At the bar with a strange man I met on the internet

Though I primarily use MySpace as a personals site (on the completely remote chance I could find a potential female soulmate on a site that seems to be primarily horny tweens, teens, and college students) and to keep in touch with my friends, I haven't used it's true social networking aspects too much. That is until a few months ago, when this guy named Paul contacted me on MySpace

Paul was out to make it abundantly clear he was not gay, as the subject line of his first message was something to the effect of "No, I'm not gay...". Of course, he also mentioned he had no problems with those who were gay. Whew! I'd hate to be sexually propositioned by a straight man who was a homophobe. That's just plain hypocritical. But seriously, Paul explained that he was simply looking to make new friends in the Twin Cities and dropped me a line.

Regardless of the benign intent, this was not the sort of message I was used to. Usually I'm being hit on by either 20 year old girls still living at home with their parents or 300 lb, 40-something single mothers of 2 to 15 children (it's a vagina, not an emergency exit!!). In the more awkward cases, the 20 year old girl is one of the 2 to 15 children belonging to the 40-something mom and the mom proposes a twisted, flab-filled threesome.

Anyway, Paul seemed like he had a good sense of humor and was making an honest effort to be social. Far more than I can say for myself at times. The last few months, he has organized several get togethers with his MySpace circle, but work and/or personal obligations have prevented me from attending. Until Friday. He invited me to meet up with a handful of other people at the Chatterbox Pub in south Minneapolis, so I brought my good friend Mary as my wing girl.

Paul and "the gang" (not a gang in the meddlesome pot-smoking teenagers solving mysteries with a dog in a van sense) seemed pretty cool. Good-humored group, unafraid of profanity (people I can't swear around make me slightly nervous--imagine that!), and completely non-douchey so far as I can tell. We had a couple drinks, ate dinner, played some Uno, Atari, and Nintendo (you can order games off the menu), and called it a night around 12:30. Since I had to go into work the next morning, I didn't intend to stay out quite that late, but it all worked out.

I summary, closing, and final words, getting out and meeting new people is a good way to make new friends (and maybe meet a potential mate at some point). I know--who knew?

Cuddles and cartwheels, ya'll!

-Jeremy

Life in a bubble

You may have noticed the posts haven't been coming as fast and furious lately. The last week or so has been crazy with work and assorted social activities, including working 14 hours over the weekend and sitting down with old friends for a delicious meal at the King & I.

I'm working on a couple of posts, one regarding some of the aforementioned social activities over the weekend, and the other is about a new toy I plopped into my home automation system last night. I don't think any jizz or poop are involved in either one, but I could be blocking the memories.

You don't bring me flowers anymore

I saw this on someone's MySpace profile. I'm not sure what the title of this artwork is, but allow me to provide a caption: "Hello! I'm a globule of semen falling from the sky, and I'd like to give you a flower. And then land on your face."

Comments

I'm getting tired of rejecting comments from poopsmack spammers with ads for dog training and assorted products and services, so I've turned on word verification in hopes that helps. I hate the friggin' word verification when I'm filling out forms, but it works. Keeps the spammers from running 'bots to automatically post on people's pages.

Jeremy interviews Jeremy outtakes

For those that enjoyed my interview with Jeremy, I've dug into my transcripts and found the original interview in it's entirety (the published interview was edited savagely for space). The original interview lasted about 45 minutes and is filled with racial epithets, complaints about painful after effects of eating 3 pounds of deep fried shrimp and whitefish nuggets, and one side of a 10 minute phone conversation with the receptionist for an escort service. Here are a few choice quotes.

"You're lucky I dropped the cell phone in the toilet, or I'd be fingering me up some 911 on your ass right about now."

"Is that--it is! Holy shit! There's totally a glory hole in here! Yoo hoo! Who's in there?" (echoed laughter)

(long, wet fart) "Oh! Augh!! I'm bleeding. I'm fucking bleeding!"

"You wouldn't expect half a gram of coke and a chip on your shoulder to land you a recurring role on Knot's Landing, but fuck if it did!"

"To this day, I don't think that was really a penis."

