Happy Birthday, Mr. Something Something Computer Guy

Or whatever my job title is.  I don’t even know what it is, because I don’t give a fuck what it is, to be honest.  It doesn’t matter unless there is a “manager’ of some kind in front of it.  I’m a year older and still in the trenches and am not getting glitter on my face tonight.  So, some stripper isn’t singing me Happy Birthday Mr. fucking President, which I guess is good, especially since being the real president isn’t even good these days.

 

Don’t even know what to say about this birthday.  It’s a weird one, a big number.  I think my father was that age when I began to remember things.  So, is it fitting that I’ve developed a drinking problem that helps me forget things at this age since I have no children at this age?  Can you even follow that line of reasoning?

 

My girlfriend asked me if I’d have a problem turning this age and I told her in no uncertain terms, hell no.  Well, I’m thinking now that maybe I do.  But I’m not sure if they are issues carried over from the year or if they have to do with the turning of, basically, kind of old.  Old enough where even I feel like creepy old guy when I go downtown drinking and can’t help but look at the 18 year olds dressed in those short short skirts with practically nothing else on.  Let’s be honest; they’re hot as hell and legal, or they wouldn’t be down there in the first place, and maybe one in a hundred could be into older guys.  So maybe you’ve still got a chance, creepy old ogling guys.  Just stop tucking your polo shirts into your hiked up khakis and/or flashing big belt buckles.  It doesn’t work like it did in 1980, hotshot.

 

 Anyway, all this talk about 18 year olds and strippers is making me want to hit Dancers Royale, the closest strip club.  Except Dancers Royale is also the shittiest strip club on the planet.  Once we took a cab there drunk from downtown, walked in, ordered a drink, saw the girls and walked out.  The cabbie had barely left the parking lot.  Looking at cigarette burned skanks with cellulite can kill your mood pretty quick.

 

But, by my logic, I could still pull some hot young tail if I played the odds.  I’m going to have to order some Viagra as a present to myself, and as a reminder not to give up hope.  So, happy birthday to me, Mr. Old Ogling Computer Guy!

Sake, Middle Age Crisis, and Bus Station Awesome Fun Time

I’ll tell you one thing; sake does not stay hot for long.  That shit is annoying.  I’m tired of reheating the shit, so it’s back to Asbach and coke for the night. 

I think most of the guys I know, myself included, are going through the mid-life crisis.  But there’s a lot of weird shit about that, especially since it hasn’t been redefined since the last 1970’s Corvette ad.  It’s not like that now, and it happens before you are 40.  Acceleration of culture and all that shit.  And yeah, nobody wants a goddamn ‘Vette anymore.  And we aren’t really skirt chasing either.  Sure, we think about young, tight ass, but the allure is fleeting, pleasant; like the thought of a trip to strip club is, or how driving the latest 6 series would be when one passes us would be is.  But a strip club is out of the way, expensive, and somewhat of a pain in the ass, and a 6 series is expensive and impractical – both are hard to justify in daylight.  It’s not a genuine pursuit. 

 

We’re half dead; we know it, we accept it.  It’s ok.  We’re not trying to fight it off with sports cars or silicone face slaps these days.  But we are trying to accept it with the proper grace.

 

Ah, but what is the proper grace these days?  That is what we are trying to find out.  We’re bouncing around like pinballs between depression, rounds of golf, trips to Vegas that are disappointing,  hours spent at poker tables winning or losing (doesn’t matter), fishing, fuck – whatever – we’re fucking searching for what drove us when we were young.  The thing we don’t realize is that when we were young it was blind ambition, the world was wide open – it could be a career, rock star, family, lottery, all at the same impossible, improbable time.  Because we were young and naïve, aka stupid.  Now we have some mix and/or one of whatever of those.  And we wonder what might have been.  Even more importantly, it was ok NOT to have ambition and just be – it was ok to just live and see what happened.  I would be lying if I said I never thought about trying that shit – just being – traveling on a shoestring budget and going whichever way the wind blew, but I know where that road goes.  I’d be writing this on a 2 by 3 memo spiral memo pad from a bench at the bus station with the plastic from the tip of my shoelace if I tried that shit now.  And I’d smell like ass, but you know how it is.

