Kathy, on the other hand, decided to remain in the car, drive it right in front of mine, and blankly stare at me for what seemed like an eternity until I decided to throw it in reverse and back down to the bottom of the hill, ruining whatever progress Josh and I may have made in the prior hour.

We went inside, and watched the painfully restrictive Boston/Providence coverage while we waited on the tow truck. We tried to come up with schemes to get the car out before the truck arrived, since that required a patience that we lacked. Josh asked his mother for salt, since, you know, that melts ice. She gave him enough salt to cover the half inch of your hand immediately below where your fingers begin. Josh asked for more, reasoning that this would probably not be enough to free a Crown Victoria from the shackles of New England winter. She told Josh that she couldn't because she had "just bought this salt" and therefore "couldn't afford to just be giving it away." Oh.

When the tow truck finally arrived, it was manned by a gentleman who was skilled in towing, but not in communication. As he hitched the car up to his truck, he commanded me to sit in the driver's seat of the car and await further instruction. He then began a series of completely indecipherable hand signals, which caused me to do unhelpful things behind the wheel. After several minutes of this business, he came up to the window, muttered insulting things in broken language, laughed at me, and then cut the wheel in the preferred direction. He told me to "just hit the gas" and walked back to the truck with a laugh. After the truck door shut, I said "How about you I leave the towing to you, and you leave the English speakin' to me?" You probably had to be there, but Josh Grimmer thought line that was so funny that he still talks about it five years later, hence this post.

The day was anti-climactic after that, with Josh and I arriving in Hyannis and binging on Len Elmore and Billy Packer for the rest of the day and night. Today, I've been able to watch seven different games without having to use a television or even do anything illegal. It truly is the golden media age in which we live, but when I think back on the struggle of that snowy day, I can't help but think it's a little too easy.

Enjoy the games, everyone.

PLAY-IN GAME LIVE BLOG AT 7 PM, Y'ALLS!

2009-03-17T13:44:00.000-07:00

Had I written my NCAA Tournament post for yesterday like I said I would, then this post would need no explanation. That did not happen, however, so you will have to wait until Thursday for that post. It'll make more sense then, since it'll be on the day of the actual tournament.

If there's one thing that Josh and I love, it's the play-in game to the NCAA tournament. For those of you unfamiliar, the NCAA play-in game has been held each year since 2001 (Please note that it was aired on TNN, and was color commentator Rick Pitino's first public appearance after disgracefully quitting the Celtics weeks earlier. Yes, I was watching. Shut up.). Each year, two forgettable academic institutions with mediocre men's basketball programs play in a die-or-die soon contest to determine which school will have the privilege of being slaughtered by the #1 team in the country 48 hours later.

This game often features teams with sub-.500 records, and for some reason it always occurs in Dayton, Ohio. I challenge you to find a city more fitting for an event so futile. The play-in game's shittyness offers a beautiful irony, an irony savored by exactly two thirds of the mousebed staff each year.

Last night, we decided that we could not let such a special event go uncommemorated. So tonight, for the fist time ever, The Mousebed proudly presents its 2009 PLAY-IN GAME LIVE BLOG! That's right folks! Here's what you can expect:

The Alabama State Hornets
The Morehead State Eagles
Josh making fun of Ohio
John drooling over Erin Andrews
John rooting for Morehead State (see above)
Lots and lots and lots of wiseassed humor

We invite you to spend your St. Patrick's Day at your computer with us. Folks, the sporting world only revolves around Dayton, Ohio but once a year. This one's not to miss. The store is open at 6:45. And that's Eastern Daylight Time, you wheatgrass-drinking douchebags.

Play-In Game Live Blog!

GO EAGLES!

A&P

2009-03-13T22:49:00.000-07:00

I've been talking a lot lately about my various jobs. Stories about adidas, Arclight, even Blockbuster Video has come up recently. I still haven't told any tales about my first foray into the working world, the A&P Supermarket in Sandwich, MA. It's been nearly seven years since I worked for the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co., so my recollection of these tales may be slightly fuzzy. The good news is none of you, my beloved readers, knew me then, so who cares?

A&P, like so many supermarkets, hired teenagers. Dumb teenagers. Dumb teenagers who got themselves fired easily, despite the existence of a union that tried to protect them. One day, a gumball machine broke, availing its chalky, supersweet bounty to all. One of the kids who worked as a cart wrangler took about 100 gumballs, put them in a bag and started handing them out to people. When the management found out, they fired everybody they saw chewing gum. Fantastic work.

I wasn't a model employee at the A&P myself, believe it or not. Everybody had a favorite place to take an extra-long, union-mandated paid break. My location of choice was the butcher's area which, considering my vegetarian ways seemed odd to most. Really, I just liked hanging out by the coffee maker with Chris the butcher and Armenian George the baker. Chris was a regular guy who I went to high school with, but Armenian George was a trip. He was 6'4”, and he hated the A&P dress code. He often wore black sweatpants and flip flops while baking the bread. He also liked to pick up Ernie, the 80 year old guy who also worked in the bakery and carry him around the store, to the delight of all. Well, everybody but Ernie.

