Here's more evidence to prove that people are crazy and that violence is evidently preferable to sex:
"While San Andreas is already full of violent behavior and sexual themes, the pornographic sex scenes push it over the edge," said the group's founder, David Walsh.
This is from an article about the supposedly hidden sex scene in "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas."
I can just picture the reaction of a concerned parent: "Oh heavens! Little Johnny might learn that people have sex if he plays this game in which you run around stealing cars, killing people, and beating up hookers."
I guess if Justin Timberlake had smacked Janet Jackson around instead of exposing her breast there would have been a few complaints, but not the uproar that resulted from the briefly exposed breast.
Years ago, in the comic "Sachs & Violens," Peter David made a comment about how violence seems to be more palatable to people than sex.
He said something along the lines of "If one guy blows another guy away with a gun, that's fine. If he blows him away in a different fashion, that's another matter entirely."
(I probably totally misquoted that, but hey, it's been more than ten years since I read it)
I would say that definitely holds true, and apparently a kill is better than a kiss...
Ultimately, I just find myself amazed by the ability that people have to worry about useless shit like this.
Why not save your outrage for something that's actually happening in the real world? Just a thought...
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Thursday, July 07, 2005
Random Encounters
This morning when I stopped at the gas station to get some water on my walk, there was what looked to be a hot young mother getting out of an SUV, though I couldn’t say for certain, as I was unable to see her face. What I could see, though, looked very nice indeed.
Once inside and paying for my water I got a good look at her and she was, in fact, extremely cute.
Further, I noticed that her ring finger was completely unadorned, though she was driving an SUV and was there with a kid, so it could be that she was in a relationship that was exclusive but not legally binding.
Or her ring could be at the jewelers being resized, or any other number of possibilities that would ultimately make her utterly inaccessible to me.
She did appear to be a bit young to have a kid the age of the boy with her, so maybe she was just the hired help for some wealthy family. Or maybe she just got knocked up the very second she got in whatever relationship she may or may not have been in. Maybe her husband gave her a kid in lieu of a ring.
Whatever the case, despite how cute she was, all considerations were pretty much irrelevant given that circumstances were hardly conducive to me trying to start up a conversation with her as I stood there sweaty and unwashed with earphones jammed in my ears while she was busy attending to the kid that was either hers, her employer’s, or some random kid she’d grabbed from alongside the road on her way to the gas station.
Some of you may dispute that, claiming that, no matter what the circumstances, I need to take every shot I can. Perhaps, but I honestly don’t see an attractive woman in a gas station at 9:30 in the morning with a kid (who may or may not be hers) responding very well to some random, sweaty, unwashed guy coming up to her and laying on what he laughingly refers to as “charm.”
Sure, there’s an outside chance (similar to the chances of lead spontaneously turning into gold) that she would admire my “moxie” or something, but more than likely she would be irritated and find the whole thing desperate and pathetic.
The “shoot at everything that moves” approach may have some merit, but I’ve never actually seen it pay off in any significant way for anyone.
In fact, I once saw this documentary in which a filmmaker stood on a street corner in NYC and just asked out every woman that walked past. He literally asked out hundreds of women, virtually all of whom (some more politely than others) turned him down.
“Aha!” you might be heard to exclaim, as you focus on that “virtually.” Clearly at least one person said yes, right? And there’s a chance that the one person might be “the one,” which would, presumably, make the hours of humiliating rejection he’d spent on that corner all worthwhile.
If that is what you’re thinking, it needs to be mentioned that the cameraman filming the whole thing conducted “exit polls” of some of the ladies as they walked past, asking them why they said yes or no. The women (I believe there were two) who’d said yes had done so just for the sheer hell of it and explicitly stated that, while they did find the whole thing sort of charming, they couldn’t really see themselves going on a romantic date with the poor schlub and had no intention of seriously pursuing a romance with him. They just thought he was kind of a charming dork, not boyfriend material.
Basically the chicks who said yes did so either as sort of a joke, or because they could see themselves being platonic friends with him.
That makes the effort he put forth still seem humiliating and pointless. Oh sure, everyone can use more friends, I suppose, but the guy wasn’t really looking for new friends, was he? Maybe in the long run being friends with these ladies, though honestly I don’t believe even that was too likely to happen, could pay off (maybe they have desperate, single friends), but it did nothing to solve his more immediate problem.
So I don’t really see the “shotgun” method as being a viable approach for anyone, and I especially don’t see it working for me.
That raises the question, then, of what other options there are.
Basically, as I see it, there are three routes to romance: The Organic, The Synthetic, and The Random Encounter.
The Organic method is when romance occurs naturally as a part of your everyday life. You make a connection with a co-worker, or a fellow student, or an existing friendship takes a turn away from the platonic. The Organic occurs gradually over time, like a plant growing and finally blossoming.
The Synthetic method involves using artificial means from outside your normal routine, such as dating services, personal ads, or dating shows. While it can take time for this method to pay off, it’s an artificial process, like synthesizing long-chain polymers to create something similar to a substance that would occur in nature, or to create something entirely new.
The Random Encounter is the whole “finding it when you’re not looking for it” method. It relies entirely on chance. For example, you might find yourself connecting with the person sitting next to you on a plane, or waiting in line to use a porta-potty, or whatever. It’s outside of your normal routine, but it’s not premeditated or expected. It’s just random.
There’s considerable crossover among the three. For example, being set up on a blind date with someone by a mutual friend can be both Organic and Synthetic, and a Random Encounter can happen in your every day life. There are countless permutations of human interaction that take on many aspects of the three methods, in countless different ways.
However, given that I work with three men and a married grandmother, the people I socialize with have no single friends they could set me up with, and I’m too cheap to pay for any sort of dating service, that pretty much leaves only the third option available to me.
Of course, the problem with the Random Encounter is exactly that: it’s random. It can’t be predicted or counted on.
You can’t walk out the door thinking “Today I’m going to have a random encounter” and expect to actually have one.
The other problem for me is that I’m rarely in situations that are conducive to Random Encounters, and even when I am, they just don’t happen.
For example, on Monday I was in DC, surrounded by half a million people. How many Random Encounters did I have? Well, despite the speculation that arose when I was spending most of my evening standing in line to use a porta-potty, the answer is, predictably, zero.
(Random Encounters, despite what I said earlier, tend to be predictable when it comes to me. Basically, you just know that they’re not going to happen.)
On the subject of my speculative hook-up in DC, though, I have to ask this of my friends: do you honestly think that if I were hooking up with someone I wouldn’t call you and let you know? Hell, I’d probably issue a press release, or an Amber Alert or something. Honestly, at this point I think Homeland Security actually does have a “Jon is getting lucky” alert that would be broadcast on the Emergency Broadcast System along with instructions on how to deal with this extraordinarily unusual circumstance and a listing of the appropriate evacuation routes. I believe it's known as a “We Don’t Have A Color For This” Alert...