 

Not that I speak for everybody, of course.  There are those who take risks.  I’ can understand the guy who divorces his wife and kicks the kids to the curb and gets a phat crib downtown to nail some hot talent every night. You gotta look good to try that one though.  Keep trim at Metro Muscle.  Wear expensive dark striped shirts and Lucky Jeans from Park Ave and leather sandals.  Your sideburns and smartly spiked hair should only be done by boutiques from within a 5 mile radius of Thornton Park.  Find a good coke dealer.  If you aren’t individually wealthy enough to tan during the day, self tan at an artificial place, but be sure that it looks natural, because people in that scene can tell the difference between a real tan (money) and a fake tan (has to work).  One misstep can cause a crisis in your carefully planned 2^nd adolescence.

 

You see, crisis comes in all forms, whether you are sitting on a bench at the bus station, or on your Adirondack on your 2 Million studio balcony overlooking Lake Eola.

 

The difference is definition of crisis.  To the person at the Waverly on their Adirondack, crisis is dropping a precious Chihuahua into the bushes next to a Mercedes AMG, where the Chihuahua might not feel comfortable because he prefers to only ride in Porches.  Whereas, to the person at the bus station, the crisis is the anal raping that could include getting A.I.D.S.  It’s always important to see things from both perspectives, and the lesson here is that from the perspective of near middle aged guys, they have it tough, but not as tough as near middle aged guys in the 70’s, because they all had to buy Corvettes. 

 

So shut up about that beating and raping, poor bus station person.  We all have our problems.  Jesus.

I Don’t Even Know What The Fuck This Post Says, Probably

I dunno, I guess this is the way the day was supposed to wind up.  My girlfriend has been wanting to throw up Japanese food and Chardonnay all over bums at the crosswalk, and I gave my last two smokes away to some couple at Monkey Bar for some god fucking unknown reason.  I probably gave it to them because I just got paid and I feel rich for a day, and they were out, and why the fuck not.  Now, I’m not only wishing I had those two cigarettes, I’m wishing I had the chairs, and was at the bar, and maybe even wasn’t myself right now.

 

I’m at that corner of Central and whatever that godforsaken street Casey’s bar meets Central Avenue is.  Most natives know that sinkhole.  There is a bus stop there; usually filled by cabs, bums, drunks, people you don’t want to see at any given hour.  I am in this sinkhole now, having crawled here after slithering out of the elevator of Monkey bar, through Slingapour’s outside bar, and across bum park.

 

My usually reliable mental case of a cab driver hasn’t shown up, and Faith has slid down to her ass on a traffic light pole, wanting to spew all over passers by.  I’m left with her goddamn Prada purse that I bought her on sale in my hand while her eyes glaze at the passing rims, and I have a half broken cigarette in my mouth that I’ve pulled from my pocket that I’m desperate to light.  I’ve got plenty from my paycheck in my pocket, but at this moment, it doesn’t help me fix my cigarette, light it, get the cab here, fill my drink, help my girl throw up…fuck, I don’t know what the sequence is.  I don’t know what I want the sequence to be.  I guess I’m old now; part of me wants to be home too.  The magic mental midget cabbie carpet should be here already to whisk us home, where the girl will fall asleep in her panties on top of the covers and I’ll stay up writing, drunk, to try to say something interesting about something.

 

So, here I am, in about that situation. My usually reliable mental case of a cab driver and I got in a shouting match in the driveway because she didn’t like the puking in the cab.  But my girlfriend, it turns out, is very handy with a plastic bag and puke.  The cabbie couldn’t argue with no spillage, so she decided to argue with the possibility of spillage.  Which is a pretty thin argument, but as I mentioned, all of her marbles arent’ there.  So we went round and round, arguing in the driveway about the possibility of my girlfriend having puked on something in her precious cab.  I like those arguments.  Because I win them.  Even with slightly challenged people.  Maybe especially with.  Maybe only with.  I dunno.  I don’t count.