One night I was back there with Chris and Armenian George, looking through the one-way mirror that faced the bakery. There was a woman in front of the various rolls and loaves of bread, using a calculator to tally up the prices of the groceries she had already put in her cart. Armenian George didn't quite understand this. Apparently in his native Armenia, they didn't have calculators or something. Anyhow, he wasn't thrilled about this woman. I will do my best to faithfully recreate his reaction to this woman.

“Who the fuck is this bitch? She is using calculator. What for? Is she trying to add up my fucking breads? Stupid bitch, I know how many fucking breads I have, I bake the breads. Fucking cunt with calculator. Who does she think she is? Jesus, God. Can you believe this bitch with her fucking calculator? What a dumb cunt.”

When Chris and I explained to Armenian George the concept of budgeting your money, he didn't buy it. He couldn't believe the nerve of this woman, using her calculator to add up his breads. I'm not sure why he thought she would be adding up his breads. What would she gain from it? Anyhow, this woman captivated Armenian George. She was a regular, and every time he came through my line he would update me on her most recent activities.

“Fucking cunt with calculator, she was back here again. Yesterday she bought dozen muffins. I made sure to tell her how many were in the box to save her the trouble of adding them up. Jesus, God.”

That's another thing. Armenian George liked saying “Jesus, God.” The only other person I've known to use that expression is my mom, so take from that what you will.

---

Eventually, I left the A&P. I remember resigning due to some moral objection I had to the way things were being run there, but I don't know if it had anything to do with girls in bathing suits. The next job I took was at Staples, which we all know came to a disastrous end. During my two or so months there, I ran into Armenian George again. He came through my line and was buying a black leather briefcase. When I asked him why he was buying the briefcase, he told me that it was nothing to worry about, but it had to do with some “personal stuff, you know?” We made a little small talk and he finally asked me why I left A&P. I told him I wasn't happy with the way the store was being run, to which he replied, “So! That fucking cunt with that calculator finally got to you, too, man? Yeah, she keeps coming back. I saw her adding up the fishes in the seafood section yesterday. I don't understand why she keeps doing that. What does she stand to gain? I don't know, man. Jesus, God.”

Adidas Story 5: Stockroom MADNESS!

2009-03-12T14:21:00.000-07:00

After the holidays, things slowed down at adidas. I wasn't really needed in apparel anymore, and since I wanted to be useful, I was moved into the stockroom. I was told by Charles, one of the managers, that I was being looked at for the position of stockroom coordinator, which I didn't really want. I wanted more money though, and that was the best way to do it. Before working at adidas, I had worked at Olympia Sports and Blockbuster Video. At both jobs I was responsible for shipments, so I figured this would be pretty easy. Unlike Olympia and Blockbuster, adidas actually kept track of what came into and was shipped out of the stockroom. This meant paperwork, scanning barcodes, and all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly things that I had to do, and I was really bad at all of them. Luckily, I had the helpful, caring and gentle guidance of the other - and let's face it, best - stockroom coordinator, Laura.

I never got the coordinator position for many reasons, but the most obvious one was how much better Laura was at the job than I or anybody else was. Laura was meticulous, careful and above all else, crazy. I was once chastised for stapling some paperwork together wrong. Not in the wrong order, but at the wrong angle. Everything needed to be at 90 degree angles, everything needed to be laid flat, everything needed to be flush. I, as you may know, do not share her insane penchant for detail, and was verbally beaten down every time I did anything. This was because I was terrible at my job, mind you. Laura was often an unreasonable bitch, but for about six months I didn't do anything right. Despite this, she's still the best boss I ever had, and that includes the one I had sex with. One thing that baffled the managerial staff at adidas, and likely still does, was how Laura managed to build a fiercely loyal stockroom team. There were no more than six or so of us on staff at any given time, and we only ever worked when Laura told us to.

Before this turns into a Laura Barragan slobber-fest, I feel like I should tell some stories about the other wonderful people in the stockroom, starting with Amira. Amira was really good at “accidentally” hurting people. My second day at adidas, I needed something from the managers' office, so I knocked on the door. Amira was standing nearby, and thought it would be hilarious to push the door as hard as she could when David the team lead answered it. When she threw the door open, it cracked him in the forehead, leaving him with a Harry Potter-esque lightning bolt scar. Another time, we were unloading a shipment from the back of a UPS truck when Amira thought it would be hilarious throw a box at me when I wasn't looking. It hit me in the balls, which was met with thunderous laughter.

There was a guy who worked with me over in the footwear half of the stockroom named Junior. He was a pretty nice guy, but he was the type of guy who loved working out and wanted to make sure everybody knew he was a hit with the ladies. One day he came to work wearing a shirt with a picture of some Skittles with the caption “Taste My Rainbow.” I laughed my ass off and when he asked me why, I explained that the phrase “Taste My Rainbow” implied that he wanted other guys to blow him, to which he replied, “No way dude, that just means I like Skittles.” When other people corroborated my story, he decided to retire the shirt.

