the new five dollar bill, existential fear of being, whether or not we had advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor, hair care products, the price of stamps, Hooters chicken wings, fuel filters, how many plys are on my toilet paper, a Windsor knot on a necktie, motivational speakers, Christmas lights that look like chili peppers, mail-in rebates, the Geek Squad, and peeing sitting down.

Date: 05/13/2008 5:52 am
Subject: Hello, Jonathan C. !
Message:
I`m Michelle )
I really feel shy, but I have to tell you, Jonathan C., that you are just a man of my dreams… I found your profile by accident but now I`m sure it`s a destiny! ))
Frankly speaking… I want to find a man who will help me to realise all my fantasies, oh, feel really SO timid to write it… !!! but I mean my $exy fantasies.. )))
your photos are marvellous… but I`m sure in your real life you will excite me even more! ))
that`s incredible… but I`m from Deltona, FL too! )
So… I would like to keep up a friendship with you, Jonathan C.!
Friendster doesn`t accept all my photos… ((
so they most interesting and hot photoes I uploaded here: http://superdatingservice.com/…/
Jonathan C., I hope you`ll take a look at them and will write me smth to start our challenge )))
ki$$ you tenderly ))

————————————————————————————

All those dollar signs….I’ve got some bad news for her.

The first in a series of posts detailing random encounters in which strangers wronged me in some way.

The other day, I had to run some errands so I decided to call my friend and see if he wanted to get a cup of coffee. Stopping at a diner, I decided to order a decaf tea. My reasoning is as such: it was pretty late in the afternoon, so I didn’t want any caffeine. Reasonable, right? Now, I readily admit that a decaf tea is not the most manly drink on the planet. But was it really necessary for the waitress to serve in to me in a rainbow mug?

I just remembered this Richard story that made me laugh. So Richard has a lot of friends who are…let’s say, of equal caliber. At one point, one of them was having relationship problems and decided to enlist Richard to solve them. The plan was hatched: Richard was to PRETEND to break into their house- basically making some noises at the windows and stuff- and his friend would look like the heroic boyfriend when scaring the would-be burglar/attacker away, coaxing the girlfriend to not leave him. Richard, of course, would be financially compensated for his work.

Well, so the night arrives, the plan seems to be going without any problems…Richard showed up at the right house, at least. He chose to use a wrench (for whatever reason) to rustle up some noise to alert his friend that he’d need to react quickly. Likely not in a suitable state of mind for method acting, Richard I think sort of forgot about the PRETEND part of the scheme and proceeded to smash the giant floor-to-ceiling window in their kitchen before running back to his car. The boyfriend thwarted the attack, girlfriend freaked out a little, and they both made up apparently.

Justifiably, Richard felt that he had performed the job adequately enough, since the end result had been achieved. Well his buddy thought otherwise, since replacing the window would cost like five times as much as he had agreed to pay Richard, and thusly told Richard he wouldn’t be paid. Of course this aggression would not stand, so a night or two later Richard went back and smashed the other giant window across the room and messed up the guy’s car pretty well (I can’t remember if it involved smashing car windows or slicing up tires or what…something along those lines). And, I would assume, they never spoke again, because I never heard a mention of the story or friend again in the several other years we worked together.

In this series of posts, we will look at events that were either real or something I imagined - but I can’t remember which. Hopefully, someone will remember and set the record straight.

1. Did Dr. Dre have a video that concluded with an extended waltz section?

…is so killer. ACCUSED OF WIZARDRY!!

http://www.local6.com/news/16169506/detail.html

It has to be some god warrior who griped about this one. It would be pretty hilarious, though, if this substitute happened to have crazy long white hair, wore a giant wizard gown and cap, and carried around one of those wizard staffs…and when they busted him out on the trick, he was just like “OK, I know this looks bad, but it’s purely coincidence, it’s how I dress everyday!”.

So I delivered pizza for a lot of years, and delivering pizza brings you into contact with some people you would never otherwise meet- coworkers, customers, employers, food distributors, etc etc. In this series of posts, I will document interesting (to me!) stories that have come up over my time driving you your food. And for the record, I will say that I truly miss the delivery business. But I cannot justify it with gas prices being so out of control. There was a time where you could make GOOD money by driving around listening to Slayer cds.

