Oh, so That’s What Happens!

Often times, I see something and I wonder what would happen if it was allowed to destroy something else. I’ve often wondered if I could saw a can of soda in half with a butter knife, or what would happen if I threw a baseball into my lawnmower’s turning blade. Yes, of course the results would be disastrous. That’s why I’ve never bothered to actually try these death-defying acts.

Apparently, in my neighborhood, it’s common practice to deliver phone books during snowstorms. Lucky for me, I decided to use the snowblower after dark. For the first half of the driveway, everything was great. I was happy that I caught the snow in time, since the snowblower was doing an excellent job of clearing the snow — so that I could see pavement. And then?

Rattle! Rattle! Rattle! BOOM!

The snowblower began to shake as if it was going to explode, flames shot out of the exhaust, and a gigantic chunk of something flew out of the chute. And then a bunch of paper debris rained down on my head.

Oh, so that’s what happens when a phonebook gets sucked into the turning blades of a snowblower! Okay, so I could’ve died just now. But admittedly, seeing a foreign object shooting out of the snowblower was pretty awesome.

I’d take a picture of the mangled phonebook, but I have no idea where it ended up.

Rant and Date

You know, I kind of like writing misdirected rants (that is, rants that aren’t about or directed at any thing or person in particular). I’ve contributed a couple of rants to craigs’, which I hope find you well. Actually, I don’t care if they find you well, but I do feel quite relieved after having ranted.

On top of that, a few of the rants I’d read were so good that I was compelled to reply directly to their authors, either offering help/crisis services or to tell them how thankful I was to be wearing something flame retardant today, or both. Well, and then there’s something else.

Yesterday, a frustrated young woman posted a rant to craigs’ where she’d complained that her car CD player had stopped working. She was asking for assistance as to how she could repair it, and who am I to ignore a damsel in distress? I felt bad for her, because life without music is really quite frustrating. Despite the fact that the stereo breakage was caused by her (admittedly) having a fit of rage and shoving a Pearl Jam CD so aggressively into the player — that the CD cracked in half and was trapped inside of the unit — I offered my help.

Acts of rage and their resulting property damage can happen, right?

So, I sent along the following note:

Dear So-and-So,

My suggestion is to tape a rubberband (a small, skinny one, that
you’ve cut so that it’s a rubber strip) to a paperclip (that you’ve
also opened up) and insert it into the player gently — so that you
don’t damage anything inside. Depending on how wedged the CD
is in there, I’d suggest pushing things around until you feel traction,
and trying to turn the CD so that it offends the player enough to attempt
to eject the broken CD.

Such things have worked for me in the past, although I can’t say
I’ve had that level of rage.

If this works, and you promise to attend anger management classes,
we should have dinner sometime. And we will only listen to cassettes
in the car.

This morning, she wrote back to me. And guess what? The engineer in me was right, she thanked me for my advice, that she was able to get the CD out of the player, and she said that she’d have dinner with me. Fucking ROCK.

Well, actually, I’m aware that this is a horrible idea on my part. I know this. While I hold traditional values about marriage and family, if I get setup on one more date, or attend one more singles’ event or professional-type of organization’s “black tie event” just to meet women, I swear that I am going to end up like that dissheveled guy near Fenway Park who offers you pamphlets about Jesus, or that teenaged kid who doesn’t own any real drums, so he plays a set of plastic buckets instead.

Besides, I’m pretty inept at the whole nihilism thing, so taking some risks makes the most sense to me.

Pursuing something with .22, for instance, was one such idea/risk. That is, the whole situation with her was totally random, but on the face of it, it seemed crazy enough to work because I was passionate about it/her. In fact, I was partly hoping that things would work out, so that someday I could be eulogized as “being crazy like a fox, baby”.

Now I’ll settle for people just saying that I look “great” when they stare down at my ashes. “He’s never looked better”, they’ll say, before they drop a cigar in my urn and close its lid.

Oh, and I’ll let you know if/how things go with Road Rage. I’m sure that there will be no shortage of stories to tell.

Rant and Rave (Against the Machine)

I’m almost back to my normal self. I’m finally able to sleep again (without the tranquilizers or getting liquored up or whatever), and I don’t dread the quiet times when I’d otherwise be left to my thoughts. Excellent.

I am in a phase, however, when I really enjoy reading other people’s rants. Some of this stuff is just tremendous.

Thank you, craigslist, for all of the hate. It’s a reminder that I’m not that bad, or mostly not, even at my worst.

The More Things Change (Redux)

I’ve had a weird few days of deja vu. You see, when I was in college, I had just about every bad job known to mankind. I worked in a supermarket. I worked as a security guard at a hazardous waste dump. I worked as a clerk in a record store. And I assembled radiators and condensors. These jobs were characterized by their unflattering nature, and by the strange physical exertion that went into some of them.

This week, I am on-call. It seems that every time I’m on-call, there’s some kind of weird drama were I find myself either jumping out of bed at some inhumane hour to answer a page, or driving 34 miles in the middle of the night to assess a problem in which I’m not well-versed. Last night, it was the latter. I’d been out with some friends earlier, and about 10 minutes before I returned home, my pager went off. Great.