Finally, there was KJ. KJ didn't like to work, but not the way most people don't like to work. Most people like doing things that aren't work, such as fishing or skiing or collecting stamps. KJ wasn't a fan of effort. He liked starting projects, then walking away and hiding somewhere for hours at a time. The only thing he was truly passionate about was how much he hated white people. Once during inventory, he asked Khaleeah, one of the team leads, for a quarter. When said she didn't have any money, but if he really needed change, KJ should ask me. At this point, you could see the Malcolm X/Marcus Garvey/Spike Lee rage boiling inside him. He started yelling about how white people are a “disease” and that “if a black man should shamefully ask a white man for help, then he would become diseased” and that there will never be a black man in a real position of power because of racists like me. Less than two years later, we elected a black guy to be President, so who's the joke on? KJ loved pointing out the racism in the stockroom. Brian and I were both racist for not liking him. Brian, by the way, is of Salvadorian extraction. If one of us was keeping black culture down, it was Brian. El Salvador has never had a black President, that's for damn sure. I mean, look at Antonio Saca - he's practically almost not brown!

Anyhow, KJ would eventually stop getting shifts. He never officially got fired, as the store didn't want to pay him unemployment. At one point he was ordered to apologize to me for saying that white people are a disease, which I accepted under protest. I don't really give a fuck if some retard thinks I'm a disease. Once the white race rises up and destroys the impure, my point will have been proven.

---

If you would like to read more adidas stories, here are the links:
1 Seth and Yanira
2 Area Leads and the NBA Event
3 Sweatshirt Folding and Orwellian Mindgames
4 (I Don't Want to go to) Chelsea
5 Stockroom MADNESS!
6 Santa Monica T-Shirt Boulevard
7 Shitwater Canyon and Fruit Flygueroa
8 Slowpoke Rodriguez and the Adidas Cavalcade of Stars!
9 How to Lose Friends and Influence Nobody
10 From the Basement to the Dream Factory

Sound Lantern is Glass Joe and Skype is Don Flamingo

2009-03-11T13:52:00.000-07:00

Trivia question: On which site did the following text appear?

HTTP Status 500 -

type Exception report

message

description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.

Trivia Answer: SoundLantern.com

Here's what you can expect in this week's podcast:

Josh pissed
John pissed
A metal taco coming out of a robot's asshole
Futile attempts to discuss topics including Bryan Geiler's birthday, Pedro Martinez, the Rte. 132 Dunkin' Donuts, and South Park

Enjoy the podcast, folks.

Free Ahmad Bradshaw

In Cold Blood: A Lesson in Farce

2009-03-11T01:24:00.000-07:00

In Cold Blood follows the madcap adventures of young scalawag Dick Hickok and his irrepressible sidekick, Perry Smith. Through a series of comic mishaps reminiscent of the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope Road to… movies, Dick and Perry end up wandering into a random Kansas farmhouse and murdering the entire family inside, for no particular reason. They then flee the scene.

The middle of the story alternates between the subsequent antics of Dick and Perry, and the bumbling shenanigans of Alvin Dewey, a Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent, as he searches for the killers. Truman Capote employs an innovative style; although the influence of writers such as Noel Coward and P.G. Wodehouse is evident, Capote has expanded the bedroom farce style to cover the entire North American continent, with episodes as geographically distant as the Alaskan wilderness and the Mexican beaches. Such a vast stage refreshes stale comic devices like the closely-missed encounter, the closely-missed capture, and the closely-missed hitchhiking murder, making them not only hilarious again, but also technically breathtaking. I mean, obviously if the killers are in Mexico and the police are in Kansas, they'll never be found, but then there wouldn't be a story, right? It is a testimony of Capote's consummate skill that the heroes of the story manage to re-enter and re-exit the sphere of investigation--several times, as a matter of fact--and not only do they evade capture, but every time they yet again fail to be discovered by the police, the circumstances continue to seem utterly plausible.

Despite the rollicking hijinks, In Cold Blood is far more believable than most fiction, with virtually no plotholes; on the other hand, one wonders if Capote tells too much of the story. With a plot that runs in such a Keystone Kops vein (even with the larger-than-usual focus on the killers), one would expect the story to begin and end with the pursuit and capture of the criminals. Not so Mr. Capote's tale. Although the chase comprises that majority of the book, there are many unnecessary flashbacks to events which happened long before the crime in question, and on the other end of the story we follow Dick and Perry well past their capture--to the end of their lives, in fact. There is a certain ironic beauty to Capote's reminder that no matter how adorable the criminals, the punishment must fit the crime, and the fact that his story is so whimsical for so much of the book makes the complete downer of the ending all the more powerful.

On the other hand, most people don't read comic novels because they want to be preached to. So if you'd like a good laugh and don't want to be kicked in the teeth by a sad conclusion, go ahead and stop after Perry reveals to the police how he and Dick woke the Clutter family up in the middle of the night, tied them up in separate rooms, slit the father's throat and then shot him and his son, and then fought about whether they should rape the women before they ended up just shooting them each in the face. The rest of the story, which they spend in prison, is really just depressing.