"Hey, YOU try shitting out 2 Rainbow Brites and a Cobra Commander and see how long you're sitting there, you smug prick!"

(crying) "I told him, 'The Cobra Commander is one too many!' But he wouldn't listen!"

Jeremy interviews Jeremy

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jeremy in a public restroom at the Mall of America after a series of vodka tonics followed by a variety platter from Long John Silver's.

Jeremy: I understand you've been working on some interesting projects lately. Tell me about a couple closest to your heart.

Jeremy: What? Who the fuck is out there? This stall is occupied, asshole!

Jeremy: (laughs) Always a jokester, Jeremy! Now about those projects...

Jeremy: What projects? Who's out there?

Jeremy: Well, for example, I heard you just signed a deal with Long John Silver's to--

Jeremy: Deal? The only thing I signed with LJS was my credit card slip. Goddammit, who IS THIS?

Jeremy: (chuckles) Are you on 24/7? If you don't want to talk about LJS, that's fine. But speaking of your credit card, I have a copy of your last statment here--

Jeremy: Whoa! Are you digging through my trash?

Jeremy: No, it was sitting on your desk at home, and I--

Jeremy: That's it! As soon as I pinch off my business up in here, I am calling the cops.

Jeremy: Now, hold on. You're the one who agreed to this interview. I'm just--

Jeremy: Interview? What are you smoking out there? I'm working out a fish-filled shit for fuck sake.

Jeremy: Hey! Now I don't do the gonzo, ambush thing. I just wanted to talk about your projects.

Jeremy: Fucking projects?? DUDE! What are you talking about?

Jeremy: Well surely you're working on some--

Jeremy: Like what? The 6 weeks of evenings I've spent organizing my 5 terrabytes of digital farm animal porn? The reproduction of the living room from Three's Company that I built in my basement? The harrassing phone calls I've been making to my neighbor's teenage daughter for the last 3 years? THOSE projects?

Jeremy: (stunned silence)

Jeremy: (unrolling toilet paper)

Jeremy: Umm...

Jeremy: You better pray to God you're not still standing out there by the time I buckle my belt.

Jeremy: I'm just doing my job.

Jeremy: (unrolling more toilet paper) So you're job is to ambush strangers in the public shitter?

Jeremy: Stranger? Jeremy, I am you. You are me. We are one in the same, my friend.

Jeremy: Whoa, that is some fucked up Tyler Durden shit right there.

Jeremy: Wanna see if we can go three-way on that girl at the watch repair kiosk?

Jeremy: (finishes wiping) Damn straight. Let's roll.

One shot, one kill

Occasionally while I'm running on the treadmill watching Headline News, I see a 10 second commercial for a Hemmorhoid cream called (you can't make this up) FREEdHEM. Their commercial consists of a still photo of the box for their product with a voiceover repeating "FREEdHEM, the only one-application hemorrhoidal cream. FREEdHEM, the only one-application hemorrhoidal cream. FREEdHEM, the only one-application hemorrhoidal cream."

This brick-upside-the-head approach is grating, but effective since it drove me to finally learn more about this single-application butt cream. Through the magic of google, I found their website at www.freedhem.com. How appropriate. What really disturbs me, though, is the finger on the left side of the page, ostensibly symbolizing number one, as in one application. But look closely at this finger. Where has it been? And what is that dark smudge at the bottom of the finger. It's a butt finger. A hemorrhoid cream covered, sphincter-probing butt finger. A butt finger circling around for another attempt at a greasy landing on the ass crack runway and pulling up to the rectal terminal.

Burglar alert II

All this theft and break-in stuff has me paranoid. Maybe it was the Hamburglar. That wouldn't be so bad. I think I could live with losing the 3 lbs of lean ground beef in my freezer. But if he touches my Red Vine and Mr. Pibb , I'm bustin' a cap in his ass. That shit is crazy delicious.

Burglar alert

I received a very disconcerting handwritten note in my mailbox today from my neighbor who lives behind me. Evidently Thursday night his house was broken into somewhere between 6 and 9 pm. The note also mentioned that the cops said from the footprints in the snow that it looked like they'd cased several houses. I checked my yard, and sure enough, along the one side of my house, coming from the neighbors yard behind me, there is at least one set of adult-sized footprints running back and forth. Yikes!

