I'm Retarded and Don't Know How to Work the Scanner. Otherwise I'd Post Pictures

We were getting ready for tomorrow’s garage sale (please come overpay for our crap) when MJ found some old photos and we started reminiscing. They went way back. There was a picture of me holding Mr. Kitty and wearing a red bandana. MJ was shocked at how skinny I used to be. I was shocked that I thought wearing a red bandana made me look cool. I looked like a dork playing a pirate in a high school play, while holding a tuxedoed cat. I looked like I was the “tough” one in a boy band. Fortunately, there was only one photo of me in the bandana. Unfortunately there were a bunch of photos, which I had forgotten about, with me sporting a high top fade. That was the dumbest haircut ever, and I had one for almost four years. I paid the barber extra to do it. On the plus side for me, I never got the little dreads, but it was closer than I’d like to remember. The only reason I didn’t get some twists was because I saw The Last Boy Scout – great movie. The first Die Hard is the only thing Bruce Willis has done that’s better. I thought he and Damon Wayans were going to be the new Murphy and Nolte. Anyway, Damon Wayans has a shaved head with his football jersey number left on the back of his head in hair. That was what pushed me into getting my head shaved. That was the best hair decision I ever made, and not just because I avoided looking like some performance poet begging for a spot on Def Poetry Jam. That show would have been so much better if they had gotten rid of the wannabe Langston Hugheses and Maya Angelous and let Mos Def freestyle for thirty minutes every week. Shaving my head is cathartic. I don’t know why. I’ve kept my hair short for the last eighteen years. I wish I hadn’t looked up when The Last Boy Scout was released. I thought it had only been fourteen or fifteen years. Man, I’m old. But then I can’t believe the honeymoon photos that were in the bunch are seven years old. MJ thought about how different it was even then. We were looking at pictures from a disposable, under water camera that we had to drag to Target to get our pictures developed after we got back from the Caribbean. We had to wait more than a week from the time we took them to the time we could see them. Now it’s instantaneous and bad or unflattering pictures get deleted. Looking at our “bad” pictures today reminded me of how happy I’ve been for the past twenty years, but there’s still no excuse for a bandana or a fade.

I Need To Be More Spartan.

I love where I live. I love the house. I love the neighborhood. I love the part of town I’m in. But one of the drawbacks to living in an old house is that it’s old. Our house was designed to keep water off our heads and not fall down. There’s no storage space. At least there’s not enough for all of our stuff. This is a generational thing. When this thing was built people didn’t have a bunch of crap. There was no thought given to where a television would fit because there were no such things as televisions. I’m giving away twenty-three shirts and it isn’t going to create any new space. We’re having a garage sale Saturday – another garage sale – to hopefully get rid of a bunch of stuff we don’t use and return to some type of order. A big part of the problem is how to dispose of electronic equipment when it stops working or becomes obsolete. We have fifteen years of computers, video game systems, video games, CD and DVD players, CD’s and DVD’s. What the hell am I supposed to do with our trillion disk changer, which was the bomb back in 1994, and the trillion CD’s that are filling it? What am I supposed to do with my laptop with the dead hard drive? Should I run a magnet over it in case some criminal finds it at the recycling center and fixes it? What about the ZIP drive and disks that are taking up space in the office? ZIP drives were the Betamaxes of the external storage race. That thing was useful for about two weeks and then the jump drive hit the market. Our DVD players are all dying and we’re left with the choices of replacing them with new DVD players, which are cheap, not replacing them at all, which is even cheaper, or making the inevitable jump to Blu-Ray now instead of later, which isn’t cheap at all. I’m at the point of let’s burn the house to the ground and start all over. You don’t think the fire inspector will find it suspicious that the brand new tankless water heaters were removed before the faulty wiring started the blaze? I’m chalking it up to providence.