Ignore All That Nice Stuff About Sound Lantern

2009-03-06T15:36:00.000-08:00

Ignore it because they fucked us. Royally. As in, the site crashed as we were uploading today's podcast.

Interesting note: I'm technically live-blogging from an NCAA Tournament event right now. Will I get arrested?

Enjoy the podcast.

Free Ahmad Bradshaw

Money for Nothing

2009-03-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

I have a weird narcissistic paranoia. For some reason I always expect to find free money wherever I go. Maybe this comes from my mom, who doesn't work and would like nothing more than to have free money rain down upon her from the skies. Every time I manage to convince myself that money doesn't just appear, something happens to undo that. Remember that episode of Doug when the titular character found an envelope with an absurd amount of cash in it, just to learn that it was lost by a little old lady? Well Doug gave the money back to the old lady. I never would. There was also a story on This American Life about a guy in Chicago who made a lot of money as a munitions dealer for warring gangs. He decided to get rid of his ill-gotten money by holding a yard sale and stuffing the cash into the cushions of a couch he was selling for ten dollars. Then every year or so, there's a stupid local news story about a guy buying a painting at a yard sale just to find that it had been painted on the back of an original draft of the Declaration of Independence. This kind of shit never happened to me, but I held out hope.

A few years ago, I was living in an old house in Bridgewater, MA. Every house in Bridgewater is old, but this one was particularly old. The house was owned by an old lady who had cordoned off a section of the house that nobody was allowed into, but anything on the other side of the mylar sheet she had tacked up was fair game. This basically meant that we were allowed to use her old pots and pans, and there were a few pieces of furniture that we could use. We were in college at the time, and my housemate and I were crazy broke. Since I lived in the attic, I was always finding weird shit, and to my surprise one day I found a few strange buckets stashed in the closet, all filled to the top with coins. When I told my housemate about the treasure trove, we both decided that it must have belonged to the old woman, but she was kind of a cooz, so fuck that. Plus, it was Christmas, and what better time of year to go to a Coinstar machine and use the spoils to buy stuff for our friends? We lugged our buckets out to the car, and headed down to the A&P, where we broke their Coinstar machine with our crazy coinage. We dragged the rest of the money down to a nearby Roche Brothers, and we managed to get about $160 when it was all said and done. We feasted on the McDonald's dollar menu and after buying a carton of cigarettes, we set off to get crappy Christmas presents for everybody. We came across a weird dollar store that seemed to have emerged from the mists, and we figured that was the best option. We were so right. All of our friends got pogs, board games and best of all, dollar store enemas. Enemae? Whatever. This all took place while I was failing out of school. We even gave our other housemate a treasure chest that we filled with play money. Attached was a note that read “Sorry we can never pay rent, hope this makes up for it.” Believe it or not, it didn't. Less than a month later I was kicked out of the house for being unemployed and useless. A week later, I found a wallet in the commuter cafeteria with no ID, no credit cards, nothing. Just $86 in cash. After a half-hearted attempt at trying to figure out who the money belonged to, I decided to pocket it.

---

A couple years later, I was once again unemployed and useless. For the record, I had held down jobs between getting kicked out of the house in Bridgewater and now. At this time I was useless and living in my parents' basement, but I had managed to find a job working for Blockbuster. This was another in a long line of shitty jobs, but at least I could make money on the side. Blockbuster sold used DVDs, which I got for a discount. Not a huge discount, but 15% off helped. I would use this discount to buy a movie, watch it, then sell it to the Newbury Comics for more than I paid. The real money came from TV box sets. I bought an SCTV set for $8.50 and sold it back for $30. Realistically this only made me about $20 a week, but it helped pay for gas. In hindsight, I should have just found a job that paid more money. In hindsight, I should have done a lot of things.

As a side note - and John Cabral can confirm this - Newbury Comics had a weird sale and decided to sell all of their Frank Zappa albums for like, five dollars. Naturally, I bought all of them, which is no small feat. About a year later, when I moved to California, I sold all of my CDs back to Newbury Comics for the dual purpose of having more cash and less stuff to move with. All of my Zappa CDs sold for six or seven dollars, so that made me a nice, $150 profit.

More recently, I've taken to selling things on eBay. This includes records, books, video games, old computer programs - anything. By the way, if you have a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 that you don't want anymore, feel free to send it to me. One of the nice things about eBay is that it can actually be free money. The amount of time it takes to post something to eBay is infinitesimal, and the results are almost always positive. I've started buying used records at Amoeba Records and selling them on eBay, as a nice sort of bookend to my Newbury Comics scheme.

