Semi-random thoughts about memory

I can remember each phase of my life that I've considered happy - when it started, how long it lasted, and when it ended.  There have been six so far: 

1. The high school band marching seasons of '87 and '88 (state marching band competitions).

2. The spring and summer of '93 (constant partying with my sister and friends) and on through the entire year of '94 (my first year in Austin on my own and living with roommates).

3. The spring of '96 to the spring of '97 (my friendship and relationship with Lorraine).

4. The summer of 2000 (my first semester at the Art Institute).

5. The fall of 2001 through the summer of 2002 (when Laura was living with me).

6. The spring of 2008 until the autumn of 2009 (a year into my life reboot after giving up poppy seeds and pain pills, then beginning my job at 7-Eleven, and my relationship with Leah, before things started to decay in earnest). 

Everything before, in and around, and after those specific phases ranged from ho-hum (most of the time), moderately depressing (frequently), or just downright horrible (rare, but awful... things such as heartache, my mom and dads divorce, feelings of extreme isolation, and full blown addiction).

It's interesting to note that the best period of my life, the spring of '08 through the fall of '09, occurred immediately after the worst, which began in early 2003 and lasted until the middle of 2007 - four solid years of constant drug use almost every day, feelings of hopelessness, and suicidal thoughts.  During that time, I believed that my life was pretty much over, and that the only thing I had to live for or look forward to was getting high the next day.  I may think that things are bad now, but I still marvel that my life is what it is, compared to what it was then.

Memory is a weird thing, especially when it's triggered by an association, such as a smell or a sound.  Mostly it's smells and sounds which trigger specific memories in me, and usually they are nostalgic memories of a past time in my life which was important in some way; sometimes bad and sometimes good.  It's remarkable when these associations take me by surprise, which is what happened today.

Recently I found an old mp3 player that had been lost since 2007, so I loaded some music onto it to listen to while I was in the cooler today at work.  I was digging through my old spare hard drive and came across an MC Chris album which I haven't listened to in a long time, since early 2009.  At the time I had really enjoyed it because it was so funny, so I thought, why not? and I loaded it onto the mp3 player. 

Today when I was in the cooler, I put on my headphones and started with Soundgarden.  That went by, and Asia was next.  Then MC Chris started, and when it did, I was immediately hit with a powerful rush of memories.  Oh wow, those days, when I first worked at 7-Eleven, it all came rushing back to me with the first few beats of the first song on that album.  Leah was a brand new friend, and the emotion that accompanies the memory of those days was omniscient.  Along with that feeling I also remembered that I'd used to like to tease her by playing and singing along with an MC Chris song called Fett's Vette (that song isn't on the album I was listening to, but that playful teasing was the first specific memory that erupted into my brain).  I had to stop for a moment as the emotions of nostalgia washed over me - it was so fun back then, and Leah and I had just begun to think of each other as more than friends, and the idea of church was a new and curious thing to me, and I was ignorant and happy, and all that mattered was the moment, and the moment was full of promise.

Ow.

Now I remember clearly why I started taking pain pills to begin with, back in '99.  Tooth.  Hurts.  Teeth actually.  Two of them.  They hurt almost all the time now.  Acetaminophen and ibuprofen help, as well as aspirin and naproxen sodium, but only for up to an hour or two, and sometimes not at all.  Oragel actually provides some relief, but only for up to half an hour at the most.  I've been going through a tube of oragel every two days, and it's getting expensive, at almost ten bucks a tube.  Dental work will be pricey too... Oh well.  At least I'm not stuck on a deserted island.  I was kind of wishing the other day that I had an ice skate handy, though... 

I've got a little money saved, and hope to have a thousand dollars in a few months.  I was planning on saving up for a new place, but I need to get something done about my teeth.  I was also thinking about buying some dental insurance and using that to cover about half of the cost of some dental work, and paying the rest out over time.  I've done that before.  I'll need major work... at least two extractions, I think, and maybe one crown and several fillings.  Maybe a root canal.  I dunno if I'm going to worry about bridge work after the extractions.  I've had it done before, but heck, I'm thinking that I can get some sculpey and just make my own tooth.  Why not?  I don't need no stinkin' dentist to charge me thousands of dollars for a couple of replacement teeth, when it would be more fun and would cost me practically nothing to make my own.  I could make fangs, even.  Or I could embed jewels in them, or coat them with a shiny black glaze, or tie dye them, or whatever the heck I wanted to do with them.  Getting them to stay in place will be the trick... what's that stuff they use for dentures?  Maybe a piece of bubble gum?  Or I could just make them so that they fit tightly, with some kind of texture that holds them against my other teeth, like rubber or something.  I'll figure it out, I'm smart.

Part of the day

I went to the Howdy Doody about an hour ago, and the inside of the car was warm.  I drove around for a bit after that and turned on the AC, but it was blowing out hot air.  Matt had turned up the heat.  It's been a little cooler lately, and yesterday it was almost chilly when I took my walk.  Matt is working long days again, and he walks to the bus station which takes him into Dallas to the job site.  When he was telling me about his new job the other night, I mentioned the park and ride, that he could just drive the car to the bus station, but he said he would just leave it at home so I could use it. 

When I got back I started watching a BBC documentary about Hiroshima.  It consisted of interviews with the crew of the Enola Gay, and an assortment of Japanese survivors.  When I'm by myself, I tend to get pretty emotional about things, and the stories of those people choked me up.  Then I heard thunder outside, so I got up to take a look at the weather.  It had clouded over since I got back, and it was sprinkling.  I saw that the neighbor across the street had also decided to check out the weather, as he was standing on his front porch and taking it in.  I moved out to the old Escort and leaned against the back of it and let the rain sprinkle on me.  I looked around at things... to see if there were any other people, I think, and also to just take in the moment, because I love this kind of weather.  A few cars drove past and I wondered what they were up to on this day, in this weather.  A few houses down somebody got into their car and started it and left.  Somebody else rode by on a bike and hollered at the guy on the porch across the street. 

I looked at the trees directly in front of me, in the yard of the house across the street, and realized that I'd never properly noticed them before.  One is a tall and of the pine variety, with very few branches until about two thirds of the way up, where they all suddenly seem to sprout.  They looked like they were reaching out for the rain, all those spiky pine needles, thrust in every direction to catch the drops as they fell.  Another tree beside it is of the deciduous variety, and a little bit shorter.  A bush a few houses down on the left had pink flowers on it.  In the yard of my neighbor to the immediate left, there is a tree which leans toward the north somewhat.  I focused on the branches and imagined them without leaves, and then marveled at how much form those thin little wisps give to the tree. 

There are so many things in life that I never even notice, little wondrous things.  Before this minute, I couldn't have told anyone about that pine tree across the street.  I didn't even know it existed, but I've lived in close proximity with it for the past four years.  Four years of not even noticing another living thing that I shared air and rain and space with.  I marveled in a form of quiet fascination and dismay at my own ego and self centeredness.

Later I was back in the house and it was dark because of the storm that moved in.  In the hallway, it was silent.  The air conditioners are all turned off today.  It was just dark, and silent, and then the thunder rolled again, gently, and muffled.  Nothing moved, and all was silent except for fading sound of the distant thunder.  In the still half-light of the hall, I realized at that moment that peace isn't something you ever attain, it's just something you experience now and then.

Unused Audio Commentary By Howard Zinn And Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002 For The Fellowship Of The Ring (Platinum Series Extended Edition) Dvd. Part One.

By Jeff Alexander and Tom Bissell

If anyone reads this and can't continue life without more of it, here are links to the rest of it.  It continues in part two of The Fellowship of the Ring, and then The Return of the King in four parts.  I guess they never did The Two Towers.

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Chomsky: The film opens with Galadriel speaking. “The world has changed,” she tells us, “I can feel it in the water.” She’s actually stealing a line from the non-human Treebeard. He says this to Merry and Pippin in The Two Towers, the novel. Already we can see who is going to be privileged by this narrative and who is not.

Zinn: Of course. “The world has changed.” I would argue that the main thing one learns when one watches this film is that the world hasn’t changed. Not at all.

