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You never loved
the fine arts.
081109
For truly,
if just
a few morsels
from
my previous opus
nauseated you so,
then any three
living Mr. Universe
winners will not
be strong enough
to keep
your fingers
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-- or your gun --
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out of
your mouth
after digesting
my current work.
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Some would argue that I was cruel to Little Man recently, going so far as to claim that I farted in his little face and laughed and laughed and laughed.
Some would claim that when Littles somehow knocked the cleaned Pyrex dish that I make the spano in to the floor, shattering it (third photo), it was retaliation for my alleged attempt to give him pink eye.
If you ask me, these Some-ones are all insane. But you decide: does Little Man look embarrassed or triumphant in the bottom photo?
"I love acting, but I also want to be alive. Publicity is like a prison. If you're not careful, you begin to live according to everyone's idea of how you ought to live. Ambition? To be a big, big star ... on the stage."
But, this week I had a loan repaid in cash and a check actually arrived in the mail, how quaint, so I took them and my plastic cup of change down to make a deposit.
My credit union has an auto-sorting coin machine that was free to use for members, which makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Unlike the change machines in grocery stores and post offices, a sorter in a bank is actually more helpful to the institution than its customers who use it: the bank doesn't have to spend teller manpower and hours counting (or doublechecking customer-rolled) pounds of coinage every day. Not using the machine hurts them more than us.
So, I walk to the machine and see this sign. They want a 3% commission on money that their customers -- again, not some bum off the street, someone who has a partnership of sorts with the bank -- are probably going to deposit in their coffers within minutes of the machine's sorting. This is so stupidly short-sighted -- in the time I was there, I saw two other customers go to the machine, read the sign and walk away (one of them straight out of the building) -- that I really did think about pulling my money and closing the account.
If these institutions have grown so strapped and desparate that they've taken to nickel-and-diming us over literal nickels and dimes, maybe the total collapse of American finance is finally upon us and my money, such as it is, would be better invested in buying and renting out pinball machines or classic cars or something. It underlines what a fine job our schools do to churn out taxpayers/consumers who are so well-conditioned but under-educated that they don't go apeshit at the idea of giving a business a 3% kickback for the pleasure of making their employees' jobs easier.
Anyway, I would like to publicly apologize to the teller who handled my deposit. Sorry to inconvenience you by forcing you to count so many, many .... many $20 bills, on top of a check that had a lot of numbers to look at, and then leave you no choice but to somehow endure counting out $3.34 in change to make the deposit a nice, round number. I don't know what I was thinking, but I can assure you it will never happen in that bank again.
Yours in Christ,
-- Secretary-General Skeletor, Esq.
Reiko Watanabe (15 at the time) was doing fire prevention work under the Student Mobilization Order, at a place 500 meters from the hypocenter. Her lunch box was found by school authorities under a fallen mud wall. Its contents of boiled peas and rice, a rare feast at the time, were completely carbonized. Her body was not found.
In one plastic bag, my cashier just crammed, from top to bottom: a 15oz bag of dinner rolls, a 16oz plastic container of cherry tomatoes, two bunches of bananas weighing five pounds, a loaf of soft Italian bread, two pounds of grapes in an open bag and a large container of deli-made chili held shut with a strip of masking tape and laying on its side. Oh, and a five-pund bag of red potatoes was on top of the bag in the cart. It's partly my own fault for not paying closer attention -- I've been getting lazy with cashier competence, figuring that putting the stuff on the conveyor heaviest-to-lightest would be enough, and I suppose it took more effort to get all of that into one bag than it would to pack them correctly -- but really, what the fuck. Did I somehow offend you Rachel?
The customer-service lady was pretty cool about things (I forgot to dig out my receipt before going back in to show them the bag). It took three bags to repack the stuff right. From now on, I should look for a familar, older face running a line when it's time to check out.
Also: Blondies! Blond Brownies! I had forgot all about them, but this display sounded a dim, muffled gong in the otherwise empty auditorium that passes for my childhood memories. I didn't buy them; I choose to let the mystery be.
Oh yeah, Bernard Hopkins is wearing a suit; I hope that means he'll totally be looming over the Golden Boy fighters with a big goofy grin on his face during post-fight interviews. For whatever reason, the awkwardness of B-Hop being there is wonderful to behold.
About time someone lost a point in a fight this sloppy and/or dirty.
But what shocks me the most is that I never ever would have entertained the idea that Paul Westerberg is actually more of a headphone artist than Pink Floyd. I have all of the Mats records and most of his solo ones, and 49:00 makes me want to rip them all to mp3 and see what else I've missed by not having Paul yowl directly inside my ears.
As for this album being pulled from Amazon and Tunecore after a week or so -- the gloriously offensive medley of classic rock manages to hug the material while somehow giving it the finger behind its back. Even if it's true that one of the publishers is still after him for old-world, overinflated-scale royalties on a second's worth of its client's hit -- and obviously it's Paul's bank account taking the hit, not mine -- it was still worth it. If the dickhead pursuing recompense on each 49-cent download is the Partridge Family's lawyer, maybe David Cassidy-obsessive Rosie O'Donnell could surprise everyone and step in to yank Paul's ass out of the fire, Clinton-in-North-Korea style. Maybe having to serenade her with "I Think I Love You" will finally discourage Paul from playing that crappy song at what seems to be every third live show he's played in the last few years, and everybody wins.
As I was closing the front door, I leaned back in and told Abuela (in my best Frank Sinatra voice) that I have one simple rule for pussy: If you simply do what I tell you to do the first time, you get all the stroking and nuzzling you want. If you really don't think I have your best interests in my heart, you shouldn't want my affection in the first place. She chirped her confused reaction (she's a chirper) and I closed and locked the door.
I may be literally going insane at the moment -- I did mow a lawn during a thunderstorm earlier in the day, figuring that getting hit by lightning would at least be something interesting (alas, blueballs for newness) -- but that doesn't mean I'm wrong about this.
Actually, Little Man literally licks the air whenever I tell him to so; this is a top-five reason why those who have my home phone number all agree that I am an honest-to-Gawd master of pussy. Even if I was a bibliophile with an all-black wardrobe who fell in with a perpetually shedding white cat who totally fuckin' hates paper and will take a bite out of any that invades his personal space. Late night, the 19th.
Also, a better photo of the house's west corner, where the internal sump pump may or may not be ready to work in case of emergency.