I was home during that time Thursday night and actually had noticed at one point that something had tripped the motion flood lights in my back yard (which isn't unusual since rabbits and cats sometimes set them off). I can't help but wonder what would have happened if I weren't here!

I've always felt very safe in this neighborhood. For one thing, the yards are very wide open, and visible from several houses down. There are also a few stay at home parents around during the day keeping an eye on things. A couple of times, I've accidentally left my garage door open, and my neighbor actually called me at work to let me know she'd keep an eye on it.

I guess I've always been more worried about burglaries in the wee hours of the night or during the day when people aren't home. That takes some cajones to just meander through people's yards in the middle of the evening when so many people are home and awake.

Reese wears Kirsten's dress. Jeremy takes nap.

On the front page of many of the major local and national news websites today are links to the shocking story about Reese Witherspoon wearing to the Golden Globes a dress that Kirsten Dunst wore three years ago. This is the kind of shit that must only be spewed from the mouths of the talking heads and hand puppets from the vacuous realm of E!, ET, and Access Hollywood. Mouths muffled by the ass cheeks of the celebrities for whom they rim browneye for scoops about who they are wearing. "Me? I bought this shit at the Gap, but it seems you are wearing my ass on your nose."

Not only that, but celebrities aren't allowed to wear the same clothes twice in public? And not even allowed to wear the clothes OTHER people wore in public? Hell, I once wore the same jeans for 2 months straight without washing them. And that's after shitting myself in a wicked drunk about 3 days into it. That's how real people live. In their own filth. It's called America. You don't like it? Buy new pants.

Parking dipshits

I've hinted at my relatively anal retentive parking habits a few times here before.
While I'm not as obsessive as I was when I first bought my brand new Acura RSX in 2002, I'm still somewhat careful about where I park. I try to find an end space where I will be unlikely to get dinged. The last few months, I've really relaxed my parking standards (my finish is not quite as pristine with normal rock chips and wear and tear, so why bother?).

Note that I refuse to make my parking issues a problem for other people. You'll never find me parked at a 45 degree angle across two prime parking spaces. I'd rather walk across the length of the parking lot than be a prick. I also try not to make it an issue for passengers. I offer to drop them off at the door if it's going to be a hike to where I end up parking.

Unfortunately, last month I paid for my sphinctoral unclenching with my very first door ding. A large Suburban driven by an unknown person we will call Asshole McGee decided to park in the lot at work about 6 inches from my car. They put a minor, but highly aggravating ding in my passenger side. I was pissed, but I will survive.

So it became obvious I needed to clamp my buttocks a bit tighter again when parking. I started parking in and end spot in a corner of our parking lot (I get to work relatively early in the morning and usually have my choice of parking spaces). Today, I ran out for lunch to find that a minivan driver we will call Fucknut McAsswipe had parked (no exaggeration) THREE FUCKING INCHES from my car. Unless Kate Moss was driving this thing, there was no physical way they could have exited their vehicle on the driver's side! Granted, they did not ding my car, but it made it very difficult for me to back out of the space without scraping the shit out of both of our vehicles.

Don't get me wrong. Sometimes I pull into a parking spot and realize I'm too close to one side or I'm all cockeyed. You know what I do? I BACK THE FUCK OUT AND FIX IT!! Why? Because I am not a lazy asshole. What gets me is this person had to have realized they parked that close. Instead of getting out of the driver's side, they had to have taken the effort to get out on the passenger side. WHY????????

All throughout my lunch break, I plotted revenge. Key the van? Nah, it's a rusty shitmobile. They won't care. Flatten a tire? Chuck a dead hooker through their windshield? *sigh* That would be satisfying, but not worth the risk of being caught. No damage done--a cooler head prevailed, and I decided to let it be. Next time someone parks too close to me though, I'm taking a dump on their hood.

Download a baby

One of my coworkers was asking around for opinions on local high speed internet providers. We both have the same cable internet provider and evidently haven't had quite the same experience. I have been getting very reliable connectivity and fast download speeds, while she is extremely unhappy with her service.