---

Speaking of bookends, money's a little tight right now, so I took the bowl of change in the apartment down to Ralph's to dump it into the Coinstar machine there and get six or seven dollars. As my poor readers no doubt know, there's a tray at the bottom of the Coinstar machine where the rejected coins end up. Usually you end up finding a couple of chipped dimes or Canadian quarters. Once I found a loonie! Anyhow, yesterday was different. I checked the reject tray to find that somebody had left a mountain of coins there. Remember the urban legend about John Wayne's autopsy? It was like that but with impacted currency. I started scooping the change into my change carrying bowl (an old cereal bowl with a crack in it), and picked out the quarters for laundry. Once I got the first chunk of change out of the machine, another torrent of coins poured out. This thing was paying off.

After a few minutes of harvesting coins from the tray, I realized that this money no doubt belonged to somebody before I got here. I had a flashback to that episode of Doug. I immediately assumed the worst; I figured the money belonged to an old lady who can't afford her pills now because of this. Then I thought maybe I had been set up. Any second now Paul Moyer of the NBC 4 News would pop out of the bathroom and ask me where the coins in the reject tray ended up. Then he'd present me with video of me greedily scooping coins out of the tray, to be broadcast on the nightly news. Then all of Los Angeles would know I was an asshole.

Side note about Paul Moyer. There was a hilarious promo ad for the NBC 4 News that was supposed to extol the virtues of their investigative reporting team. The first guy was like “So and so served 25 years in the United States Marine Corps and fought in two wars.” The second guy was like “So and so was a member of the CIA from 1974-1988.” Paul Moyer's credentials were as follows: “Was once considered for manager for the Pittsburgh Pirates.” They probably should have led with Paul Moyer, is what I'm saying.

Anyhow, after my minor crisis of conscience, I figured the money probably belonged to a homeless person. This presented its own set of issues. First, I figured this guy needed the money way more than I did. Then I thought, well, how am I going to find this guy? It's not like I live in Mayberry and it's just a matter of finding Otis, the Town Drunk and giving him the cash. I live in Hollywood, a city second only to Santa Monica in roaming homeless population. I wasn't going to just give it to some random homeless guy, either. This would break my longstanding tradition of not giving money to the homeless.

While I had been considering the many possible origins of this ill-gotten booty, it had managed to filter its way into the Coinstar machine. It was over 20 dollars, and I decided I needed the money too much to care. If that makes me a bad person, then I'm a bad person. I took my receipt, went through the line and got my $26. I made it a point to make my escape from Ralph's as quickly as possible, in case the old lady from that episode from Doug was around. I headed across the street to the Quizno's for some delicious sub sandwich action. Do yourself a favor - don't try to eat anything after you've handled hundreds of coins. Your hands smell like homeless urine.

---

I keep finding sources of free money, but they're never the huge payoffs I want them to be. Even now, I found out that I have a vinyl Beck EP from before he was famous that's going for $50 on eBay. I paid 25 cents for it at a thrift store. I guess I should just be happy with having a lucky streak a mile wide when it comes to this kind of stuff, but I always feel sort of dissatisfied. I've fallen victim to what Pat Riley calls “The Disease of More.” Once I accept that most people don't find $300+ worth of lost money in a lifetime, I'm sure I'll feel a lot better about the small fortune I've found.

Adidas Story 4: (I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea

2009-03-04T19:38:00.000-08:00

When you work at a minimum wage type job, you know ahead of time that you won't be dealing with the best and brightest, be it your customers or coworkers. Of all the brilliant minds I dealt with, there was none more impressive than that of my dear friend Chelsea. I want you all to know from the outset that I love Chelsea. I think she's a lot of fun. I don't want anyone to take this essay as some kind of attack – I really think she's alright. Maybe not mentally, but as a person. Since there's no way to weave these stories together as a cogent story, I'm just going to present them as separate petals that add up to one beautiful, precious, retarded flower.

---

Chelsea was raised by rich parents. Her mom invented some kind of breast pump and her dad was sort of a real estate type, I think. Her parents were pretty racist, and they tried to raise their daughter that way. The problem was she didn't exactly understand how racism worked. One night she asked me if she should date a black guy. I didn't see why not, and told her as much. She told me that her dad didn't approve of her dating minorities, and that if she did, he'd take her out of the will. By the way, more people need to be taken out of wills. I always think that's pretty funny. We went back and forth on the subject all night, with me trying to convince her that by the time her dad dies, she ought to have figured out how to make her own fucking money. Finally she told me things would be okay if she could just find one black guy who wasn't a minority; I suggested she should go to Africa. She told me that there were plenty of black guys in America who weren't minorities, and it was just a matter of finding one. When I asked her what she thought minority meant, she told me it was anybody with a low income.

---

For somebody who lived in Los Angeles so long, Chelsea had a bizarre relationship with race - as mentioned above, she had a bit of the jungle fever. She didn't quite understand, though, that people other than me might take offense to her strange ideas about what is proper for non-whites. She once famously complained to me about a shampoo ad she saw that offended her. From behind, all you could see was beautiful, pin-straight blond hair, shimmering luxuriously for the camera. When the model turned around, however, it was revealed that she was ASIAN! This was beyond the pale to Chelsea. Seeing an Asian girl with blond hair was wrong to her. She told me that it “threatened [her] Americanness.”