Chomsky: We should examine carefully what’s being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the “master ring,” the so-called “one ring to rule them all,” is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.

Zinn: I think that’s correct. Tolkien makes no attempt to hide the fact that rings are wielded by every other ethnic enclave in Middle Earth. The Dwarves have seven rings, the Elves have three. The race of Man has nine rings, for God’s sake. There are at least 19 rings floating around out there in Middle Earth, and yet Sauron’s ring is supposedly so terrible that no one can be allowed to wield it. Why?

Chomsky: Notice too that the “war” being waged here is, evidently, in the land of Mordor itself — at the very base of Mount Doom. These terrible armies of Sauron, these dreadful demonized Orcs, have not proved very successful at conquering the neighboring realms — if that is even what Sauron was seeking to do. It seems fairly far-fetched.

Zinn: And observe the map device here — how the map is itself completely Gondor-centric. Rohan and Gondor are treated as though they are the literal center of Middle Earth. Obviously this is because they have men living there. What of places such as Anfalas and Forlindon or Near Harad? One never really hears anything about places like that. And this so-called map casually reveals other places — the Lost Realm, the Northern Waste (lost to whom? wasted how? I ask) — but tells us nothing about them. It is as though the people who live in these places are despicable, and unworthy of mention. Who is producing this tale? What is their agenda? What are their interests and how are those interests being served by this portrayal? Questions we need to ask repeatedly.

Chomsky: And here comes Bilbo Baggins. Now, this is, to my mind, where the story begins to reveal its deeper truths. In the books we learn that Saruman was spying on Gandalf for years. And he wondered why Gandalf was traveling so incessantly to the Shire. As Tolkien later establishes, the Shire’s surfeit of pipe-weed is one of the major reasons for Gandalf’s continued visits.

Zinn: You view the conflict as being primarily about pipe-weed, do you not?

Chomsky: Well, what we see here, in Hobbiton, farmers tilling crops. The thing to remember is that the crop they are tilling is, in fact, pipe-weed, an addictive drug transported and sold throughout Middle Earth for great profit.

Zinn: This is absolutely established in the books. Pipe-weed is something all the Hobbits abuse. Gandalf is smoking it constantly. You are correct when you point out that Middle Earth depends on pipe-weed in some crucial sense, but I think you may be overstating its importance. Clearly the war is not based only on the Shire’s pipe-weed. Rohan and Gondor’s unceasing hunger for war is a larger culprit, I would say.

Chomsky: But without the pipe-weed, Middle Earth would fall apart. Saruman is trying to break up Gandalf’s pipe-weed ring. He’s trying to divert it.

Zinn: Well, you know, it would be manifestly difficult to believe in magic rings unless everyone was high on pipe-weed. So it is in Gandalf’s interest to keep Middle Earth hooked.

Chomsky: How do you think these wizards build gigantic towers and mighty fortresses? Where do they get the money? Keep in mind that I do not especially regard anyone, Saruman included, as an agent for progressivism. But obviously the pipe-weed operation that exists is the dominant influence in Middle Earth. It’s not some ludicrous magical ring.

Zinn: You’ve mentioned in the past the various flavors of pipe-weed that Hobbits have cultivated: Gold Leaf, Old Toby, etc.

Chomsky: Nothing better illustrates the sophistication of the smuggling ring than the fact that there are different brand names associated with the pipe-weed. Ah, here we have Gandalf smoking a pipe in his wagon — the first of many clues that link us to the hidden undercurrents of power.

Zinn: Gandalf is deeply implicated. That’s true. And of course the ring lore begins with him. He’s the one who leaks this news of the supposed evil ring.

Chomsky: Now here, just before Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday party, we can see some of the symptoms of addiction. We are supposed to attribute Bilbo’s tiredness, his sensation of feeling like too little butter spread out on a piece of bread, to this magical ring he supposedly has. It’s clear something else may be at work, here.

Zinn: And soon Gandalf is delighting the Hobbits with his magic. Sauron’s magic is somehow terrible but Gandalf’s, you’ll notice, is wonderful.

Chomsky: And note how Gandalf’s magic is based on gunpowder, on explosions.

Zinn: Right.

Chomsky: And it is interesting, too, that Gandalf’s so-called magic is technological, and yet somehow technology seems to be what condemns Saruman’s enterprises, as well as those of the Orcs.

Zinn: Exactly.

Chomsky: But we will address that later. Here we have Pippin and Merry stealing a bunch of fireworks and setting them off. This might be closer to the true heart of the Hobbits.

Zinn: You mean the Hobbits’ natural inclination?

Chomsky: I think the Hobbits are criminals, essentially.

Zinn: It also seems incredibly irresponsible for Gandalf to have a firework that powerful just sitting in the back of his wagon.

Chomsky: More of his smoke and mirrors, yes? Gandalf conjures the dragon Smaug to scare the people.

Zinn: One can always delight the little people with explosions.

Chomsky: As long as they’re blowing up somewhere else. Now we come to Bilbo’s disappearance. Again, we have to question the validity of the ring, and the magic powers attributed to it. Did Bilbo Baggins really disappear at his party, or is this some kind of mass hallucination attributable to a group of intoxicated Hobbits? When forced to consider so-called magic compared to the hallucinatory properties of a known narcotic, Occam’s Razor would indicate the latter as a far more plausible explanation.

Zinn: I also think it is a spectacular display of bad manners to disappear at your own birthday party. And here, for the first time, Gandalf speaks to Bilbo about magic rings. Still, it is never clearly established why this one ring is so powerful. Everything used to justify that belief is legendary.

Chomsky: Gandalf is clearly wondering if it’s time to invoke his plan for the supposed revelation concerning the secret magic ring. Why now? Well, I think it’s because the people in Mordor — the Orcs, I’m speaking of — are starting to obtain some power, are starting to ask a little bit more from Middle Earth than Middle Earth has ever seen fit to give to them. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to expect something back from Middle Earth. Of course, if that happened, the entire economy would be disrupted.

Zinn: The pipe-weed-based economy.

Chomsky: And, as you pointed out earlier, the military-industrial-complex that exists in Gondor. This constant state of alertness. This constant state of fear. And here Gandalf reveals his true nature.

Zinn: Indeed. Gandalf darkens the room and yells at poor Bilbo for rightfully accusing him of trying to steal his ring. It is abundantly obvious that Gandalf wants to steal the ring. But if he is caught with the ring himself, his pretext will dissolve. He needs to throw as much plausible deniability into his scheme as possible, which is why, later, he has Frodo carry the ring for him.

Chomsky: Gandalf knows the ring is powerless. It’s interesting that he attaches so much importance to it and yet will not pick it up himself. This is because he knows that merely possessing the worthless ring will not help his cause. It’s important to keep others thinking that it can. If Gandalf held the ring, he might be asked to do something with it. But its magic is nonexistent.

Zinn: Well, power needs to have its proxies. That way the damage is always deniable. As long as the Hobbits have the ring, no one will ever question the plot Gandalf has hatched. So here is the big scary ring, and all that happens when Gandalf moves to touch it is that he sees a big flaming eye. And notice it is a… different kind of eye — not like our eye.

Chomsky: Almost a cat-like eye.

Zinn: It’s on fire. Somehow being an on-fire eye is this terrible thing in the minds of those in Middle Earth. I think this is a way of telling others in Middle Earth to be ashamed of their eyes. And of course you see the Orcs’ eyes are all messed up, too. They’re this terrible color. And what does Gandalf tell Frodo about the ring? “Keep it secret. Keep it safe.”

Chomsky: “Let’s leave the most powerful object in all of Middle Earth with a weak little Hobbit, a race known for its chattering and intoxication, and tell him to keep it a secret.”

Zinn: Right. And here we receive our first glimpse of the supposedly dreadful Mordor, which actually looks like a fairly functioning place.

Chomsky: This type of city is most likely the best the Orcs can do if all they have are cliffs to grow on. It’s very impressive, in that sense.

Zinn: Especially considering the economic sanctions no doubt faced by Mordor. They must be dreadful. We see now that the Black Riders have been released, and they’re going after Frodo. The Black Riders. Of course they’re black. Everything evil is always black. And later Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White. Have you noticed that?

