I can't plan for shit

I find that people are often surprised by what I'm into, really into, especially because different people meet me from different contexts. I remember the horror in one person's voice when she was flipping through my CDs and asked, "Why do you have a Cardigans album? Holy shit, why do you have ALL the Cardigans albums?"

No one would mark me as a country guy, and I'm really not, but with Stevie Ray Vaughan gone and Pizzicato Five broken up, the #1 show I want to see any time possible is Junior Brown.



Well I checked his tour schedule, and he's playing the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay the week I'm in Las Vegas in January -- an hour after my flight leaves. And there's an Indian stripper I'd love to take to that show. Goddamnit.

More tales of laziness

I live in a small apartment. It doesn't take much to keep clean, and I usually do a half-decent/half-assed job of maintenance cleaning, but I just don't want to. So I might get a maid.

But it's kind of embarrassing to hire a maid service for a glorified studio. In my head, I see her showing up and thinking, "He needs me to clean this?" Really, there isn't even two hours worth of work to do. So I feel like I need some kind of other excuse to have a maid come over.

Hiring a naked maid would be an excuse. I've found more than one ad for this kind of service, and although I'm actually more concerned about the cleaning than the nudity, the pretense gives me a plausible reason I would go to the trouble of hiring someone just to avoid five fucking minutes of vacuuming.

The funny thing is, as Kiki points out, that the pretense is supposed to work in the other direction: For most clients, the cleaning is actually an excuse to ogle a naked woman. But most clients aren't sick-in-the-head lazy.

Further bonus with the naked maid: Given that she'll assume I'm a pervert anyway, I won't have to do a porn sweep and hide the case for "Suck My Ass, Win Valuable Prizes".

You never hear people say "hanky panky" anymore

I have a dry cleaner in my building, but I go down the block because I like the motherly Korean lady who runs the place. I took my vacation laundry in today, and while she sorted through it, she said, "Ai-ya! Lipstick all over this shirt. You have some hanky panky?"

I think there are people other than doctors and priests who need confidentiality rules.

All my stories have strippers

Several loose ends and stray threads got tied up on this trip to Las Vegas. The top 5 things I learned:

1) I think I know things, but I don't know dick. About betting football, partly, but it's a good thought to keep in mind generally.

2) A burnt orange suit may just look like a slick, stylish brown indoors and at night, but in bright desert sunlight, hoo-boy, it might be pretty orange.

3) For fondue, putting a hunk of rice krispie treat on a stick and dipping it in chocolate is a kick-ass idea.

4) Jesus is only interesting up to a point. And even pretty naked ladies talking about Jesus is only interesting up to a point.

5) If a dancer insists that you exchange cell numbers, sometimes it is because you're going to be friends, but sometimes it's because she's trying to conduct certain types of business off-premises. I should be the last one to be naively unable to tell the difference, but, getting back to lesson #1, I fool the shit out of myself sometimes.

I love October

It's the official start of pumpkin pie season, Michigan is 5-0, the Tigers are in the playoffs, and it's time to bring out the jack-o-lanterns. I always get started with a Mr. Pumpkin Head for Kiki.



In a couple of weeks there will probably be a pumpkin-carving party (with pie). But I'll never be able to match this one.

Ah, memories ... wait, I don't remember

My sister mailed me something she found in an old book that apparently hasn't been opened in more than 20 years since she took it from the house we grew up in. Note the memo on what the check is for.



Apparently no pictures or negatives were found in the vicinity of the check, and for the life of me I can't remember what the gag was. Man, I'm getting old.

Anil, if you're out there, I guess it's safe. I've got nothing on you.

I've had fresh legs since 1988

So it was happy hour, but one of us was late. When she got there, she announced that she was just ex-HAUS-ted. Wow, from what, I had to ask.

Well, apparently she was stuck in the office for an extra hour dealing with West Coast people. "So you were on the phone? And you're exhausted from that?"

I was just giving her a hard time, but it's quite possible this woman has never been tired in her life. Not really tired. And I don't mean that as criticism. I probably haven't been genuinely exhausted since college, when I spent a couple of weekends bucking hay on a prof's farm. Now that'll wear you out. It's hot, ass-busting work.



What she and I do, on the other hand, doesn't make people tired. Basically, I type. I even got a trackball so I don't have to put out the effort necessary to move a stupid mouse around. Work has made me sleepy (especially some writers), but not exhausted.

Truly, in the last 18 years, I doubt I've done anything that legitimately required me to rest afterward, other than play tennis. To see my picture in the dictionary, the word people will have to look up is "sedentary."



That's not bad news to me. I just need a reminder sometimes that I should never act like my life is ever all that tough. Or some jackhole might call me on it over margaritas.

One messed-up broad

It was sunny and hot, but I nevertheless agreed to accompany Kiki (no, the title does not refer to her) to the Gold Coast Art Fair, because I suspected I might get a free lemonade out of it. Fortunately I was right, and it was just outside my door, after all.

