Where are my pants?

Well now... since I've gotten so many emails from my adoring readers complaining that I haven't written anything a couple of days... here you go.

I forgot how much sitting home all f'ing day sucks. I mean, if it were summer, I could walk down to the Park Ave Deli, sit outside with a sub and a beer with the rest of the unemployed, pseudo intellectual, goatee growin', really small glasses wearin', tie your hair in a ponytail rubber bandin', backpack slingin', smoothie drinkin', non-showerin, people that I can't stand. But I can't. It's not summer. The Park Ave Deli is closed... some dude bought it and is opening it up later this year. But to address my original point, sitting home all day sucks. I actually got up at a decent hour this morning... I think it was around 8:15AM... don't get too excited... it wasn't my idea, but rather the idea of Tom. Who's Tom you ask? Tom is the telemarketer that called me on my cell phone this morning at 8:15 AM and woke my lazy ass up. Since when can they call you on your cell phone??? What was that all about? Needless to say, I thanked Tom for his wakeup call, rolled over and tried to get back to sleep but to no avail. Dammit... now I have a whole day to kill.

I guess it's good that I was up that early... I promised a friend that I would do my laundry today. I've been saying since Monday that I was going to do it the next day, but there was a wandering band of street punks huddled outside my door just waiting for some tall, skinny geek to come out of the corner apartment with a laundry basket and detergent so that they could jump him, knock him out, take his Lance Armstrong bracelet, pillage the aforementioned corner apartment, and make off with his life savings of $84.73. So, you can see the pickle that I was in. Obviously safety is my concern here. The good news is that I looked out the peephole and the street punks weren't there today. My guess is that they got Josh first and that satisfied their bloodlust... at least for today.

What really sucks is that I have 3 cigarettes left... which ultimately means that sometime today I'm going to have to bundle myself up like an eskimo with poor circulation, go outside, use a metal detector to find my car, brush more of that white crap off, and drive to Wilson Farms for smokes. Maybe I can make the remaining smokes last until like 5:00, so that I can move my car and get cigs in one fell swoop. That would be a feat. It would be an especially triumphant feat, considering that I'm now down to 2... my ex just called. That's a whole other post, and I'll get to that.

My new boss called yesterday... she's going to pick me up at 8:00 on Monday morning so that we can head out to Buffalo to pick up my company car. She seems pretty cool, and it's also pretty cool that they're just tossing me the keys to a brand new vehicle that I'm supposed to use for pretty much anything, including personal use. The only thing that I'm worried about with the new job is that there's someone in the new office that's all gung-ho about the company, the product, her kids, or whatever. There was one of those in my old office. I could not stand this woman. Every f'ing day it was this broad babbling on about how great she was and what an awesome company it was to work for and yada yada yada. This person... oh man. I can't even find the words. I just want to break into her house while she's sleeping and crack an ant farm over her head so that the ants lay eggs in her scalp and she has to shave her head, and when she walks down the street all the kids in her neighborhood point and laugh and call her anty anty scalpy scalpy. That'd teach her to have a positive attitude.

I think I have a new thing that's pissing me off, and it's MTV's "Real World." I hate this show with a f'ing passion. What they do is take 6 of the biggest moronic crybabies that they can find, stick them all in a posh downtown apartment, provide all their food, utilities, decor and whatever, and just film them for a few weeks. Ladies and gentlemen, that is about the farthest thing from the real world that you could find, on TV or anywhere. Ya wanna see the real world? Come live with me for a month. Come with me into my wonderful world of work, taxes, French bread pizzas from Wegmans, diet vanilla Pepsi, $20 hair cuts, $6/pack cigarettes and psycho ex's. That's the real world my friends, I just don't have a video crew... yet.

Sorry to take that sidebar, but I had to get that off my chest.

Good news... I found my Todd Snider album. If you've never heard him, I highly recommend picking up an album. He's got this kind of comical, story telling style. Good stuff. The following are the lyrics to one of his songs that's "hidden" on the Songs from the Daily Planet album. It's at the end of the album, about a minute after the last song ends. It's not a separate track, more of a trailer on the end. Pretty funny.

Hey, hey, my, my, Rock 'n roll will never die. Just hang your hair down in your eyes, you'll make a million dollars.

Well I was in this band going nowhere fast. We sent out demos but everybody passed. So one day we finally took the plunge... moved out to Seattle to play some grunge... Washington state, that is. Space Needle, Eddie Vedder, Mudhoney. Now to fit in fast we wear flannel shirts, we turn our amps up until it hurts. We got bad attitudes and what's more, when we play we stare straight down at the floor. Wowee. Pretty scary. How pensive. How totally alternative.

Now to fit in on the Seattle scene, you gotta do something they ain't never seen. So thinking up a gimmick one day, we decided we'd be the only band that wouldn't play a note, under any circumstances. Silence... music's original alternative. Hell, that's alternative to alternative... roots grunge!

Well we spread the word through the underground that we were the hottest new thing in town. The record guy came out to see us one day, and just like always we didn't play. It knocked him out. He said he loved our work. He said he loved our work but he wasn't sure if he could sell a record with nothing on it. I said, "tell 'em we're from Seattle." He advanced us two and a half million dollars.

Well they made us do a video but that wasn't tough because we just filmed ourselves smashing stuff. It was kinda wierd because there was no music, but MTV said they'd love to use it. The kids went wild, the kids went nuts, Rolling Stone gave us a 5 star review, said we played with guts. We were scorin' chicks, takin' drugs, then we got asked to play MTV unplugged. You shoulda seen it. We went right out there and refused to do acoustical versions of the electrical songs that we had refused to record in the first place. Then we smashed our shit.

Well we blew 'em away at the Grammys show by refusing to play and refusing to go. And then just when we thought fame would last forever, along come this band that wasn't even together. Now that's alternative. Hell, that's alternative to alternative. I feel stupid... and contagious.

Well our band got dropped and that ain't funny 'cause we're all hooked on drugs but we're out of money. So the other day I called up the band, I said "boys I've taken all I can, shave off your goatees, pack the van... we're going back to Athens."

More good news, the 3rd and 4th loads of laundry are now officially in the dryer. I'm thinking I could probably dig up a few more quarters and finish off virtually everything... nah, small steps. I also promised this friend that I would clean my bathroom, but I'll save that for another day when I'm particularly ambitious... not today... I don't have enough cigarettes.

I think I'm done for now... got some serious folding to do.

Until next time...

R