As the conversation continued, my coworker asked how fast my download speeds were. I immediately and very proudly proclaimed, "I downloaded a BABY!". Now I have no idea what that means either, but in critical review of my non sequitur, it seems there may be some unintentional logic there. It stands to reason that downloading an entire baby would require a very stable, high bandwidth internet connection. One would not want to be halfway through downloading a baby and have the connection time out. Yes, this obviously warrants further analysis.

First thing's first--we need to find someone with a baby we can download. Luckily, a family friend near Seattle just had one with her mouth-breathing husband. The baby being halfway across the country lends further merit to potential test results. The more the hops for the packets along the route, the better!

So I had my friend scan her baby onto her computer.

Experiment #1

As you can see, Experiment #1 was an unmitigated disaster. Somewhere around the 50% mark, the connection to the server timed out. Baby innards and strained peas everywhere. Science is messy.

Result: Partial baby!

Experiment #2

This is a happy, perfectly healthy baby, but quite clearly this is the WRONG BABY!!! Server hiccup?

Result: Somebody out there missing a baby?

Experiment #3

I'm really not sure what happened here. My theory is that while the download completed at 100%, just enough packets where corrupted or dropped to shift around some chromosomes. Sloth-looking little bastard, isn't he? He doesn't seem to like the Baby Ruth bars I tried to feed him, though.

Result: Corrupted baby!

Experiment #4

Yes! Ten, Ten, and One! A fully functional baby! But this raises a whole set of moral dilemmas in the vein of stem cell research and cloning. Never mind what I'm going to do with this thing--who wants to adopt a downloaded baby? Eh, fuck this noise. Into the trash with the rest of them. Don't worry--with the cold weather we've been having lately, the crying and squirming should stop before trash day rolls around.

Result: Success!

The fluid that kills

Has anyone else seen this commercial? Camera zoomed tight on an overturned car in a snowy ditch. The camera slowly pans back while background sound is someone singing along happily to the radio. Then screeeeech and CRASH!!! Screams of pain and anguish! Oh, the humanity!

A PSA discouraging drunk driving? Nope. An auto insurance commercial? Guess again. The scene cuts to bottles of windshield wiper fluid with a stern voiceover, (I'm paraphrasing) "Ice and snow blocking your view can get you KILLED!" Talk about getting brainfucked in the mindgina!

24 - Day 5, year of the...um...tree squirrel

***AVAST! SPOILERS FOR "24" AHEAD.***

Yes, the ass walloping continued tonight on 24. All but two of the hostages saved, but perhaps Jack is secreting his dumps and whizzes? Hmm...after my post early this morning, I started thinking about it more. Jack isn't always on screen. They have the little dramas and asides with the ancillary characters, like the wack job first lady trying to get the very real information regarding Palmer's phone call across to her limp-dicked husband, who brushes it off because she's nuttier than peanut brittle in a pecan sundae. This leaves Jack a few minutes here and there to drop trou in a corner office at the airport. It's war, people. There are no well-maintained restrooms on a battlefield. You squat when and where the squattin' is good. Like in the bottom desk drawer of a middle management type named Craig Pemberton. Happy Monday, Craig! Here's a drawer full of hot, steaming government agent poop!

24 - Day 5

Can I just say how much this show completely kicks ass? I won't give out any spoilers if you haven't watched last night's 2 hour premier, but the first 5 minutes prove they are not fucking around this season. I look forward to seeing more of Jack not fucking around tonight (is this poor guy ever going to have a day where he can set aside 10 minutes to take a dump?).

An editorial response to my fortune cookie

Everyone enjoys cracking open their fortune cookie at the end of a Chinese meal. Some enjoy the eating the cookies themselves, but far more people enjoy demonstrating how clever they are by adding "...in bed!" to the end of their fortune. Yeah. Priceless. But no one ever questions the supposedly sage wisdom of the fortune cookie.

Just today, I got this fortune cookies with my lunch from Leenn Chin.

Bad news never gets better with age.

