My Hood.

I remembered why I don’t really do a whole lot of walking anymore when I was walking through my neighborhood today.  well, not walking, but driving slowly due to the idiot in front of my driving a Truck that defies explanation and contributes to my hatred of Orchards in general.

This guy was driving something that would be more at home smashing rusted Buicks into rusted flattened Buicks than cruising down a road that was roughly 6 inches wide enough to accommodate it.  It was about 12 feet tall, black, and had exhaust stacks rising out of holes cut in its bed Like it was a cruise ship or Mac truck or something… Definitely like it was being driven by a dude who had – ahem – shortcomings that could only be made up for by being the biggest douchebag in an area of town known for its douchebags.

Anyway, after I had driven by this monstrosity, attempting to look annoyed ,angry and sad for the person at the same time and projecting this amalgamation of emotions toward the underside of his truck, I proceeded to drive to the Gas station.

Our gas station is an ARCO.  Yes, I know it is BP.  yes, I know it is crappy gas.  I also know that I am broke and drive a car with a quarter million miles on it, so shut up; I could drive this thing on whiskey and it would still run.  It is on the corner of a very busy street and a less busy but very ghetto street.  I am talking “has a house that was on the news and might be on Hoarders” ghetto.  This, as you could imagine, gives one an interesting window into the demographic makeup of our neighborhood.

After being followed into the parking lot by the truck from Jeepers Creepers, I stopped and took i the scene around me.

Being that it was the first really nice day we have had since the Clinton administration, the people were out in droves.  There were multiple types, styles, and colors.  There was the girl who had fish nets tattooed on her legs, stars on her shoulders and the most aggravated look I have seen on a woman who was roughly 5 feet tall since I Was in college.  There were the two teakers that amazed me.  They were both wearing Lakers caps, muscle shirts and track pants that were bright red.  They were both driving really nice trucks that look like someone had attacked with steel wool.  They were both moving like someone else was controlling their movements and they were both the loudest people I have ever heard at a gas station that wasn’t on fire.

As an aside I never understood tweakers propensity to be loud.  I know that they don’t really have full control over their brain-body interface, and that is sad, but you would think that after 3 days of always moving and always, ALWAYS talking by the time you had the guts to go put gas in your strangely painted truck you wouldn’t have any voice left at all.  Having never been a tweaker myself, it’s a strange thing.

Anyway, the trash man was there, being hugely friendly to everyone in a way that makes you think he probably has to be since he smells like a rotting carcass.  Slutty McSlutterstein was there wearing shorts that are more appropriately named than most, a sports bra, enough makeup to keep DuPont (or whoever makes that stuff) in business for a few more years, and pigtails… despite being probably 35.  Hooligans were there, but it is a gas station and there is nowhere else you can go while skipping school to ask people to buy you cigarettes and Boones Farm.

The people that work at this gas station are interesting in their own right.  The main lady that works there – I haven’t learned her name yet, which is kind of sad – is weird in a way that I can’t put my finger on.  She moves and looks like a tweaker, with the rough skin and sunken eyes, but is not loud, does not, to my knowledge, steal things, and is friendly to the point of being family.  She remembers all her customers, we all love her, and she always has a smile.  She wears a do-rag and listens to old-school gangster rap but looks like my grandma.  I can’t figure her out, but she’s kind of growing on me.  Her co-worker, however, is not.

She is a 5’6″, brown-haired devil.  I know this because I have dated many of these in my life and I can see them a mile away.  She’s nice,  a little flirtatious with the men folk, and she looks like she wants to take you home, hang you from her ceiling and deposit her eggs in your abdomen.  I am terrified of this chick because I honestly think she carries a gun and it would’t surprise me at all if she ends up using it on some unsuspecting person in the near future.  She’s the kind of person that appears right beside you as if from the eather, and after she passes you want to check your back for a knife or missing kidney or something.  Just awful.

Leaving my little micro-cosm of Orchards hilarity I emerge into the sunshine, the smell of gasoline (which I enjoy) and the hooting of tweakers hollering at eachother like machine guns despite being exactly one gas-pump apart.  I follow tattoo-girl past the tweaker truck that she gets in to (of course) over to my car and start putting gas into it where something strange happens.

