Thursday, September 27, 2007

Bottle Up and Explode

This is a continuation of a post I made back in May…wow, I really haven’t been blogging…

Step 11: The longest hour. That hour right after you return from lunch has got to be the longest hour of your entire life. See, each day it gets longer and longer, thus becoming the longest hour of your life - with the exception of that hour you sat next to the big, smelly guy on the plane that kept looking for the flight attendant to order his next round of drinks as a continuation of his layover hangover busting romp in the airport bar. So now you are back at work, calls are waiting, your stomach is turning after eating something that appeared to be a chicken sandwich but you are now thinking it was fried rubber, because, hey, everything tastes like chicken. Anyway, your all too brief respite is soon forgotten as the work piles up and your co-workers have all gone off on yet another birthday luncheon for someone you aren’t even sure works in your office. As your body begins to make noises and hemorrhages that alerts seismometers of subterranean movement and you think you might just spontaneously implode you look at the clock and it has only be 15 minutes since you returned.

Step 12: Afternoon “nap.” At this point you have survived the morning obstacles to the shower, the nascar race they call a morning commute, the co-worker arrival gauntlet to your desk, the over-caffeinated callers and their fix-my-problem-now user incompetence issues, and the after lunch, steel cage match, bare-fisted bout your stomach had with your large and small intestines. Now it is time for that caffeine induced afternoon crash. That blissful, quiet time of the day when you shut out the world, stare off into space as if you had blinders on. Calls go unanswered but you don’t care. Paper work blows away with the wind like leaves in autumn. Drifting, drifting away. Reality and daydreams meld together and you lose track which is which. You call your male co-worker Alice and the e-mail notification sound is like seagulls chirping just outside your beach front home. The hand on your computer screen that signifies a link can be clicked looks like one of those foam hands saying your team is #1 as your team wins the big game. Whammm. Back to reality, some server went down and the place has gone to ludicrous speed with people all up in a frenzy.

Step 13: Final countdown. Waiting, watching the clock, its 4 o’clock, its got to stop….I know, I know, too many unrelated musical references there but you get the point. Those last few agonizing minutes when you are doing everything possible to make the time go by faster…even by doing work, actual work. Amazing, never thought I would see the day when you would actually do work because the alternative is you being so bored that time has completely stopped. Now fellow disgruntled employee, hang in there for it is almost time to go, almost time to leave all of this behind, relax, sleep, then start all over again in a few hours. What a fun life we have.

Step 14: Closing time. So the clock has struck that time, you know that time, the one that releases the 300 pound weight that you’ve been supporting on your head for the past 6+ hours, that time of the day that if you work in a factory back in the 19th century or a query in Bedrock would be accompanied with a steam whistle or a really loud prehistoric bird screaming. Now it is time for the escape. Imagine that scene in Indiana Jones, no, not the one when everyone melts away for looking at the arc, you know, the one at the beginning, where Indy is stealing the golden skull looking thing. He weighs the bag of sand trying to judge to right weight, then makes the switch. All is clear right? No booty traps this time, you mean booby traps, that’s what I said, booby traps. But we all know better. And like a big ass perfectly round rock chasing after us, we take off. Throwing caution to the wind we dodge poison darts flying, jumping bottomless caverns, get chased by unruly natives with bad haircuts only to end up in a plane, sitting on a snake…there are motherf$%king snakes on the motherf$%king plane! But hey, you got out of there. Your prize? A stress-filled drive home that includes red lights at every traffic light, a bottle neck at another road repair site, and some guy on a Moped. Then you get stuck in a major traffic jam and that guy on the Moped goes tooting by with that annoying little motor like the turtle beating the hare.

Step 15: Home life. Finally you arrive home. Now what? Dinner. Maybe a little ranting to a loved one or loved ones, real or virtual (present company included). A hot shower to rid yourself of the filth that you accumulated on your body, mind, and soul over the course of the day. How ‘bout some mindless TV watching? Or a movie? Are you just wasting time until it is time to go off to dreamland? Are we all just working for the weekend? (you can never get enough ‘80s references) Well, it is now up to you to take this 15 step program and flip it on its end, heels over head, and shake things up because this daily minutia should always be avoided at all possible opportunities.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Greatest Hits - Disc 1

Greatest Hits

I’ve been going back through older blog posts because I am gradually adding to my myspace account (yes, I caved, but don’t worry, I am being cautious and it has gotten me back in touch with some old friends, so whatcha gonna do? Dress me up in a chicken suit and call me a hypocrite) But it has given me an opportunity to see how funny I actually am…in writing. It is curious to me, especially in my current doldrums, how these moments of humorous inspiration hit me. How are the ideas generated? Where do they come from? Why am I at the mercy of moods which affect my thinking and ability to be humorous? So in these days of monotony, callers with endless stupidity, and constant days of nonsensical jabbering only broken by cold silence let’s look back on some of the highlights (lowlights) of previous posts. Think of it like the “best of…” episodes run by sitcoms when they have run low on humorous stories or ideas and need a week (or month) off. At the end, remember to hum to yourself Green Day’s “Good Riddance”.

