Broom Hilda and soup

First, instant karma

I was in the grocery store this weekend doing a little impulse shopping on an empty stomach (it’s really the wave of the future; you ought to try it) and, as usual, I made some smart-aleck comment on the state of the people in the store. I turned the corner into the “soup and prepared food” aisle and started choking on my own spit. If that’s just not a message from the gods, I don’t know what is.

Then, the dumbest joke ever

I generally like to treat people like they’re humans. I find that no matter where I encounter another person, if I treat them like they’re me (except perhaps a little less likely to blog about something) just working a job to pay the bills or out enjoying a little snippet of their precious free time, things go along pretty smoothly.

So there I am, in the checkout line at the supermarket and the woman in front of me looks like she could be the lead in the cult classic “I was a bored middle-aged zombie working at the grocery store.” She’s got the dull washed out eyes, the stringy, was in fashion 20 years ago hair, and a huge crooked nose probably picked up in a bar fight somewhere. In other words, just your average northern Wistucky (sorry, Josh, but I had to) workin’ stiff. Nothing to be ashamed of, and in fact, I can even hear her internal monolouge: “I hate this job. Soup. I really hate it. Roma tomatoes. Stupid people. Doritos. Coming to the stupid store. Bread. To buy stupid. Lettuce. Things.” She gets done scanning everything and says, “Fourteen-eighty-nine.”

I’m thinking, OK, this I can work with for a little humor. “A good year, from all accounts,” I say. And immediately regret it. That’s gotta be one of the dumbest, kitchiest, requires-the-least-amount-of-brain-power-possible jokes ever. Yeah, not to mention overused by tools like me. Broom Hilda looks at me, completly mirthless, with the emotional response-o-meter pegged firmly in “contemp.”

“Hu,” she says. Not “ha,” not “heh,” but “hu.”

And I figure I got off pretty easy with that, all things considered. But I’m no dummy. I been schooled all the way through grade 16, and I got a piece of paper to prove it. I know when I’ve been beaten. I shut up and stood there, trying to hide all 6′4″ 260 pounds of me behind the little stand they have for writing checks and signing credit card receipts. When Broom Hilda handed me the receipt, I could barely bring myself to look at her and say “thanks,” then scurry out the door with my groceries.

I haven’t been back to the store since. Anywhere I almost die, then find my best effort at a joke is lamer than a one-legged horse ain’t for me, no ma’am. But I don’t have to worry. That store’ll be out of business soon enough. See, Super Wal-Mart’s comming to town. Take that, grocery market of embarrasment.

Can’t sleep

I woke up half-an hour ago thinking about drugs. I watched “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” last night. I think that’s one of the only movies that’s ever left me feeling hung over. I figured since I can’t sleep, I may as well come make a post. Maybe I’ll be so boring that I’ll put myself back to sleep.

I found myself thinking more about my pet online news project, too. I haven’t really moved forward with it at all. I’ve kind of built the outline, but haven’t started using it yet. I guess I’ve been kind of holding off from making any kind of committment to journalism again. I really like going out into the world and figuring out what’s going on, then sharing tha news with other folks, but I also like not being in the belly of any of the numerous political monsters that roam the boreal forests.

On the other hand, that would be a way of making blogging my job, which is also something I’ve been giving more thought to recently. I’m even considering signing up for Google’s Ad Words. Except that I find that fairly annoying on other people’s blogs, or at best, I ignore them. But I could potentially make money with them… So that’s the spiral my head is in this early morning.

If I could work on The Sun and build a decent site that has a good collection of news, and bring readership up to maybe five hundred or a thousand people a month, I could start selling ads. If I could sell 20 ads for a hundred bucks a month each, I could seriously make that my job. And qualify for food stamps, too. What a deal.

So I guess the thing to do is hang this up, go work on The Sun a little, then get my sorry rump back into bed so I’m ready to move fire wood in six hours. Speaking of which, if any of you feel like coming over to play with pieces of oak, this is hereby your official invitation. We’ll have soup and cornbread around 1 p.m. or so.

Gaaaaah!

Warning: This is purely a vent with no good reason to exist other than making me feel better. Proceed at your own risk.

Both the wife and I have had one heck of a day at work. I was doing well, but then this afternoon, got swamped by a rogue wave of blah. Then buffeted by a typhoon of who gives a rip. Meanwhile, the wife was busy doing everyone’s work except hers. Fixing the proofreader’s pages for him. Dealing with the fact that she’s a graphic designer working for a company that expects her to do her job with a beige Mac G3 running photoshop 5, Acrobat 4, and Quark 4.1, if you can believe that. Nothing like working with goods that are between four and seven generations old.

Fer cryin’ out loud.

