“Attention This Is Your Captain…”

“We’ll be landing shortly. The time is exactly 9:11 here at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and the temperature is 85 degrees.  Please remain seated with your safety belts on. Please turn off your cell phones and log off of your computers as this may affect the landing process. Thank you…”

We’ll Be Right Back

Burnout

The alarm rings. Get up, fix coffee, make a sandwich for lunch.

Drive down the highway exchanging middle fingers with the same morons every morning.

Report to work, knock out ten hours, go home, eat and go to sleep.

 

 I do this every day.

 

 No variation. No difference. Not the slightest bit of diversity in my routine.

It ain’t easy being me.

 

 Well the time has come for a little cage-rattling. This mundane day to day existence is killing me.

 

In the very near future I am getting on a plane and taking my very first ever international flight.

 When I return I hope to be energized; I know I am going to have some beautiful photos and some more material for this blog. And it’s just now getting real to me as the big day draws closer.

 

 Every afternoon for the last week I have come home after work exhausted. Usually I shower and then head straight for the futon. Then I nap until about nine or so, get up and eat and then… it’s time to go to sleep again. I lay in bed and start thinking about this trip. Next thing I know I’m up just a few hours before I know that alarm clock goes off thinking about all the thousand and one little things that need to be done.

 

 Got to keep my head together here but that is so much easier said than done. Had a minor panic attack yesterday; temporarily lost my drivers license. I found it later after thinking about it; I DID spill the contents of my wallet the other day while sitting at a drive-through. After looking carefully inside I found it in a crevice of my bucket seat. Whew! It was such a relief knowing I wouldn’t have to go stand in line at the drivers license office the next day. But that’s just how even little things can set me off and another reminder I need some time off, and also to relax and take it easy.

 Leaving my Fortress Of Solitude. This thought gang-rapes my mind. Never left the country before.

It’s been five years since I’ve gotten on a jet and flown away from here. Five years since I’ve watched the sun set over the ocean. Five years since I’ve sat on a beach and stared at the ocean.

 I went to work this morning in a good mood for the first time in years. Everybody probably thought I was on drugs. Despite a lack of sleep I feel good.

Not really nuts about flying; it scares the shit out of me to be honest.

 

But I’m looking forward to this trip

I need this.

I need this worse than oxygen or food.

Got to get up and work tomorrow, but I don’t mind.

I don’t mind at all; it’s all over-time anyway.

 Going to do it standing on my head.

 

 

The Miracle Of Editing

So I’m sitting in my living room watching National Lampoons Vacation on TBS. It gets to the part where Chevy Chase wrecks his car in the desert and he’s sitting with his son Rusty and he tells him about the time his Dad shared a beer with him when he was about Rusty’s age. He opens a can of beer and in a split second turns it upside down empty. They cut out the part where he and Rusty “share” the beer (Rusty drinks it all  in the original version)

What the hell? 

Was someone at TBS afraid this was going to lead to father/son binge-drinking? WHO was that short scene going to offend?  Man I need to get some premium channels….

RIP John Hughes (1951-2009)

Forged Autograph Alert!

According to my own personal  sources on my exclusive File23 satellite newsfeed, the North Koreans are flooding Ebay and other collector markets with forged Michael Jackson autographs.

They have erected massive industrial complexes made up of large factories which house long rows of benches behind which rows of child slave-laborers are chained together signing mass-reproduced posters, LP sleeves, CD inserts , 8X10s and various promotional items from the entire span of Michaels career.

I am posting this to warn the public so that no one spends their  hard-earned money on these fakes. According to my own File23 Appraisal experts the phony items are easy to spot by the following phrases:

“Good luck, Michael“

“God bless you , Michael”

“Have a nice day, Michael”

“Die imperialistic American dogs, Michael”

Breaking Non News

Haven’t updated the site for a couple of weeks; I’ve been busy. Working a lot of overtime at the job takes up the bulk of my week; and then there’s my other “job” that seems to take the up any remaining waking time.I’ve written about this before; my “second job”; the job of being a bachelor.

Most people (especially married people) think that being a bachelor is some 24/7 marathon of beer and unsafe sex and I would like to think that somewhere real life permits that sort of thing. But in my plane of existence I am severely inconvenienced by the reality of having to make a living in addition to all of the little things I find myself having to do when not at The Job.