Chomsky: The most simplistic color symbolism.

Zinn: And the writing on the ring, we learn here, is Orcish — the so-called “black speech.” Orcish is evidently some spoliation of the language spoken in Rohan. This is what Tolkien says.

Chomsky: From what I understand, Orcish is a patois that the Orcs developed during their enslavement by Rohan, before they rebelled and left.

Zinn: Well, supposedly the Orcs were first bred by “the dark power of the north in the elder days.” Tolkien says that “Orc” comes from the Mannish word tark, which means “man of Gondor.”

Chomsky: Shameless really.

Zinn: Gandalf mentions the evil stirring in Mordor. That’s all he has to say. “It’s evil.” He doesn’t elaborate on what’s going on in Mordor, what the people are going through. They’re evil because they’re there.

Chomsky: I think the fact that we never actually see the enemy is quite damning. Then again, Gandalf is the greatest storyteller of all. He weaves the tales that strand Middle Earth in this state of perpetual conflict.

Zinn: He is celebrated on one hand as a great statesman, a wise man, and viewed by the people who understand the role that he actually plays as a dangerous lunatic and a war criminal. And you will notice that Gandalf’s war pitch hits its highest note when the Black Riders arrive in Hobbiton. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Chomsky: This is the Triumph of the Will.

Zinn: And now Frodo and Sam are joined by Merry and Pippin, as they finally escape the Shire. They’re being chased by the Black Riders. Again, if these Black Riders are so fearsome, and they can smell the ring so lividly, why don’t they ever seem able to find the Hobbits when they’re standing right next to them?

Chomsky: Well, they’re on horseback.

Zinn: Right.

Chomsky: This episode in Bree should cause us to ask, too, how much Frodo knows about the conspiracy. He seems to be piecing it together a little bit. I think at first he’s an unwitting participant, fooled by Gandalf’s propaganda.

Zinn: I’m much more suspicious of Frodo than you are. I’ve always viewed him as one of the most malevolent actors in this drama, precisely because of how he abets people like Gandalf. He uses a fake name, Mr. Underhill, just as Gandalf goes by several names: Mithrandir, the Grey Pilgrim, the White Rider. Strider is also Aragorn, is also Estel, is also Elessar, is also Dunadan. He has all these identities.

Chomsky: We call those aliases today.

Zinn: But is Sauron ever anything but Sauron? Is Saruman ever anything but Saruman?

Chomsky: And now, with Frodo in the midst of a hallucinogenic, paranoid state, we meet Strider.

Zinn: Note that the first thing he starts talking about is the ring. “That is no trinket you carry.” A very telling irony, that. It is the kind of irony that Shakespeare would use. It is something Iago might say. And did you hear that? “Sauron the Deceiver.” That is what Strider, the ranger with multiple names, calls Sauron. A ranger. I believe today we call them serial killers.

Chomsky: Or drug smugglers.

Zinn: And notice how Strider characterizes the Black Riders. “Neither living nor dead.” Why, that’s a really useful enemy to have.

Chomsky: Yes. In this way you can never verify their existence, and yet they’re horribly terrifying. We should not overlook the fact that Middle Earth is in a cold war at this moment, locked in perpetual conflict. Strider’s rhetoric serves to keep fear alive.

Zinn: You’ve spoken to me before about Mordor’s lack of access to the mineral wealth that the Dwarves control.

Chomsky: If we’re going to get into the socio-economic reasons why certain structures develop in certain cultures… it’s mainly geographical. We have Orcs in Mordor — trapped, with no mineral resources — hemmed in by the Ash Mountains, where the “free peoples” of Middle Earth can put a city, like Osgiliath, and effectively keep the border closed.

Zinn: Don’t forget the Black Gate. The Black Gate, which, as Tolkien points out, was built by Gondor. And now we jump to the Orcs chopping down the trees in Isengard.

Chomsky: A terrible thing the Orcs do here, isn’t it? They destroy nature. But again, what have we seen, time and time again?

Zinn: The Orcs have no resources. They’re desperate.

Chomsky: Desperate people driven to do desperate things.

Zinn: Desperate to compete with the economic powerhouses of Rohan and Gondor.

Chomsky: Who really knows their motive? Maybe this is a means to an end. And while that might not be the best philosophy in the world, it makes the race of Man in no way superior. They’re going to great lengths to hold onto their power. Two cultures locked in conflict over power, with one culture clearly suffering a great deal. I think sharing power and resources would have been the wisest approach, but Rohan and Gondor have shown no interest in doing so. Sometimes, revolution must be —

Zinn: Mistakes are often —

Chomsky: Blood must be shed. I forget what Thomas Jefferson —

Zinn: He said that blood was the —

Chomsky: The blood of tyrants —

Zinn: The blood of tyrants —

Chomsky: — waters the tree of —

Zinn: — revolution.

Chomsky: — freedom. Or revolution. Something like that.

Zinn: I think that’s actually very, very close.

Song lyrics

First things first.  I passed an old lady today when I was out walking, with her head buried in a book, just like I'm always doing.  But I didn't have my book with me!  I had decided to just listen to music today as I walked.  Dammit!  That would have been perfect, to pass a fellow Book Walker.  I imagine that we would have nodded casually to each other, both of us content in our own knowledge of the secret to paradise on Earth.

So anywho.  As I said a few sentences ago, I was out walking today and listening to an old mp3 player, one that had been lost for about 4 years.  I found it when I was digging through the dark depths of the corners of my room the other day, looking for something or another.  It has a bunch of old Pearl Jam songs on it that I haven't heard in years, along with a bunch of other music I had been really into at the time.  I'm not supposed to post song lyrics here according to my own rule, but these ones are important in that I identify strongly with them. And after all, it's all about me, isn't it?  No?  It isn't?  Well, I can pretend.


These are all Pearl Jam songs.  This first one pretty much speaks for itself.  And for me, too.

"Wishlist"

I wish I was a neutron bomb for once I could go off
I wish I was a sacrifice but somehow still lived on
I wish I was a sentimental ornament you hung on
The Christmas tree I wish I was the star that went on top
I wish I was the evidence I wish I was the grounds
For 50 million hands upraised and open toward the sky

I wish I was a sailor with someone who waited for me
I wish I was as fortunate as fortunate as me
I wish I was a messenger and all the news was good
I wish I was the full moon shining off a Camaro's hood

I wish I was an alien at home behind the sun
I wish I was the souvenir you kept your house key on
I wish I was the pedal brake that you depended on
I wish I was the verb 'to trust' and never let you down
I wish I was a radio song, the one that you turned up
I wish I wish I wish I wish I guess it never stops.

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I didn't realize this one was about suicide until today.  The guy in the song pretty much describes me, all except the part at the end when he checks out.  I've spent far too much time in my life thinking about it, though.  And I've actually done the sitting in the car bit, listening to the radio, and watching people as they arrive home and pull up to their houses at the end of the day.

"Sleight of Hand"

Routine was the theme. He'd wake up, wash, and pour himself into uniform.
Something he hadn't imagined being.
As the merging traffic passed, he found himself staring down at his own hands.
Not remembering the change. Not recalling the plan. Was it?

He was okay, but wondering about wandering.
Was it age, by consequence, or was he moved by sleight of hand?

Mondays were made to fall. Lost on a road he knew by heart.
It was like a book he read in his sleep. Endlessly.
Sometimes he hid in the radio, watching others pull into their homes.
While he was drifting.

On a line of his own. Off the line of the side. By the by.
As dirt turned to sand. As if moved by sleight of hand.

When he reached the shore of his clip on world, he resurfaced to the norm.
Organized his few things. His coat and keys.
And he knew realizations would have to wait.
Till he had more time. More time.

A time to dream to himself. He waves goodbye to his self.
I'll see you on the other side.
Another man moved by slight of hand.

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This one is about addiction.  When you're high, truly, nothing is as it seems.  It's a big, beautiful lie.

"Nothing as it Seems"

Don't feel like home. He's a little out.
And all these words alone, it's nothing like your poem.
Putting in. Inputting in. Don't feel like methadone.
A scratching voice all alone.  It's nothing like your baritone.