My A/C has been fixed at last. The maintenance guy came in, said, “It will definitely get fixed today,” then went to work, saying that they now knew what the problem was (though he didn’t elucidate on that point other than to say that he’d known all along that it would be “something stupid”), and a few minutes later he was gone, taking the window unit with him, and my central air was blowing coolness through the various vents located throughout the apartment.
As I’ve mentioned before, I seldom actually use my A/C, as it doesn’t really work that well, and I like the fact that most of the time my electric bill is fairly low, which using my A/C would disrupt.
But, since it was so much trouble to get it working again, I figure I’ll try it out for a little while.
I had been making a lot of use of the window unit, as that worked wonders for cooling down my bedroom, though for reasons that I wouldn’t be likely to be able to articulate, its operation seemed to cause me some amount of anxiety while I was sleeping.
At least I’m assuming it was the source of the anxiety, as the anxiety appeared when the window unit did, and my gut-reaction to the odd, anxious feelings was to attribute them to the window unit.
Why? I really have no idea, nor can I really define the anxiety. Essentially I just found myself having dreams that seemed to be filled with anxiety of some kind, though, again, I can’t really define it. While the dreams themselves tended to be odd, they weren’t especially unusual or disturbing. No nightmarish imagery or anything like that, just more or less standard fare…with the exception that in the dreams I seemed to be caught in the throes of some kind of vague anxiety that had no discernible source.
In any case, here’s hoping that tonight’s dreams, sans window A/C unit, will be free of any anxiety...
Whenever I refer to my job, and, indeed, even to the company I work for, I tend to be pretty vague.
That’s a deliberate choice, as there are sort of nebulous rules defining just how open we can be about our work lives. For example, it’s pretty much public knowledge around these parts that the facility I work at belongs to my employer, but in any sort of public information about the operations of the facility it is referred to as an “undisclosed location.”
Of course, most Threshold readers know what company I work for, particularly since many of them actually work there with me.
In any case, over the weekend another department had a big event that required staffing beyond what the department has available, and so they turned to other departments for volunteers.
Many people from the weekday shifts in my department volunteered in order to receive some overtime, but lots of other people, including salaried employees, turned up for it as well.
On Saturday morning before work I had an encounter with one of those volunteers when I went out to the parking lot to throw my gym bag in my car and grab my lunch bag. She asked me to show her how to get to where she needed to be.
Actually, she asked me to show her to where I work, but I knew that she meant the newly-constructed area that’s pretty much adjacent to where I work, and which has a similar name to where I work (the acronym is off by one letter).
In any case, she wasn’t especially cute, but she was fairly attractive.
As it was really early in the morning I wasn’t exactly at my sharpest, so I failed to do a ring check, and I doubt that I mustered up much in the way of what I laughingly refer to as charm (same stuff I failed to unleash on the cute chick at the gas station this morning).
As we neared her destination, she said something like, “Hey, you’ve got the black chucks. Good job! Mine are gray.” She admitted that last part as if she were greatly ashamed of her lameness.
Like I said, it was really early in the morning, so, having no idea what she was talking about, I responded with a pithy “Ah,” while I performed a mental inventory and tried to determine what I had on or about my person that was black.
Once upon a time it would have been extremely difficult to do this, as I tended to dress all in black (I’m slightly more colorful these days). On this particular day, though, the only black thing I was wearing was a T-shirt, which didn’t seem to be a likely candidate for chuck-hood.
By the time I realized that my Converse All Stars are also black, and are specifically known as “Chuck Taylor Classic All Stars,” and that, in fact, she had been wearing Converse All Stars as well, it was several minutes after we’d parted company.
That’s the other problem with Random Encounters for me: when they do occur, they usually do so when I’m at my dumbest or otherwise unable to respond to them properly…
The past few days went by pretty quickly. It seemed as though once Tuesday arrived my weekend was over. Beyond some cooking, I really didn’t accomplish much this week.
Next week I’ll be in an XML class at headquarters on Wednesday and Thursday.
Monday I finally have a dentist appointment, so I’ll be finding out how much my new teeth are going to cost me.
Tuesday, just because he asked, not because I actually want to see it, I’ll be going to “Fantastic Four” with Scott.
So it’ll be a pretty full week, no doubt filled with all sorts of Random Encounters…which I’ll totally screw up.
In any case, I hope you all have a good weekend, and I’ll met you back here next week.
Once inside and paying for my water I got a good look at her and she was, in fact, extremely cute.
Further, I noticed that her ring finger was completely unadorned, though she was driving an SUV and was there with a kid, so it could be that she was in a relationship that was exclusive but not legally binding.
Or her ring could be at the jewelers being resized, or any other number of possibilities that would ultimately make her utterly inaccessible to me.
She did appear to be a bit young to have a kid the age of the boy with her, so maybe she was just the hired help for some wealthy family. Or maybe she just got knocked up the very second she got in whatever relationship she may or may not have been in. Maybe her husband gave her a kid in lieu of a ring.
Whatever the case, despite how cute she was, all considerations were pretty much irrelevant given that circumstances were hardly conducive to me trying to start up a conversation with her as I stood there sweaty and unwashed with earphones jammed in my ears while she was busy attending to the kid that was either hers, her employer’s, or some random kid she’d grabbed from alongside the road on her way to the gas station.
Some of you may dispute that, claiming that, no matter what the circumstances, I need to take every shot I can. Perhaps, but I honestly don’t see an attractive woman in a gas station at 9:30 in the morning with a kid (who may or may not be hers) responding very well to some random, sweaty, unwashed guy coming up to her and laying on what he laughingly refers to as “charm.”
Sure, there’s an outside chance (similar to the chances of lead spontaneously turning into gold) that she would admire my “moxie” or something, but more than likely she would be irritated and find the whole thing desperate and pathetic.
The “shoot at everything that moves” approach may have some merit, but I’ve never actually seen it pay off in any significant way for anyone.
In fact, I once saw this documentary in which a filmmaker stood on a street corner in NYC and just asked out every woman that walked past. He literally asked out hundreds of women, virtually all of whom (some more politely than others) turned him down.
“Aha!” you might be heard to exclaim, as you focus on that “virtually.” Clearly at least one person said yes, right? And there’s a chance that the one person might be “the one,” which would, presumably, make the hours of humiliating rejection he’d spent on that corner all worthwhile.
If that is what you’re thinking, it needs to be mentioned that the cameraman filming the whole thing conducted “exit polls” of some of the ladies as they walked past, asking them why they said yes or no. The women (I believe there were two) who’d said yes had done so just for the sheer hell of it and explicitly stated that, while they did find the whole thing sort of charming, they couldn’t really see themselves going on a romantic date with the poor schlub and had no intention of seriously pursuing a romance with him. They just thought he was kind of a charming dork, not boyfriend material.
Basically the chicks who said yes did so either as sort of a joke, or because they could see themselves being platonic friends with him.
That makes the effort he put forth still seem humiliating and pointless. Oh sure, everyone can use more friends, I suppose, but the guy wasn’t really looking for new friends, was he? Maybe in the long run being friends with these ladies, though honestly I don’t believe even that was too likely to happen, could pay off (maybe they have desperate, single friends), but it did nothing to solve his more immediate problem.