You have got to be kidding me! There is nothing better than holding onto bad news and springing it on someone when they are most vulnerable. Like inviting the neighbors over for dinner and waiting until they've scraped the last morsel of food off of their plate to inform them that you bathed your dog in the spaghetti sauce. Oh, and that you also jacked off into it.

Grace

Grace, I'm sorry about the indoor swimming pool at your new apartment complex. I followed all of the posted rules to a 'T' except the one that got you evicted. I read the sign about no running, no swearing, pushing or shoving. I did none of those. I even obeyed the whimsical sign that said, "Welcome to our ool. Notice there's no P in it. Please keep it that way." But I just could not abide the "No shitting off the high dive." sign.

Sorry again,

-Jeremy

Lunch in my gut

Lunch time at Tinycorp*. A bowl of steaming soup fresh from the microwave, scooped ravenously from a disposable bowl with a disposable soup spoon. It's not uncommon for me to eat this way at home, either. Paper plates, paper bowls, plastic forks and spoons, and Diet Mountain Dew cans--I put more trash into the landfill in a week than a family of ten. I really need to start recycling.

However, I do regularly enjoy cooking real food with things called "ingredients" and "effort", even if it's just for myself. And when I do, I typically insist on using a real plate with a real fork. I'm not going to go to all that effort just to break off a plastic tong in my mouth and accidentally swallow it. Try passing THAT after your morning coffee and donut.

*Not our company's real name.

Take your penis to work day

Tomorrow is Take Your Penis to Work Day. Grab your penis, and take it along to the office. Show it around a little, introduce it to your coworkers, and just say "howdy!"

Feeling left out, ladies? No worries--Take Your 'Vag' to Work Day is the day after Ash Wednesday.



Buy Take Your Penis to Work Day
shirts, caps, and other gear now!

A creak in the bones

Cripes! I just realized that it was nearly ELEVEN fucking years ago that I heaved forth my first slapdash website onto the unsuspecting masses. It was so long ago, that even the esteemed Internet Archive doesn't have so much as a single snapshot of my unbuttered shit. We didn't have fancy WYSIWYG editors like you snotnose punks have now. In order to post a webpage, we had to fellate an angry mountain gorilla, walk 15 miles to a the nearest FedEx to overnight it to a sweatshop in Indonesia, and wait 4 to 6 weeks for it to be to show up, all the while wondering what that whole gorilla thing was about.

Those were the days, man. My site was named one of the 20 Weirdest Websites of 1996 by a now-defunct magazine, I was interviewed for a couple webzine articles, and two different sections were mentioned in a book called Things on the Net Newt Wouldn't Want You to See. But let's face it--I wasn't clever. Just first.

UPDATE: I found one of the original logo graphics for my old site. Good thing I'm a notorious hoarder of my digital life (and porn!). And in case you're wondering, the swank drunkened cat in the clouds is F. Lee Bailey. Yeah, I don't know why, either.

Book Review - Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody

So after finally buying Diablo Cody's memoir, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, I sat down and read it cover to cover today. If you don’t know who Diablo Cody is or have never read her blog, the Pussy Ranch, do yourself a favor go there NOW! Obviously I am a fan since one of my permalinks to the right is to the PR. Yes, it is often as raunchy as the name implies, and there is on rare occasion some relatively tame nudity, so if you are reading this while at work, consider yourself warned. For example, at the time of this writing, the first thing you see upon loading her site is a photoshopped image of her giving the finger from behind the wheel of a power boat as faux topless versions of Beyonce, Jenna Elfman, and J-Lo look on, showering each other with streams of lactation. Meanwhile, a dead manatee floats in a watery cloud of blood in their wake. Out fucking standing.

Diablo Cody (we now know her disappointingly pedestrian maiden name to be Brook Busey—not that you’d expect it to be Vagwise Snatchpuss) acquired internet notoriety in 2003 and 2004 as she anonymously blogged her almost impromptu foray into the world of exotic dancing, which eventually led to a stint working a peep show booth at a local smut shop called Sex World and rounding it out with a phone sex job. The money enabled her and her then-boyfriend / now-husband to put down payments on a car and a house, and the blog led to an associate editor gig at the local alt weekly City Pages, the book deal, selling the script for a movie currently in preproduction, and a two script deal with Warner Brothers. She’s also currently working on a sitcom pilot set in Minneapolis, hoping it will be picked up by UPN.

