time passes and i accumulate more shit, little of any value. i sometimes secretly wish my home would be completly consumed by fire.

i wouldn't mind starting over, but i don't have any matches.

tired of the conventional easter traditions, we are starting our own.

yesterday i awoke with a small headache that developed into a humdinger. i was well into grump mode by 9 am. about mid day i tried to go outside and enjoy the weather , but the brightness of the sun was magnified to an intolerable level by my headache. back into the house to find a hat that might shade my eyes.

in the closet i found my seven year old green army surplus bucket hat. an all time favorite, that has been missing for 2 years.

i put it on. the headache completely vanished, my mood did a 180. all was right in the world. incredible to me what impact a simple hat (or super ball, or a pop tart, or a new sharpie pen) can have. it really is the simple things.

today upon the invitation of some friends we attended an easter function at their country club. our saturn sl1 had no one to talk to in the parking lot, a mudless land rover and freshly waxed lexus flanked her. The club was packed with people, but no personalities. i saw only one person straying from the color white. he was working the door. silicon and hair plugs seem to be the rage. i watched a woman with really big hair chew out a club employee for accidentally walking between her daughter and her camera . i saw many things there that are supposed to improve my quality of life.

i stood leaning against the wall wishing i had wore my seven year old green army suplus Easter bonnet.

just when i thought movabletype could not rock any harder, they blow out a stack of marshall amps with version 2.

gotta send em some more money!

upgraded tonight, fifteen minutes and a few issues with fetch, but i think it was user error.

1. if you could eat dinner with and "get to know" one famous person (living or dead), who would you choose?
marcel duchamp, but since he doesn't know who i am and i don't speak french we would probably just stare at eachother. the whole event would likely appear to be a dadaist performance piece.

2. has the death of a famous person ever had an effect on you? Who was it and how did you feel?
Burroughs and Ginsberg in the same year, the beat generation died with them.

3. if you could be a famous person for 24 hours, who would you choose?
bill gates, but not because i like him. i would use the 24 hours to liquify all of his assets, then in the last hour i would run through the streets naked (except for the backpack of money and some large swim fins for dramatic effect) throwing 1000 dollar bills at people.

4. Do people ever tell you that you look like someone famous? Who?
howdy doody, having red hair can suck.

5. Have you ever met anyone famous?
does emo phillips count? i stood at a urinal next to him. he was very tall.

friday five puts forth 5 questions each friday. you are encouraged to answer them in your blog. do it.

chew ice when looking at your monitor. it is easier than writing that stupid java script to make the browser window shimmy and shake.

two snipits of conversation i accidently heard yesterday.

on an airplane, two suits across the isle.
suit one, "that meeting was the highlight of my day"
suit two, "the highlight of my day was banging my wife!"

at target in the paper product isle, man and wife.
man, "this happens every time we come here"
wife responds by spinning around, face pinched and middle finger raised. "fuck you!"

people should whisper more.

occasionally i read the obituaries for fun, but it is never as much fun as i thought it might be. most people don't know when they will die and are not well prepared. the next of kin is burdened with trying to find a photo for the paper. the photo can't be just any photo, it needs to capture the essence and personality of the stiff. as the camera shutter clicks, very few people think, "that's the one for my obit".

to save my kin time and effort, i submit my obituary photo above. send me yours, perhaps i will create a site of premature obit photos.

it's a good thing i don’t believe in karma, it would be way creepy if i die later today. just in case i do... i didn't know anything about those things buried in my back yard.

fast food joints and small restaurants have become very impersonal. it is time they recognize me as a human being, not just an order number on a paper receipt.

i would like to see these places give their customers nicknames. names based on physical appearance, smell, disfiguring scars, hairstyles, etcetera. names like grunt monkey, spooky tooth, stench, crabby bitch, og the destoyer, and pookie. much easier to remember than a random number.

order up! jumbo burger for dumbo!

my first design related job was in a small print shop. 3 presses in the back and a few copiers in the front. the fax machine was the chief revenue generator. clientele consisted of people xeroxing 300 page manifestos for street corner distribution and unemployeds printing resumes, names centered across the top in all caps on marble print paper.

jimmy was a regular customer, what follows was my first encounter with him.

he was working at the self serve copier with his back to me. "ya ever had one of them salt water enemas?" his volume set to 10.

i tried to think of an answer that might derail a story that he was obviously anxious to tell. before i could answer, he spoke even louder.