So I don’t really see the “shotgun” method as being a viable approach for anyone, and I especially don’t see it working for me.
That raises the question, then, of what other options there are.
Basically, as I see it, there are three routes to romance: The Organic, The Synthetic, and The Random Encounter.
The Organic method is when romance occurs naturally as a part of your everyday life. You make a connection with a co-worker, or a fellow student, or an existing friendship takes a turn away from the platonic. The Organic occurs gradually over time, like a plant growing and finally blossoming.
The Synthetic method involves using artificial means from outside your normal routine, such as dating services, personal ads, or dating shows. While it can take time for this method to pay off, it’s an artificial process, like synthesizing long-chain polymers to create something similar to a substance that would occur in nature, or to create something entirely new.
The Random Encounter is the whole “finding it when you’re not looking for it” method. It relies entirely on chance. For example, you might find yourself connecting with the person sitting next to you on a plane, or waiting in line to use a porta-potty, or whatever. It’s outside of your normal routine, but it’s not premeditated or expected. It’s just random.
There’s considerable crossover among the three. For example, being set up on a blind date with someone by a mutual friend can be both Organic and Synthetic, and a Random Encounter can happen in your every day life. There are countless permutations of human interaction that take on many aspects of the three methods, in countless different ways.
However, given that I work with three men and a married grandmother, the people I socialize with have no single friends they could set me up with, and I’m too cheap to pay for any sort of dating service, that pretty much leaves only the third option available to me.
Of course, the problem with the Random Encounter is exactly that: it’s random. It can’t be predicted or counted on.
You can’t walk out the door thinking “Today I’m going to have a random encounter” and expect to actually have one.
The other problem for me is that I’m rarely in situations that are conducive to Random Encounters, and even when I am, they just don’t happen.
For example, on Monday I was in DC, surrounded by half a million people. How many Random Encounters did I have? Well, despite the speculation that arose when I was spending most of my evening standing in line to use a porta-potty, the answer is, predictably, zero.
(Random Encounters, despite what I said earlier, tend to be predictable when it comes to me. Basically, you just know that they’re not going to happen.)
On the subject of my speculative hook-up in DC, though, I have to ask this of my friends: do you honestly think that if I were hooking up with someone I wouldn’t call you and let you know? Hell, I’d probably issue a press release, or an Amber Alert or something. Honestly, at this point I think Homeland Security actually does have a “Jon is getting lucky” alert that would be broadcast on the Emergency Broadcast System along with instructions on how to deal with this extraordinarily unusual circumstance and a listing of the appropriate evacuation routes. I believe it's known as a “We Don’t Have A Color For This” Alert...
My A/C has been fixed at last. The maintenance guy came in, said, “It will definitely get fixed today,” then went to work, saying that they now knew what the problem was (though he didn’t elucidate on that point other than to say that he’d known all along that it would be “something stupid”), and a few minutes later he was gone, taking the window unit with him, and my central air was blowing coolness through the various vents located throughout the apartment.
As I’ve mentioned before, I seldom actually use my A/C, as it doesn’t really work that well, and I like the fact that most of the time my electric bill is fairly low, which using my A/C would disrupt.
But, since it was so much trouble to get it working again, I figure I’ll try it out for a little while.
I had been making a lot of use of the window unit, as that worked wonders for cooling down my bedroom, though for reasons that I wouldn’t be likely to be able to articulate, its operation seemed to cause me some amount of anxiety while I was sleeping.
At least I’m assuming it was the source of the anxiety, as the anxiety appeared when the window unit did, and my gut-reaction to the odd, anxious feelings was to attribute them to the window unit.
Why? I really have no idea, nor can I really define the anxiety. Essentially I just found myself having dreams that seemed to be filled with anxiety of some kind, though, again, I can’t really define it. While the dreams themselves tended to be odd, they weren’t especially unusual or disturbing. No nightmarish imagery or anything like that, just more or less standard fare…with the exception that in the dreams I seemed to be caught in the throes of some kind of vague anxiety that had no discernible source.
In any case, here’s hoping that tonight’s dreams, sans window A/C unit, will be free of any anxiety...
Whenever I refer to my job, and, indeed, even to the company I work for, I tend to be pretty vague.
That’s a deliberate choice, as there are sort of nebulous rules defining just how open we can be about our work lives. For example, it’s pretty much public knowledge around these parts that the facility I work at belongs to my employer, but in any sort of public information about the operations of the facility it is referred to as an “undisclosed location.”
Of course, most Threshold readers know what company I work for, particularly since many of them actually work there with me.
In any case, over the weekend another department had a big event that required staffing beyond what the department has available, and so they turned to other departments for volunteers.
Many people from the weekday shifts in my department volunteered in order to receive some overtime, but lots of other people, including salaried employees, turned up for it as well.
On Saturday morning before work I had an encounter with one of those volunteers when I went out to the parking lot to throw my gym bag in my car and grab my lunch bag. She asked me to show her how to get to where she needed to be.
Actually, she asked me to show her to where I work, but I knew that she meant the newly-constructed area that’s pretty much adjacent to where I work, and which has a similar name to where I work (the acronym is off by one letter).
In any case, she wasn’t especially cute, but she was fairly attractive.
As it was really early in the morning I wasn’t exactly at my sharpest, so I failed to do a ring check, and I doubt that I mustered up much in the way of what I laughingly refer to as charm (same stuff I failed to unleash on the cute chick at the gas station this morning).
As we neared her destination, she said something like, “Hey, you’ve got the black chucks. Good job! Mine are gray.” She admitted that last part as if she were greatly ashamed of her lameness.
Like I said, it was really early in the morning, so, having no idea what she was talking about, I responded with a pithy “Ah,” while I performed a mental inventory and tried to determine what I had on or about my person that was black.
Once upon a time it would have been extremely difficult to do this, as I tended to dress all in black (I’m slightly more colorful these days). On this particular day, though, the only black thing I was wearing was a T-shirt, which didn’t seem to be a likely candidate for chuck-hood.
By the time I realized that my Converse All Stars are also black, and are specifically known as “Chuck Taylor Classic All Stars,” and that, in fact, she had been wearing Converse All Stars as well, it was several minutes after we’d parted company.
That’s the other problem with Random Encounters for me: when they do occur, they usually do so when I’m at my dumbest or otherwise unable to respond to them properly…
The past few days went by pretty quickly. It seemed as though once Tuesday arrived my weekend was over. Beyond some cooking, I really didn’t accomplish much this week.
Next week I’ll be in an XML class at headquarters on Wednesday and Thursday.
Monday I finally have a dentist appointment, so I’ll be finding out how much my new teeth are going to cost me.
Tuesday, just because he asked, not because I actually want to see it, I’ll be going to “Fantastic Four” with Scott.
So it’ll be a pretty full week, no doubt filled with all sorts of Random Encounters…which I’ll totally screw up.