It's nothing as it seems. The little that he needs, it's home.
The little that he sees is nothing, he concedes. It's home.

One uninvited chromosome. A blanket like the ozone.

It's nothing as it seems. All that he needs, it's home.
The little that he frees is nothing, he believes.

Saving up a sunny day. Something maybe two tone.
Anything of his own. A chip off the corner stone.
Who's kidding? Rainy day. A one way ticket headstone.
Occupations overthrown. A whisper through a megaphone.

It's nothing as it seems. The little that he needs, it's home.
The little that he sees is nothing he conceives. It's home.
And all that he frees, a little bittersweet... it's home.
It's nothing as it seems. The little that you see, it's home.

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And this one is about love and pain in relationships, with a lot of dysfunction thrown in.  Mostly I identify with the pleading pain.  The implied violence, abuse and control drama is something I've seen a lot of in other relationships.

"Go"

Oh please don't go out on me,
Don't go on me now
Never acted up before,
Don't go on me now
I swear I never took it for granted,
Just thought of it now
Suppose I abused you,
Just passing it on

Once passive, servile,
Now you're getting sharp
Moving oh so swiftly,
With such disarm
I pulled the covers over head,
Should've pulled the alarm
Turned to my nemesis,
A fool not a fucking god

Please...
Don't go on me
Please...

Go...  fuck...  blood...  touch...  burn... 
Oh...  time...  tunnel vision... search...  turn...

Please, please, please...
Don't go on me
Please...
Don't you want me...
Don't go on me
Please...
Don't go on me


I'll add more as I think of them.

Oh, this is funny.

Third shift showed up and we counted the drawers, and I put everything in the MOT, and then I announced to everybody in general that I was going into the cooler to stock it up, as I usually do.  As I was heading that way, I heard from the office, Olivia's distant voice - "Bye, honey!"  Cracked me up. She's a sweetie.  She made some meatloaf and brought some to work today for me.

Yesterday and today

Yesterday sucked.  One customer called me a liar when I told her that I wasn't purposefully trying to give her a hard time by not letting her pay with just her credit card numbers, and no actual credit card.  Manual entry doesn't work on those registers anyway.  I tried to explain that to her, and she didn't believe that either.  Later a guy called me an asshole because I wouldn't accept his torn up, peeling, expired North Carolina ID to buy alcohol. I wouldn't let his friend buy beer either after that, because they were together, and that's a frikin state law.  I tried to explain that to his friend, and he called me an asshole too.  I bought one of those 24 oz Steel Reserve beers and took off walking straight after work with a book and a flashlight and an mp3 player.  It's getting cooler now, and walking season is officially open, I think.  I walked around last night until 3:00 am, and it did me some good.  I missed walking and reading, it's been so hot that I couldn't stand it.  While I was walking, I was traversing a dry creek bed.  It was really cool... the embankment walls were about 8 feet high, and being down in it was like walking through a mini-canyon.  It was fun.  While down there, I came across a rabbit trap somebody had set.  It was a cage with a mechanism of pulleys and wires, leading to a metal trap door, with carrots clustered together at the end of the cage.  Well, I couldn't resist, so I picked up a stick and started pushing against the pressure plate, and clickity ka-chunk, the door popped shut.  No rabbit inside, though... somebody is gonna be irritated.  I also marveled at the brightness of the full moon, and how it illuminated everything.  I read once that the surface of Titan would be lit about as brightly as a night on Earth under a full moon.  I imagined I was on Titan, slogging through a slurry of frozen hydrocarbon slush and ammonia rain, with everything having a reddish cast instead of blueish.  At one point I tried to spot the supernova that had recently erupted in the pinwheel galaxy.  I knew it was near the handle of the big dipper, but I couldn't find it, which I thought was weird.  I can always spot the big dipper.  So, I hunted around for the little dipper, and from there tried to work my way towards the big dipper, because you can draw a straight line from the front two stars of the big dipper to the pole star.  Well, that wasn't successful at all, and I began to grow really frustrated... until I realized I was looking at the pleiades, and not the little dipper.  They do look kind of similar, but I kicked myself anyway.  I know the frikin pleiades, or the seven sisters as they're also known.  I felt like a right retard.  I still couldn't find the big dipper though, which was even weirder.  I did spot Orion rising at about 2:45 though.


Today, work was much better than yesterday.  Mostly because this one girl came into the store and wouldn't shut up about how gorgeous I am.  She said I was the cutest one who worked there, and she kept calling me gorgeous after that.  'Hey gorgeous, how much is this?  Thanks, gorgeous.  Hey gorgeous, are you married?  Isn't he the cutest?  Doesn't he have gorgeous hair?'  This got embarrassing, as she was saying it loudly and to other customers too.  It was still kind of fun though, and made me feel good.  And Matt (a guy I work with, not my brother) invited me to a dress up party.  The theme is 'rock star', and everybody shows up dressed like their favorite genre of rock.  I don't know if I'll go, or even be able to.  It's on Saturday night a few weeks from now, and I have vigil on those nights, and church early the next morning.  Plus, I don't know how I'd get there, what with the car situation.  Still, it was nice to be invited, and I wouldn't even have to dress up if I went... I'd just go as myself.  Mr. Grunge.

Sick of this.

Last night I came home from vigil and went into my room and plopped down to read.  Matt came in a few minutes later and asked me if I wanted to go to Mr. Chopstix with him.  I declined, as I wasn't hungry and it was late, and I was tired.  He didn't say anything and went to his room.

About 20 minutes later, he came back into my room and I was on my computer, watching the appendix DVD's to The Lord of the Rings.  He stood there for a second and then asked, "Is that all you're doing?" 

I have to confess to being a little confused as to the question.  Was what all I'm doing?  Watching a movie?  Yeah.  "I'm watching a movie," I replied

"What else have you got going on?"  I then realized what he was beating around the bush about.  I was currently downloading a movie, and that tends to take up a lot of bandwidth and he was having trouble streaming a movie on his laptop.  Or so I assumed, since when he's not working he lies in bed in his room and watches streaming video.  He's also gotten into the habit of just unplugging my internet cable from the modem without even telling me.

"Oh, yeah, I'm downloading a movie.  That's slowing everything down, probably.  I'll stop it."  I closed the download program.  Matt continued to stand in my doorway.

"Do you know what bandwidth is?" he asked.  Do wha?  What in the heck did he mean by that?  He knows that I know what bandwidth is.  I had no idea why he was asking me that.  I looked at him for a few seconds, trying to figure out if he was joking.  He said, "When you download, it eats up the bandwidth.  We only have so much bandwidth."

"Of course I know what bandwidth is, I'm not retarded," I said to him.  "I just can't figure out if you're trying to be sarcastic, or what."

"When you say something like 'it slows everything down', it sounds like you don't know anything, like you're just ignorant.

I had no idea why he was being an asshole all of a sudden, but I didn't feel like arguing with him, so I just ignored him and went back to watching my movie. 

About a half hour later, I realized that I didn't have any cash to give to the church the next day.  I needed to drive up to the Wells Fargo ATM and withdraw some, so I started hunting around for the keys.  First off, let me preface what is about to happen by saying that Matt has been using mom's car for the past couple of months for work, so when he's not actually working, it's convenient to have a car here for when I need to run to the store.  So, I was looking for the keys, and I couldn't find them.  I peekeed into Matt's room and saw them lying on his bedside table near the door, so I picked them up and said, "I need to take the car for a second so I run up to an ATM and get some cash."

He gave me a look of pure hostility and said, "THE car.  You're taking THE car, right?"

Oh boy, here we go again, I thought.  "Uh... yeah, that's what I said.  I didn't say MY car.  It's mom's car."  I though that maybe he'd thought that I'd said 'my' car, and that it had irked him, since it wasn't 'my' car. 

"Whatever.  THE car."

I had no idea why he was being so overtly hostile, when just an hour before he'd offered to get us dinner at Mr. Chopstix.  I was starting to get a little upset, and he was making me feel like I needed to explain myself, so I said, "I need to get some cash for church tomorrow..."