I pull out the window-washer thingy from the tub of washing… stuff and begin to clean my windshield.  about halfway through this I realize that the tweakers had stopped yelling and looked up to see them staring at me like I was performing brain surgery while juggling right here in the middle of Fourth Plain.  It was like something out of the movies: The man from mars in his khakis and dress shirt performing some magical maintenance on his spaceship while the surly earthlings look on.  I stared at them while finishing my windshield in comically intentional slow motion, put the thingy back and finish fueling my car.  As I get back into my car, with my giant diet Mt. Dew in hand, the banter begins again, but they are still staring at me like I am at a zoo and doing something never before seen by human eyes.

At this point I disengage and drive away quickly, afraid I was going to get swamped in some Romero-esque nightmare of rapidly moving but enormously dumb creatures after my brains… or maybe just my Jerkey.

Anyway, I got out of neighborhood alive again and drove to work, safe from harm and content with my Jerkey, but I still can’t shake the stares of the tweaker brigade as I washed my windshield.  What was it that made that so interesting?  We may never know.

I got a tan.

Ok, so I didn’t actually get a tan.  I got something, but I will get to that later.  In fact, what I did was go get me a base coat for a trip that I am taking.  I am going to Mexico in a couple of weeks and decided that I didn’t want to ruin the trip by having to walk around like someone with a skin disorder because I went in the sun for three seconds and became Jeremy en-flambe.

The problem comes from my heritage.  Even though I am half Italian, and therefore tall and swarthy (as I constantly remind the lady of the house), I have a half of me that is decidedly Irish.  This means that I can drink more beer than almost anyone I know, but also means that I have skin that goes up like flash paper if exposed to UV light for longer than it takes for me to get from one air-conditioned room to another.  In light (har har) of this fact, I decided to go tanning for a couple of weeks in order to enjoy my vacation and possibly convince my household of the swarthier parts of my being.

Tanning salons are strange places.  First of all they are almost always shoved into a corner of some derelict strip mall on a busy street.  You know the kind, a long row of shops that are mostly Starbucks, and those that are not Starbucks are the kind of bar where you can catch a cheap drink, or herpes.  Or both.  At the same time.  They are almost always in a storefront that makes you think they are closed, with stained awnings covered in bright yellow lettering that looks like it was probably a different color thirty years ago.  Despite this somewhat lackluster exterior, inside it was bright and warm and there is someone there to greet you with a smile, and in my case, what a smile it was.

The woman who would be administering my dose of radiation was nice.  She had a the ready grin of someone who was about to make a commission, and a perky attitude of someone who spent her days in the “sun.”  Unfortunately, for her and for me (I have always been leery of tanning) she also looked like someone resurrected Skeletor and wrapped him rather tightly in football leather.  This kindly but aged skeleton was more than happy to take my money and give me a tour of her facility.

There are multiple types of tanning beds, did you know that?  Me either.  There are beds for the basic tan, beds that are destined to make you deeply brown, beds that look like they could keep you in stasis during a voyage across the stars, and beds that aren’t even beds because you stand up inside of it, and rotate as if in a rotisserie – a sentiment that she did not find very funny.  This last one intrigued me because I was always under the impression that the whole point of tanning was that you didn’t have to work for it.  As I was learning all of this from Mrs. Spaulding, inserting the requisite “mm-hmm” and “that makes sense” during lulls in the torrent of unfamiliar vernacular pouring from the recesses of her mouth, I came to the stunning realization that this was an industry that I was wholly, though intentionally, unknowing of and that a great deal of thought and technology goes into the whole shebang.

The tour over I was left to my devices.  Not understanding the proper workflow, I stripped to my skivvies and laid down on an impossibly thin sheet of plexiglass that was all that stood between me and what could easily become zillions of shards of razor sharp glass.  That would be the opposite of what I was trying to accomplish.  It creaked and groaned, but it stayed.  I put on my eye-shade things, took a deep breath, hit the red button and I was off.

By off I mean zapped.  Even with the required eye-ware I was stunned by the intensity of the light.  I could feel it on every square inch of my body, and the noise it was making reminded me of a time spent in an MRI (that is a story for another day).  I felt like I was young again at some rave in a warehouse, only there was no dancing, no one was asking to touch me and the only music choice I had was crappy hip hop and equally crappy country (isn’t it all?).  the fan at my feet did little more than inflate the skivvies that in hindsight I should not have been wearing.  It was incredible, the idea that light bulbs could exert a palpable force strong enough to trigger my nervous system… and cause it to ask the conscious part of my brain just what the hell it thinks it’s doing.