The streets of my neighborhood were lined with a couple hundred tents full of paintings, sculpture, jewelry and various crafts, tons of it breathtakingly craptastic. But there was some moderately cool stuff too. I tend to prefer 3-D art to the 2-D kind, and I like when the sculpture looks like something. Say ... a gigantic iron pig.



I must like animals. Even this slightly more abstract acrylic thing seemed cool. Maybe it's hard to tell in this picture, but I think it's a bunch of swan heads. Anyway, I like how it catches colors.



Then we found an sculptor who worked in bronze. A lot of her pieces seemed to have a certain theme. This is called "Now, As I Was Saying..."



And this one is entitled, "A Breakdown In Negotiations" (yes, that's the artist in the background).



There were others, including one of a woman taking a guy down by the neck with a flying headlock. A sweet little girl who was looking around asked Kiki, "Are they all of girls beating up boys?" Even at 7 years old, it only took her about 30 seconds to scope it out -- something has gone wrong in this woman's head.

I wanted to buy her a lemonade for reacting with what seemed like concern, rather than brainless you-go-girlism. But I already had a date.

Orleans Street bridge

Still figuring out the nuances of the camera. On the list of pros and cons of my job -- this is my view when I run to the 7-11 for coffee and Twinkies.

This may become a photoblog

Five years overdue, I finally went to Comerica Park. I've been to most of the retro-modern stadiums now, and Detroit's is as nice as any of them. One thing that stands out is that there's an awful lot of statuary. The giant white tiger is kind of cheesy, even moreso than in Las Vegas.



But the sculptures on the walk of fame were better. Hal Newhouser was my favorite.



Next ballpark trip: Fenway in August.

Toys 'R Fun

I finally gave up on film and bought a digital camera. Not a great one, but I found a refurbished 4MP Kodak point-and-shoot that's good enough for my limited purposes and abilities. I'm still figuring out how to get good shots, especially closeups. In good regular daylight I think I'm OK.



But in lower light I don't really know how to handle the flash yet. I tried this practice shot a couple of times, and this fuzzy piece of crap was the best one.



It's fun to play around with though. And I've learned that half of photography is picking the right subject.

More news from the asylum

When we moved to the new building, we got fairly expansive cubicle-style work spaces -- much more space than I need. To keep my desk from being totally empty and sterile, I got a pathetic little plant.



Sometimes a random action figure or bobblehead will appear:



And I printed out a couple of 8X10s and stuck them in $1 frames. I rotated them every couple of months. This being Sports and me being me, I started with this shot of Chris Perry:



Then there was this nice Ivan Rodriguez photo:



But then I went with this famous picture of Cristie Kerr after she won the LPGA's Longs Drugs Challenge.



It's a funny picture, but it has extra resonance for us in the office because we actually know Cristie. Or at least one guy, who played high school golf against her in Miami, knows her. By default, that makes her our favorite women's golfer.

Can you see where this is going? Yes, a couple of months later, out of the blue, I get called in and informed that there has been a complaint. The photo "creates a hostile environment," and it has to go.

Look, I don't really object in principle. Even though it's obviously a joke picture, I understand how it could be viewed as borderline (by a humorless idiot). What bothers me is: 1) This is a management team that does nothing about plagiarists and thieves on staff but got right on my ass about this; 2) They wouldn't tell me who dimed, which makes it feel like a suspiciously chickenshit move; but mainly 3) This picture was never displayed in an in-your-face manner. Partly intentionally, you almost had to be sitting in my chair to see it. It's in the corner, well hidden behind the monitor and not visible to a passerby:



The point being, someone really had to go to some effort to 1) see it, then 2) take offense, then 3) take time out of their day to go bitch about it. Fucking loser.

In the end, it's a picture of a golfer with a golf trophy. Because I can never take this kind of shit without resorting to bitter, obnoxious sarcasm, I immediately replaced it with a picture of our beloved Cristie with a more acceptable trophy:



And I vandalized my own nameplate a little bit.



Right now my only regret is that I didn't quite have the onions to use this picture.

"I'm 37, I'm not old..."

Well, I met a lovely young lady from Senegal with an awesome French accent at Lisa's soiree over the weekend. We went on the traditional symphony+dessert date, and it went nicely. She's smart, she likes Mahler, no complaints.

Except ... at the end when she was giving me the "I had a great time" spiel, she added, very sweetly, that I was proof of why it's better for her to date an older guy. Fuck, I never heard that one before. But I guess I was never older by double digits before. Fuck.

Well, if I want to feel young again, I have the Chicago Pipe Show this weekend. That's a crowd where I'm definitely one of the whippersnappers. I like to think of it as an Adult Entertainment Expo for absent-minded professors, country gentlemen, and Popeye. I never did one of those AEE-style show reports for the pipe show before (I don't think you'd enjoy the pictures as much), but here's a quick version of what I'll be looking for.