Testing

Test one, one, one. Test. Test! Test. Two (This, I just happen to know, is the resonant frequency of CJ’s floor, and is about 20% under C under middle C. The things you do when at a friend’s house for dinner…) Two! So a priest, a rabbi and a duck walk into a bar…

Correct me if I’m wrong

…but if you (hypothetically speaking, since I’m sure the majority of what little audience I hypothetically have would rather find themselves with their hypothetical pants around their hypothetical ankles in the middle of Ashland’s hypothetical Main Street on a Friday night when drunken teenagers are scooping the hypothetical loop, then actively put themselves in such a hypotheical position) are calling for peace and social justice for all, can you espouse a view that could potentially (hypothetically, even) leave someone behind and still look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, when some parts of you are flattened from sleep, and others are more bristly from the same, and think, “Gee, I’m a really good, solid person,” while swilling organic orange juice picked by immigrant lesbian latinos who are not only paid a fair living wage, but are also offered the chance to marry the partner of their choice, not because it’s a political statement, but because it’s the right thing to do, while wiping the sleep from your eyes with the backs of your hairy knuckles while the one person you left behind with your ultra-liberal, socialist manifesto-cum-political-agenda-cum-the-man-in-a-red-beret-keeping-me-down is trying to huddle a little closer to the fifty-five gallon barrel that holds the glowing embers of her child’s cradle because that’s all she has to keep her warm on this frosty November-in-Wisconsin morning because while you were out busy trying to make sure everyone is feeling good about the signs and buttons and slogans you and your longhair friends made last night, you forgot to reach out to your neighbor who was falling through society’s cracks; it only would have taken something so small, so simple, you never would have noticed it — a smile, a handshake, a word of encouragement &mdash but no, not for you because you were too busy, too wrapped up in your own ideals of smiling people who actually know about the world, not to mention who give a rat’s ass, to reach out to help someone right in front of you, to practice what you preach, to do the right thing?

I think not.

Update:

Notice that the above monograph is actually a single more-or-less gramatically correct sentence. Booyah.

Living in the twighlight zone

I have an old man and his partly naked son dancing with a fifty-foot silver snake on my roof.

So there.

I have unleashed a hydra

Remember all those monster movies where the giant ______________ (fill in the blank) wades out of the ocean | sea | lagoon | sewer (choose one) and uses its firey breath | bulging, scaly muscles | incredible sense of interior decorating (again, choose one) to create massive devastation on the coast of Japan | Japan | Japan (I dare you!)? I’m kind of like that, except that Tokyo’s safe crushed by my massive claws this week.

I have created a multiheaded, self-aware blogomonster. It started innocently enough. I thought, hmmmm, I’ve heard a lot about blogs, so maybe I should make my own. So I did. That was pretty easy. So I made one for the kid. That was easy, too. So I cajoled my wife into making one, too. And a friend, who in turn got her boyfriend to make one (though he almost never posts anything), and one of her friends also started (though he writes even less than the boyfriend), and now one of his friends has (sort of) started a blog, too.

This is my gift to the local community: I’m like the jerk that goes to Kenya for a week and comes back with ebola. Except that the gestation period is different. But if you spend too much time with blogs, you can pretty much count on your brains liquifying and running out your nose while your eyes cross and collapse back into your empty skull cavity.

I figure being a viral contagion vector is really the least I could do for my community.

In other news…

I’ve passed the 500 viewers mark on the ol’ blog. Too bad I can’t pass the bubly as well, eh, old chap?

On creativity, for CJ

This here’s for my bud, CJ, who’s fightin’ the artist’s fight. Follow the link first, then come back and read. It’ll be worth your time. Really.

Yo, CJ. I reckon creativity isn’t about drama or having your life in the toilet. See, that’d be reactive, and all the really great, creative things in the world are, almost by definition, proactive. Look at it this way: you always hear about a really great movie, but how often you hear about a really great movie review?

I think that creativity can certainly tap into strong emotions (and what’s stronger than chaos, the bedrock of the universe?), but that’s kind of like beginning meditation. What I really want to get to is the advanced meditation kind of creativity where I’ve practiced my craft (whichever one I finally choose) enough that it’s not about sitting down to do it, it’s not about the words or the instrument or the brush. It’s about diving into the depths of my soul and bringing back a streaming, muddy fistful of universe to share with my buddies.

I guess I have a little recipie for creativity that’s a little like sourdough starter (in that once you get it going, if you’re a little careful, you’ll never run out) that goes like this: Combine a few bushels of practice with an armful of love and a dollop of respect. Prod gently. Let sit over night. Repeat. Feeds as many as can wrap their minds about it. Best served chilled, with fire and passion.

Dig it, CJ. See you for dinner!

Lighten yer load

And no, I’m not talking about a personal encounter with a porcelain goddess. I’m talking about news agregators.

OK, Billy-Joebob, get out of the tree. They ain’t that kind-a gator.

I don’t know about you all, but I’ve got a bunch of Web sites that I like to follow pretty closely. Rather than surfing to each one individually, then hunting for new stuff, I subscribe to their syndication feeds.

Here’s an easy, step-by-step way to do it so your feeds are gathered online and available to you no matter where you go (Except fer Moquah. They don’t got no stinkin’ Internet out there. You want news in Moquah, you go over to Old Man Sorensen’s place across the way. ‘Can’t miss it.):

• Go to bloglines.com and sign up.
• Click the “my feeds” tab at the top of the page.
• Click the “Add” button.
• Enter “beest.blogspot.com” in the the “Blog of Feed URL” blank.
• Click “subscribe.”
• Enjoy my rants and raves for years to come. Sucker.