"i have! a home kit deal. last week. twice! wicked" that was as far as the non sequitur went.

he was concerned with the quality of the copies. he explained that the copies contained evidence against cher that would soon ruin her career.

he told me he was recently stationed in germany serving in the u.s. army. cher was visiting to entertain the troops and he was assigned to keep her happy. jimmy claimed cher tied him to a chair naked and forced him to drink whiskey till he was sick. as he drank, she danced around him performing a striptease. once he passed out, cher told his commanding officer that jimmy was drunk and unable to perform his duties. these events that led to his discharge were documented in the collated and stapled documents spewing forth from the xerox.

actually, jimmy was probably the highlight of that job. i find crazy people highly entertaining.

note to self - when i finally quit or get laid off, burn all bridges. leave no relationship salvageable.

it was late morning when my dad arrived at the donut store. punishment for being late is a poor selection. one customer stood in front of him and a few behind. he noticed one behind him was fidgety. she was trying to see through my dad to see what donuts remained. when it was dad's turn, the counter lady asked what he would like. before he could answer, fidgety exploded "you can't have the last nutty, the last nutty donut is mine!" she was very serious and very angry.

wtf?

note to southern readers - the nutty donut is somewhat rare in the south, but plentiful in the north. it is a cake donut encrusted with little nutty bits. a pretty good donut, but rarely does it generate the fervor exhibited in miss fidgety.

my dad is not a fan of the nutty. probably a little too exotic for his tastes. he left the nutty for the nut.

when my dad told me of this event, it generated an hour-long conversation of what action he should have taken. next time we will be prepared for her. a few ideas follow.

order the nutty, lick it, put it on the counter and walk away.

order the nutty, tell her it to look for it on ebay later today.

order the nutty sans nuts thus rendering it a plain cake donut.

as everything goes digital, iconography becomes more difficult. if you asked people to describe the physical attributes of a phone 20 years ago, all answers would be very similar. today you would get a much broader spectrum of answers. 10 years from now there may be no consistent answer.

if we continue to use the old icons, my son will have to learn what a rotary phone looked like to understand the icon. thus, it is no longer an icon.

soon a phone will look like your mp3 player, which will look like your digital camera, which will look like your pda, which may greatly resemble your watch. what a potentially visually boring world. as a designer i find this depressing.

my t-shirt design made the semi-finals (1 of 129, yea, you shoulda seen how many entries) on foofighters.com. mine is number 94. there are some really good ones (and some really bad ones). vote for mine if you see fit, i will still love you if you don't. just a little less.

the odd thing is that i originally did this design for the design is kinky t-shirt competition. it lost. i was distraught. it was last minute second entry to the ff competition. i still think it works better as a dik shirt.

on my way to visit someone about something ultimately unimportant, i bounced a small colorful super ball purchased from a gum ball type machine. when i arrived at her cubical, she saw the ball in my hand and asked what it was.

"a superball!" i continued, "for 25 cents, the cost to fun ratio is..."

before i could finish she barked "zero?!"

what a joyless person. how does one become so joyless?

so, if april showers bring may flowers...

wtf will this damned march monsoon bring?

my mom's green raleigh bicycle had a child seat mounted on the back. she peddled, i watched everything pass by at 12 miles an hour. we once rode through a park and passed a small brick structure barely wider than the door attached to it. I asked my mom what was in the building. she told me that that was where they kept all the insects, and that i should never open the door.

thinking back, it must have been a tool shed. i believed what she told me for a long time.

a couple weeks ago giant fluffy white snowflakes gently drifted downward, delicately landing on the grass. a rare event in dallas. my son was very excited and woke me up to tell me about the snow. he asked if we could go outside to catch the flakes on our tongues. i told him those were the flesh eating snowflakes that devoured our cat.