"I don't give a fuck what you need to do.  Why should I care about that?  What the fuck has that got to do with me?  I don't give a shit about that or whatever it is that you need to do."  He said this to me like he was talking to a piece of shit; that anything I had to say to him wasn't worthy of his attention.  That got me genuinely upset.

"What crawled up your ass?" I said.  He just sat there on his bed and glared up at me.  He didn't say anything, so I said, "Somethings pissing you off.  What is it?  What did I do?"  He still didn't reply.  "What?  What did I do?"

"You did know that I'm buying that car from mom, right?"

No, I didn't know that.  It was news to me.  But now everything made sense... kind of.  He was pissed off because I had been in the habit of just up and taking 'his car' when I needed to run an errand.  There was something more to it than that though, because even if it was his car, and it was a known fact that it was his car, he wouldn't have gotten upset about me taking it unless he was pissed off about something else.  He'd never gotten upset before when I took the car for a 5 or 10 minute hop to the store.  Why is that something to get upset about anyway?  I don't know.  Like I said, I think there was more to it, but I don't know what.

"No, I didn't know that."

"Well, now you do."

I tossed the keys to him and said, "Fuck it, I'll just walk."

He gave me a really shitty smile.  "Sounds like a great idea to me!  You do that!"  I walked away from his door and went into the bathroom.  He called after me.  "Why don't you have a car, anyway?"

"You're an asshole," I said, and shut the bathroom door.

"You're always relying on other people, mooching off people.  Why are you always depending on others for everything?  Why can't you just depend on yourself for a change?"

This had the effect of pissing me right off.  I opened the bathroom door.  Matt was lying in bed with his head turned toward me, with a FUCK YOU snarl plastered across his face.  I was incredulous.  What the hell was going on?  There wasn't any reason for any of this.

"I can't believe you're saying that to me," I said.  "I paid all of the bills, all of the rent, everything for two months while you just moped around the house and sat in your room all day, not even looking for a job.  I didn't mind!  And now you're using mom's car so you can work.  If it weren't for mom, you'd be up shit creek, so who's depending on who?  What the fuck is this shit?"

"And I paid all of that back to you!" he said.

"That's not my point.  I didn't mind paying for everything, and I didn't give a flip if you ever even paid me back at all.  What I take issue with is you telling me that I have to depend on everybody, and implying that I especially have to depend on you."  I slammed the bathroom door.

I still don't understand what the hell happened.  Maybe he felt irked because I didn't want to go to Mr. Chopstix with him.  I don't know.  He's like a selfish, spoiled asshole little kid.  I just want my own place, and to be away from him.  I'm sick of this shit.

A dream - fantabulous imagery

You ever wake up from a dream, and just lie there for a moment, and go WOW over and over in your mind?  Eventually saying it out loud?  And you're still saying it ten minutes later, until finally you have to write the whole thing up?

I worked in some kind of lab, like a Frankenstein lab with three other people... but it was more modern than crazy.  Just kind of haphazard, but definitely not all in order.  Maybe even kind of dangerous.  There was this tall nuclear fusor standing in the back room, which was constantly giving off heat.  I wondered about it, and asked the eccentric old scientist who was responsible for it if it was dangerous, and he just shrugged.  The walls of the entire lab were made of concrete and cinder blocks though, so as long as I wasn't near it, I figured I wouldn't get slowly fried.  There was also a large swimming pool in one room, and the old guy was trying to change the water so that it had healing properties.  With the radiation from the fusor. 

I came to work one day and the tall radiation machine had been moved into the main lab.  I wasn't sure how much I liked the idea of working around it all day, every day, slowly soaking up neutrons.  I asked the old scientist why he'd done that, and he said, "So I can charge my cell phone.  Check it out."  I looked at it, and he'd attached his phone to it. 

"Does it really charge like that?"

"Yup, just soaks up the neutrons."  I thought about sticking my cell phone to it to see if really worked, but I didn't want to soak up the neutrons.

Apparently we were also an operating room, because a sick man came in and we operated on him.  We had him hooked up to all kinds of pumps and tubes, and his heart monitor was beeping away.  We had high hopes that we could save him, but then his blood started to clot.  I watched the tubes turn purple with clotted blood, and one of us cried, "It's an embolism!"  We did frantic things to him, but then a big purple bubble welled up on his abdomen and then surged through one of of the tubes, and the heart monitor stuttered and flatlined.  Well, I guess he died.

Then the old coot who had been irradiating the pool jumped into it and started screaming, "It works!  It works!"  I thought he meant to revive the dead patient.  I was worried that the water was irradiated and deadly, but he seemed so joyous that I jumped in too.  We all jumped in.  The water started to flow very fast, and we were washed outside into the street, which was flooded.  I swam over to the curb and dog paddled there, holding onto it.  I turned and saw the most spectacular sight of my life.

A large thunderhead covered a third of the western sky, and the sun was setting behind it.  It looked like a gigantic fireball.  Above, where the sky was clear, Venus and Jupiter were in conjunction, forming an almost single star, blazing in its intensity.  Below, I could barely discern another planet and its moon as a gray smear.  If I shifted my vision to the left, I could make them out.  As the sun set and the clouds moved, the lighting behind and inside the clouds would shift, patterns of orange and white light would coruscate through the clouds, parts of blue sky would become briefly visible, and rays of sunlight would emerge and fade, emerge and fade.  It was glorious joy, watching it.  My colleagues swam over, and we all turned to behold the sight.  I wanted to say that it looked like a monstrous explosion.

Instead I said, "It looks like a gigantic fireball.  Like the western sky is on fire, and the explosion is frozen in time."

The crazy old man handed me a fifth of some kind of liquor.  He handed bottles to my other colleagues.  He lifted his in a toast.  We all drank from our bottles, as a salute to the glorious evening.

Then the thunderhead seemed to well with light, and it turned white, and it was as if a wind blew across it, because vapor writhed and boiled for a few seconds, and then blew away and vanished, leaving it looking even more clear and pristine.  Then the blue and orange colors of the sky behind it began to shift.  I looked up at the conjunction, and the two planets were circling each other and dancing.  I looked at the faces of my friends, and they were shifting, moving like puzzle pieces.  I began to grow suspicious.

"What was in that bottle?  Did you dose us, you asshole?"

The crazy one smiled and didn't say anything.

"He dosed us!  Are we gonna trip tonight?  He dosed us!"

"Yup, I dosed us.  Yup, we're gonna trip!"

I thought that I might be afraid, but the tension and anxiety never coalesced.  I resigned myself to an insane evening with my insane colleagues.  We all smiled.

Awe inspiring

Olivia proposed to me tonight.  It was so sweet.  I had just finished telling her about my Mexicanness, and how it was ok to be a human dwarf because of your genes since it's not your fault.  I also said I had an inferiority complex and only liked girls that were shorter than me. She gushed at this, whatever that means.  I said, "How tall are you?  5 feet?  That's a good height.  Doesn't threaten my machismo at all."  She said, "WILL YOU MARRY ME?"  I of course said yes, and predicted that we would have hobbits for children.  Mexican hobbits.

When third shift showed up, Olivia said "I proposed to Ash tonight!"  Everybody looked at me and bowed down like I was the man.  I stood there and basked in it, and punched in the numbers in the MOT.  Then I backed up and made some space around me, and said:

There once was a boy named Ashley
Who everyone loved unabashedly
"I am who I am and I don't give a damn"
"If you do, kiss my quarter Mexican Ass-ley."

And it was so awesome that the ducks showed up.

Don't FiretrUCK with the humans.

Fuck with the humans, you get a nuclear bomb up the ass.  Aw, did that piss off the poor widdle awiens?

Dreams

Last night I dreamed about Martians again.  It's been a recurring theme since I was a little kid, when I first read 'The War of the Worlds' by H. G. Wells.  Always it's a nightmare in which I'm trying to hide from the Martians, and frequently it takes place at my grandma's house in East Texas.  Last night I dreamed that I was at Grandma's and the Martians were outside, trying to get in.  I had locked all the doors but I couldn't get the living room window to lock properly.  It was one of those old fashioned rotating window locks, the kind that would turn and slide into a brace attached to the frame.  I stationed myself there on the couch which was situated against the wall with the window, trying to get the lock to turn while peeking through the curtains frequently to see if the Martians were coming.  The dream ended when I realized that even if I did get it to lock, the Martians would use their telekinesis to unlock it.