OK, so first up is this guy Richard who I worked with at Mama Mia’s Pizzeria and Seafood. The establishment’s name will be addressed later, as it is sort of absurd, no doubt. But yeah, Richard is difficult to sum up in printed word- he was pretty much constantly high, stole motorcycles as a side job, had enough speakers, gauges, and dials in his car that it looked like a power plant’s control tower, fathered two children, robbed a gas station, and once punched a guy in his head and put him in a coma (which reportedly, he never came out of). He also had a knack for randomly choosing popular catchphrases and repeating them incessantly for weeks at a time. I can still vividly picture him exclaiming “Yo quiero Taco Bell!” and laughing with this weird monotone “aaaaaaahahaaaaaaaahh” that sort of sounded like a muscle car idling at a stop light. He had also been fired and rehired at Mama Mia’s easily ten times over the years. And it’s no joke, something about the guy was so likable, our boss couldn’t stand to see him gone for more than a couple months at a time.

I will tell you two particular stories about Richard for now. One night, a real slow night for deliveries, I returned to see Richard cleaning the inside of one of the coolers, where we kept all the dough and sauces we made every day. Except that he had climbed into the cooler and was cleaning the inside with the doors shut. At first I chalked it up to him being his usual self, stoned out of his mind, as I saw him kind of look up with a woozy, expressionless face. Didn’t look high, more sick. Then I realized he was scrubbing the insides of the cooler with open bottles of both bleach and that purple degreaser stuff that has all kinds of weird chemicals in it. Before allowing the poison to fully render him unconscious, I opened one of the sliding glass doors on the cooler to tell him that maybe this wasn’t a good idea and to let the fumes out a little, at which point he stated “I think I need to take some Tylenol…or get some of that white bitch, aaaaaaaaahaaahaha”. See, “white bitch” in this context was his slang word of choice for cocaine. Dude always had a contingency plan, I’ll grant him that much.

This other time, Richard and a bunch of other coworkers and friends were helping our boss move this gigantic hot tub that he bought from some old lady’s house to his own home. After spending a good 2 hours blowing it on miscalculating how to fit it in the back of a moving truck, we settled on piling it in the back of a pickup truck. I don’t even recall how we fit it on there, but that isn’t the point. So as we’re driving back to the house in my car, it starts to rain. Richard found a pack of gummy worms that I had on the passenger side floor, at which point he decides it will be funny to stick them to my car…bewilderingly, he had some rudimentary concept of chemistry that these gummy worms would in fact bond to my car with the rain water. And they did. So we’re driving around an old station wagon with gummy worms stuck to the windshield, rendering the wipers virtually useless in torrential rains. Whatever, that’s not really “crazy” or anything, but a funny little aside. So we get back to our boss’s house to unload the hot tub, which goes off now without much of a hitch. But before we leave, Richard finds one of those shock collars for dogs that are used with an electric fence…which of course our boss has around his yard for his dog, which for the purposes of the task at hand had been moved inside. For some reason, Richard decides to strap that bad boy around his bicep, and upon seeing this our boss immediately shoves him straight into the woods, where, you guessed it, the electric fence line had been placed. The noise omitted by the guy might best be described as faint hints of pain intertwined with the aforementioned laugh…textually represented by “AHaaaaaaahhhhAHHHaaaaaaahAHHHH”. And since it was mildly shocking him the entire time, he couldn’t get it together enough to take off the shock collar…and he didn’t have the wits about himself to stand up. So he just got shocked for the 20 seconds or so that those things last. To this day, that memory still makes me laugh out loud.
More to come, I’m sure…let me know if this is worth reading. There were a lot of funny observations, stories, and characters in my life over the last decade.