In any case, I hope you all have a good weekend, and I’ll met you back here next week.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
This Just In: New Evidence Shows That People Suck
With a sort of horrified fascination I’ve spent much of the day reading the blog of Joseph Duncan, the man arrested in an Idaho Denny’s with missing girl Shasta Groene on Saturday, July 2.
It’s a pretty disturbing look into his mind…and into the minds of the members of the population leaving comments on the blog as if they think he’s going to be able to check them while he’s in jail.
I find that the worst example of humanity comes not in the form of Duncan himself, though he is pretty much at the bottom of the barrel, but in the form of opportunistic bastards who, knowing that the blog is getting a lot of traffic, are posting fucking ads in the fucking comments.
Those people are actually feeding on the slime trail that Duncan left down at the bottom.
Then there are the others who see this as the perfect opportunity to share their anti-Semitic views with the rest of the world.
And those are among the nicer comments.
So yeah, the blog serves as an all-around example of just what an enormous waste of space the greater mass of humanity represents.
As for Duncan itself, what’s most disturbing about his entries is how his paranoia and delusions of persecution were clearly mounting over time, right up the point when they boiled over in the form of him giving in to his “demons” just days before Shasta’s mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and her older brother were found murdered, and she and her brother Dylan went missing.
So all in all it wasn’t a fun way to spend the day, and yet it’s been difficult to look away.
But now I will, and I’ll turn to my blog, which hopefully will never be looked back on by people who are saying, “Well, if you read the entry on July 6th, you can see that his plan was beginning to form” and posting ads for their Web sites.
After all, as messed up as I may be, I’m not anywhere near being that messed up, and we all know I’m altogether too lazy to go out and do anything psychotic.
Seriously, though, any anti-social urges I have lead me to avoid people, not go out and hurt them.
Apart from reading Duncan’s lame whining about his lack of privacy and how he’s a poor victim of police harassment and the comments that were, in their own way, much more disturbing than his entries, I didn’t do too much.
I did pick up Kathleen so we could have lunch, though, which made it occur to me that it’s kind of funny that my social life, beyond the things I do with Scott and his family, consists primarily of having the occasional lunch with a married woman.
What makes that really pathetic is the fact that there’s not even anything sordid going on...
When I was on my way out for an afternoon walk last Thursday I stopped at the office to drop off my rent check. While I was there I mentioned that my A/C was broken to the (cute-ish, but oddly monochromatic, and now, apparently, either engaged or married, based on the ring I saw) Property Manager, who asked me which apartment I live in and told me to “stay right there” while she keyed in the info for the maintenance people. When she told me to stay put I said, “No way; I’m making a break for it,” and pantomimed running away. It made the other girl in the office laugh, but the Property Manager didn’t seem to notice.
In any case, when I came home Friday night I found a note from maintenance in my door indicating that they’d been in to work on the A/C while I was at work.
I came inside, noted that my living room window was closed, and that it was a bit cooler, though my A/C didn’t seem to be running.
When I got to my bedroom I found that the slight coolness was coming from a window unit that had been put in the side window.
So I read the note which stated that the transformer needed to be replaced (which was what happened last year), and that, thanks to the holiday, it couldn’t be replaced until Tuesday.
So on Tuesday morning when I got back from my walk all sweaty and nasty, the guy was in working on my A/C.
This meant that I couldn’t take a shower, as it would have felt kind of weird with him in the apartment, especially since he was working in the hallway next to the bathroom.
After a while he left to check on something, so I squeezed in a shower, then headed to the store to do some grocery shopping.
I got home and he wasn’t back yet.
Eventually he did return, though, and said that he couldn’t figure out the problem, so he was going to have his supervisor check it out. Unfortunately, his supervisor had taken the day off, but he assured me I’d be the first job of the day today.
So when I got up this morning I didn’t take a walk, as I knew that I’d be leaving to meet Kathleen, so I made sure to get in a shower right away before the maintenance people came in.
They hadn’t arrived by the time I left, and while I was eating lunch I heard my phone’s indication that I’d gotten a voicemail (though I never heard the phone actually ring). It was from someone on the office informing me (big surprise) that the maintenance people wouldn’t be able to make it in this morning.
By the time I got home that afternoon, they still hadn’t arrived. Once they did, though, they were here for several hours, and were ultimately unable to figure out what the problem actually, and so they informed me that a “specialist” will be in tomorrow to figure it out.
The other thing I did today was to try cooking some Indian food. I found a recipe for the “Butter Chicken” I’d had when I ate at the Indian place with Brian and Kathleen a couple of weeks ago, so I decided to give that a shot.
(In fact, I declined an invitation from Kathleen to see “Bewitched” with her and Brian because they were going when I was planning to work on the chicken. Also, though I like Will Ferrell, I don’t have much interest in seeing the movie.)
The recipe actually called for using rotisserie chicken with the sauce, but the authentic version called for Tandoori Chicken, so I found a recipe for that as well.
I actually started on the Tandoori on Tuesday night by making the sauce and putting the chicken marinating in the fridge overnight.
So today I cooked the chicken, then put it together with the butter sauce (which has more tomatoes in it than butter, though butter is the base for it).
It was pretty tasty, though quite a bit spicier than the “medium hard,” as they called it at the restaurant, version I’d had, thanks to the use of lots of spices in the Tandoori, and then again in the butter sauce. Damn that was spicy!
But tasty. The chicken itself wasn’t quite as tender as I might have liked, but wasn’t too bad.
I did learn, though, that just because I see Rachael Ray do something it doesn’t mean that I should try it. When seeding jalapenos, I did so with my fingers, just as I’ve seen her do many times. That turned out to be pretty painful, especially when some of the oils got under my thumbnail.
There was more I was going to say, but it’s fairly late and this entry is already pretty long, so I guess that will do it for now.
It’s a pretty disturbing look into his mind…and into the minds of the members of the population leaving comments on the blog as if they think he’s going to be able to check them while he’s in jail.
I find that the worst example of humanity comes not in the form of Duncan himself, though he is pretty much at the bottom of the barrel, but in the form of opportunistic bastards who, knowing that the blog is getting a lot of traffic, are posting fucking ads in the fucking comments.
Those people are actually feeding on the slime trail that Duncan left down at the bottom.
Then there are the others who see this as the perfect opportunity to share their anti-Semitic views with the rest of the world.
And those are among the nicer comments.
So yeah, the blog serves as an all-around example of just what an enormous waste of space the greater mass of humanity represents.
As for Duncan itself, what’s most disturbing about his entries is how his paranoia and delusions of persecution were clearly mounting over time, right up the point when they boiled over in the form of him giving in to his “demons” just days before Shasta’s mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and her older brother were found murdered, and she and her brother Dylan went missing.
So all in all it wasn’t a fun way to spend the day, and yet it’s been difficult to look away.
But now I will, and I’ll turn to my blog, which hopefully will never be looked back on by people who are saying, “Well, if you read the entry on July 6th, you can see that his plan was beginning to form” and posting ads for their Web sites.
After all, as messed up as I may be, I’m not anywhere near being that messed up, and we all know I’m altogether too lazy to go out and do anything psychotic.