There is another dream that I've had only a few times but it has stuck with me for years.  I dreamed this back in 2003, and I associate it with the very beginning of my problems with addiction, as that's when my problems started with pain pills.  Anyway, it's not the dream I remember, exactly, but just a few images and the feeling that goes with it.  It takes place in a forest, at night, up in the trees.  There is torchlight here and there, orange flickering light, and it's as if there is some kind of society up here in the trees.  A town of sorts, but with no buildings or houses or anything actually constructed... but still, the trees are a place where people live.  Or something lives... maybe elves.  I don't know.  But the feeling of being up there in the trees with the torchlight, and the presence of 'others', is a mixture of comfort, sadness, joy, apathy, and of being content with all of that, and also a sense of timelessness.  That it is all enduring and never changing, and that things don't rot or die, and existence is static and almost intangible.  It's like one moment stretched out forever, and the feeling of that moment stretched out with it, and it is also like being embedded in a myth of thick fog... not real fog that you would see in the morning which dissipates with the sun, but a fog of mind and emotion.  A mythical numbness which keeps all that is 'inside', and all that isn't 'outside'.  Inside consists of myself, the 'others', the forest, the torchlight, the emotion, and the static unchanging quality.  Outside is everything else, especially the passage of time, and as a result, daylight.  It is always night in the forest.  Thinking about it fills me with such a longing that it's almost unendurable if I dwell on it.  The way I've described it isn't complete, as there is some description of sense which is missing, that can only be felt inside, and therefore can't be described to the other senses.

The comfort I feel in that dream is similar to that of a waking dream I used to have a lot, which I call 'The Wafer Fab and the Window Room'.  When I worked in a wafer fab, I used to sit next to the machine and wait while it processed wafers.  I'd close my eyes and get lost in the constant sound of the air filtration units, and I used to imagine I was sitting in a comfortable lounge chair with a glass of iced tea on a side table.  I would be facing a wall of glass that ran from floor to ceiling and tilted away from me at about a 45 degree angle.  The glass stretched to the left and to the right for about 20 feet in both directions, forming one long, unbroken window.  This 'window room' was hovering above a desert of concrete which was broken up into geometrically precise yet random sections.  Each section varied only a little in height from the adjacent sections, giving a slight but definite impression of depth to the flat immensity which stretched away in all directions, towards the horizon and infinity.  The sky outside was an intense and perfect blue, and the sun was bright, shining relentlessly on the perfect desolation of infinite technical concrete.  I always imagined how hot it would be outside with all of that concrete soaking up the brutal heat of the sun as it beat down mercilessly, but inside my window room, with the sound of the air conditioner, and my iced tea, I was cool and relaxed and happy.

A running commentary of War of the Worlds, the 2005 Spielburg Turd-O-Rama

What follows is a running commentary of my experience of sitting through that giant multi-million dollar turd back in 2005 - War of the Worlds. It probably helps if you've seen the movie to understand all the references that I make, but don't worry if you haven't, because the movie sucks huge piss flavored popsicles anyway so it doesn't matter. 

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And here we go. The War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise and two kids, because kids in movies are never annoying, ever.  Anyway, things seem to start off well. The buildup to the emergence of the Martian... oh right, Spielberg said they're not Martians. So, they're aliens, I guess guess, outer space aliens from The Horses Ass Nebula, and fuck you H. G. Wells. The buildup to the emergence of the 'aliens' is almost scary, but if they're aliens, what the fuck are they doing burying their big ass tripods directly under down town New Jersey? 

Anywho. Like I said, the buildup is almost scary, and it's actually somewhat enjoyable. The lightning storm (this is before I knew how fucking retarded it was) causes me a little bit of anxiety, and does a competent job of increasing the buildup. Then when Tom gets there where the lightning was striking over and over and over, he picks up a rock from this area of the road that is broken all to shit. It's already a weird stacked on top of super WTF casserole day, but instead of immediately high tailing it, he picks up a piece of broken asphalt and it's freezing... which I think is weird, but whatever.  When the tripod climbs out of the ground and raises itself to full height and then trumpets its call to its friends, well, this is just downright awesome. Unfortunately, this is where the awesome ends, forever and ever, and just fuck me running with a pogo stick.

Now everybody is standing around and staring like retarded mongoloids at this big fucking bastard that just climbed out of the ground, and lemme pause here. Allow me to postulate... If I was right there with that gaggle of retards, staring at this big bastard, I'd be thinking...

"What's it gonna do next? Nothing? No, it's gonna do something. It definitely ain't gonna do NOTHING. It's either gonna completely surprise the hell out of everybody, and then nobody gets killed, or it's going to either stomp on everybody or kick them or pick them up and scream into their faces until they melt and after that it kills all remaining humans. So, two possibilities - something, anything at all, or it's gonna start stomping the humans."

And holy shit, whoa, I was right! But instead of stomping, the tripod shoots blue beams of death out of these ridiculous tiny little baby robot arms and lots of people get smoked. The 'getting smoked effect' is kinda neat, but I've actually got a huge problem with this method of killing off the human infestation. First off, these blue beams of death do a great job of turning a person into dust, but they don't do any damage to clothing, as when a person gets smoked, their organic bodies immediately turn to ash, but their clothes aren't damaged at all. They just float away on the breeze! What the fuck? 

But then we see one of these blue beams strike a car, and the car goes flying through the air and explodes! What's up with that? And then, right after that, the blue beams completely destroy a concrete interstate on ramp full of traffic, and everything explodes! So, for some reason, these beams are useless against certain kinds of fabric... weird, but I figured this out in just a few seconds... but it didn't seem like anybody else really noticed. I mean, if I figured it out, anyone could have figured it out after seeing a few people turned to powdered toast. Thus, the logical strategy would be to cover every inch of your body in clothing. Perfect shielding!

Back to it. Tom Cruise is so scared out of his mind that he doesn't notice that clothes are invulnerable, either. Lord, have mercy on these mongoloids. So, intent on escape, Tom manages to find the only working car in New Jersey. Supposedly the alien EMP blast that preceded all of this nonsense fried all of the electronics all over world and, um, that's including all electronic car solenoids. No problem though, as the mechanic dude at the garage just finds a spare one that somehow was miraculously shielded from EMP...? Whatev, so he installs it in a van. And, voila! Now Tom and company don't have to trudge across country for the first half of the movie. The little girl, um... whats her face, totally freaks the fuck out in the car and I wanted to slap her right across her scrunched up little screaming mug to get her to shut the hell up! I think, however, that this is an attempt at character development... 

"Fuck the words and sentences, I'm tired of writing this fucking script. The little girl screams in order to show that she has serious abandonment issues."

"Yeah, that. Damn that brat sure has a set of lungs."

Finally Tom plus the kiddoes get to moms house, and everything seems normal. No tripods! Whew, what a relief! And it's here where he reveals himself to be an immature jerkoff with zero parenting skills. I think this is supposed to be another attempt at clusterfucking the characters in this movie to make it 'serious'... whatever. 

Anyway, later that night, this thing happens that sounds exactly like another alien thunderstorm. However, despite the similarities, Tom is convinced that it isn't. He says...

"No, this is something else!" 

Ok. How many times has Tom witnessed bizarre flashes of light and bizarre thunderous sounds that aren't natural? Obviously enough times to be able to tell two different types of unnatural flashing noisy phenomenon apart, right? So anyway, a plane crashes and lands on the house, smooshing anything above the basement to smithereens. I assume this is a 'nod' to the cylinder crashing on the house, a major scene from the book. When I realize this, I'm incensed with rage. I ball my fists up and punch myself in the eyes over and over. "ARRGGGH!" I want to yell out loud in the theater, but I don't. I just sit there like a lunatician who finally figured out how to go insane at will and wait for whatever happens next to happen. 