I quickly ate my McDonald’s (I freakin’ love McDonald’s after I’ve had a few drinks), called some workfolk on the phone to discuss the issue, then headed back to the city — from whence I’d just come. And then I had to find the server. Of course, it was located at some forsaken data center in the middle of Cambridge. If you’re unfamiliar with data centers, they’re often located in the sketchy parts of town, and without any kind of placard out front — that tells the general public who your company is. Basically, the storefront of these data centers is absolutely nothing, and for all the obvious reasons (who the hell would rob someone who doesn’t have enough money to put a sign for their company outside?).

Places like these are not even suitable for the filming of pornography. Seriously, what are the actors going to do? Do it near some fiber optics? Maybe slip and fall on some black ice outside? Just thinking about these possibilities is making me a little bit hot under the collar.

After I tracked the server down, I realized that it was like a house of cards in the place where it was stored. If I tried to remove one piece, the entire shelf would come crashing down. Hell, not even the cables that were connecting disks were probably connected. Just by looking at them, they nearly disconnected themselves. Not only was it treacherous; it was a crushing blow to my self-esteem!

So, one by one, I disassembled the house of cards, shelf by shelf, cable by cable.

In the meantime, my pants were falling down just like a plumber. I kept cutting my hand on the rack and was leaving a trail of blood. I kept laying on the floor so that I could get better access to the server. And then I remembered college.

10 years ago, I was doing approximately the same thing, but for $6/hour. I laughed to myself at this strange twist of fate, reminded myself of my mortgage and standard of living. I pulled my pants up for like the millionth time (I have a wishlist item to grow an ass one of these days.) and finished my work. By 4:15am, I was back home. In college, I would’ve ended the evening with a Stroh’s Dark or Old Milwaukee with a bowl of chili with cheddar, and maybe even some Jack Daniel’s.

These days, I find it preferable to curl up in bed with a woman. Last night, this was not a possibility, so I drank a Zima instead.

Rent-A-What?!

Terrible things happen to a city when it snows too much. This includes problems with finding a place in which to put the snow. So, you end up with either lane reduction on all of the main roads, or gigantic snow piles that make it impossible to walk on the sidewalks, or in the cases of Boston and Cambridge: both. This myriad of snow also makes certain people very, very greedy.

I park in a garage that’s across the street from work. This is, all at the same time:

1. Cramped
2. Irritating
3. Convenient
4. Expensive
5. Necessary

During last week’s snowfall, said garage failed to plow the top floor correctly, so there was a deficit of nearly 80 parking spots. For a garage in the city, this caused much of the garage to be useless, and rendered those of us who pay for monthly parking without spaces.

Finally, two days ago, they started to plow effectively and more spots were discovered. There’s still a shortage, caused in large part by the pigfuckers who insist on taking more than once space at a time. The garage began to hand out “parking violations”. I was the recipient of one of these violations, taped to my side window, for reasons that I cannot understand (no part of my car was even touching another spot at all!).

This morning, people were back to their normal tricks, and I had no place to park again. This afternoon, I checked the top level of the garage to see who’d been given the infernal “parking violation” tickets.

There were none, even for the cars that were consuming 2.5 spaces!

But outside of my griping, there is a larger question, and that is: “if my garage hands out parking violations, do they have their own platoon of parking police?” If a parking violation doesn’t carry a fine (which it doesn’t), what enforcement powers do the parking police have? If the parking police don’t have enforcement powers, how can they hand out violations? The next time someone takes a spot or two extra, maybe the parking police could give out books of matches or thin mints? Books of matches or thin mints would at least have some inherent value (fire, weight problems, cavities), as opposed to a parking violation that serves no purpose than to remind someone that they should exercise a little bit more discretion when choosing a spot.

Just a thought.

Brutal(l)

I called Bookstore Girl last night. We had a fun and frothy chat, well, until it took a turn for the serious. Serious is good. Or is it?

We talked about things like career direction, recent dates, mortgages, and pop culture. It was your pretty typical first conversation, you know, kind of safe and boring but engaging enough that during the course of it, you think that you’d like to have another.

“There’s one thing that I was thinking after I’d met you yesterday”, she said.

“Oh?”, I asked.

“Yes. You see, it concerns me, that. Umm, how do I say this?”, she stammered.

“It concerns you that I’ve admitted to having a bad temper?”, I inquired.

“No, that’s okay. What concerns me is that you’re so, umm, tall.”, she admitted.

“Excuse me?”, I asked.

“I mean, you’re gigantic.”, she continued.

(Noting to self that being referred to as “gigantic” is actually quite a flattering compliment to me.)
“And that’s bad how?”, I remarked.

“Because it makes me nervous, the more that I think about it. I mean, 6′3″ is really my cut-off.”, she noted.

“What does this mean?”, I asked.

“I guess that I don’t feel comfortable now.”, she said.

“Because I’m tall?”, I asked again.

“Right.”, she confirmed.

Well, there’s a first time for everything. Actually, this whole thing was entirely amusing, for two reasons:

1. I always thought that a girl wouldn’t give you her phone number unless you’d asked for it, which was not the case here — when she’d just handed it to me.
2. I’ve never actually been rejected for reasons of verticality.