After some time wondering if the woman at the desk was also scanning me for cancer – (a thought that  both was hilariously ironic and terrifying), the light abruptly turned off.  Instantly I was cold and nearly blind – a problem resolved by taking off my welding goggles – but strangely refreshed.  I climbed out of the bed, to its audible relief, and dressed very confidant in the knowledge that there was not a single living thing anywhere on my body.

I said my goodbyes to the Cheerful Skeleton and left, nearly running into a small, blond, deeply tanned girl of probably 19.  Seeing people that are that tan here in Vancouver is always somewhat jarring to me because I haven’t seen the sun for more than a few hours in roughly 6 months, and know for a fact that they have not either.

I am supposed to go back tomorrow, since I am apparently “building my base.”  I was told to do so unless I feel pink.  I currently have the complexion of a lobster who was recently acquainted with his extreme allergy to boiling water, and feel a little crunchy, but I think that is what I can expect from sitting in a tube filled with the same stuff that comes out of the 90 million mile wide fireball that we are currently orbiting.

But I am told that is normal, so I’ll probably be back tomorrow.

My new environ

Office people are interesting. Being from the service industry I never really appreciated the little quirks that make living and working inside of a concrete box that has no windows and was built sometime around the end of World War Two a little more bearable. A few of the things that I have noticed:

Fake plants. Not only are the plants here that are supposed to make the fact that we can’t see real plants from our desks fake, they aren’t even really in the shape of plants. Well, let me change that: they are in the rough shape of plants, but being that they are stickers on the institutionally white-ish walls, they are two dimensional representations of things like Bamboo (doesn’t really grow here) and palm trees (only grow here when the developer of a strip mall tries to spruce the place up (see what I did there?) and then the die pretty quickly due to the lack of sunshine that we troglodytic North Westerners live with on a daily basis.) and other plants which I can’t identify due to their being a generally unpleasant shade of dark green and perfectly flat. These are everywhere. They are on the walls between cubes. They are in the hallways. They are on little plastic inserts that have been placed over the aged and cracking florescent light covers so that it looks like you are looking at a nice blue sky, through dense tropical foliage at the little clouds that float lazily along the underside of the second floor of the building I work in. If they really wanted to make it like having windows they should just paint the lights with a semi-translucent grey paint, put a bunch of soggy, lichen-covered sticks on the ceiling, and turn the fire-sprinklers on to just the faintest of trickles. *edit: yes I know that that was one of the worst constructed sentences in the history of the world. Get over it.

Nerf Guns. God. Damn. Nerf. Guns. I mean don’t get me wrong, I like Nerf guns and have a small arsenal (read: Waco) of my own, but the idea that at any time I can be in the middle of doing something that I have ever done before, for which the fate of a grocery store’s ability to sell crap to people may or may not hang in the balance (dramatic music) and suddenly be pegged in the top of the head by a whistling, medium-density foam dart from across the room – probably from near one of the fake trees – kind of bugs me. It has the effect of throwing me off my mental track like a bad switch on the Burlington-Northern.

Trinkets. There are trinkets everywhere. People have all kinds of crap on their desks. I understand pictures of the wife and the kids and the dogs and the motorcycles and the cube you are sitting in and you and the motorcycles. What I don’t understand is the ability for every third cube to have a string of Christmas lights, a third of which are burned out, looped around the top of their cube, blinking madly away in a room that already nearly as bright as the sunlight outside (which is to say kind of gray and coming from everywhere). From where I am sitting I can see a plush Undertaker Doll (the wrestler, not the monster truck… sadly), A Nerf cannon that is controlled via USB by the persons computer, three different kinds of coffee makers, a plant (real), a white board, a lava lamp, and enough pictures to cover the walls of MOMA. It’s weird to see all of this in a place that I had always thought of a sterile environment powered on the souls of the people who worked there. It’s kind of nice to see that that isn’t really how it works…… for the most part.

Attitude. The people here again give lie to the idea that offices are full of straight-laced people with nothing more than their computer screen for a friend while they are at work. At least in this room, I have met so many friendly people that have such foul mouths and minds it is giving me hope that working in a cube might not actually drum the spirit out of the cynical and often foul-minded person that I am today. It his hilarious to hear people trading jokes that probably shouldn’t be traded in polite company and laughing and such and as soon as the phone rings switch to business mode and speak to the caller in a sultry, even tone that does little to show that they had just been slamming the person next to them for an accidental double entendre.

Food. I have worked here for three weeks and have already consumed more cake than a fat kid whose birthday is every day. Sandwiches, vending machines… it is all a little too much for someone who is trying to eat healthy and stay in –relatively – good shape. The people here are constantly snacking on things… the kind of bored grazing behavior that is more indicative of bison roaming the plains of South Dakota than an office in the middle of one of the most health-conscious cities in the country.

