Lyrical Saturday: What I Stole
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Yearly Archives: 2006
The winter '07 Couch Surfing tour is on!
So today begins my two week escape into my own past, visiting with friends and family, and traversing the haunts of my youth for a time. The trip is planned around a traditional gathering of my closest friends from high school and college that takes place tomorrow night, and I plan on having a mini high school reunion with some old friends during my time in the hometown. I like to travel with an “open itinerary”, going where I feel like when I feel like it. Having lived in Southern California for 7 years, I'm also looking forward to experiencing to genuine winter. I may get more winter than I bargained for, with a large winter storm coming across the country as we speak. Speaking of as we speak, my journey has gotten off to an inauspicious beginning, and I'm writing this now from the airport in Nashville, where my flight has been delayed. I also found out today that one of my oldest and best friend's father died yesterday. He is one of the friends that I was looking forward to seeing at the gathering tomorrow night. This obviously changes the complexion of our gathering, since we've all known him, and his parents, since high school and before. I can only assume that he won't be attending. But, if you are one that believes that things happen for a reason, then perhaps the timing of this sad occurrence while we are all in town together is meant for us to be here to support him. We can only guess.
I'll update as I can from the road, but I'm not sure if it will be easier or harder. I'll have more time for writing, obviously, but less internet access. If anyone in North Carolina is reading this, email me and lets get together!
Merry “Christmess”
Christmess is the holiday celebrated the day after Christmas, when you have to clean up the mess you made on Christmas.
This year's christmas was somewhat convoluted, stretched out and fragmentary, but enjoyable none-the-less. The only family I was with was my dad, who came to San Diego because I couldn't get off work. I actually worked on Christmas day, but my Dad, roomates, roomates' families and friends and I all celebrated christmas on christmas eve. So this year, christmas and christmess were on the same day. I got out of the cleaning, one of the only perks of having to work. Christmas eve was very enjoyable. I slept in, had a lazy morning, then watched the Saints beat the Giants. My dad and I then went across the street to my roomate's parents' house to watch the Chargers vs. Seattle. It was an awesome game with good company, complete with a game-winning deep touchdown pass with seconds left in the game to win it. It set a festive mood for us for the rest of the evening. We then stuffed our house full of relatives and friends, gathering mostly around the Wii in the living room. We had a great dinner prepared by Mario with several dishes brought by guests. The meal was “Hamtastic”! We then retired to the living room and took turns playing “Guitar Hero 2″ on the Playstation 2. This was good, silly fun. My dad even played. It had to be the first time in history that my dad could be convinced to try a video game. I challenged everyone to a real-life guitar duel, but had no takers.
My dad took off early on christmas morning. Since I had to work, there was no need for him to stick around and be bored on christmas. He returned to Oatman to spend the day with his adopted family. I opened a couple of remaining gifts with my roomates. I got a robot desk lamp from my mom. Her annual toy for me. It's a robot with a lamp for a head that has articulated limbs and hands that can grasp things. I dig it, but haven't figured out where to put it, yet. From my roomates I got a Dr. Who toy sonic screwdriver, complete with Invisible ink and UV light to reveal it. Fun! The rest of my christmas will be celebrated with my mother next weekend when I get to North Carolina. Probably Saturday morning.
I'll be in the state for 2 weeks starting friday, and am looking VERY MUCH forward to the new year's gathering (actually th 30th instead of the 31st) at the Mitchells' residence in Statesville. It'll be the first one of these I've been able to attend since 2000, thanks to the eternal impossibility of getting off work for the holidays. I wanted to go so much that I traded away any time off requests I had in for Christmas and actually worked my days off Thanksgiving weekend in order to insure that I got it. I'm wanting to make a definitive decision on whether or not, and when, I'm going to move back to the east coast, and seeing all those people again will be instrumental in aiding such a decision. I need to find my path again. It has been lost for several years now, and these are the people that I had once been sure my path lied with. It will be useful to shed some “Other Light” on the subject.
For now,
Merry Christmess!
Lyrical Saturday: The 12 Bobs of Christmas
So I've got this Personal Temporal Vortex…
Some kids rebel against their parents in obvious ways. I chose to do so by bending the space-time continuum. Only, I didn't do it consciously, nor did I even realize I was doing it until many years later. I'll start at the beginning. My dad has often been referred to as the “late” Jim Loggins. He is very much alive. He has this nickname from years of legendarily lacking punctuality. To this day, all our relatives tell him that the annual Christmas Eve gathering is an hour earlier than it actually is, just so there is some hope of him getting there somewhere close to on time. When I was a kid, and dependent on my father to get to places, I was often late. In retrospect, of course, I never missed anything important, but you know how much more important things seem to be than they actually are when you're a kid. As a result of years of this, I developed excellent punctuality. I'm the guy that shows up to the party when you tell me it's going to start, even though you know that no one will show up until an hour or two after you tell them. To me, there is no fashionably late.