Seriously, though, any anti-social urges I have lead me to avoid people, not go out and hurt them.
Apart from reading Duncan’s lame whining about his lack of privacy and how he’s a poor victim of police harassment and the comments that were, in their own way, much more disturbing than his entries, I didn’t do too much.
I did pick up Kathleen so we could have lunch, though, which made it occur to me that it’s kind of funny that my social life, beyond the things I do with Scott and his family, consists primarily of having the occasional lunch with a married woman.
What makes that really pathetic is the fact that there’s not even anything sordid going on...
When I was on my way out for an afternoon walk last Thursday I stopped at the office to drop off my rent check. While I was there I mentioned that my A/C was broken to the (cute-ish, but oddly monochromatic, and now, apparently, either engaged or married, based on the ring I saw) Property Manager, who asked me which apartment I live in and told me to “stay right there” while she keyed in the info for the maintenance people. When she told me to stay put I said, “No way; I’m making a break for it,” and pantomimed running away. It made the other girl in the office laugh, but the Property Manager didn’t seem to notice.
In any case, when I came home Friday night I found a note from maintenance in my door indicating that they’d been in to work on the A/C while I was at work.
I came inside, noted that my living room window was closed, and that it was a bit cooler, though my A/C didn’t seem to be running.
When I got to my bedroom I found that the slight coolness was coming from a window unit that had been put in the side window.
So I read the note which stated that the transformer needed to be replaced (which was what happened last year), and that, thanks to the holiday, it couldn’t be replaced until Tuesday.
So on Tuesday morning when I got back from my walk all sweaty and nasty, the guy was in working on my A/C.
This meant that I couldn’t take a shower, as it would have felt kind of weird with him in the apartment, especially since he was working in the hallway next to the bathroom.
After a while he left to check on something, so I squeezed in a shower, then headed to the store to do some grocery shopping.
I got home and he wasn’t back yet.
Eventually he did return, though, and said that he couldn’t figure out the problem, so he was going to have his supervisor check it out. Unfortunately, his supervisor had taken the day off, but he assured me I’d be the first job of the day today.
So when I got up this morning I didn’t take a walk, as I knew that I’d be leaving to meet Kathleen, so I made sure to get in a shower right away before the maintenance people came in.
They hadn’t arrived by the time I left, and while I was eating lunch I heard my phone’s indication that I’d gotten a voicemail (though I never heard the phone actually ring). It was from someone on the office informing me (big surprise) that the maintenance people wouldn’t be able to make it in this morning.
By the time I got home that afternoon, they still hadn’t arrived. Once they did, though, they were here for several hours, and were ultimately unable to figure out what the problem actually, and so they informed me that a “specialist” will be in tomorrow to figure it out.
The other thing I did today was to try cooking some Indian food. I found a recipe for the “Butter Chicken” I’d had when I ate at the Indian place with Brian and Kathleen a couple of weeks ago, so I decided to give that a shot.
(In fact, I declined an invitation from Kathleen to see “Bewitched” with her and Brian because they were going when I was planning to work on the chicken. Also, though I like Will Ferrell, I don’t have much interest in seeing the movie.)
The recipe actually called for using rotisserie chicken with the sauce, but the authentic version called for Tandoori Chicken, so I found a recipe for that as well.
I actually started on the Tandoori on Tuesday night by making the sauce and putting the chicken marinating in the fridge overnight.
So today I cooked the chicken, then put it together with the butter sauce (which has more tomatoes in it than butter, though butter is the base for it).
It was pretty tasty, though quite a bit spicier than the “medium hard,” as they called it at the restaurant, version I’d had, thanks to the use of lots of spices in the Tandoori, and then again in the butter sauce. Damn that was spicy!
But tasty. The chicken itself wasn’t quite as tender as I might have liked, but wasn’t too bad.
I did learn, though, that just because I see Rachael Ray do something it doesn’t mean that I should try it. When seeding jalapenos, I did so with my fingers, just as I’ve seen her do many times. That turned out to be pretty painful, especially when some of the oils got under my thumbnail.
There was more I was going to say, but it’s fairly late and this entry is already pretty long, so I guess that will do it for now.
Worst Amusement Park Ride Ever, A Sneak Preview Of My Afterlife, And The End Of The Boycott
Yesterday morning when my mother asked me if I had any plans for the 4th, I know she did so out of habit, realizing that the odds were that it was utterly unlikely that I had any plans, but feeling duty-bound to ask anyway, so she was extremely surprised when I told her that, in fact, I did have plans.
In my defense, while it had been five years since I’d last done anything to celebrate the 4th, this was the first time in four years that I didn’t have to work on Independence Day…though that really doesn’t do anything to change the fact that I’m a socially awkward shut-in.
The last time I went out on the 4th, as mentioned, was in 2000, and that experience was very different from yesterday’s activities.
For one thing, it involved traveling to Copper Harbor, which for you non-Yoopers is pretty much at the very northernmost point of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, at the very tip of the “thumb.”
It’s an extremely small town that is a popular tourist destination, as it is pretty much surrounded by Lake Superior. That, combined with the fact that it has a very good fireworks display (fired off over Superior, which enhances the effect of the fireworks considerably), makes it a very popular destination on the 4th, which is why myself and several of my friends, along with massive amounts of beer, made our way up there five years ago.
Which is the other major distinction between the two celebrations of our nation’s birth: no booze whatsoever was involved yesterday, whereas in 2000 I pretty much drank myself retarded.
And of course, my presence notwithstanding, yesterday’s activities were very much a family outing.
Not that I’m complaining; all things considered I had a pretty good time, and any aspects that detracted from my enjoyment had nothing to do with the company, but were entirely the result of my own hang-ups and apparent aversion to having fun, and also with the sheer number of people there.
As any regular Threshold reader knows, Jon plus large gatherings of people seldom equals happiness, puppies, and sunshine. Not that it would do me any good if it did, since I could hardly be considered a fan of those things.
In any case, the day started when Jamie and Casey stopped to pick me up. As they more or less had to go past me to get to Scott and Stacy’s anyway (or at the very least didn’t have to make much of a detour to pick me up), I figured it would make more sense for me to just snag a ride with them, especially since it would save me some bother.
From Scott and Stacy’s we made our way to the Metro station. The Metro, for anyone who doesn’t know, is the train system that serves the Metropolitan Washington DC area.
I hadn’t ridden on the Metro since 1998, when I’d come out this way to visit my brother, who at the time was stationed at the Pentagon.
Taking the Metro into DC was pretty much the only way to get there; driving would have been an absolute nightmare and would have been utterly out of the question.
The ride in on the Metro was uneventful, and soon enough we’d arrived, and, after avoiding the receipt of the handouts being offered by some guy standing outside the Metro station with a sign saying “Jews for Jesus,” we made our way to a security checkpoint. From there we went to the National Air and Space Museum in search of bathrooms, where, not for the first (or last) time I was forced to spend a fair amount of time standing in line.
Once nature’s call had been answered we hung out for a while to listen to the United States Air Force Band and Singing Sergeants performing, though we were unable to find a spot where we could also see them performing.