With both shows, the coolest thing is that you can meet the towering giants of that culture, the tip of the top. He's probably never heard himself described this way before, but Greg Pease is the Jenna Jameson of tobacco blending.



What would that make Karl-Heinz Joura and Lee Von Erck, other than master pipe carvers? Well, I don't want to push the analogy too far.



The pipe show actually might be better than AEE. For one thing, even if you can never really have a $3,900 Knudsen or Chonowitsch, you can pick up the object of your affection and handle it all you want (just be careful).



Outside the show hall, there will be people making deals from their hotel rooms. The off-site scene always reminds me of Taxi Driver, when Easy Andy is selling guns to Travis Bickle.



In the end, though, the goal is pretty much the same: just taking the time to properly enjoy seeing something beautiful.

Another domain name I don't need

I'm now the proud owner of scumandvillainy.com. I don't know what happened to the previous site there, but it's gone. It's rare that any even remotely Star Wars-related domains come open, so I grabbed it. I have no idea what I might ever do with it, but now I can use the spiffy email address wretchedhive@scumandvillainy.com.

The last stupid domain name I bought, of course, was youcanblowme.com, and I can still be reached at yeah@youcanblowme.com as well. When I set it up, I just threw up a pretty random front page. I guess Bonnie Bernstein was on TV at the time, and at the office we're big fans because of an infamous comment from a few years back. If I recall correctly, she was transitioning from talking to Dick Enberg to interviewing Dick Jauron, and blurted out, "Two Dicks! Wow!"

Anyway, for no reason at all, I grabbed a screen shot of bonniebernstein.com and made it the index page. And for the title, I just typed in "Two Dicks! Wow!" and never gave it another thought.

A N Y W A Y, I just took a look at the web stats for youcanblowme.com. Not a lot of hits, because none of the secret pages (I can't tell you what they are, it's a secret) are linked from the front page. So according to the "search query report" only 10 people have ever web-searched their way to this site. That's right, every one of them was running a search for "two dicks."

Let me refer you to my web site at youcanblowme.com

OK, email and internet issues have been resolved. I finally found the stupid, stupid woman responsible for shutting off my service for no reason. Apparently some leasing company I've never heard of or dealt with gave my name and address to the ISP on a list of people to disconnect. I have no idea yet why she got this information from my building. "Silvia" was actually not any fucking help when I got her on the phone, but she did try to tell me that she had a lot on her mind because she was pregnant, as if I would give a shit. I told her, with all due respect, that I didn't see the line of cause and effect between her getting knocked up and me losing internet service.

Anyway, my ISP did apologize for listening to her and got me hooked back up.

But I don't know if the old site will stay around. We'll see. There was no Vegas report this year, sadly, because this time I really was too lazy to take any pictures. Other people got some nice ones though.

My New Year's resolution was to be an even bigger asshole

I finally found the website I needed. Most places that make custom silicone "message" wristbands have a minimum order of 100, but shanrene.com will make just one for you if you want, for $2.99.

For those who don't know the background, a guy we'll call "R" pulled an amazingly chickenshit attempted anonymous backstab on me at work a couple of years ago. This is a limp-dicked vegan douchebag who, at the end of the day, never seems to have actually done anything. He's a fucking empty chair.

Anyway, I figured I would mimic those What Would Jesus Do bracelets with a wristband that says WDRD, asking the not-really-rhetorical question, "What Does R Do?" Which also echoes the classic line from Office Space: "What would you say you do here?"

So wristbands have been distributed to the many co-workers who have wondered the same thing. It's a bit of a long way to go just to be a prick, especially for someone as allegedly lazy as me, but like the Livestrong ones, it's for a good cause.

Maybe you had to be there

Walking to work today, I found myself behind two women, attractive but not too out of the ordinary. Ugg boots, tight jeans, short ski-style jackets, Nordstrom bags -- typical Saturday downtown shoppers. As they strolled innocently past some steps, an old homeless woman spat out, "Look, it's the happy hookers!"

I could see them kind of stop in surprise for a half-moment, then keep going, because what was there to do? As they went by, the old woman said disapprovingly, "Look like whores."

I gave her a dollar.

I can't explain this to you.

I think you have to be pretty spectacularly lazy for this next anecdote to even make sense. You might not understand how it's even possible. But at the deli today, when the guy asked if I wanted lettuce and tomato on my egg salad sandwich, I was actually too lazy to tell him, "just tomato." I just grunted and ate the lettuce. It's insane. But sometimes I feel compelled to do the absolute minimum possible.

If Generalized Anxiety Disorder is real, there has to be a Chronic Laziness Syndrome. I'm a victim, dammit.

Svetochka mailed me these

I have to admit, what I really do miss is that electric fan, which I accidentally trashed one night when I was trashed. It was a good one. It was older than I am, old enough to totally not be kid-safe. The blades aren't protected by a tight cage like you'd see today. Look at those gaping holes (still talking about the fan).



And I miss that view from the balcony, too. I might have to move again.