---

Every Saturday night, adidas closed later than normal. Weeknights the store closed at 9pm, and Saturdays it closed at 11pm. This meant that after cleaning, we'd get out around 1am, which is just a horrible time to get out of work and go home. Instead, we would often go to Norms to get some shitty breakfast food. Norms, for the uninitiated, is like a Denny's with a facade of classiness. There's one over on Pico and Sepulveda, where nobody's dreams come true. The Norms crew usually consisted of myself, Chelsea, my wife and Jared, one of the managers. Chelsea liked to go because of the food, my wife liked to go so she could make fun of Chelsea, and Jared and I liked to watch. A few noteworthy events took place during late-night Norms adventures. Chelsea once confided in us that she was having trouble in school. When asked why, she said that her professor totally failed her for no reason, which sounded very believable. When prodded, it was revealed that the class was one of those classes where you submit all of your homework online, and take the test in person. She had paid some guy to do all of her homework, and when she didn't know any of the answers for the final, she was failed. The injustice of it all.

There was one Saturday when Chelsea really wanted to go to Norms. Like, more than anything ever. The most important thing was going to Norms. She made it a point to remind me of this every time she saw me that night. “We're going to Norms, right?” “Remember, Norms. Right. After. Work.” “I can't wait to go to Norms!” When we got there, she ordered a cup of soup, garlic bread and a glass of water. For somebody who was so excited about Norms, she sure didn't order much. When the check came, her portion of the bill totaled $4.85, so she left a five dollar bill, making her tip fifteen cents, as opposed to fifteen percent, which is the custom in America. Apparently, she only had five dollars. My wife ripped her a new asshole and told her that if you're going to eat out, you need enough money to tip, not just pay your bill. Chelsea didn't quite get it. She never did.

As a side note, my wife became famous at adidas for being really mean. She was universally beloved for her sharp tongue and her willingness to yell at Chelsea.

---

A few weeks after the tipping incident at Norms, Chelsea asked me out for drinks after work. Apparently, she had gotten her hands on a fake ID, and was going to test it out later that night. I told her I wasn't available, and I reminded her that it's customary to tip the bartender. She revealed to me that not only was she going to the bar with David, one of the team leads at adidas, but she also never paid for drinks. She got men to buy them for her. I asked her what her plan for life was once she eventually became old and ugly, and she thought for a second. She told me that her plan, as far as she figures it, is to just settle down and become a MILF. I told her that her ass was too big to become a MILF, to which she responded, “I know, I'm working on that.”

---

For all the shit I gave her, Chelsea kept coming back to me. She would always confide in me if she ever had problems. She would always start each of her questions with “So like, you're smart right?” I guess I was, considering how many of her problems I managed to solve. I don't know what she's doing now, I haven't seen her in six or so months. Last we spoke, she was working at Brookstone with David who, according to her, was still trying to have sex with her, despite having a wife and child.

---

If you would like to read more adidas stories, here are the links:
1 Seth and Yanira
2 Area Leads and the NBA Event
3 Sweatshirt Folding and Orwellian Mindgames
4 (I Don't Want to go to) Chelsea
5 Stockroom MADNESS!
6 Santa Monica T-Shirt Boulevard
7 Shitwater Canyon and Fruit Flygueroa
8 Slowpoke Rodriguez and the Adidas Cavalcade of Stars!
9 How to Lose Friends and Influence Nobody
10 From the Basement to the Dream Factory

1984: A Retrospective

2009-03-03T00:08:00.000-08:00

Few Mousebed readers can remember the year 1984, and yet it does not require a personal memory of the time period to recognize the research—or lack thereof—in George Orwell’s “seminal” work as nothing short of execrable. Orwell’s 1984 shows us a version of our own world so implausible as to be ridiculous, and yet he claims that this world existed a mere twenty-five years ago.

1984 focuses specifically on a completely unlikeable hero named Winston Smith, whose most distinguishing physical characteristic is a varicose ulcer on his ankle that has more personality than he does. Winston’s lack of personality hardly matters though, as his story is merely an excuse for Orwell to show us around the world Winston lives in—a world that never existed.

In a clever attempt to manipulate the reader’s credulity, much of 1984 revolves around the revision of history; changing previously documented events and even news archives to reflect the past the government wants the populace to believe in. Without any alternate record, the past we are shown on record must be the one that happened. Except that the past Orwell would have us believe in is beyond fanciful. In Orwell’s 1984, every government-issued apartment has a huge telescreen covering one wall. The entire wall! Nobody had that technology in 1984, except maybe the Japanese, and they didn’t have room for it. I don’t know many people who can afford that shit now, and forget about wall-to-wall TV in government housing. They barely have glass in their windows.

Orwell also talks about giant white government buildings, dominating the London landscape, but I did an extensive Google image search and found no evidence of these buildings. I did, however, find this. Care to explain, Mr. Orwell?