From there we headed to the National Mall to stake out a spot. Along the way we passed the revival tent where a low-rent Jesse Jackson was rapping about Jesus and how we need to get high on love rather than drugs.
I noted that the problem with getting high on love is that you can’t really snort it, smoke it, or inject it. Besides, the street price of love is just way too high for most people to afford...
Once we found a spot I noted that while there were a great many people around they were pretty well spread out, so I never felt too terribly crowded and was therefore reasonably free of anxiety.
I will say that the elevator ride in the parking deck at the first Metro station was a little close, but the fact that it was a short ride and it was people I’m comfortable with helped keep it from being too unnerving.
In any case, we sat and ate the sandwiches we’d picked up before we’d gone to the Metro station and just sort of chilled for a while.
Eventually to pass the time a card game was broken out. Because of my seeming aversion to fun I opted out of playing and chose instead to walk around the mall and check things out.
Honestly, I don’t know that it’s really an aversion to fun so much as it is an aversion to structured activities. That’s really what seems to be at the heart of my dislike for any kind of game-playing.
Well, that and the fact that I tend to suck at most games, and have no real desire to get better, and since I don’t really enjoy doing things that I suck at…
Really, I don’t know why I don’t like to play games. I just know that I don’t.
Walking along the National Mall on the 4th of July did have a sort of intrinsic coolness, but honestly, there wasn’t that much to see. None of the little stands that were set up were that interesting. Mostly they were just selling food, and I’d just eaten.
I didn’t bother taking the two question “Are you going to Heaven?” test, as I’m pretty sure I know the answer and a brownie isn’t sufficient consolation.
Eventually I made my way back to the rest of the group.
I noted to Scott that I’d received another demonstration of the fact that I seem to always be at odds with everything, as when I was walking toward the other end of the Mall, everyone else was headed the other way, and once I turned back, traffic had reversed, putting me against the flow both ways.
By the time I’d made it back to the group nature was calling again, so I headed for the nearest grouping of porta-potties.
There were several of them in a row – with mile-long lines at each of them.
When it came to ensuring that there were adequate facilities for the crowd, someone very clearly dropped the ball. The people to potty ratio seemed to be several hundred to one, with just a handful of potties spread out rather sparsely throughout the area. Several of them were locked and out of service.
After wandering around for a bit I considered just heading back to the group and holding it in, but then I considered the lengthy Metro ride ahead of me and the traffic jam that was likely to result once we tried to leave the Metro station, so I found the shortest line I could and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
I’m not sure how long it was, but the line I was in was about a half a block long, and the sun had set before I managed to finish - just in time for the fireworks to begin.
Overall, it was sort of like standing in line for a ride at some sort of demented amusement, waiting for your turn on the lamest ride in the world.
While I’d been in line the others had begun to worry about me, and had, in fact, called several times, but the nearby performances of the Beach Boys, the Ojays, and Gloria Estefan drowned out the sound of my phone ringing.
The waiting in line would have been bad enough in and of itself, but it was made worse by the two really irritating guys ahead of me.
The biggest problem with them was that they thought they were funny even though there was no basis in fact for this belief.
They kept making rude comments about people who passed by at a volume that was just not quite loud enough for their targets to hear.
I wouldn’t have had a problem with this if their comments had actually been funny. Rudeness is forgivable; being unfunny isn’t.
The other thing I found bothersome was the girl who was with them. At the oldest, she was maybe sixteen. I would guess that the two guys were in their early forties.
All three appeared to be part of some larger group, based on the comments they made and the fact that several other people who knew them periodically stopped by to visit with them, some of them old, some of them around the girl’s age.
Of the two men, one was tall and the other had a beard. The one with the beard was the one who thought he was the funniest. The tall one seemed to have some connection with the girl, and had, in fact, referred to her at one point as “babe.”
Given the disparity in their ages, and just how young she was, it was my sincerest hope that he was the girl’s father.
After a while, I was no longer sure that I hoped that, as their behavior, while not totally crossing the line between being an extremely close father and daughter and being a creepily close father and daughter, they did seem a little bit too affectionate.
It’s possible that I was totally misreading things. Maybe he was younger than he looked, and maybe she was older (though it seems unlikely), and they were a couple and it wasn’t creepy (or illegal). I don’t know.
Either way, it was odd, and the guys were really irritating.
The really odd part, though, was that when we were finally nearing the “finish line,” the three of them just decided that they’d had enough and gave up.
It was fine by me, as they were irritating me, and their absence brought me that much closer to my destination, but still, it was a pretty dumb maneuver on their part.
When it was finally my turn a desperate pregnant woman who was way back in the line that had gotten twice as long as it had been when I got into it, came up, apologized, and asked if she could go ahead of me. How can you say no to a pregnant woman?
So, I waited for her, and thought that, given what was at stake, maybe I should get started before I went in, just to be sure that I didn’t seize up with performance anxiety once I got inside. After all, making that crowd wait even longer could be deadly.
But there were no issues on that front, and, as mentioned, I made it safely back in time for the fireworks.
Evidently there was a great deal of speculation as to where I was for so long. One particularly outlandish theory was that I’d hooked up with someone and was therefore too “busy” to answer my phone.
That one made me laugh.
We left pretty much right after the fireworks display was over, fighting the crowd on our way to the nearest Metro station as the DC police guided traffic in a test of evacuation routes and procedures. Once we got to the station we hit a bottleneck as way too many people tried to pass through the turnstiles that were meant to accommodate much smaller and more organized groups.
Along the way Scott noticed that my phone was blinking, indicating that, once again, I’d gotten a call without hearing the phone ring, though this time the caller had left a voicemail message.
It had been Kathleen, calling to say happy 4th and to let me know that at her and Brian’s fire department’s festivities for the day, which included the raffling off of a truck, I didn’t win the truck, but for a moment, until the “Jon,” or more likely, “John,” who won it had his last name read, she thought that maybe I actually had.
I tried calling her back, but got her voicemail. While we were still waiting to get into the Metro station she called back, and this time I heard my phone ring.
Once we got into the Metro we managed to get onto a fairly empty car on the train, though at each stop it filled up more and more to the point that I was utterly surrounded by people. It made me think about the “Two Questions” stand, and where I’m likely to end up if there is an afterlife.
I suspect it will be a lot like that train ride, only it will go on longer, and the people will be bigger, sweatier, smellier, and naked. Plus they’ll be chatty, and there will be more of them.
And snakes.
Still, I managed to avoid panicking by essentially shutting down and retreating into myself for the duration of the train ride, which really isn’t hat much different from how I normally operate.
Once we got to the Metro station, which is the end of the line (or the beginning, depending on which way you’re headed) we made for our cars and spent a good forty to fifty minutes trying to get from the parking garage to the actual highway.
All told, it took nearly three hours from when we left DC to when I got home, which is really, really pathetic considering that I really don’t live that far from the DC.
Still, despite the various annoyances, I did have a good time, and it was definitely an experience. Given that I do live so close it would be silly for me to not go to DC for the 4th at least once, so I’ve accomplished that much anyway.