So, after years of being precociously time-conscious, it is no surprise that I've become very interested as an adult with the nature of time, and theories of time travel. It is during adulthood, also, that I came to realize a recurring tendency in the nature of my reality. More specifically, I noticed a tendency in one aspect of my reality: clocks. I began to notice that independently operated clocks that I spent a lot of time around displayed some unusual common innacuracies. The clocks that were affected by this were my watch (which I stopped wearing 2 years ago), my alarm clock, and my car's clock. All the other clocks I am around are self updated from a network, like my computer clock, my cell phone, and the cable box. The jist of it is, all the clocks around me gain time. The creepy thing is that they seem to gain the same amount of time. My watch, car clock, and alarm clock (the last time I regularly used all 3) had all gained 45 minutes or so in about a year and a half. I had some work done on my car at the dealer in September, and they reset my car clock at that time. Since then, the car clock and my alarm clock have both gained about 14 minutes. So, either I have some weird electromagnetical affect on clocks, or I'm experiencing more time than everyone around me. Have I experienced 14 minutes more than you have since september? In an Einstein, relativistic sort of way, it could mean that I'm lazy. According to the theory of relativity, the faster you move, the less time passes for you. Does that mean that I'm so lethargic that I'm actually speeding up time? I don't think it works the other way. And I'm not that lethargic. I thought time was only supposed to fly when you are having fun.
Lyrical Saturday: I woke up this morning and got out of bed
I'm declaring Saturday to be lyrics day. Each Saturday I'll post some lyrics to a song from one of my musical endeavors whether it be Great Awakening, Bob Spelled Backwards, 3-five-7, Magnuson, earthShine, or just something that hasn't been used yet. Today's entry fits the latter category. For your enjoyment, a silly poem called “I Woke up this Morning and got out of Bed”.
I woke up this morning and got out of bed
I didn’t feel very sane
Because I woke up this morning and got out of head,
Found myself in front of a train,
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What if someone else woke up this morning and got out instead?
Would you be able to tell?
If they woke up this morning and couldn’t be read,
Would they wind up like me as well?
So I woke up this morning and got filled with lead
Was it some random drive-by?
If I’d woke up this morning and I had sped,
Would I still have had to die?
So I woke up this morning and got out of dead,
People ran from me for miles,
So I woke up this morning and got out of dread,
And I was greeted with smiles.
So I’ll wake up this morning dressed all in red
Hoping to catch her eye
So if she wakes up this morning and finds we are wed,
She won’t be quite so surprised.
If you wake up this morning and find I have fled,
Wondering where I could go,
If you wake up to see the life that I have shed,
Then you will finally know.
So wake up this morning and find you’re mislead
There’s only one thing you can do
Wake up this morning from illusions you’re fed,
Find the world you never knew.
Long Distance Tree Decoration
So Sunday, my roomates Mario, Bethany and I were sitting on the couch watching a football game. Well, I was watching the football game, Mario and Bethany were contemplating christmas decorations. Bethany had decided that she didn't like the glass ball ornaments we'd been using the past 2 christmas's, but they had determined that it was too late to replace them this year. So, Mario and I turned our attention to the TV while Bethany continued to contemplate the still boxed up ornaments that were waiting to be placed on the tree they'd picked up that morning. Then, out of the blue, one of the ornaments flew across the room, over the heads of Mario and I, and shattered against the wall against which the tree is placed. This was like one of those old movie moments where someone does something outrageous and there's a record player playing somewhere that is suddenly stopped with a loud “VOOT!” noise. Friends of mine from college will remember several “Voot” moments we notated. So, in slow motion, our faces, wearing understated expressions of confusion/concern/shock/terror/hilarity turned towards Bethany. Her face was sporting an impish grin that mischeivously implied, “oops”. She laughed and said, “I was aiming for the tree, actually”. I'm not sure whether or not I believe her, but that's beside the point. Several more ornaments, with wire hook hangers attached, followed shortly after the first, most of these actually hitting the tree. Some managed to hook themselves onto a branch, some joined their shattered brother on the floor, some went into the tree and bounced down to the floor like a “plinko” chip. Before long, we were all chucking ornaments, hooks or not, at the tree. Then we started keeping score. Bethany, having gotten many more shots in than either me or Mario, had the highest number of successful “decopoints”. One of her later shots hit and shattered an ornament she had previously successfully scored with. We actually debated for a minute whether or not she should lose credit for that one when we realized the absurdness of our actions and declined into laughter. It was later determined that the excess unwanted ornaments would be sent to the backyard and subject to firing squad. Firing squad being roommate Mike's airsoft rifles, and Mario's paintball gun. Oh what a festive, sparkling, cheery holiday massacre it was.