I don’t really know how to take this. It is a very odd shift from being in the face of the customer, either getting them over caffeinated or boozed up, to helping people 3,000 miles away figure out how to turn on the computer. Working in an office has shown me an entirely different side of the workforce than I ever thought that I would ever see, and it is a strange, strange side indeed.

Ailey.

I have a daughter.  She is four months old and I can’t really remember a lot of my life before her.

For those of you who do not have a daughter, or a baby of any sexual identification, you know how I am feeling right now.  It is at once the most frustrating and fulfilling, heartbreaking and joyous, scariest most beautiful thing I have ever gone though, and it is just getting started. These may seem to be all very contradictory (and they are) but let me explain.

It started from the very beginning.  When I first heard that my amazing girlfriend and I were going to have a baby, the first thing that I began plotting – after I could speak and process thoughts more complex than uuhhh…… – was what kind of wood I was going to use to build the case for the Heisman (but not worrying about it too much because I had a few years, at least, until football became an issue).  This was the general train of thought; camping, football, hiking, football, go-carts, football until the ultrasound technician reported the absence of a required piece of hardware.  Suddenly it was all pink things and frills and the wood was going to have to be different for the Track-And-Field or Volleyball trophies, a jarring and very contradictory way of thought for a person who always assumed, despite a relatively good understanding of the basics of genetics and the uncertainty contained therein, that he was going to have  a son when the time came.

The contradictions in the way that she makes me feel come from the very nature of her existence.  Even a dog will stop making noise or have a relatively good chance of making it known to you what they need to be happy again if they are in distress.  This is true for them from a very early age.  A baby, on the other hand, does not do this.  Taking into account the fact that a two month old baby is basically a brain-stem that needs to be fed and changed and is attached to a loudspeaker, understanding what it needs to remain healthy and stop using said scream-amplification device takes some finesse.  It can be frustrating and almost maddening in a way that I can’t convey in words when everything that you do that you think is right results only in more crying and screaming and carrying on in a way that proves that girls and drama are inextricably connected on a genetic level.  The odd thing is that once you figure it out and she goes right back to giggling and drooling and laughing you feel like more of a man than He-Man, Gi-Joe and Mike Rowe rolled into one, and the smile that she gives you makes you happier than when your football team makes it to the Rose Bowl (but not wins It, because I am a Coug, and we have yet to do that While I have been alive)

As she gets older it seems that a different set of challenges meets me every day.  what made her believe that I was the sum total of all gods every worshiped by man one day just makes her cry harder the next.  Every strange thing that she does makes me convinced that she has any number of genetic problems or mental or motor diseases or was kidnapped by aliens or IS an alien or something that I can not even fathom or understand is happening and it is stressful in a way that I did not know stress could present itself.  Then I calm down and read any of the number of resources at my disposal and realize that babies have been doing that very same thing for… well probably for roughly 4 million or so years and that baby monkeys and snakes and dolphins do it too.  The relief and slight embarrassment that I feel after what should not have been an epiphany is like that first pull off a really good glass of whiskey when you feel your insides warm up and the tension drain out of your muscles and you understand that everything is going to be OK.

It is terrifying, the idea of raising a female in this world.  I have known, dated, met and witnessed so many crazy, screwed up, sad female cases of poor parenting in my lifetime that I kind of assumed that all a man had to do was say no once to the wrong thing and BAM! his daughter was going to end up wearing black all the time, listening to Manson and having more issues than the New York Times.  I know now that this is not the truth, but there are so many things in the world that can derail the the job that I am trying to do that someday having a well adjusted and normal woman for a daughter has become my mission in life.

I’m not trying to say that I am super dad.  Far from it I firmly believe that I don’t have all of the necessary tools or personality traits that are required for even the title of great dad.  The beautiful thing that I have found out so far in this first tenths of a percent of the life I am going to have with this amazing creature is that I don’t have to have all of the tools right now.  They will come with time – age means experience and all that rot – and if they don’t, I can pretend.

All told here so far I am amazed by this little scientific and psychological experiment that I have living in a room ten feet from mine.  She brings out parts of me I didn’t know I had, or was even capable of.

Stay tuned for more.

45?

Okay, people of the Northwest.  I have something that you need to hear.