In what little spare time I have I also have to do my own shopping, laundry, yard work, housework and every once in a while I find a few minutes to sit in my big Archie Bunker recliner that takes up an awful lot of space in my living room. I have so little spare time to actually sit in it and watch a television show all the way through it has become more of a catch-all in my living room.

There is always at least one towel or t-shirt draped across it and in the winter it also functions as a coat rack. You can also usually find my latest load of laundry dried, folded and stacked in it. Visitors often mistake it for a temporary guitar stand until I get nervous about someones Fender hitting the floor and fetch a real stand from the other room.

 

Trust me I’ve looked but I can’t find the wires or sensors that trigger the phone to ring whenever I do the following: 

Put the needle down on a choice piece of vinyl or put on a favorite old CD

 Plug a DVD into my player

 Sit in my Archie Bunker chair or better yet lay down on the futon.

 

 But I can’t remove the phone as much as I would love to quit mailing money orders to my provider; it is a very necessary evil in my life. And over the upcoming few weeks even much more so. Going on my first real vacation in five years next month; a birthday present to myself. And I just figured it out but I am so stressed out about this it’s comical. Been in complete denial about it too but it’s true. But I have been “on the move” too much to really think about it.

 

 Wrote in my last post about how hot it can get here but yesterday was the first day in three weeks the temperature was actually below a hundred. And I can’t help but wonder if that didn’t have anything to do with everyone I spoke to here locally yesterday seemed to be in a good mood. Everyone I encountered yesterday were actually smiling; maybe not standing in a pool of your own sweat had something to do with it?

 

 The extreme heat takes a toll on my appetite; I have basically cut down to about two meals a day: breakfast followed by some weird combination of lunch and dinner ( “Linner“?)

Yesterday I drove over to Granny’s Tacos (703 East Long) on Fort Worth’s North side of town after reading about it on this site: http://fortworthholeinthewall.blogspot.com/2008/11/grannys-tacos.html
and driving by it about a million times. I like “hole in the wall” dining; the food is usually both surprisingly cheap, good and the people running small non-chain places usually seem to genuinely appreciate your business even if you are shoving a handful of chump change across the counter.

And Granny’s Tacos is a great example of this; for five dollars you get a pile of sliced pork, potatoes, beans and cheese stacked on a tortilla and set in a paper that looks like it was intended to hold hot dogs or pastries but serves to hold the monstrous taco together. The damn thing is only slightly smaller than a masonry brick and I found picking the logistics of picking it up, closing it and eating it difficult without picking the bulk of it out with a fork first.

 

 And then a couple of weeks ago I discovered a really happening little convenience store on Fort Worth’s South side on the corner of James and 820 ( look for the Valero gas pump signs) The sign on the building says “China One” and I guess it sums it up well enough. Besides being a convenient place for me to get gas on the way home from work, they have all the amenities one expects at a good convenience store: lotto tickets, money orders and they are next door to a Dollar General as well. I can pull over here after work and cover a whole lot of bases at once in just a matter of mere minutes.

 

And if this wasn’t reason enough to visit at least once a week they have a great “to-go” with burgers but the star attraction is a mini-buffet of sorts where you can get a big box with your choice of either rice or noodles and two of their entrees for a mere six dollars. On my last two visits I managed to get at least one additional meal out of the immense pile of food courtesy of my microwave. Just look at this; who the hell sits down and eats all of THIS at once ( this is orange and teriyaki chicken by the way )

 

Well gosh-diddly-darn-it I didn’t really have to much to update with but this has been a lot of typing for what little I had to work with. Going to go microwave the left-overs from my Granny’s Taco for breakfast now….later!

 

A Fourth In the Stomach

Got a three-and-a-half day weekend respite this week because of the Fourth. Today is my last day off and I am just now starting to feel relaxed; this has been a long week.
Summer has arrived and with a vengeance; triple-digit temperatures daily since Memorial Day.

So using the old logic of making lemonade when life doles out lemons, when one lives in Texas one can complain about the blistering heat or they can make sun tea.