As a relatively recent recruit to the Cody fanwagon (I started reading her blog on the City Pages website last summer), I was disappointed to learn that her original pre-City Pages version of Pussy Ranch is no longer online. However, through the magic of the Internet Archive, last week I was able to skim through the vast majority of her original postings from beginning to end, often coming dangerously close to spewing fountains of Diet Mountain Dew across my computer screen as I guffawed out loud. I fully intend to go back and read them word for word now that I’ve finished the book. The old school Pussy Ranch was a jawdroppingly frank account of her year burning her way through the Minneapolis sex industry, delivered in machine gun bursts of disarming, sarcastic humor that is one part cerebral to two parts locker room pottymouth. Meanwhile, her steadfastly devoted boyfriend Jon, often mentioned with such euphorically loving adoration that I practically wanted to switch teams and sleep with the guy myself, supports her every step of the way.

As memoir, Candy Girl stands on its own quite well. However, I wish I had saved reading any of the original Pussy Ranch until after I had read the book. The blog entries have a more lurid appeal because given the forum, they are written with the crisp detail of immediate memories being channeled from Cody's brain to the keyboard. Having them fresh in my head made the book seem slightly watered down and tame in comparison.

This is certainly no fault of Cody’s. A blog is a diary, a choppy snapshot in time of the author’s life. A book needs to keep the narrative flowing. And flow it did. It may not have had the same gut-busting comedic impact or shock value of her original writings, but it was a page turner to be certain. Trust me, if you can get my ADD ass to sit still for an entire afternoon and read your book beginning to end, you are one hell of a writer.

If you were one of the original followers of Diablo Cody’s travails, I have a feeling that Candy Girl will be a fond trip down memory lane and that you’ll get a charge out of holding concrete evidence of the success of your favorite former secret stripper. You may even vaguely recognize passages lifted nearly verbatim from blog entries and probably won’t be quite as thrown off as I was by minor changes to details and quotations, since I had literally read them less than 48 hours prior to reading the book.

If you have never read anything from Diablo Cody, I am going to stop short of imploring you to immediately run out to pick up Candy Girl at the nearest bookstore or order it from Amazon. Here is my suggestion—go and skim through her current blog. If her humor is your cup of tea, the book will sell itself to you, and you won’t even have to pay a cover fee or buy it a $9 soft drink. Then you can save yourself my mistake, and read her original Pussy Ranch site AFTER you finish the book. You will appreciate the juicier morsels all the more, including details of her courtship with Jon and her transition from stripping to the legitimate writing world.

Overall, I give this one an A-, with negligible points deducted for starting out with overzealous and awkwardly thick verbiage (yes, I realize that is the pot calling the kettle black) and for a mildly disappointing epilogue that seemed to need some fleshing out.

Taking it in the technological duodenum

Don't get me wrong. I am a gadget / tech / science / scifi / computer geek through and through. I have certain personal standards, however. I will never be caught dead or alive wearing a Jedi Knight, Frodo, Neo, or any other costume related to jeans-creaming fanboy devotion. I love Star Wars, The Matrix, and the like. But I can't quote entire scenes verbatim (though I can paraphrase) and haven't seen any one of them more than a handful of times. Nor will I never be found in a dank basement playing Dungeons & Dragons or any other game involving dice with more than 6 sides. It's bad enough I know about the dice with more than 6 sides. *shudder*

Yes, I will cop to a period in my late teens/early twenties where I stood in line for hours tittering in giddy anticipation of screenings of the enhanced Star Wars trilogy and The Phantom Menace. And during those times, I was thisclose to strongly considering thinking about maybe wearing a costume in line. Maybe. But my relentless march into adulthood (I'll get there someday) has clamped me down with blasé shackles of indifference. I'm fine with waiting a few weeks to see the latest sequel to a scifi classic, and I'm fine with waiting to purchase the DVD until it's in the $9.99 bin with Dumb and Dumberer at Wal-mart.