It was actually the first time I’d been to DC in two years, as I’ve been holding a grudge against the place from when I tried to drive through it and ended up lost for hours on my way to visit Eric in Maryland. Ever since that experience I’ve essentially boycotted the place.
But the boycott is now lifted, and maybe someday I’ll head down there again to take in some of the sights.
Yeah, right.
Anyway, there’s a lot more for me to say, but I guess I’ll save it for future entries.
In my defense, while it had been five years since I’d last done anything to celebrate the 4th, this was the first time in four years that I didn’t have to work on Independence Day…though that really doesn’t do anything to change the fact that I’m a socially awkward shut-in.
The last time I went out on the 4th, as mentioned, was in 2000, and that experience was very different from yesterday’s activities.
For one thing, it involved traveling to Copper Harbor, which for you non-Yoopers is pretty much at the very northernmost point of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, at the very tip of the “thumb.”
It’s an extremely small town that is a popular tourist destination, as it is pretty much surrounded by Lake Superior. That, combined with the fact that it has a very good fireworks display (fired off over Superior, which enhances the effect of the fireworks considerably), makes it a very popular destination on the 4th, which is why myself and several of my friends, along with massive amounts of beer, made our way up there five years ago.
Which is the other major distinction between the two celebrations of our nation’s birth: no booze whatsoever was involved yesterday, whereas in 2000 I pretty much drank myself retarded.
And of course, my presence notwithstanding, yesterday’s activities were very much a family outing.
Not that I’m complaining; all things considered I had a pretty good time, and any aspects that detracted from my enjoyment had nothing to do with the company, but were entirely the result of my own hang-ups and apparent aversion to having fun, and also with the sheer number of people there.
As any regular Threshold reader knows, Jon plus large gatherings of people seldom equals happiness, puppies, and sunshine. Not that it would do me any good if it did, since I could hardly be considered a fan of those things.
In any case, the day started when Jamie and Casey stopped to pick me up. As they more or less had to go past me to get to Scott and Stacy’s anyway (or at the very least didn’t have to make much of a detour to pick me up), I figured it would make more sense for me to just snag a ride with them, especially since it would save me some bother.
From Scott and Stacy’s we made our way to the Metro station. The Metro, for anyone who doesn’t know, is the train system that serves the Metropolitan Washington DC area.
I hadn’t ridden on the Metro since 1998, when I’d come out this way to visit my brother, who at the time was stationed at the Pentagon.
Taking the Metro into DC was pretty much the only way to get there; driving would have been an absolute nightmare and would have been utterly out of the question.
The ride in on the Metro was uneventful, and soon enough we’d arrived, and, after avoiding the receipt of the handouts being offered by some guy standing outside the Metro station with a sign saying “Jews for Jesus,” we made our way to a security checkpoint. From there we went to the National Air and Space Museum in search of bathrooms, where, not for the first (or last) time I was forced to spend a fair amount of time standing in line.
Once nature’s call had been answered we hung out for a while to listen to the United States Air Force Band and Singing Sergeants performing, though we were unable to find a spot where we could also see them performing.
From there we headed to the National Mall to stake out a spot. Along the way we passed the revival tent where a low-rent Jesse Jackson was rapping about Jesus and how we need to get high on love rather than drugs.
I noted that the problem with getting high on love is that you can’t really snort it, smoke it, or inject it. Besides, the street price of love is just way too high for most people to afford...
Once we found a spot I noted that while there were a great many people around they were pretty well spread out, so I never felt too terribly crowded and was therefore reasonably free of anxiety.
I will say that the elevator ride in the parking deck at the first Metro station was a little close, but the fact that it was a short ride and it was people I’m comfortable with helped keep it from being too unnerving.
In any case, we sat and ate the sandwiches we’d picked up before we’d gone to the Metro station and just sort of chilled for a while.
Eventually to pass the time a card game was broken out. Because of my seeming aversion to fun I opted out of playing and chose instead to walk around the mall and check things out.
Honestly, I don’t know that it’s really an aversion to fun so much as it is an aversion to structured activities. That’s really what seems to be at the heart of my dislike for any kind of game-playing.
Well, that and the fact that I tend to suck at most games, and have no real desire to get better, and since I don’t really enjoy doing things that I suck at…
Really, I don’t know why I don’t like to play games. I just know that I don’t.
Walking along the National Mall on the 4th of July did have a sort of intrinsic coolness, but honestly, there wasn’t that much to see. None of the little stands that were set up were that interesting. Mostly they were just selling food, and I’d just eaten.
I didn’t bother taking the two question “Are you going to Heaven?” test, as I’m pretty sure I know the answer and a brownie isn’t sufficient consolation.
Eventually I made my way back to the rest of the group.
I noted to Scott that I’d received another demonstration of the fact that I seem to always be at odds with everything, as when I was walking toward the other end of the Mall, everyone else was headed the other way, and once I turned back, traffic had reversed, putting me against the flow both ways.
By the time I’d made it back to the group nature was calling again, so I headed for the nearest grouping of porta-potties.
There were several of them in a row – with mile-long lines at each of them.
When it came to ensuring that there were adequate facilities for the crowd, someone very clearly dropped the ball. The people to potty ratio seemed to be several hundred to one, with just a handful of potties spread out rather sparsely throughout the area. Several of them were locked and out of service.
After wandering around for a bit I considered just heading back to the group and holding it in, but then I considered the lengthy Metro ride ahead of me and the traffic jam that was likely to result once we tried to leave the Metro station, so I found the shortest line I could and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
I’m not sure how long it was, but the line I was in was about a half a block long, and the sun had set before I managed to finish - just in time for the fireworks to begin.
Overall, it was sort of like standing in line for a ride at some sort of demented amusement, waiting for your turn on the lamest ride in the world.
While I’d been in line the others had begun to worry about me, and had, in fact, called several times, but the nearby performances of the Beach Boys, the Ojays, and Gloria Estefan drowned out the sound of my phone ringing.
The waiting in line would have been bad enough in and of itself, but it was made worse by the two really irritating guys ahead of me.
The biggest problem with them was that they thought they were funny even though there was no basis in fact for this belief.
They kept making rude comments about people who passed by at a volume that was just not quite loud enough for their targets to hear.
I wouldn’t have had a problem with this if their comments had actually been funny. Rudeness is forgivable; being unfunny isn’t.
The other thing I found bothersome was the girl who was with them. At the oldest, she was maybe sixteen. I would guess that the two guys were in their early forties.
All three appeared to be part of some larger group, based on the comments they made and the fact that several other people who knew them periodically stopped by to visit with them, some of them old, some of them around the girl’s age.
Of the two men, one was tall and the other had a beard. The one with the beard was the one who thought he was the funniest. The tall one seemed to have some connection with the girl, and had, in fact, referred to her at one point as “babe.”
Given the disparity in their ages, and just how young she was, it was my sincerest hope that he was the girl’s father.