#2 On Straight Outta Compton

It’s seven o’clock in the morning and I didn’t sleep well last night. I completely freaked out about my qualifications as a dad, and that kept me up. I watched some Tony Bourdain and some West Wing, and at dawn I overdosed on the Henry Gates thing. Cops are evil, all of them. That’s not true, but as a Black male – no longer young Black male, yay I win – it’s a safe operating assumption. I’ve known five people that have become cops, all men, all violent action junkies. One of them was a very good car thief when he was a teen. Another was a very bad drug dealer. I don’t care about racist cops. Politics don’t mean anything when it comes to doing a job well. Wolfgang Puck may be a Holocaust denier, but that doesn’t mean he can’t cook – even latkes. I don’t think Chef Puck is a Nazi, but his ethnicity made for a nice sentence. I do care about being professional. Just do your job, and part of that job is taking crap from unhappy citizens. I’ve seen white males rage at cops and seen the cops ignore it, while they frisked the compliant and respectful me. I was in the passenger seat with a buddy in high school who was pulled over for doing eighty – EIGHT ZERO – in a thirty-five. The cop asked the driver, “Guess why I pulled you over?!?” trying to be witty I guess, and the driver responded deadpan, “Cuz yer a dick?” There was a lecture, a written warning, and a 9mm under the driver’s seat. There wasn’t a car search… for driving eighty in a thirty-five. I’ve gotten three moving violations in my life. They all happened within six months of each other. One was legitimate. I wrecked my aunt’s Pontiac 1000. The others were differing degrees of the same unwritten offense. I was ticketed for driving thirty-five in a forty-five – aka driving while Black in the wrong neighborhood – and I’m not dyslexic. I was also ticketed for reckless driving – aka driving while Black with a hot White chick in the wrong neighborhood. Barney Fife pointed a gun at me in the last case. I have a bunch of examples from my own personal experience of stuff like this, but my point is that, in my experience, cops are unprofessional. I mentioned four examples, and in three of those examples the cop did nothing but make the situation worse. Cory, the driver, learned there are no consequences for cocky Murray Hill rednecks. LJ went on to become another angry guy with dark skin. Like I said, cops may not all be evil, but if you’re male and you fail the brown paper bag test, it’s a safe assumption.

All Bad Poetry Springs From Genuine Feeling

I had a really boring chest and biceps workout today so I’m going to write about a few movie quotes that I like.

I’m a mushroom cloud laying muthaf**ka, muthaf**ka! This is from Pulp Fiction, which is so full of great quotes it may be the only movie to make the list today. Jules says this to Vincent as they’re cleaning Marvin’s brains out of the backseat of Jules’s car. Jules is berating Vincent for shooting Marvin in the face when Vincent reaches his boiling point and tells Jules that “[He] could blow”. Jules barely takes a breath before uttering the above quote. It’s the second muthaf**ka that makes it great, and one of the few times that the Al Pacino/Chewbacca/Samuel L. Jackson method of screaming all one’s lines works.

Someplace warm. A place where the beer flows like wine. Where beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano. I'm talking about a little place called Aspen. This is from Dumb & Dumber and it basically sums up the whole movie. It’s by far Jim Carrey’s best work. The Farrelly brothers just let him do his thing, and Jeff Daniels didn’t try to compete with him. This quote is Lloyd selling Harry on the idea of leaving Providence, Rhode Island and heading to Aspen, Colorado. There’s so much wrong with his little spiel, but it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it, and Lloyd sold it. I laughed harder at this movie than I did at anything not done by the Marx Brothers.

Consider that a divorce. This is from Total Recall and it’s Arnold’s best post-ending-someone’s-life-violently one liner. He can’t act, which is what makes him so great. And he’s been here for thirty-five years, why is his accent still so thick? He’d been brainwashed to believe that Sharon Stone was his wife, and then she tried to kill him and his Mexican hooker girlfriend, Melina. After dispatching Sharon’s henchmen, he gets the drop on her as she’s beating Melina’s ass. She says, “You wouldn’t kill me would you, Doug? We’re married.” He puts a bullet in her head and then drops the line. This was also right before Sharon Stone did Basic Instinct, became a star, and lost her mind. She looked her best and gave her best performance in Total Recall. It’s also Paul Verhoeven’s best movie. They need to redo this movie, along with Robocop, with new special effects.

Exercise and Diet Notes.