i can't be the only one who has noticed this unfortunate store placement just off 75 in dallas.

recently overheard "honey, i really believe your mother would have preferred the corrugated over the mahogany."

i'm thinkin' boxes to go gets the casket store overflow. but who gets those customers that find boxes to go a little too hoity-toity? a few doors down i'm will soon open "burlap sacks and more".

soon i will post pictures of the time i sat on my couch in my underwear staring at the wall while everyone else on the planet was in austin attending sxsw learning, living and prancing about.

i am an angry and bitter man.

today i installed the magnolia 3000-E. that is how the sales guy referred to it, i would call it a toilet seat.

on the maiden voyage i was doing some thinking. it is these small pleasures in life that can not go un-noticed. for at least today my toilet seat is newer than bill gates seat. my seat is the cleanest in the world, cleaner than martha stewart's. my new seat has less milage than ed mcmahons. my seat smells better than bono's seat. considering the advances in technology, my toilet is more advanced than the one elvis died on.

There i sat on my throne, king for a day! then i realized the true king is the guy in line behind me at home depot. his seat is 5 minutes newer than mine. Oh well, i still enjoyed those five minutes.

today we attended a local church. i saw a young boy lovingly stroking his mothers back a few rows in front of us. when he removed his hand, it revealed a "hello my name is" sticker. he had written "im dume" on it. kids are great. and wise too.

after 35 years of life, my autograph collection is not very impressive.

1976. the sheik lived in my home town. i met him in his home. he showed me his snake. he played a bad guy and often wrestled my hero bobo brazil for Big Time Wrestling. Big Time Wrestling was a forerunner to the wrestling boom that would happen in the eighties and continues today. the sheik was the first bad guy wrestler that supposedly came from the middle east. many different sheiks have followed.

1978. sam vincent visited my middle school. i think he came by with the intention of convincing our students they should attend his summer basketball camp, but the principle said no. students surrounded him as he tried to get back into his car. he signed a few camp brochures before speeding away. i was one of the few that got one probably because i was tall. sam played at michigan state and later in the NBA.

1981. i never met pee wee, but my mother enlisted me in his fanclub as a gift. he sent me an 8x10 b&w photo signed "your pal, pee wee".

i have never understood the fascination with autographs. i am going to abandon this hobby.

it was a pain in the ass to get her down here. the vet in michigan gave me sedatives causing her to sleep under the driver’s seat. when she was not sleeping you could watch her fur fall off. stress induced.

she was not happy when the other woman (fiancée) moved in. the relocation pushed her over the edge.

the new apartment sucked, a sliding glass door opening to a cement slab surrounded by a 4 foot high wooden fence. no birds or squirrels to be seen.

i think the cable guy gave her the escape opportunity. it has been 8 years since i last saw her. although, i think i will see her soon.

i have been doing a little math. detroit is 1200 miles away. taking into consideration walking speed, head wind, sight seeing, and a few brief romantic encounters along the way, edwina probably arrived back in detroit 4 years ago. i imagine she probably hung around the old apartment awaiting my return for a few weeks. then i figure she probably began her four year journey home.

i expect her any minute.

i better put a food dish out incase she gets back while i am at work. i would hate for her to think we went back to Detroit.

is a site without links a site? i think not.

added a link page via the chain link icon to the left. design related links.

still debating linking blogs, seems sorta incestuous. not that incest is not fun.

last night i dreamt of the perfect bracket. a bracket that all others would be graded against.

my wife complains that my radical mood swings in march are unpredictable. au contraire mon frair.

a 13 beats 4 = euphoria
"local interest" coverage by cbs = frustration
leading the pool = arrogance
first wrong bracket pick = vulnerable
mathematical elimination from pool = withdrawn
MSU loss = devastation, bitterness
MSU wins tourney = giddy, hyper, drunk
Duke wins tourney = suicidal
Dick Vitale suffers heart attack = amusement

amazing how something so inconsequential (in the grand scheme of things) will dictate my mood for an entire month.