After a while, I was no longer sure that I hoped that, as their behavior, while not totally crossing the line between being an extremely close father and daughter and being a creepily close father and daughter, they did seem a little bit too affectionate.
It’s possible that I was totally misreading things. Maybe he was younger than he looked, and maybe she was older (though it seems unlikely), and they were a couple and it wasn’t creepy (or illegal). I don’t know.
Either way, it was odd, and the guys were really irritating.
The really odd part, though, was that when we were finally nearing the “finish line,” the three of them just decided that they’d had enough and gave up.
It was fine by me, as they were irritating me, and their absence brought me that much closer to my destination, but still, it was a pretty dumb maneuver on their part.
When it was finally my turn a desperate pregnant woman who was way back in the line that had gotten twice as long as it had been when I got into it, came up, apologized, and asked if she could go ahead of me. How can you say no to a pregnant woman?
So, I waited for her, and thought that, given what was at stake, maybe I should get started before I went in, just to be sure that I didn’t seize up with performance anxiety once I got inside. After all, making that crowd wait even longer could be deadly.
But there were no issues on that front, and, as mentioned, I made it safely back in time for the fireworks.
Evidently there was a great deal of speculation as to where I was for so long. One particularly outlandish theory was that I’d hooked up with someone and was therefore too “busy” to answer my phone.
That one made me laugh.
We left pretty much right after the fireworks display was over, fighting the crowd on our way to the nearest Metro station as the DC police guided traffic in a test of evacuation routes and procedures. Once we got to the station we hit a bottleneck as way too many people tried to pass through the turnstiles that were meant to accommodate much smaller and more organized groups.
Along the way Scott noticed that my phone was blinking, indicating that, once again, I’d gotten a call without hearing the phone ring, though this time the caller had left a voicemail message.
It had been Kathleen, calling to say happy 4th and to let me know that at her and Brian’s fire department’s festivities for the day, which included the raffling off of a truck, I didn’t win the truck, but for a moment, until the “Jon,” or more likely, “John,” who won it had his last name read, she thought that maybe I actually had.
I tried calling her back, but got her voicemail. While we were still waiting to get into the Metro station she called back, and this time I heard my phone ring.
Once we got into the Metro we managed to get onto a fairly empty car on the train, though at each stop it filled up more and more to the point that I was utterly surrounded by people. It made me think about the “Two Questions” stand, and where I’m likely to end up if there is an afterlife.
I suspect it will be a lot like that train ride, only it will go on longer, and the people will be bigger, sweatier, smellier, and naked. Plus they’ll be chatty, and there will be more of them.
And snakes.
Still, I managed to avoid panicking by essentially shutting down and retreating into myself for the duration of the train ride, which really isn’t hat much different from how I normally operate.
Once we got to the Metro station, which is the end of the line (or the beginning, depending on which way you’re headed) we made for our cars and spent a good forty to fifty minutes trying to get from the parking garage to the actual highway.
All told, it took nearly three hours from when we left DC to when I got home, which is really, really pathetic considering that I really don’t live that far from the DC.
Still, despite the various annoyances, I did have a good time, and it was definitely an experience. Given that I do live so close it would be silly for me to not go to DC for the 4th at least once, so I’ve accomplished that much anyway.
It was actually the first time I’d been to DC in two years, as I’ve been holding a grudge against the place from when I tried to drive through it and ended up lost for hours on my way to visit Eric in Maryland. Ever since that experience I’ve essentially boycotted the place.
But the boycott is now lifted, and maybe someday I’ll head down there again to take in some of the sights.
Yeah, right.
Anyway, there’s a lot more for me to say, but I guess I’ll save it for future entries.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Lousy Tourist Pt. 2
Here's a lousy shot of Scott, Stacy, Jamie, Casey, and the various kids that belong to them in some fashion or another (one was Scott's niece), whom I went to DC with, sitting on the lawn of the National Mall.
They're all wearing matching shirts in the spirit of togetherness and the holiday.
They provided me with one to wear as well, but, not having it in my nature to give in to a group mind, and being a jerk who tends to refuse to get into the spirit of things, I opted not to wear mine, though I did appreciate the gesture. Also, while I do consider them friends and was glad to have been invited along, I don't really consider myself part of the group in the way in which the rest of them do (that's totally my issue, and not the result of some lack of inclusiveness on their part).
But mostly I'm just a jerk.
Here's a really lousy shot of the fireworks.
It is, however, the best shot of the bunch. My camera doesn't really work well in low-light settings, and so I'm not able to adequately share with you the magnificence of the fireworks as they went off behind the Washington Monument. Sorry.
And that's pretty much it for the visual portion of my trip to DC. Later I will provide much more detailed analysis of it all.
Lousy Tourist Pt. 1
As per usual, I made for a lousy tourist, in that I really didn't take that many pictures (and what pictures I did take didn't turn out that well) while I was in DC, but I did take a few.
Behind the sculpture you can (barely) see one of the many security checkpoints set up. They really didn't seem to do much. Basically they just looked through bags, and if you didn't have a bag you could just walk right through. Scott, who was carrying a backpack anyway, was kind enough to take my camera bag so that I could just go through.
Here we see a view of the Capitol building on the National Mall.
This was something of an old-fashioned tent revival (and the location of the sign offering free brownies for finding out whether or not you're going to heaven). I think that, in part, the whole evangelical thing was set up in response to...
...the "Festival of India" that was set up on the other side of the street, which extolled the Satanic (from the perspective of the fundamentalist Christian evangelists) notions of "higher consciousness" and reincarnation.
Behind the sculpture you can (barely) see one of the many security checkpoints set up. They really didn't seem to do much. Basically they just looked through bags, and if you didn't have a bag you could just walk right through. Scott, who was carrying a backpack anyway, was kind enough to take my camera bag so that I could just go through.
Here we see a view of the Capitol building on the National Mall.
This was something of an old-fashioned tent revival (and the location of the sign offering free brownies for finding out whether or not you're going to heaven). I think that, in part, the whole evangelical thing was set up in response to...
...the "Festival of India" that was set up on the other side of the street, which extolled the Satanic (from the perspective of the fundamentalist Christian evangelists) notions of "higher consciousness" and reincarnation.
Consolation Prize
Of all the many sights and sounds I experienced in DC on the 4th, this was quite possibly the most entertaining:
The nice thing about it was that if you find out you're not going to heaven, at least you get a brownie, and if you are going to heaven, then bonus!
I'll be back with more details about my trip to the our nation's capital, along with some more pictures, later, but in the meantime I thought I had to share this.
The nice thing about it was that if you find out you're not going to heaven, at least you get a brownie, and if you are going to heaven, then bonus!
I'll be back with more details about my trip to the our nation's capital, along with some more pictures, later, but in the meantime I thought I had to share this.
Long Day
I just got back from celebrating our nation's birthday in our nation's capital.
As it's been a long day, I'm not up for writing much of an entry right now, but I will be back after I've crashed with a more extensive entry, along with some pictures.
As it's been a long day, I'm not up for writing much of an entry right now, but I will be back after I've crashed with a more extensive entry, along with some pictures.
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