Holey Moley I can’t walk across a room; I can’t think an entire line of a sentence without “Fuck it’s hot” working it’s way into the middle of the sentence somewhere. Somehow I gather my wits ( as well as my prescription sunglasses) and open the door to my storage space in the carport. Okay that grill’s gotta be in here somewhere; there it is. Dust it off and then take a quick inventory: I’ve got my favorite charcoal (mesquite; kind of overkill for hot dogs but if it burns, good) but need to buy starter. Good: here’s the grill brush. It’s been a while since I used the grill; I know I’m going to need that.

Off to the store I drive in the sizzling sunlight. Somehow I have managed to get out the door halfway early this Saturday; the store parking lot has lots of empty parking places. I pull to a screeching halt as far away from everyone else and their carts and their car doors as I can stand to walk across the Death March parking lot to the store. Shit I can see the heat as I look across the parking lot hanging over the hot concrete like waves of radioactivity, distorting the landscape beyond.

Rush through the store in a mad dash, my own version of Supermarket Sweep. The edible stuff is easy; I pretty much know the inventory on my kitchen shelves: coffee, cereal, that six-year old jar of peanut butter and that nine-year-old bottle of salad dressing. It’s the little things like that can of charcoal starter that always seem to throw me. Find that new by-product of the recession, the “dollar aisle” where I locate 88-cent buns, 99-cent chili and 99-cent sweet relish. I spend a whopping $1.70 on a package of hot dogs and an even more extravagant $2.29 on a small can of charcoal starter. Seven dollars and two pennies later, I have purchased all the makin’s of my Fourth of July feast.

Back at home I give the grill a quick cleaning and arrange fresh charcoal in it and soak them good with the starter fluid. Wait a few minutes…dum de dum de dum ….”I am a lineman…for the count-eeee….” okay that’s long enough….toss the match on there and …it lights; success! Go inside and start heating the chili on the stove while the coals ignite..

This is kind of a guilty pleasure; I know damn well hot dogs aren’t good for you but what the hell it’s the Fourth. These aren’t a usual part of my diet but they do seem to taste better when I fix them myself. I open the packages for the buns and wieners and extract four from each. My own one-man hot dog eating contest; how can I lose? Don’t usually eat four hot dogs in one sitting but if I’m going to the time and trouble of digging out my grill I’m going to do this big. The chili heats up fast; peek out the door. The coals are white; time to cook. Put the sunglasses back on, grab my thermal mug full of ice water , hold my breath and open the door. I’m Going Out There.

My grill is a tiny “tailgate” grill; it doesn’t really require a lot of charcoal and I have in the past cooked small steaks for as many as six people on it. For the hot dogs I have placed all the coals on one side of the grill and put the dogs away from the coals and let them cook slowly until they swell and the skin starts to crack. When they look as if they are close to being done, I put four buns on a piece of aluminum foil and heat them directly over the coals, flipping them once. All of this takes mere minutes which is fine with me; it’s insane to be out here any longer than one has to. Just bought a new thermometer a few days ago and have it hanging in a shaded corner of my carport just above my grill. According to it: 101 degrees in the shade. The buns and hot dogs look as done as I feel; the nine of us dart back in the air-conditioned house, and I begin assembling the hot dogs for consumption. Fish my favorite mustard off the shelf and apply it to the dogs. Spoon fulls of chili and sweet relish are ladled onto the dogs; I now have a feast fit for … well, me.

Wake up on the couch hours later; the phone is ringing. Where am I? What day is it? Where are my glasses? Where’s the phone? Is it ringing or is that the TV? Dazed and disoriented; takes me a few seconds to figure this out. The sunlight outside is now dark; look at the clock. Oh shit, the fireworks!

Drive up to my favorite spot and guess what? Cars are parked up and down the street but fortunately no one is parked exactly in my spot; I wheel into the parking lot and back up to the corner of the lot I usually just walk up to and set up my tripod. Tonight I will have an added advantage of using the back of my truck as an elevated platform for my tripod. I put everything in the back, set up and wait. I have brought a big travel mug full of ice water as well as a back-up bottle of water. Good thing too; even though the sun has gone down it’s still 96 degrees out. More waiting.