No more speed work until I’m under two bills. I’ve set a weight goal for myself, and while I’m off to a good start, I have a very long way to go. 190 lbs. isn’t over the horizon but it’s not easy to see right now. I went for a run this morning and was feeling good so I decided to sprint my lap around the circle at Memorial Park and sprint on the straightaway along the river. Now it’s fourteen hours later and my ankles, hips, lower back, and lower abdominals are giving me problems. Strangely, my shins and calves don’t hurt – yet. I guess I’m too heavy to sprint on concrete and asphalt. It looks cool on my Garmin stats to see high speeds but my body just can’t take it. Oh well, there’s nothing wrong with puttering around like I’m seventy, at least until I’ve dropped some more weight. I did enough damage this morning that I doubt I’ll run for the rest of the week, which means I’ll be spending time on the elliptical machine. At this point calories are calories. I may mix in some time in the swimming pool, but it’s such a hassle bringing a change of clothes and avoiding the cornucopia of fungi, molds, and bacteria that coat the YMCA locker room floor. I feel much more comfortable, from an infection stand point, swimming in the ocean on the weekends. I’m picking the drowning poison over the infectious disease poison. Until then, it’s old school weights and cardio. I’m going to be extra prima sore this week. I haven’t lifted in two or three weeks. I could check my blog posts, but I don’t want to get depressed. On the positive side, my dieting is going very well. Thanks in part to some world class blueberries. I don’t know what it is about the current crop at Publix, but they’re like candy. I’m also fitting into more of my clothes, which is encouraging. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

All It Takes Is a Week

We went on a family bike ride this morning to the YMCA. I hadn’t exercised in a week and I could tell the moment I started to pedal. It always amazes me how fast the body starts to atrophy. It was a frickin’ week and it’s not like I’m Lance Armstrong trying to climb the Pyrenees. Most of the trip there was down hill, but my legs were burning anyway. It’s not that I took the week off. It’s that last week was one of those busy ones that get rolling on Monday morning and the next thing I know it’s Sunday afternoon and my legs are burning. Even though the ride was harder than I expected we had fun. MJ decided to bring a Frisbee so we would have something to do once we got to the Y. She throws a Frisbee almost as well as I sing. She brought it along because she thought LMJ would enjoy playing with it outside as much as she does inside. But we don’t have giant light posts at home to climb, so the Frisbee was almost totally ignored by the baby girl. I had fun throwing it way up into the air and trying to chase it down. I don’t know if it’s because I’m old or because I’m fat or a combination of the two, but I can’t cover ground the way I used to. I’m also unwilling to dive in the dirt. There were a couple of tosses that I could have caught if I had been willing to get dirty. I guess those days are gone. We played Frisbee for about ten minutes and then some landscaping chick/dude came by and told us (s)he would be mowing in about twenty minutes so we packed up our stuff and headed to the Times-Union helipad to watch a train cross the river. It took forever, which worked out – not just for the rest – because a big sailboat had pull up short to avoid running into the bridge. It wasn’t a close thing, but it was cool anyway. MJ almost got run over a couple of times on the way back, but we made it home just fine – except for my soon-to-be-sore legs.

When Did Professionalism Die?

Today felt like a Sunday even though it was a Saturday. We cleaned house this morning and I gave twenty-three shirts to Goodwill. MJ doesn’t think I can value them at $50 a piece for tax purposes. I’m doing it anyway. A few of them are Ralph Lauren and more than a few are very rare race t-shirts. I don’t think the IRS will come after me for eleven hundred bucks. It’s not cost effective. Maybe my aggressive tax avoidance is giving me bad karma because we’re having problems with our new water heaters. We think the plumbers did something wrong because they’re plumbers. It seems that there’s not enough water flow going through the heater so it shuts down to prevent overheating and we’re getting hot-cold-hot showers. It’s not a big deal right now during the dog days, but it will be huge frickin’ deal in December. A crappy water heater is what caused Charles Whitman to climb a bell tower with his rifle. Unfortunately, the water heaters aren’t the only things the plumbers screwed up. They forgot to turn off the water when they started taking out the old water heater and sprayed water all over the attic. We found this out last night when MJ looked up and saw a huge water stain on the kitchen ceiling. It’s almost like this guy is trying to wear us down with his incompetence. Now that’s going to have to be cut out and redone. These home repairs have been nothing but the exact nightmare we were afraid of. Why can’t anyone just do what they’re supposed to do? What’s wrong with doing a good a job and paying attention to detail? If I don’t pay attention to detail I get sued. I know a guy who spent the last twenty years saving up for his dream home, and the last thing he did before he broke ground was get his general contractor’s license because he knew he couldn’t trust anyone to do what he wanted. I think he was on to something. I’m enrolling CG in classes at FCCJ as we speak. Whoops! CG? I’m enrolling you in some classes at FCCJ.