I agree that the last few days the clouds have been more full of holes than 9/11 truther’s theories, pouring their water loads all over our cars and making the roads shiny, the trees barren, and my life extremely inconvenienced.  You see, I have to drive to get to work.

I know that this isn’t a shock to anyone.  Most of us drive to work, or to school, or to get freaking anywhere over a mile from our house (and lets face it, usually a shorter distance than that).  The problem comes when I am trying to drive at the speed limit – or anything approaching it – and everyone else on the road is putting down the freeway at 45 miles an hour, acting like the road is covered with ice covered with Crisco covered with WD-40 covered with Crisco.

You live in the Northwest.  It rains here something like 170 days out of the year.

170 days.

Per Year.

And yet none of you have any idea what you are doing when water comes out of the sky and lands on your windshield (hint: wipers).  I understand that most of you came from either Russia or California, neither place known for it’s preponderance of conscientious drivers, but seriously; I have seen so many people in the last couple of days hunched over their steering wheel, peering through slitted eyes at the road in front of them that I thought there had been some new law that was enacted while I was in Florida governing posture while motoring.  I don’t understand how putting yourself in the position to get a very unfriendly Heimlich from your airbag in the event that something does go crazy with your 45 MpH trip down the 40 foot wide road is going to make you a better driver.  If anything you are going to tweak something when you turn to see me passing you at the normal rate of speed laughing at the fact that not only are you NOT going the right speed, you look like a 123 year old while you are doing it.

Seriously folks, nothing is going to change about the way that you are experiencing your daily commute of terror.  Give the guy in front of you a few more feet of space to account for the fact that you are probably not performing scheduled maintenance on your vehicle and are therefore driving on three good tires and one that is  as bald as my daughter on the part of her head that rubs on her crib.  Stop talking on the phone so you can pay attention to the fact that you are traveling at 60 MpH in a vehicle that weighs two tons (a hint for everyday life, folks).  Just be more careful…  No need to drive at a glacial pace just because it is raining.

Please?

Fake Smiles Hurt Sometimes.

I understand that there are a great many things that happen when you work in the food-service sector that may or may not be desirable, depending on your ability or desire to handle bullshit and drudgery.  Grease in/on/around/behind your skin/clothes/ears/eyes, breathing things that probably shouldn’t be breathed, serving people things that probably shouldn’t be served (I’m looking at you Mrs. 300 pound scooter-driving 1,200 calorie white chocolate permeated coffee drink drinker)…

Wait one, some of these people deserve to be served drinks that, while not entirely lethal – at least in the short run – will put a serious dent in their pocket book and blood pressure, and I am having a harder and harder time being nice or polite to them.

Indeed, fake smiles hurt sometimes.  Not hurt in the “I threw acid on my own face and then blamed one of the 14 black people in Vancouver for it” kind of hurt.  (too soon?)  It’s more the self-abasing kind of hurt that reminds you, at least on a sub-concious level, that you are selling your soul to feed your family.  I am sure that many, many of you know what I mean.  For those of you who don’t, let me explain:

I do not care, in the slightest, that your dog gets her little cup of whipped cream and eats it, getting whipped cream all over your shitty car and making oh-so-much of a racket. I don’t care how cute it is, and I don’t really care that you are wearing a shirt with a picture of your dog wearing a shirt with a picture of itself on it.  I want to tell you to comb your hair and get out of my line, but I put on a smile and ask what kind of dog you have (Even though I know it is tiny, shakes and probably hates your very existence for feeding it whipped, vanilla-flavored heavy cream.)

When I say hello to you, say hello back.  Every time you come up to my line with your pornstache and respond to my not-entirely faked “How are you doing today” by staring at me and snapping off your coffee order like you are talking to a misbehaving robot, I have to fight back the desire to reach across the counter and slap the crap out of your kid for even possibly learning such foul behavior from you.  But I put on a smile and complete your order with visions of your kid in jail for something stupid he did while in some frat at UW floating in my head.

HANG UP YOUR GOD DAMN CELL PHONE.  This one requires no more description.  You don’t talk to me, I don’t talk to you.  I have gotten in trouble for this one many many times, and I don’t care.  No smile for you.