The show starts a few minutes later. Across the way through the trees I can hear a choir and the Fort Worth Symphony orchestra building up to some sort of climatic finish. Unfortunately I can also hear crying children, people yakking on their cell-phones and even though rockets are flying through the air, taking pictures of each other instead of the colorful explosions in the sky. A glass bottle hits the concrete and breaks behind me; come on people! I can count no less than four open dumpsters within both eyesight and easy walking distance. Exactly WHAT is your excuse for littering?

They drag out the show; there are long pauses where nothing happens and then the fireworks start up again. I shut off the camera after about five minutes of this and a solid minute of black sky. Switch the camera from video to night exposure mode, take a few pictures and then remember the special fireworks mode and snap a few more. Then I switch back to video and shoot the grand finale to the show.

When the show ends I take down my tripod and get ready to get out of there. I have a plastic bag in the back of my truck I have brought from the house with some stinky take-out remains. After everyone else leaves I walk around real quick and pick up the larger bits of trash: bottles, cans (which I can at least sell) and fast-food debris. Oink oink people; do you do this at home? I sink a bag of trash into the dumpster with the elan of an NBA player and leave.

The Fourth is over; I spent seven dollars. Safe? Give it that much. Sane? Seems sane enough to me. Hey considering the budget I’m running on, I’d call it a good weekend. Now I’m off to cook the rest of those hot dogs…

How About A Nice Old Fashioned Fireworks Show?

I live a short distance from where the Fort Worth Symphony does its annual “Concerts In the Gardens” at our nearby Botanical Gardens. An outdoor family event every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night that ends in a massive fireworks display. They use mortars to launch the fireworks and even when I am holed up here in the File23 compound with the A/C on and the doors and windows shut, there is no mistaking what’s going on outside; someone is shooting something outside.

 You can see the larger bursts on the horizon but there are a lot of trees between me and them so if I want a good look I have to leave the safety and comfort of my home and walk about four blocks. I found a pretty good spot in front of a commercial business with a nice level driveway. There are a lot of trees between me and the stage; they have a sort of natural amphitheater thing going but when the orchestra does movie themes ( Superman, Star Wars etc.) they have a laser show I can see over the trees and then of course the fireworks show which is the big go-home/show’s over finale.

From my spot I can even see the orange and green trails from where they launch the mortars, something I think the stage hides from the paying audience. So this year I have started dragging my tripod up the street three nights a week and setting up my camera.
What the hell; might as well enjoy them. And come to think of it as far as free entertainment goes this is pretty cool. The shows get a little bigger and a little longer as they build towards the Fourth of July. Last nights show was a pretty spectacular and no that’s not the FW Orchestra; I just dubbed over the wind noise and the noisy industrial-sized air conditioner unit for the business I am standing in front of.
Anyhow here is last nights show; enjoy:

Busy Day At 1104 Mission Road

The icons are dropping like flies; in just a matter of a few hours Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and now Michael Jackson are all gone. The paparazzi are swarming like flies, tearful fans leave flowers at the wrong star on Hollywood Blvd. The Internet comes to a crawl as the world Googles Michael Jackson.

Now I am typing slowly here; I resisted writing this until I had slept on it first. I’ve HATED Michael Jackson for years. Back in the 80’s I learned to hate him when the media felt compelled to report every time he wiped himself. The same nauseating saturation coverage they give Britney Spears today; Mikey’s name and face was in the paper every day. When Thriller took off you couldn’t get away from him; his face was everywhere. I remember walking through a Sears in 1984 or so and seeing an entire aisle of those hideous red Sgt. Pepper jackets he took to wearing for sale and no takers. Wonder what landfill they’re all in today?

But in all fairness to Mikey unlike the typical “celebrity” Hollywood chooses to cram down our throats these days at the very least Michael had a degree of talent. He could sing and dance and even if his music sounded like it was written with a punch press, he wrote songs. Now take a look at the typical “celebrity” we get today. Paris Hilton: professional slut or Perez Hilton: professional gay man. Vapid one-dimensional non-talents and that’s holding back on what I really think of them. In comparison to them Mikey truly did have star quality.

Now when someone sells as many records and CDs as Mikey it’s not unusual for them to be forced to withdraw from the world. The reporters, paparazzi and obsessed fans will force a person to hide from the world and into a near-bubble-boy existence. Those of us who aren’t famous can only imagine what it would be like to not be able to go to a restaurant or a business without causing a fuss. Or what it would be like to have to employ security who are at our sides 24/7. I can imagine how this would twist a person after so many years.