Hi Ross

OK, this is a total cop-out, half hearted attempt at new content. But I’m sick, I’m tired, and I’m bored. I have Charlie Wilson’s War from Netflix but I can’t bring myself to watch it even though The Graduate is probably in my top 5 movies. So instead of coming up with any original content for the blog, I’m going to set iTunes to “random” (actually called “Party Shuffle,” but there is no way I’m calling it that) and write about the songs that come up. Interesting, huh. Also its worth noting that I have a small tear in my left contact lens that makes everything in my left eye look like the time travel scene from 2001 when I look straight ahead.

1. Wilco, “Handshake Drugs” from A Ghost is Born.

Well, we’re off to a great start with one of my least favorite late-era Wilco songs. It’s arguably the weakest point of the album. Keep in mind this album contains a track with like 11 minutes of white noise that is supposed to represent one of Jeff Tweedy’s migraines.

2. The Kinks, “Powerman” from Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, Pt. 1

OK this is better. This is the 2nd to last great Kinks record. I can’t really think of anything else to say, but one time I saw a Kinks greatest hits album that only contained songs from the 80’s. Luckily, I have “Come Dancing” on a separate compilation so I wasn’t forced to purchase it.

3. R.E.M., “King of Comedy” from Monster.

People hate on this album all of the time, but its good. This is one of the highlights, I think. Maybe I just like the movie so much that it makes me like the song too.

4. Tom Waits, “Hoist That Rag” from Real Gone.

Oh man, this song rules. How good of a lyric is “God used me as a hammer, boys/to beat his weary drum today.” Real good, thats how good. I have an ongoing debate with my father as to whether or not Ross and I made it to Atlanta in 5 hours when we saw Tom Waits there. He doesn’t believe me.

5. The Dirtbombs, “Ode to a Black Man” from Ultraglide in Black.

Great title. But surprisingly, its not even the best song title in the band’s catalog. That honor goes to “I’m Through With White Girls,” which is on their next album.

6. Leonard Cohen, “So Long, Marianne” from Songs of Leonard Cohen.

What can I really say here? It’s Leonard Cohen and there is a woman’s name in the title so you know what you are getting here. At this point, I’m officially regretting this post. But I shall soldier on.

7. Roxy Music, “Virginia Plain” from Roxy Music.

One of my favorite songs ever. I always liked that he referenced Robert E. Lee in the lyrics. Also I like the phrase “midnight blue casino floors.” I’m not feeling too well. Eight more songs to go.

8. Sleater-Kinney, “The Fox” from The Woods.

This album is good but obnoxiously loud. I always forget if this band broke up or not. I think they did.

9. Yo La Tengo, “Nuclear War (Version 3, Long Version)” from Nuclear War.

Sun Ra cover. They didn’t play this when I saw them last year, and I was a little let down but they played the first and last songs from their last record, both of which clock in around 10 minutes so I guess they didn’t want to play that many long songs. That probably would have lost the crowd.

10. The Ramones, “Something to Believe In” from Animal Boy.

Oh man. Possibly my two least favorite Ramones songs - this and “Somebody Put Something in My Drink” - on the same album. An album that contains all time classic “My Brain is Hanging Upside Down.” How could one album produce such polar opposites? I don’t know, man.

11. Nirvana, “Big Cheese” from Bleach.

Up until now, I’m pretty sure I would have never listened to and/or thought about this song again.

12. The Clash, “Straight to Hell” from Combat Rock.

Is this the last great Clash song? I think so. That M.I.A. song thats everywhere samples this. I don’t know what else to write. I want to hear that Joe Strummer solo album that has the song from John From Cincinnati on it. I think I was the only person in the world who liked that show. It was good, for real. It was about God coming back as a retarded surfer.

13. Wire, “The Other Window” from 154.

Fairly terrifying song about a guy on a train who looks out the window and sees a horse stuck in a barbed wire fence. “The more it struggled/the more it was strangled.” Then the guy just looks out of another window instead. Man, I love Wire so much.

14. LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends” from Sound of Silver.

Fantastic song. I can’t state this strongly enough. This guy probably (as Ross says) wears a lot of denim but you can’t argue with this song. Some of you know me personally. How often do I express my emotions or have really strong opinions? Not too often.

15. Rage Against the Machine, “Testify” from The Battle of Los Angeles.

Some might say this brings the list to a shameful end. Well, F those people.