Most people who know me know that I don’t really care about politics.  That being said, I definitely have my opinions and biases.  Thing is, I keep them to myself, like a civilized human being.  If you come to my counter and start railing me with your political views (I don’t care about gun laws, the Tea Party, Glen Beck, white supremacy, Mexicans, what “really” happened on 9/11, your moms view of our president, your views on the military/economy/globilization/banks, etc.), hooting and hollering and deriding people who think like me without even a thought as to the fact that I may be one of them, I will respond with a polite smile and begin to use words that you don’t understand to point out what an asshole you are.  This will have a twofold effect; one, it will make me feel better for the fact that I still have my job because I didn’t have to slap your fat ass right out of your giant, hideous, mustard-stained confederate-flag shirt, and two it will make you walk away feeling smug and happy, but a little confused.  It is my heartfelt desire that this confusion will eat at you until you snap someday and go totally comatose.

I work in a restaurant (Kind of); it has a counter where you order and a line forms there.  If you move at a pace that makes the migration of a glacier in Greenland seem like watching a top-fuel dragster, and speak at a clip that would do Forrest Gump so proud he poops his knickers, or plan to pay with pennies that are spread through your purse like ticker-tape in times square, maybe at least know what you are going to order, or have your money in your hands, or take some Meth before you get in that line… Do SOMETHING to make it so that I don’t have to spend three hundred years staring at your wrinkled, waaaaaay-too-often-tanned skin while smiling like a plastic surgery victim.  It hurts my cheeks, it hurts my performance statistics, and it makes everyone behind you hate me because I am the slow one in the equation because dumbass customers like you are “Always Right,” which makes me want to hurt you.

These scenarios are played out so many times a day that I lose track of them, even though I try to remember some of them because they make great fodder for my workouts.  (Listening to fast, loud music while visualizing the demise of all of the people who you have to suffer treating you like garbage really gets the heart-rate going.)  Putting on the fake smile is like armor for me, it shields me from things like depression, termination and litigation.

So you see, fake smiles hurt when they are applied day after day after day after day.  Thank god for weekends, because I think there would not be such thing as job security in the service industry if we were forced to pretend that we give a shit about anything you have to say every single day of our lives.

That being said, I am really, really good at it.  I would call myself a professional.  Some of the customers that I hate the absolute most always tell my boss how nice I am and how much they love having me in the store.

Fake Smile 1, Customer 0.

Obama is not a submarine.

So I have to admit, I am pretty sick of people using the oil spill in the gulf for political grandstanding.  While I agree that the government has some say in how the whole thing is handled, I think that using something that is a true disaster and, while not quite an accident, something unexpected, I disagree with the idea that they have some secret weapon or ability that they are not using to stop the flow of oil into our waters.  These are my thoughts:

- Stop blaming Obama.  Stop saying he should go down there and kick some ass.  Stop saying that he should turn into an “Angry Black Man” – I’m looking at you, CNN.  Stop saying that he should go put on a personal submarine with little arm-holes so that he can get down to the leak and stick his thumb in it and stop it with the power of that one little dutch boy in the land of wooden shoes, below-sea-level construction and lots and lots of windmills…  What?  People aren’t saying that?  Well they should be, because that is the only way that he could personally have some active role in getting the leak stopped.

- Stop saying the Govt should get involved.  Should the National Guard go down there and clean up beaches? Sure.  Should the Government get involved in the daily operations of the cleanup?  Are you crazy?

Anyone who thinks that the government could do a good job of this either has never heard of the US government, or has, ignores everything that they have seen and heard, and goes right on and gives them waaaaaaaaaay to much credit anyway.  Remember Katrina? The hurricane that destroyed large swaths of Louisiana and Mississippi and whose mess the Government promised to clean up and make OK again but still hasn’t even tried to clean up 5 YEARS LATER?  Yeah.

- Stop saying the Govt. should take over.  The government can’t federalize a company that is not American or stuff – like underwater robots – that are the property of said foreign company.  That is called stealing.  Our government isn’t in the oil drilling business (Just in the business of dealing out lisences to do so near fragile ecosystems to companies with safety records that are somewhat shaky to say the best).  We don’t have the expertise or equipment to deal with this effectively.  BP Does.  As much as that sucks, it is the way it is.  Deal with it.

- Go little Robots.  This has nothing to do with any of that, but when one of the little robots that BP has surrounding that well like aliens surrounding Ed Harris and his nuclear bomb had one of it’s arms explode, CNN was all over it like cocaine on Lindsay Lohan’s septum. (Metaphor’s are fun)  Does this mean that people are actually cheering these little underwater mechanics on in their quest to stop the gusher?  I hope so because they are certainly endearing themselves to me, especially when they help each other out by handing their neighbor a tool or holding some metal together so a friend can weld it.  It’s just kind of creepy but very anthropomorphic.