Listen, I was alive in 1984. I was not very old and I don’t have very clear memories of that year, but as I obviously can not trust what anyone else tells me, I’ll tell you what I remember about 1984. I lived in North Hollywood, which was part of California, not Oceania or whatever, and we were not at war with Eurasia or Eastasia; we were maybe sort of at war with the USSR but I had no comprehension of that, so I can’t let it count. I remember one time I somehow got out after dark by myself and to this day I swear the boogeyman chased me home. Big Brother was nowhere to be found. My mom told me to think of Jesus as my big brother and that definitely worked when I was a tiny kid, but he did not live in my TV wall, because we didn’t have a TV wall, we had shag carpeting. Other than that, the only thing I really remember from the year 1984 is My Little Ponys.

WHERE ARE THE MY LITTLE PONYS, GEORGE ORWELL? Nice try, but you’re not fooling anybody.

Look upon me! I'll show you the life of the mind!

2009-03-01T21:00:00.000-08:00

- Look, you confused? You need guidance? Talk to another writer.
- Who?
- Jesus, throw a rock in here, you'll hit one. And do me a favor, Fink: throw it hard.

I recently started a new job. This change scared me, as change always seems to do. First of all, I’d need to acclimate myself to a new commute. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if I had a car, but I’m stuck taking the bus everywhere. Once I figured out how to get to work, it was a matter of meeting new people and figuring out whether or not I belonged with them. Arclight Cinemas is chock full of people who want to Make Art. They’ve all got their scripts, or their demo reels, or whatever. They want to be discovered, published or produced. I never thought of myself as the type of person who needs to Make Art. In fact, I’m downright bad at Making Art. Not for lack of trying, of course. I thought I wanted to be an emotional, intellectual, misunderstood artist. I would create my masterpiece and people would come from two towns over just to see the majesty of my opus. The problem is, I can’t draw. Or paint, or sculpt, or sing, or write music, or anything. I can’t even make shit up and be the first person to do something. I am firmly in my time, and have no hopes of ever being ahead of it.

I come from a nice background of non-achievers. You may recall my biological father was a drifter and my mom would have the work ethic of a drifter if she could manage to get off her ass at first light to start rambling to an adjacent county. Having never been given the gene that predisposes one to busting your ass to make something of yourself, I’ve had a hard time trying to scrape together motivation all my life. I never did homework because school was too easy, which was fine for skating through public school and getting a diploma, but I failed out of college because I hadn’t developed the proper study skills. Honestly, I’ve written more in the six months since I started Mousebed than I had in my prior 22 years combined. Thank you, Mousebed reader, for giving me a reason to write something every week for half a year.

Recently, I’ve been going through a bit of a crisis. I’ve been thinking, and I think I might actually have broken my self-imposed curse of just being an appreciator. I think I’m creating. As a result of all the writing I’ve done, I think I’ve become a writer. It’s a scary thought for me, as that would imply that I identify myself as something very different than I have been for so long now. My wife has been kind of needling me about becoming something serious for a while now, as opposed to working low-wage shit jobs for the rest of my life, just barely making it by and then dying anonymously, which was my plan. When I started writing Mousebed, I figured I would bang out 800 words every week as a cheap substitute for therapy. I’ve had a pretty shitty go of things for a while now, and writing about the horrors of my life has really helped me. I owe a lot of my happiness to you, the Mousebed reader. So thanks.

Anyhow, I’m still not comfortable being a writer. This is especially tough living in a city that’s overrun with writers. I always wanted to toil anonymously in my shit jobs, but if I’m going to Make Art, then I’m going to be somebody, Goddamnit. I was putting off calling myself a writer until last night. One of the problems with starting a new job at a place like Arclight is that every shift is spent with new and different people. This is a jarring change, considering at my old job there were only four other people in my department if you include my boss. Last night, I worked with a guy named Jeremy. He told me that I needed to write. Apparently he’s been around a lot of writers, and I need to become one of them. He warned me against wasting my life toiling in anonymity in shit jobs for eternity. My wife has been saying this for years now, but everything snapped into focus last night when a total stranger sized me up and told me, in no uncertain terms that I had a gift that needed to be shared. It was devastating. He told me that I needed to Make Art and stop being such a fucking pussy. Maybe not in those exact words, but that was the gist of it. So starting tonight, six months after the inception of the Mousebed, it’s official.

I'm a writer, you monsters! I create! I create for a living! I'm a creator! I am a creator!

Severe Bummer Alert

2009-02-27T12:32:00.000-08:00

Please note: This Mousebed is sad. Like, really really sad. It involves a dead pet, and if that makes you cry – like it makes me cry – you probably shouldn’t read this post. Go back and read a Mousebed that isn’t sad. There’s even a great podcast of me complaining about things that aren’t as sad. You’ve been warned.