The next morning Tom explores the destruction from last night. It's a jetliner that crashed directly on top of moms house. Whoo-ee, she's gonna be pissed! After wandering around like a retard for a minute or two, he happens to happen upon a news van, and this reporter chick shows Tom some slow motion footage of the lightning bolts, and now the sinister alien plot is revealed by this reporter chick in the van and, oh yeah, some deaf guy. Anywho, fuck the scientific method, she just 'decides' that the aliens shoot themselves into the ground inside lightning bolts and down to the waiting machines...

Call me weird, but I would think that an alien lightning bolt, traveling at the speed of light and slamming into solid asphalt, would pretty much paste whatever organic occupants that were riding the lightning. But then again, maybe they have the ability to dampen inertia somehow - but if they can do that, then why do they ride around in clunky tripods? Why not just hover everywhere or fly a cool anti-gravity ship if they can defy the laws of physics? And whats with this tripod being buried right under the ground in downtown Jersey? You mean nobody ever noticed this thing when they were laying the water pipes and the foundations? And why does the damn thing have to unscrew the ground above it? You mean to tell me that they built New Jersey on top of a giant screwhead for a giant container which housed a giant tripod, and didn't notice the damn giant things buried there? Another feeble nod to the book I guess, since the real Martians had to unscrew the end of their spaceship to get out. 

And whats with the 'million year' scenario? Like, the aliens have been waiting for millions of years apparently, for human beings to ripen, I guess. But according to the infinite wisdom of this reporter chick, those aliens had been preparing to have a big ole chunk of fun with the earthlings a million years ago with all of this fabulous weaponry to take out the human race, but a million years ago, humans hadn't even evolved past the homo erectus stage! People had only just discovered fire for Petes sake, and had half the brain capacity of modern humans. And these aliens, instead of taking over the Earth then and there, decide to wait another couple million years? Maybe they just thought it would be more fun to blow up buildings and shoot passenger planes out of the air and stomp on earthlings and drink their blood and stuff.

So, Tom gathers up his fam, and... his son, what's his face number two, does a dismal job of pretending to be 'angry' at the aliens, as if he's the only human on Earth that's totally pissed off at these aliens. Fuck that guy! Then Tom and co. get passed by a convoy of soldiers, and I get a little excited. Are we gonna see some butt whomping? No. Instead we get to see Tom and his two brats argue, and brat number one just screams a lot. Ow my ears, and yawn. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The smaller brat needed to take a leak, and just when she's about to piss in a river, she sees dead bodies floating by, and the bodies are wearing clothes...? WTF was that all about? Nevermind, who cares. 

Now we see Tom and the brats driving past some refugees. Almost immediately, a few of the refugees get a little excited when they see a working car, and this is reasonable, I suppose. They all want a ride and suddenly it's a zombie movie as hordes of zombies try to break into the car. Eventually, Tom and company lose their vehicle to a zombie with a gun, and they narrowly escape with their lives. Then Tom cries like a sissy in front of his kids, who desperately need to see him be strong, but he's not. He's a big sissy and cries like a little girl when he gets carjacked. Life sucks and then you die, Tom! Everybody knows that. 

Next, Tom plus two brats are trudging along with a line of refugees intent on boarding a ferry which will take them to safety. Huh? This looks a little bit like maybe the Thunder Child will torpedo some aliens! Although, I am wondering what a battleship would be doing on the Hudson River at that exact moment, but that doesn't quench my hopes. Suddenly, tripods appear! They truly look menacing and bad ass. I start to get a little excited again. Here they come, and they're trumpeting to each other in those horribly frightening voices of theirs. Everybody panics, and they all try to get on the ferry at once. Chaos ensues as everybody freaks the fuck out at the same time. 

Oh yeah, whats his face - the big brat. I can't remember anybody's name in this stupid ass movie. Anyway, his character, the biggest brat, bravely tries to help people aboard the ferry. We now see his character in a new light... he is completely devoted to humanity, he wants to kill alien tripods with his bare hands, he wants to join the army and kick some big alien booty, and to top it off, he has instantly developed into 'the good guy', that irritating little fucker... a true humanitarian. Oh, and he takes care of his sister, whats her face, to boot. How can dad stand to be around this little punk? That big brat shows him up every chance he can get, what with his superior morals and everything. Tom can't wait to pawn these brats off on mom.

Anyway... so they get on board the ferry, and I'm waiting for the Thunderchild to show up, but instead, a tripod comes up from underwater. Why this one waits until now to appear, I just can't say. I mean, all of its brothers have been kicking ass and taking names for a day or two already. Maybe a week! Or, maybe the water shorted out the lightning bolts and it took a while to get the aliens into this particular machine. Or, maybe the alien was just waiting until the ferry left because it would be more fun to scare the living crap out of all the terrified people on board by rising up out of the water right fucking next to it. And about that machine rising up out of the water. It definitely looks about ten times bigger than the other machines in this scene.  Is this some kind of super tripod? Why would they need super tripods when the regular ones are doing a pretty good job of wiping their asses with America? 

Sigh. How much more is there? Good God, I can't believe I'm sitting in a movie theater watching this turd blossom. So the Thunderchild never shows up to save the steamer... I mean, the ferry... and the super tripod knocks the ferry over, dumping Tom and company and everybody else into freezing water. The fam narrowly escapes death and they finally emerge from the water, soaked to the bone and probably about to freeze to death when... Miracle of miracles, dry clothes suddenly are falling out of the sky! I guess these are the clothes of all the people who just got smoked by the tripods.  Nobody thinks to change out of their freezing duds though, because they're fucking retarded. 

All of that shit happened and now Tom and his brats are trudging across country once more. I think this is an attempt to communicate the level of human suffering inflicted by the aliens by portraying humanity as bedraggled, wounded and burned, fleeing some nameless horror, shocked, awed, totally fucked up, oh how the mighty have fallen... you know, some shit like that. Nobody really seems injured though, but all of them are dirty with nasty shit encrusted filth. 

Suddenly, military jets scream by overhead! Helicopters appear firing rockets at something! Humvees and tanks are all heading towards a spot behind a hill where a fierce battle is obviously being waged! Soldiers bravely stand their ground, fighting this unseen enemy in an attempt to delay their advance so the trudging refugees can escape! Then Toms son, whats his face number two, goes completely insane. Wow, I should have seen that coming... anyway, he runs like a full blown lunatician straight towards the battle, intent on self immolation. And what's his excuse?

"I want to see it," he says. 

Gone are all thoughts of kicking alien tripod boo-hiney and protecting his sister. Now he just wants to watch as the United States military gets an alien sized mudhole stomped into its ass? Ok, whatever. Or, more likely he just wants to die. Fucking emo teenage brat. Tom pretends like he is concerned, but in his mind he's thinking...

"Whew! Finally got rid of one of em," 

And he hurries back to his daughter who is indeed in danger - not from aliens, but from being kidnapped by fleeing refugees! Oh my goodness, how suspenseful. Screw the aliens, they ain't got shit on these good Samaritans! Then, before anybody can do anything, a giant tripod appears which is completely surrounded by a churning maelstrom of roiling flames. And, what's this? 

Once again, I have to be the one to think of shit. So, armed with the wisdom that comes with looking at something and thinking of shit, it's apparent to me that the flames have no trouble at all penetrating the alien shielding. I mean, the machine is completely engulfed by them at one point! Hey, army, use your flamethrowers! DUH! Then a few minutes after that we see a missile explode several yards away from a tripod, stopped by the invisible shields. Whats up with this? Didn't the army invent flamethrowers exactly for a situation like this? You could probably heat up one of those tripods if you were persistent, par broiling the aliens inside! Nobody thinks of this though. Once again I'm the only one who thinks of shit. Oh, and we never get to see the battle. What a big fat hairy disappointment. Fuck this movie! 