With this unintentional evolution toward slightly increased social acceptance has also come a marked drop in gadgetry fervor. Back in the day, I was always the first on the block to have the latest and greatest in gee whiz googaws and doodads. Usually taking it in the financial rectum in the process.

These days, I'm practically an ascetic Luddite in comparison. Sure, I've kept up with the Tivolution and can literally log into my house via an encrypted connection over the internet (I'm not joking!), but I set all of that up years ago. My approach to technology is now far more conservative. I refuse to wear anything but an analog watch if I wear one at all, and if it doesn't fit in my front pocket in the form of my mobile phone, I don't carry it. I'm not strapping any PDA's, phones, blackberries, or pagers to my belt, dammit. Carson Kressley knows what he's talking about.

But I have to admit feeling completely left out in the cold over the ipod. For a couple of years, I've regularly agonized over it. EVERYBODY has one of these things but me. My friends, my coworkers, the 40-something stay at home mom across the street--my brother's already owned two of them! But I just can't bring myself to do it.

There are three nagging voices in my head (I call the husky one Francine), two of which give me reasons NOT to buy one.

There's the voice of fiscal responsibility. "Pay off your loans early! Invest in mutual funds! And for the love of God, don't forget to diversify your portfolio!!!!" *splashes himself with cold water and downs a shot of Jäg*

And there's the voice of technological conservatism. "Dude, if you wait 6 months, they'll be able to store the Library of Congress in an ipod small enough to be surgically implanted in your duodenum for $19.99." The money one I could justify my way out of, but it's a challenge to counter the duodenum argument. Incidentally, Ptolemy's Duodenum Argument is still hotly debated to this day by pasty, turgid mathematicians over shrimp sandwiches and applecake at Ikeas around the world.

Unfortunately, the only voice with a positive argument just whines, "I WAAAaaant one!" then stomps his feet and smudges chocolatey fingerprints on the brand new beige carpet in my brain.

So what is a shockingly handsome (and let's not forget winsome) boy to do? Technically I can afford one even if I should spend the money more responsibly at the moment. I feel like Vin Diesel choosing between his career as a cop and the thrilling world of illicit street racing. And that's really the only time I've ever felt like anything remotely connected to Vin Diesel. Though I did feel a smidge like his cousin License Plate Hemi once.

I simply need to remove the emotional element from the decision. When I can purchase an ipod for x dollars with y storage space and features, I will do so once it is financially feasible. Now if I could only apply such detached logic to my Hummel figurine purchases. Like ceramic crack those damn things!

Jurisprudence

Beh...Got a letter in the mail today from the US District Court, District of Minnesota. I am officially in the potential juror pool. Damned civic responsibilities. Looks like there's about a 50-50 shot I could be called as a petit juror (I would feel so delicate and small). If selected, I'd be on call as a potential (there's that word again) juror for 2 months, sometime between September 1 and the following August 31. My crime and drug free life as an upstanding suburban professional is finally catching up with me.

New logo

Mmmm hmmmm. Much better than the original glowing electro roller rink thing I had going before. The GIMP rocks. Like electric sex in the living room window.

Hit me

So a couple days after moving my blog here from MySpace, I've already had more traffic in less than a day than I did in all of my busiest week at MS. Seems that blogspot is far more kind in referring people to blogs than MS. Of course, MS is primarily a hormone-driven meat market filled with horny high school and college students with little interest in reading snarky ramblings from an almost 30 year old computer dork. They'd rather listen to their "ipods" and talk about "popular music" and "text" each other codes for posting "music videos" of perky bleach blonde nails-on-chalkboard singers. Singers that I totally would do, but would tape their mouths shut first so I wouldn't have to listen to their pop tart caterwaulling. Wait...that's not really what I--is my backspace key broken AGAIN?? Goddammit. Oh well. *post*

Kitties, puppies, and babies, oh my!