 

I don’t know what I want the sequence to be.  That’s honest.  Just let me be the DJ.  Let me hold the mouse to the iTunes forward button while it is on random.  Sometimes it has fits, and those fits are unbearable.  Sometimes it chooses exactly what you want, but exactly what you want ­isn’t exactly what you want halfway through.  We’ve all been there.  That song that’s great that turns bad.  That song that has great memories that turns into something else, that turns into regrets, into streams of things that could have been, could have been paths of totally  – whoa, this is getting off on fifty tangents here.  Alright, enough left field for one post. This should come with a disclaimer but, shit.

Shitfucked By The System, or At Least By Lamps and Bookcases

Yeah, so all of us have been worried about our jobs, and it turns out that they fired 15 people in the past week.  It also turns out that one of our team has to take a job with more responsibility without commensurate pay.  They are asking for volunteers.  Fuck that, we all say; knowing that one of us is on the chopping block regardless.

After the firings were not announced, they passed out a corporate email about Pep Day!!! where employees all jumped around in photographs with gleeful faces.  Meanwhile, one guy from the team reluctantly took the “open job”, knowing his on-call time just increased without a pay increase.  We all had lunch today to ‘celebrate’ his move; but it really was a bit sad losing a team member and knowing he just got shit-fucked in a way.  At the same time, we all were secretly happy, because his loss meant we got to keep our jobs.  Yeah, the world is cruel and all that.

So, after work I continued the celebration best way I know how:  I went to the liquor store and bought the following:

2 bottles of Sake

4 bottles of wine

1 bottle Asbach Uralt

1 bottle Absolut Vodka

2 Macanudo Madura

+ mixers

We have the start of a good night.

1 bottle of Sake and several drinks later, other friends come over.  I remember part of it.  I don’t remember the part where I broke a lamp or knocked over a bookcase, but the girl took it in stride.  Maybe because I wasn’t the only one annoyingly drunk, or maybe because she took all of our money at poker.

The next bottle of Sake later, the bottle of Asbach gone, the wine and beer gone, I don’t remember anything.   Maybe that’s what I sought.  I don’t know.  It wasn’t about work worries really, but there is definitely something sweeter about a drunk where you don’t have to worry about the bullshit; you don’t have to worry about co-workers, lamps, bookcases, or anything.  There is something to that, and it’s not the simple escape that it sounds like.

Newsflash: Job Reviews Are Useless

 

“They don’t care because they stay paid anyway – “

            Flava Flav, 911 Is A Joke, Fear of a Black Planet

 

Got my yearly review today.  For those of you not in corporate culture, it’s a 1 on 1 meeting where your manager assesses your progress/performance.  These are bullshit because the manager is told to pare down the numbers, while at the same time it’s known that you did a kickass job.  As usual I am an “above average” employee, which is what everyone gets because the manager cannot give out the real points.  I expressed my displeasure with the numbers today, not because I don’t know the situation, but because in years to come, I’ll need those badass numbers.  The way it was explained to me is that, basically, there is no promotion from within and the numbers will never matter.

Now, that’s refreshing honesty; reviews are admittedly useless and not even tied to raises.  Raises, by the way, probably won’t happen despite the company securing a billion in contracts in just the last quarter.  I love my fucking job.

In Left Field, As Usual

 I need to stop opening the page (drunk) and writing posts about (drunk) boring shit.  I should write interesting shit about winning the lottery.  Thoughts about winning the lottery are always interesting.  I could use this Coltrane (Mr. Syms) and this red wine/scotch/beer/white wine buzz to pontificate about the world’s problems maybe.  But this may be more than a buzz and pontificating would be more inane than the regular shit.  I could light up my last cigar and stink the fuck out of my place, finish this white then try to stomach some scotch without ice.  But, strangely, that doesn’t sound like a good idea.  Yep, it’s drinking while on call again time.  I’m just going to finish the white.  I’m a company man.

 

I will say up front that if I win the lottery I’m buying a condo in Europe and starting a publishing house.  And that would be it, except for all the drunken stripper parties, but that goes without saying I figure.  With my free time, I’d sit in my cliché studio flat in Paris or Munich, or whatever, and write and drink, soaking in the cliché and fucking loving it.  At least until the French started to bug me, then I’d come back to the states until I was reminded of how stupid Americans are.  Then I’d go back overseas, and so on.

 

Is that too much to ask?  I mean, I know there are starving kids and shit, but come on Karma, just hook it up already.