But what I will never understand is someone’s compulsion to alter their appearance with plastic surgery and transforming themselves into a real-life Joker or Phantom of the Opera. How much Demerol must one consume to consider THIS a “look”?

There was a lot of speculation in prior years about Mikey’s health. He wore a germ mask in public long before the SARS or swine flu scares and in recent years was wheeled around in a wheelchair. To a degree he seemed to welcome the buzz, even possibly fueling it just to keep the public talking about him. Everyone knows your stars shine will fade if the fans aren’t talking about you. And after allegations of child abuse began to surface, it took its toll on his record sales. Throughout the 90’s he kept re-releasing his “greatest hits” packages over and over and they sat on the shelves gathering dust. “Comeback” tours would be announced and canceled within hours. No matter how childlike he acted the fact remained he was a 50-year-old man; and 50-year-old men are a tough act to market to teenagers.

In recent years watching him go Peter Pan was an uncomfortable experience. Despite allegations of child abuse, he continued to host “slumber parties” with all-male groups of small children seemingly uncaring about what the public thought. At that point one can only speculate on the motivation of the parents who would dump their kids off at the Neverland gates. Were they hoping for their kids to be molested so they could cash in and get a little piece of his estate? A handjob to easy street? One can only wonder.

But as much as I hated Michael Jackson and his Pollyanna-ish squeaky-clean image, it was kind of sad watching a 50-year-old man locked in an undeniable bout of denial. Getting older is not easy but how hard is it really to just accept it? It happens to all of us rich and poor alike. The last thing I am going to do is pay a plastic surgeon to mutilate me into some freakish monster; real life is scary enough.

Meanwhile ordinary people are dying protesting in the streets of Tehran. Women are being raped in the fields of the Congo by soldiers. Children are being murdered in civil wars all over the world. But as Nikolas Shreck so wisely pointed out in his documentary CHARLES MANSON SUPERSTAR somehow in the public’s eyes the death of a celebrity is so much more terrible than that of an ordinary person.

The English band the Stranglers once recorded a song entitled “Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead” and the news reports for Mikey’s passing are going along with that train of thought. Well forgive me if I’m not joining in on this little love feast. I say drive a stake through his heart. Just to make sure he doesn’t come back…

Oh Those Wacky Neighbors

I live in a duplex.

Sharing a yard with the neighbor next door has its ups and downs. My current neighbors are okay.

They drink hard but for the most part conceal it well.

The city is doing a lot of road work in my neighborhood; replacing water and sewer pipes, widening the streets and re-paving, putting in new sidewalks etc.

Woke up one morning recently and found one of those orange and white street barriers ( “ ROAD CLOSED TO THRU TRAFFIC” ) in pieces and scattered all over the back yard. Upon inspection under flashlight I noticed each piece had a bright yellow sticker on it and on each one of those tiny little stickers in tiny print it said in plain English that “Possession or mis-use of this is a felony punishable by…” HOW many years in prison?

Think that was about as far as I got through reading; I dropped it in the grass like the hot potato it was and fetched my leather work gloves. Didn’t know how it got there but I wanted this thing out of my yard and fast.

Fortunately it was still dark; about four in the morning. All of the surrounding neighbors lights were off. Yours Truly gathered each piece of the sign and piled them up in the street next to a road barrier just like it right across the street in front of a giant ditch the city had dug the day before. As long as it was out of my yard and back in the street I figured the city workers would know what to do with it. Back in the city street = back in the city’s possession.

Later that morning I was hard at work holding down the futon in my living room when I heard the sound of heavy equipment rumbling around outside. Peeking through the blinds I could see several Hispanic city workers standing around staring at the disassembled sign in the street. A bulldozer rolled up and they unceremoniously started tossing the pieces of the sign into the bulldozers scoop on the front. The huge machine backed all the way in reverse (“… beep … beep … beep… “) to the other end of the block where I could see another crew begin to re-assemble the sign and put it up in the intersection down there. So much for that.

Ran into one of the two guys who live next door later and asked him if he knew why that sign was in the back yard to begin with. He shrugs and tells me: “Oh we were a little drunk the night before and stole it; don’t really know why …”