Shall I do this in chronological order or like a countdown of my favorites? Hmm…I think I will go with the latter which will force me to use some cognitive thinking, remember kids, it is not what you learn in school, but how you learneded it. What the F, that’s the second time in 4 hours that the Star Wars theme has come up on my iPod, what is wrong with this thing?? What is wrong with me for leaving it on here?? (See, random statements…not so funny) Should I admit to you that the next track on the iPod set to shuffle is Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House”. Yeah, I need to look into not putting every single song I have on it.

Now this may take some time to go through all of these so bare with me. I am a little scare to find how many typos and just plain misspellings I will find. Needless to say, it will be close to the triple digits…wow, I am finding it hard to even understand myself. That explains so much, you just don’t know. Now on with the hits:

Track 1:
I love to know where things have come from, where they’ve been, how they got there. And I mean everything, old buildings, people, a bolt, a Popsicle stick, this chair I’m sitting in. Where was it made? Who made it? Who’s sat in it? How many farts have passed through its mesh lining?

Track 2:
As you can tell by now…I tend to go off on tangents, bare with me, maybe this medium, and modern word processing technology, will help me fix that problem. (that hasn’t happened yet, has it?)

Track 3:
Oh, the classics…but that walk down nostalgia lane only shows how covertly the Televisions wooed our senses, brainwashed our thoughts, and made us long to be able to jump over tall fences, talk to really short people in robot costumes, and walk into a bar and have everyone know your name (first sign that you might be an alcoholic – seek treatment).

Track 4:
I actually went without cable for a year of my adult life, back to rabbit ears, and all that did was get me addicted to broadcast network TV shows. Don’t get me wrong, I certain wish I was lost on a freaky island with Kate, Claire, Shannon, and Libby…but I have a feeling that when the truth is revealed on that show, it will all have been one big giant commercial ad for Honda.

Track 5:
So that should give you some idea where this observation is coming from…but back to the topic at hand, which I have no idea what it is anymore…thanks for playing along.

Track 6:
what will happen when we get to a point where we are talking to people by cell-phone, or atom-phone, or implant-a-phone, to a person right next to us. Or when we don’t recognized our own children when we run into them that one day we just so happen to be in our house at the same time.

Track 7:
I recently got a Bluetooth hands-free headset for my cell phone and it totally kicks ass. Now I can blog, chat, e-mail, drive, look pompous, talk on my cell phone, talk to other people, talk to myself without looking crazy, all with this fashionable earpiece dangling from one ear.

Track 8:
Too much of anything is bad for you…water = drown, sun = dehydration, alcohol = alcohol poisoning, The Brady Bunch = an overwhelming feeling Marsha is always stealing your thunder that leads to a mental breakdown and intervention by Peter who seems to be the only person who noticed, at which point Alice comes in and discovers the dog is missing and blames you for not being responsible enough.

Track 9:
I need noises so abundant that my entire body vibrates with the voracity of a jet fighter flying at mach 2. I need my eyes spinning, jittering, bouncing 80 times a second that one day I will have to bob my head up and down like a bird just to see straight. Surround sound…how about surround vision? When’s that SV-TV going to be available to the consumer market? Imagine your TV viewing as if it were in an iMax theater

Track 10:
Although crazy Astronaut lady probably could have taken care of this all online, without having to drive non-stop along I-10 in diapers to meet the other woman at the airport….the AIRPORT, really? That one place in Orlando where the security personnel don’t look like Mickey Mouse and are probably more abundant than at the Magic Kingdom?

Track 11:
Now, we as men know that women express their affection in their own way, which usually involves (in no particular order) a lot of crying, sighing, gazing, giggling, and hysterics, often all in the span 20 seconds.

Track 12:
Now sit back in your comfy la-z-boy and watch the crumble of the western world right before your half-closed eyes…unless you are watching Fox News, then everything is fine.

Track 13:
If a camera was following me around, I doubt my family would even watch. They would use it to torture double-agent, MI-6, double oh, gentlemen spies right after they were told the highly elaborate global take-over plans by an obviously nicknamed villain.

Wow, good times, I hope you enjoyed reading some of the highlights from the past 6 months as much as I did. Look for more disc sets to follow…