How hard is it for stores to stock a cheap-ass wall calendar that isn't cover to cover kitties, puppies, babies, or flowers? And I don't want a $15 glizty, glossy, intellectual property-laden calendar filled with Dilbert, Britney Spears (now with stretch marks!), or even those decreasingly humorous, but still kinda weakly ha ha funny Demotivators. I just want a wall calendar for $5-$10 with big ol' boxes where I can check off my workouts with stinky markers as I have for the past 6+ years. Something bland, non-flaming, and that doesn't scream, "Grandma loves me!" Is that so hard to ask? Thank you to Walgreens, which actually had, amidst the calendars of kitties, gay tigers, and children pretending to urinate (I know--what the fuck!), a single 2006 wall calendar filled with classic cars for a mere $2. *sigh* It'll have to do.

Welcome to my new blog home--I keep my blogs here!

Howdy, Chesters and Chesteresses. This is the first official posting at afterglide's new home. I've been busy copying all of the old postings over here. I think I've got all of them, and hopefully the date and timestamps on them aren't too out of wack.

Why move it over here? Two words: MySpace blows. I've had an account here on blogspot since 2001, but ended up only posting about 3 dick-blisteringly mundane entries about boring day to day shit. Yeah, you'll still get that going forward but just not as dick-blisteringly so. It was really in July of 2005 after I joined MySpace that I started blogging with any frequency. Unfortunately, I soon found that MySpace is a two-fisted clusterfuck of random error messages, napworthy response times, and complete system outages. Interesting since I attended their keynote presentation at a conference in Bethesda, MD last summer where they touted their uptime and code quality. Tout in one hand, shit in the other...

So blog on, you blogging cocksnoggers. Blog on.

Lost our lease! Must move EVERYTHING!

Note from Jeremy: Prior to January 2, 2006, this blog was hosted at MySpace.com

I can't say it was exactly a hard decision to make, but I've decided to move my blog wholesale over to a different site devoted specifically to blogging. I'm not going to delete anything I already have here on MySpace, but I am in the middle of copying all of my old postings over to the new site so I won't have stuff spread out all over the place.

The plan is to point afterglide.com to the new site when I'm done. I'll post an announcement here when it's ready.

Snappy New Year

It is the 2k6. I'm putting "the" in front of all my shit lately. I'm flying to the A.Z. next month. Shut yo' ass fo' the fuck sake. It is the 2k6.

The New Year brings promises and hopes of...well, jack shit. Why is it such a slate-cleaning event for a lot of people? It's just another date on a calendar. "I'm going to workout more this year!" .... "I'm going to quit smoking this year." ... "I'm going to stop artificially insemenating the homeless against their will this year."

Hmm...you know what? I was about to light into a rant about getting your shit wired on your own instead of using a date on a calendar, but if that works for you, that's great. If that January 1 really is a clean slate for you, a fresh start, and it works, go for it. I, of all people, should know that every person needs to find their own motivation. They also need to find their own heads and pull them out of their own asses.

*pop*

My evening was spent at my brother and sister-in-law's house down in Savage. My designated driver, bless her, was my good friend Mary. A glass of wine early in the evening, and she was set. I don't even think she had champagne at midnight. Of course, she loves to rub my nose in it and bring up the time 3 or 4 years ago that I was supposed to be the designated driver, and we and several other friends ended up having to crash in Plymouth with one of the guys playing grabass with her all night. Let it go!

This certainly was not anywhere near a repeat of my 10.5 mile run, nothing to eat, hard liquor pukefest from November, but suffice it to say that I was feeling no pain. The beer flowed from a red plastic gas can (freshly purchased from the store--no need to sicken revelers with gasoline residue) and the variety of hard liquor was impressive. I stuck with beer most of the night, save a couple group shots of some nasty thick, green ectoplasm-like apple schnapps and mixing up some Grey Goose Citron and Fresca at one point. I sang some karaoke for a while downstairs and was given unsolicted (and frankly, rather poor) advice about who at the party I should be dating. "You and so-and-so would be PERFECT together." Yes, thank you for the advice, woman who I've just met for the first time in my life and have talked to for 90 seconds. I'll get right on that.

All said and done, a very fun evening. I was at tad worse for the wear Sunday, but sleeping in until 1:30 in the afternoon sure helped.