I recommend using non-breakable ornaments in further attempts at playing this sport. Although, that did add an interesting element of danger…and humor.
Sometimes it's good to have these moments of unbridled destructiveness, if only to remind us that we no longer live with our parents, so we're not going to get “in trouble”. Being free adults, we can break our stuff any time we want.
Living Human Larva!
I didn't get the memo!
Apparently, it's national “Bring your infant to work” day and no one told me. Not that I have an infant, but I could have borrowed one maybe. So I arrived to work to find that my cubicle had been transformed into a nursery. My desk was covered with small children and their accouterments. Bottles, diaper bags, those little seat things you carry babies around in, all used up every available inch of space on my desk. These particular children were the recently manufactured twins of my co-worker, Sammy. Henceforth they will be referred to as “Sammy Spawn”. I advised that the Sammy Spawn should be removed from my cubicle, not because I discriminate based on age, but because I've been battling a particularly resilient cold and I didn't want to be guilty of unintentional infanticide via microbial infection. Everyone assumed I was just being all “bah humbug”, biased by the recent christmas music episode (See Dec 5th entry). So, the kids were not kept at minimum safe distance. I just hope their newly created immune systems are able to withstand this particular viral infection better than, say, a full grown adult who recently recovered from only the third illness to befall him in the past 21 years. But who's counting? If Sammy had expressed concern for the health of his twin Spawn, I was ready to reassure him that he does have a spare, but these appear to be the latest model, and are notoriously difficult to replace. Babies, I've been told, prefer the term “People of recent creation”.
So, as I had inferred earlier, I'm not a baby hater. I must confess, however, to being annoyed by adults when there are babies around. Normally competent, tolerable co-workers become cooing, blubbering imbeciles as soon as somebody whips out a human larva. All you can hear is “blah, blah, blah, cute!, blah, blah, cute!, blah, blah, blah, blah, so cute!, blah blah”. I guess it didn't really bother me as much as amuse me. I guess I'm weird that way. We had recently conversed at work about the world's oldest people, and how amazing it was to live a life that spans 3 different centruries, but today reminded me that everyone, if only for a few nanoseconds, gets to be the world's youngest person.
Christmas season, and the curse of mall employment
'Tis the season to go postal.
For 6 years, from late 1994 until late 2000, I worked in a mall and lived the life of a clerk. It started at Waldenbooks in the Boone Mall, eventually moving over to Software Etc in the Boone Mall (Now Gamestop) and ended after my transfer within the now Gamestop company to San Diego. Those of you who've ever worked in a mall know of the mall employee christmas curse: a permanent and incurable hatred of christmas music. This is due to the fact that malls, typically, start playing christmas music the day after halloween, and keep playing straight through January 2nd. That's 63 days of non-stop heartwarming holiday classics. For a full time employee, that's roughly 45 work days, or 360 hours listening to the same handful of christmas songs repeated hundreds of times. Assuming an average of 4 minutes per song, that's 5400 christmas songs listened to. Assuming there is, at the very most, 30 different songs, you'll hear each song roughly 180 times, or at least 4-5 times per day. That's enough to make almost anyone sick of it.
Still, my co-workers at present, in an office environment, were incapable of understanding why I reacted with sheer terror at the prospect of them turning on the cable channel dedicated to non-stop christmas music. My earnest and desperate protests were met with ridicule as holiday favorites performed by legendary talents such as John Tesh and Pat Boone began to fill the room. As my eyeballs melted and my skin began to peel back, I was only able to fend off certain death or psychotic breakdown by plugging my computer speakers into my iPod and turning up loud enough to drown out the cheery holiday horror. Tomorrow, I may have to use my headphones.
wish me luck…
Bloggin
So, I'm thinking about entering the blog world. I guess that's obvious from this post. I've been known in the past to come up with clever and humorous things to say and ponder, but I need a great deal of practice getting them into written form of any kind, so this seems like a good way to go about it. This site system will allow me to post seemingly limitless photos, space allowing, and can attach files of any kind, which means I can make mp3's of my stuff available on here. I'll have a learning curve to deal with, so don't expect this to be all slick any time soon. Do you think this is worth 5 bucks a month? Should I find a freebie to begin with? This free trial ends in 7 days. Mayhaps that's a good trial run for me as well. I'm looking for something to kick me in the motivation to devote more time and effort to my creative endeavors. Will I ever have any readers? Who knows. Will I ever actually keep up with something like this long enough and well enough to merit readership? Who knows. I've fancied myself a writer a couple of times in the past, only to suck at getting things done in a regular, timely manner. For now, I really like the idea of this. Only time, and this free trial, can tell if the novelty will wear off before it gives me enough pleasure to merit a long term commitment. So, let's give it a shot, shall we?