I love pets. I am in no way ashamed to admit that I will spend hours looking at pictures of cats and dogs doing stupid stuff. I get really excited when I see things like baby hedgehogs. They’re adorable. You may recall from an earlier essay that I grew up in a weird planned community/upper class slum, which didn’t allow pets. When I was eight, my mom got remarried, I was adopted by her new husband, and we moved into a house, which allowed pets. It was awesome. For the first year and a half or so, I didn’t really trust my new dad. For one thing, he was new. He represented all the changes in my life that I didn’t like. In hindsight, they were all for the best. I lived in a nicer neighborhood and we lived a pretty opulent life, compared to my old one. And again, I could finally get a pet. That’s really what was most important.

Right around Christmas I got a cat. I couldn’t believe it. He was orange and he liked to poop behind things like television sets and bookcases. My dad decided the best possible name for him, considering how much he liked to leave dried up turds everywhere, would be Crusty. I was eight, so it’s not like I was coming up with a better name. Best of all, my mom hated the name so it stuck.

Crusty was a pretty horrible cat. Like I said, he liked to poop behind things that were hard to move, he liked peeing in my parents’ bedroom, and he really liked scratching me. He even ate my Magic cards. He got fleas one time and they infested my entire bedroom. I was riddled with fleabites for a whole month. I realize he was a burden on my parents – after he died they had to put in new carpets – but I really loved him. He didn’t feel the same way about me, however. I was a little overzealous in my love of the cat. I wanted him to hang out with me. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent time with cats, but they’re more into hanging out with you if you’re not a spastic nine year old.

I was also really protective of my cat. I figured since I was his best friend – according to me, at least – that I knew what was best for him. I barely let my parents neuter him, so when they told me that they thought he should become an outdoor cat, I was skeptical. I didn’t want him getting mixed up with the riff raff and the other neighborhood cats. I mostly didn’t want him hanging out with my dad’s dogs. When my mom and I moved in with my dad, he had two dogs. One was an English Bulldog/Lab mix named Jamaica and his very angry and protective mother, a Labrador named Diamond. Jamaica was, true to his name, a pretty chill dog. Diamond was an asshole. One time we all went for a walk in the woods and she stole the ice cream sandwich I was eating. She jumped up and ate it right out of my hand. It sucked. I didn’t really care for Diamond after that. Whenever she came inside, she tried to fight my cat, so that didn’t score her any points either. Anyhow, I couldn’t do much to protest. Crusty was to become an outdoor cat.

That same week, I got some even more horrifying news. My parents didn’t just want the cat out of the house; they wanted to ship me off to summer camp. They were sending me away for ten whole days, to be holed up in a cabin in the woods in Duxbury, MA with a bunch of weird kids. I didn’t want to spend a week and a half away from my life, my new friends, my video games and most of all, my cat. I protested, but the problem with being nine is that nobody ever listens to you.

All in all, camp was pretty awesome. I learned how to use a bow, I learned how to make campfires, and I made my own Ghostbuster costume for the Halloween-themed party on the second to last night. I even learned how to make a candle out of only a wick and some wax! The best part was volunteering at the farm and spending time with the animals. I made friends with a goat, a chicken, and the family of calico cats living in the hay. I kind of wanted to just move into the barn.

When I finally came home from camp, the only thing I wanted was to see my cat. I put my sleeping bag and my backpack up in my bedroom and ran out to the backyard to see what he was up to. I was horrified to find that somehow he had managed to make his way into the dogs’ pen, and they had ripped him apart. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I ran inside and told my mom, who came out to look at the situation. She told me that my dad didn’t like the cat, and he had put the cat in the pen because he didn’t want him around anymore. I believed her because I was in shock, but looking back it didn’t really make any kind of sense. If he really wanted to get rid of the cat, he could have just given him away or put him out in the woods. Having his dogs kill the cat and leaving the body out there for me to find it isn’t exactly the perfect crime.

Anyhow, the aftermath of the dead cat situation was pretty gruesome. I developed a deep distrust of my dad, and my mom made my shit list just for suggesting that the cat should spend time outside. My dad had to euthanize Diamond at my mom’s decree. He wasn’t pleased about that development, either. This was really a losing proposition for everybody. I would go on to get another cat that would live a full and happy life before dying of natural causes, but I never let him outside.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson from all of this, but sadly I did not. A few years after my second cat died, I got a third one. His name was Leon and he was the cat I always wanted. He would hang out with me in my room, and once he managed to trip my mom, causing her to break her leg in four places. As a result of my mom’s inability to navigate her way around him, my parents convinced me that he should be an outdoor cat. I took a week-long trip to Ohio that summer, and when I got home the cat was gone. He must have run away or gotten hit by a car. When I asked my mom what happened to him she said “What cat?” and never spoke of it again.

---

Just so this post isn’t all dead cats and gloom, here’s Peepopo. In this picture she's sleeping with a pillow shaped like a cat. She’s not an outdoor cat. One time she ran through the front door of the apartment to make a daring escape, but when she saw how big the world outside was, she smooshed herself down onto the tile floor of the lobby and slithered back inside like a furry, ashamed snake. She doesn’t much care for the outside anymore, and I couldn’t be happier. The pillow's name is Norman, and he's also an indoor cat.