if you like your bluegrass evil, let us experience the sights and sounds of slr at the gypsy tea room thursday!

if 6 months seems like yesterday, 20 years will seem like a couple weeks ago. some memories have no expiration date.

while on the topic of underwear, ... my primary motivation for changing it on a daily basis is the fear i will be in an accident, carted off the hospital where doctors and nurses will gather around me to make fun of my dirty underwear. all as I lie unconscious.

i would like to thank my mother for planting that fear. simply telling me it was for sanitary reasons would have convinced me to change at least every other day.

between the shower and my underwear drawer, i glanced in the mirror. I put my underwear on. i went back in front of the mirror to brush my teeth.

realization.

i look better naked than i do wearing underwear. not that i look good either way, just better naked.

if you ever see me in my underwear, please envision me naked.

perhaps if i stop wearing underwear under my clothes, it will enhance my overall appearance.

they called his name and he climbed to the highest plateau of the stand. the medal placed around his neck hung from a red, white, and blue stripped ribbon. he raised his arms so high his belly button was visible.

other medal recipients smiled and shared glances with friends and family in the crowd, not this one. he stood stone faced, seemingly staring beyond the crowd. applause rose from the crowd and then faded.

he stood like a statue. arms raised. stone faced. eyes not moving. an awkward silence ensued.

he continued to stand. the medal giver told him he could climb down now.
he continued to stand unaffected by his surroundings. more time passed. it became obvious physical intervention would be necessary. the medal giver put a hand just below each arm pit. he didn't protest, just maintained his pose with arms raised. she lifted him off the podium.

when his feet touched ground, he broke from his pose and sprinted to me. he clutched my leg and pressed his head into my thigh. later i finally convinced him to remove the medal when we put on the bat man pajamas.

the lady in front of me ordered a grilled cheese on white. i ordered a grilled ham and cheese on wheat. minutes later the cook handed us Styrofoam boxes. we went our separate ways. i stopped to talk with tony near the cash registers. grilled cheese on white walks up, interrupts to say "you have my white, i have your wheat. i could scrape your ham off my white and put it on your wheat.". as she spoke, she was making a scraping motion with her pointer finger across her open palm. she needed a manicure. the melted cheese and ham shavings did not seem as modular as her solution implied.

she seemed angry, i did not know how to respond. her stare made me feel guilty about the white bread in my box. the guilt did not override my fear of her troll fingers performing a hamectomy on my sandwich. i could tell tony found this very amusing. he held back laughter.

"er,... i think i will just stick with what i got" her pinched face and furrowed brow told me she was disappointed in my decision. i briefly thought she might punch me, but she just turned and walked away.

i didn't really enjoy my lunch, it tasted like some one else's sandwich.

i am running out of people to bitch to about my job. morale is so low co-workers have lost the will to bitch. my friends have been laid off so they don't want to hear about it. my parents fall asleep on the phone.

i hated it when someone would bitch about their job and end the rant with "well at least i'm employeed, it's a check". i always felt that if it came to that, there were other jobs to be had. no one should fell that way. now i find myself ending my work related rants with the same phrase.

this economy sucks.

"There's no earthly way of knowing, Which direction we are going. There's no knowing where we're rowing, Or which way the river's flowing. Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hurricane a-blowing? Not a speck of light is showing, So the danger must be growing. Are the fires of hell a-glowing? Is the grisly reaper mowing? Yes, the danger must be growing, 'Cause the rowers keep on rowing, And they're certainly not showing, Any signs that they are slowing! "

said willy wonka

sometimes when i hear Bush talk about the economy, i just want to give him a big "whatever dude".

been a long time since i defraged (as sung to the Led Zepplin tune) so i let Dr. Norton do his thing overnight. Norton creates beautiful before and after graphical depictions of your hard drive. Every byte is given a color code.

my before image resembled a Jackson Pollock, my after is a Mondrian. ahhhhhhh.

i wonder if Norton really does anything or just makes me feel like it did something. no matter, the placebo affect is so great i don't care.