But it keeps happening, right in front of me, and I have no choice but to watch it in silent horror. Now Tom and his daughter are running across the countryside when blind luck falls on them... they, Tom and brat number one that is, have just been selected out of the hundreds of fleeing refugees by an insane vigilante,  who wants to recruit them so that that they can help him single handedly destroy all of the aliens. Tombrat is unaware of this however, and sees this guy urgently inviting them into a basement, which seems to him to be their only chance of safety. At first this seems like an alright situation, as the aliens obviously don't care anything about this house because they haven't laid the smack down on it. Once they're all in the cellar or basement or whatever, the guy introduces himself as Ogilvy. And I seriously want to vomit. Come on. Here we have the bastard child of Ogilvy the astronomer and the artilleryman from the original novel, but with the addled wits of the curate thrown in for good measure! In one fell swoop, Spielberg has managed to cram three characters into one bastardized semblance of a man gone completely bonkers... thus saving the expense of actually portraying these original three characters as actual... you know, characters. Instead we get three for one. Wow, what a bargain. 

Anywho, soon it becomes clear that Ogilvy is a retard, as he tries to take on an alien tentacle with an axe. Later, his mental capacity drops even further as he tries to shoot one of the actual bare assed and slimy green aliens with a shotgun as they're exploring the basement. 

Let us examine this situation for a moment. Say um, oh. Ogilvy, let's say he actually manages to kill one of the bastard ass aliens. Or if he's lucky, possibly two since the shotgun has two barrels. Or maybe it's pump action, hell I can't remember. Anyway, there are three aliens, so at most Ogilvy can probably kill two of em. But one of the aliens will be left alive, and unless he can take it out with the axe, of course the one surviving alien hauls ass back to the tripod and alerts the rest of the aliens to the presence of these three humans in the basement. 

Now, lets say, for the sake of a completely pointless argument, that Ogilvy gets really lucky and takes them all out. I would think that one or two of the aliens up top would notice after a while and send that tentacle down again, and this time with no B.S. So, Ogilvy is either very very stupid, or he's just flat out insane with a suicidal streak, and also fucking retarded. But he's definitely is freaking the fuck out, no argument, which by itself is enough to alert the other slimy fuckers, and Tom can't have that, no siree. So now it's time for Tom to flex his muscles, and he just flat out beats Ogilvy to death with his bare hands. This show of bravado endears his daughter to him, seeing him kill a man (she definitely peeked) and she runs to his arms and falls safely asleep.

Now for the real corn casserole, and with extra cheese. Another alien tentacle enters the house. Wow, big surprise... and this time there is no fooling it like last time, which puzzled me because I definitely saw that boot move behind the mirror. And if I saw it, you know that tentacle saw it... but nevermind, shit is getting real, real fast, and Tom hacks the alien tentacle to pieces with the axe. Instead of endearing whats her face to him like before, this time the insane display of violence scares the living crap out of her and she flees outside. Good Lord. So Tom runs after her, shouting her name - you know, whats her face - but despite the fact that she can only be a few yards away and definitely heard Tom shouting, she picks this time to finally shut the fuck up and she doesn't answer. Maybe she is scared stupid? That's a thing that happens, right? 

Anyway, Tom has it out with a tripod and gets thrown around a little, and whats her face number one gets captured. Tom looks around frantically and finds some grenades in a wrecked humvee, and chucks one of the grenades at the tripod. It explodes harmlessly against the shield, but the tripod doesn't even pause to asses the situation... it simply turns around and captures Tom, apparently forgetting that this little human just threw an explosive device at it. I would think... call me weird, but here goes... If I were a tripod full of aliens, I should definitely think first before I let anything inside my shield... especially if said thing had just chucked a big kablooey at me, like five seconds earlier.

ANYWAY! Tom and the brat are both in a cage now, captured by the aliens.  Every couple of minutes a slimy tentacle comes out of the side of the tripod and into the cage, before finally grabbing a screaming human and dragging him back into the tripod for a snack or something. And wouldn't you know it, yeah, it's Toms turn and he gets sucked inside by the tentacle. The other captured humans hold onto Toms legs, and he only goes halfway inside, but while he was halfway in there he pulled the pins on about five grenades, which are now inside the tripod. I gotta say, pretty clever! The tentacle let's go as the grenades go off inside of the alien machine, which gets destroyed as a result and drops the cage containing the humans right onto a spiky tree. Miraculously, nobody is impaled. Now whats her face looks at the fallen alien tripod, then she turns to stare at daddy with amazement. I guess she's decided that she loves violence after all! You can almost hear her thoughts... 

"Wow, daddy saved me from the tripod. Daddy is a bad ass. This changes everything.  Bye bye, abandonment issues!"

Yeah, that. 

Meanwhile, the red weed, which has practically covered the entire planet in slimy red vines, starts to die and then shortly after, so do the aliens. Tom and the brat happen upon some soldiers who are wondering what to do about a half-dead alien which is just standing there and howling when Tom notices that birds are resting on the unprotected hood of an alien tripod, as opposed to just hovering a foot away from them as they would have been if the tripods shields had been working. Its a good thing too, since there's no telling what that half dead alien might have done if what's left of the United States army wasn't there to blow it up with hand held rocket launchers. 

And this, my friends, is the penultimate battle scene... 

A staggering, defenseless drunken alien, is pulverized to death by hand held rockets. No Thunderchild. No small but glorious victory by a well hidden artillery sneak attack. No aliens falling into the river as a lucky shot hits a tripod square in the nuts. No cheers from refugees who have just gotten a taste of hope, however small. 

No...  Just a stumbling drunken tripod getting whomped on by a bazooka.

Ok, so without shields, and what with all of them getting sick with the flu, this one gets bazooka'd, falls over, and crashes through a big brick building before finally lying still. Oh yeah, as it's crashing directly toward the humans, one hapless human who didn't get out of the way quickly enough got crushed to death underneath a car that the tripod smashed into, and then squashed again by the actual tripod. I thought that was semi-cool, and I actually laughed out loud in the theater. 

Somebody said, "SHHHHHHHHHH!" 

I said, "Something wrong with your lips, motherfucker?" 

And that ended that right quick and in a hurry. 

So then a hatch opens and orange goop falls out in great slimy gobs. Is this alien blood? What is all of this orange goop coming out of a machine? Fucking nasty! Now, in a brave but sickening tribute to the George Powell film, an alien hand claws its way out of the hatch and then the alien dies, once and for good. 

Finally we see Tom carrying the brat as they finally arrive at Boston, and Tom is relieved that soon he'll be pawning this screaming meemie her off at moms. Something doesn't make sense though... as by some miracle, Boston is unscathed while the rest of the world is pretty much incinerated. They arrive at Grandma's apartment then, and Tom practically throws the brat at the mom. 

Fuck, dammit, now that fucking brat number two appears, somehow still alive and already at grandmas, and he heads straight for daddy and gives him a sticky smelly bear hug, as he's still wearing the same smelly, dirty, torn up wet clothes that he had on when he joined the monster mash. Anyway, that's the touching embrace scene, and finally it's mission accomplished. The aliens are dead, and Tom doesn't have to deal with the two brats anymore.

Halle-fuckin-lluia. 

The End.

A joke

A seven year old and a four year old were upstairs in their bedroom. 'You know what?' said the seven year old, 'I think it's about time we started to swear.'

The four year old slowly nodded his head in wide-eyed agreement.

          The seven year old said 'When we go downstairs for I'll swear first, then you
          swear after me, OK?'

'OK' the four year old agreed tentatively.

Their mother walked into the kitchen and asked the seven year old what he wanted for breakfast.

He looks her straight in the eye and says, 'Who gives a shit. Maybe I'll have some Coco Pops'

WHACK!! She hit him so hard that he flew out of his chair and across the kitchen. He got up, and ran upstairs crying his eyes out.

She stared at the four year old and asked with a stern voice, 'And what do YOU want for breakfast, young man?' 

          'I don't know,' he blubbered, 'But it won't be fucking Coco Pops.'

This blog

I closed my blog and made it private the other day because I didn't figure that anybody read it anyway, and some of the stuff I post is kind of personal and I felt weird about posting it on a blog that doesn't get any traffic.  I don't know why... I just did.  Anywho, I got some requests from a few people to be invited back in, some from people I didn't even know, which surprised me.  I dunno how people know about it anyway, I don't publicize it.  Anywho, so if people like reading it, ok.  Here it is.