Basically all I want to say, politely and in a very reserved manner, is this: STOP POLITICIZING EVERY GODDAMN THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE WORLD.  Just because someone screws up and something bad happens, it doesn’t mean that every news channel, pundit and Joe-Blow from down the street has to start screaming bloody murder about how it was the Republicans or the Democrats or the Communists or the Aliens from Omicron Setii effing Five.  A customer in my store today made it sound like Obama and Hitler held hands, dove on the well in a submersible filled with poison and blew it up with their fundamental malice and hatred for humanity in an effort to spread the obvious vitriol of a clean energy agenda across the gulf coast.  I don’t understand how people can’t see that it was a huge, corrupt company whose only interest was profits that made bad decisions and killed eleven people, untold numbers of see and animal life, and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people.

Get over it and see what you can do to help, for Christ’s sake.

Atlantis and Company

It should be no secret to any of you by now that I am a massive nerd.  This surprises some people still, so let me be clear:  I am a massive nerd.

In that spirit, and with the best interests of those 6 people in orbit right now on Atlantis’ final mission to microgravity, I wil share some of my favorite things about the Space shuttle.  I figure that they should be writen down for posterity since our fearless leaders have decided to delete any dominance that America has in the field of space travel after just three two more flights.

So here is your education on miscelania you preobably don’t care about, but is still kinda neat:

- The Space Shuttle Atlantis- named after Woods Hole’s first sailing ship – which right now on orbit, was one of the original four shuttles, alongside Columbia, Discovery and Challenger (Enterprise and pathfinder were test articles and were never intended for orbital use).  It has flown 31 missions in 25 years.  She weighs 151,000 pounds, making her the second lightest of the Space Shuttle fleet.  Atlantis was destined to be stripped for parts in 2008, but got a stay of execution for three more flights, culminating in today’s launch.  She has traveled 117 million miles at an average altitude of 250 miles.

- The main engines on the Space shuttle generate 37 million horsepower, the eqivilant of 76,000 Corvette Zo6′s.

- The Main engine fuel turbopump weighs approximately the same as a V-8 automobile
engine, but develops 310 times the brake horsepower and develops as much torque as 18 V-8 auto engines. The main shaft of the turbopump rotates at 37,000 rpm—a car operating at 60 mph runs at 2,000 rpm.  It could drain an average family swimming pool in 26 seconds.

- The solid rocket motors that give the Space Shuttle it’s initial boost through the lower atmosphere burn 5 tons of fuel per second.  Hummer got nothing on that.  They generate a combined thrust of 5.3 million pounds. That equals about 40 million horsepower or the energy of 14,700 six-axle diesel locomotives or 400,000 subcompact cars.

- The Space Shuttle accelerates from 0 to 17,000 MpH in 8 minutes.  That’s 0-60 by the time it travels 200 feet.

- The large Fuel tank that sits under the Spcae Shuttle is more than half the length of a football field and 34 feet longer than Orville Wright’s historic first flight in 1903. Despite its size, the aluminum skin of the tank is only an eighth of an inch thick in most areas.

- At -423 degrees Fahrenheit, the engine’s fuel, liquefied hydrogen, is the second coldest liquid on Earth. When it and the liquid oxygen are combined and combusted, the temperature in the main combustion chamber is 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the boiling point of iron.

- The nose of the Space Shuttle, made of a Reinforced Carbon/Carbon laminate can hit 1,700 degrees C on re-entery.

Anyway, these are soe fact to let you know that this piece of technology, this aircraft that has ensured America’s technological superiority in space (despite it’s being 30 years old) is absolutely amazing, even on the eve of it’s demise.

Hope you learned something!

Dear Nature, Addendum.

For some reason I have been writing a lot of letters lately.  Weird.  Anyway:

—

Dear Nature,

I know that we have not always seen eye to eye.  Indeed, we have often been rightfully at odds with each other.  I have said some pretty mean things to you, but that was only because you can be such a inconsiderate bitch.  On the other hand, you have enacted retribution upon me for said grievances in epic manner.  From hurricane force wind to freezing fog and everything in between you have hurled your wrath down upon us, and I understand that this was at least partially my fault (don’t expect more of an admission than that, it’s as good as it gets).

All of this being said, I wanted to write you to thank you for today.  No, this is not a trick, today was a pretty amazing day.  Dirty, cloudy skies gave way to bursts of sunshine apparently bright enough to blind people driving down the road; this judging by the large amount of vehicles with flashing lights on top dotting the freeways/byways/driveways I passed in my varied travels.