 

To come completely out of left field here, I’m looking forward to a retrospective on GWB2.  I need validation that the embarrassment I’ve suffered as an American and my impulse to cringe when I hear his voice or see his face is something that I am not alone in.  Seriously, people voted for him, twice?  Is it abnormal to still be stupefied by this?  On the eve of the first election, when GW gave his acceptance speech after pickpocketing the election from Gore, I turned to my girlfriend at the time and said, “There goes our foreign policy.”  No shit, I called it and I wish at that time Vegas had a board running for his (dis)accomplishments.  I’d be a motherfucking millionaire and wouldn’t even need to buy these lottery tickets.  My girlfriend at the time just looked at the screen and nodded, because she was bi-polar and totally doped up.  So she probably can’t verify my claim to fame, but she was a sweet gal anyway.

 

I really need to refer back to the first line of this post and follow my own advice.  This shit is completely inane.

Sad But True

 

Received in an email…ignorance is bliss.

Shit That Is Incredibly Boring

 Finally ordered the Bukowski Tapes DVD.  Been waiting a while to get that shit.  It is as good – or better – than “Born into This”.  It is by a filmmaker who just sat and filmed Buk in his backyard doing impromptu interviews for an entire 2 discs.  They are done in snippets, which is perfect, and are totally candid.  Hollywood has been trying and failing to capture him for decades, but the Mickey Rourke film (Barfly) and, to a lesser extent, Factotum (Matt Dillon), failed.

On another note, all of the books my father sent me were stolen by the postal system, for which I can not offer any out; basically it is totally shady shit and unforgivable.  Everything that I have sent insured has always arrived.  My father, in his typical economical way, sent several books to me.  The box arrived completely empty, with the postman offering his apologies and the fact that he had added some tape to help keep the box in a “box like shape.”  The sad fact is the box held some semi-valuable contents; mostly Ludlum hardcovers that were pristine.  If you look on E-bay, those fuckers go for over 30 bucks each, at the cheapest.  Especially the Bourne ones.  Postal workers – I thought you were paid pretty well.  Maybe that is an incorrect assumption, so now you steal.  Hey, thanks.

Ultimate Bet just emailed me and said that they are giving me a free ten bucks.  Later.  This post was stupid as fuck anyway.

Surviving The Sweat Out

 A few friends and I have had many discussions on weeknight drinking and the best way to pull it off.  How to avoid hangovers, how to make it in to work without getting pulled over, etc. 

Our latest one was about stinking of booze at work and how to avoid detection.  You gotta realize the stink stays with you all the next day.  There are three ninja steps to pulling this one off:

 

Douse

Distance

Deflect

Spray on that cologne, pop those tic tacs, make sure your clothes are clean – Douse the alcohol coming through your pores.  It sounds like common sense, but don’t just do it in the morning, you need to keep a fresh application of distracting scents going all day.  Make sure you are at least 2 plus feet away from your client at all times if possible.  Always talk with the least amount of breath you can manage exhaling if you can not Distance.  Deflection can be particularly tricky; it involves settings like elevators where you are forced to be in close contact.  In these situations you need to slightly shift your person so that any perceivable alcoholic odor is transferred from you to the person next to you.  This can confuse others as to who is still drunk at 8am.  It takes practice, but be sure to throw in a confused looking eyebrow at all times; this lets people know you are in on the smell and it can’t possibly be you.  Looking at the corner of the ceiling and the wall isn’t a bad ploy either; it makes you look like you are trying to determine the source of something.

Keep these steps in mind, and you should be successful at surviving the sweat out.

Book Still For Sale, Which Is Unfortunate For Everyone

For those of you visiting who are interested in a schizophrenic read that jumps between a 23 year old’s travel journal during the 90’s, poetry, and short stories, The Hermit Ledger is available for sale.  Grammatical errors are free (the count is 3 plus in just 200 pages, nice!).  The good part is that I paid extra for good paper, cover, etc. so it will last a long time, gramatically incorrect and all.  It’s 8 bucks plus shipping.  Email nonculture@gmail.com for details if you have money to burn on shit you’ll flip through and probably never read cover to cover anyway.