I saw enormous clouds today that were spectacular in their ominous nature, being bright and billowing on top but angry and dark underneath.  From these clouds issued forth a vast array of roadway-slowing debris, from raindrops the size of a household cat to chunks of ice the size of popular snack candies, million-degree bolts of electricity to downdrafts powerful enough to knock over Glenn Beck’s ego, I experienced every kind of weather I think I can here, and it was all your fault, er, creation.

Indeed those rains that caused me to take almost 40 minutes to drive 15 miles because of the rain-soaked highway and lunacy of California-transplant drivers were also responsible for the brightest and most spectrally separated rainbows I have ever seen.  The other drivers on the raid saw it too, resulting in my almost being hit several times by people looking not at the road but directly away from it to take in the amazing vista of refracted sunlight.  And all because you thought you would make our life interesting.

Gee thanks.

Anyway, I thought you should know that it is a tempestuous relationship that we have, at best (see what I did there?).  Despite this, days like today are actually kind of worth having you around, despite your continued insistence on creating weather patterns that inconvenience me.

So thanks, I guess.

Cordially,

Jeremy Mills.

Dear Baseball Dad, An Open Letter.

I know you.  You are Baseball Dad.

You are the kind of guy who would go to his kids T-ball game and get angry.  Yeah, you’d get angry and start yelling and berating people.  You would berate the kids on the field for not giving your kid a chance to catch a ball that they are ALL afraid of.  You would hoot and holler at the tee for it’s flagrant disregard for the laws of gravity.  You would yell at the coach for not yelling at the parents for not yelling at the kids for not yelling at the tee for not yelling at the birds to get out of the way of the ball that they are all afraid of.

Yep, you are the same guy that yells at people from the cockpit of his Lexus Land-Yacht while you drive through the parking lot at the ball fields at 90 miles an hour, cutting people off for being stupid while they wait in line for the red light.  At Round Table you yell at the kid trying to take everyone’s order; his face pimply from too much cheese and eyes dulled by too many days dealing with pricks like you.  You park in the fire lane and you lead your kids around by the scruff of their neck and you freak out on coaches and parents and mascots andmiscellaneous inanimate youth-league sports paraphernalia.

Why do you do this?  You do this to prove to everyone that you were the king, and your kid is going to be king too.  That’s why.  You do this despite the fact that your kid seems to inherited your traits; he is portly, lazy, morethat a little effeminate and has the overwhelming athletic ability of a railroad spike.

Your wife wants your kid to be an engineer.  Your kid wants to be a fire-fighter.  Your neighbors just want you to stop yelling at the about the 6″ overhang of their Willow tree into the sight-line of your front bay-window.  You are not the person that you want everyone to believe you are.  These are all facts, so get over them.

Listen: I know things were hard for you growing up.  Your dad kept yelling at people for things that you didn’t understand, and he made you play football with a bunch of six-foot-three, 230 pound kids who wanted nothing more out of life than to snack on your bones while all you wanted to do was put on that clingy thing you found in your sisters closet and dance the nutcracker.  I get it.

Even now I get it.  I understand where you are coming from, man.  Your job that takes you away from your kids for so long each week that the only time that you are able to spend with them is at their baseball games.  None of the parents know who you are because your wife learned a long time ago that inviting you to things like PTA meetings, parent teacher conferences and birthdays was a moot point, because she knows that you would rather be off cheating on her with my assistant at some upscale lounge downtown working at the office to put food on the table.  You don’t know who any of them are either because they are the parents of the kids who are responsible for your children’s constant behavioral problems, failing grades and general lack of good upbringing.  As such you have no reason to want to rub elbows with the Joneses down the street; people who you see as direct competition for the dominance of your personal legacy on this street.  I totally relate man.

Wait, no I don’t.  You are an asshole.

I want you to listen, I mean really listen to me.  Your conduct is unbecoming and uncouth and is going to result in your kid getting kicked out of college for some bizarre and untoward activity at the Frat House you are going to make him rush.  His nickname is going to be Boner and he is going to be the one they duct-tape inside the closet with a fifth of Jack Daniels until he goes crazy.

It makes your wife submissive to the point of lethargy, your kids hate you and everyone around you pity you.  Coming into my store and glaring at me because I don’t have the snack you want 10 minutes after I close is so far and beyond asinine it almost hurts so…  Go crawl up in your den that is decorated with all those trophies that you never won in high school and leave the rest of us well-adjusted people, and your kids, alone.

Best,

Jeremy