M. Giant's
Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks


Tuesday, August 20, 2002  

I'm glad I didn't spend a lot of time arranging my Zen Rock Garden just so, because apparently it's community property. People just love to push the little wooden rake through the sand when they come to my desk. So I guess it's good that I didn't spend a lot of time getting it just right. I'd feel like quite the jerkwad if I stood up from my desk every couple of days and bellowed, "WHO'S BEEN PLAYING WITH MY SAND?!?"

T. Rex is the most creative about it. For a while, she had the stones arranged so they were standing up in a little circle, one of them lying on top of two others so it looked like a teeny-tiny little Stonhenge. It made Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge look almost like the real thing by comparison. People who say you can’t be funny with pebbles just aren’t trying hard enough.

I forgot to mention this the other day, but the Zen Rock Garden is probably the best thing I could have at my desk that's associated with the word "garden."

I used to have a plant at home. It looked like Jean Reno's plant in Leon, aka The Professional, and I paid it about the same amount of attention. Then we got a cat, who kept eating the plant until he finally pulled it off the windowsill and killed it. So no more plants at home for me.

Then I won a plant at work, to keep at my desk. But I was like, "hey, I'm working here, not gardening," and I forgot to water it, and it died. By the next time I looked at it, it was a dessicated stick poking out of a lump of dirt that had shrunk to half the size of the pot it was in. I tried to rescue it anyway, even though I was pretty sure it was hopeless. I’d pour water in the pot and it would go right into the saucer. However, after a week or so, the lump of dirt was a little bigger. I got a small sense of accomplishment from that. Then I accidentally brushed the remains of the plant with the glass. The stem shivered into a small puff of dust, and that was the end of that.

Then T. Rex got me a cactus. She thought it was funny. She thought I wouldn't be able to kill it. She was half right. One watering and three years later, somebody pointed out to me that my cactus was kaput. Again, I made heroic efforts to revive it, but since it looked exactly the same after a couple of weeks, I had to give up hope. Not that it looked all that different than it had the day I got it. Shut up. Cactuses are hard!

So now I have my Zen Rock Garden. Fortunately for it, it’s fairly low-maintenance. But if there's a way to kill it, rest assured that I'll find it.

I just wish I could figure out why it doesn’t seem to be growing.

* * *

One of the most difficult things about maintaining a blog is trying to stay out of a rut. Especially if you write every day, you run the risk of settling into a routine, you stop taking risks, and before long the blog is a shadow of its former self, a ghoulish, lifeless revenant shambling hopelessly towards the big bit bucket in the sky. So today I’m doing something I’ve never done before.

Are you ready?

Here goes:


Chicago: Ravenswood Manor/Horner Park
(AVAILABLE NOW AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2002)

Archivist/part-time grad student and her dog seek respectful roommate to share:

large 2 BR vintage apt. in HORNER PARK (Montrose & California)

3 blocks to Francisco Brown Line stop

furnished (except bedroom) in 6-flat

$500 rent (includes all utils: DSL, heat, gas and electric)

12 x 12 sq. ft. bedroom with spacious closet

3-season porch, eat-in kitchen, back yard

free washer

possible use of garage

About Me: 38, gay, good sense of humor, considerate, reader, radio listener, cyclist wannabe, German speaker, moderate
drinker, non-smoker; neat.

About Dog: 25-lb. female terrier, loves walks.

e-mail: betharthur@yahoo.com

Okay, that wasn’t really all that exciting. I’m just doing this as a favor to a friend of Trash's from grad school. If you’re looking for a roommate in Chicago, there you go.

posted by M. Giant 3:43 PM 0 comments

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Monday, August 19, 2002  

Dear Trash’s Uncle:

During our weekend in Iowa, it was nice to have the guidance of someone like yourself when we were “making the scene” in Des Moines’s famously vibrant nightlife. Thanks for knowing all the bars in Des Moines where the "cool people" hang out. Those places would have been a lot less entertaining than the places we actually ended up going to.


Dear Des Moines sports bar:

Thanks for having such a wide variety of alcoholic beverages on tap. With a selection that included everything from Budweiser to Bud Light, I was overwhelmed by the embarrassment of riches laid before me. I look forward to subsequent visits, when I plan to delve even deeper into the veritable telephone directory that is your beer list. There’s nothing quite like being awakened at five a.m. the next morning by a jackhammering Budweiser headache, and I am in your debt for making that experience available to me.


Dear guy parked in front of the big-screen at the sports bar:

I agree, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars is a visually arresting tour de force of cinematic storytelling. I have nothing but respect for the way your attention was utterly riveted by every onscreen development, every transgressive image, every nuance of Natasha Henstridge’s multifaceted performance. Even without the benefit of sound or closed-captioning, you displayed a level of focus and concentration that would be the envy of any Lama, Shaman, or Jedi Knight. When the channel abruptly changed in the third act to a football game, you responded with nary a twitch. I could only assume that your spirit had entirely departed the corporeal plane, and reacted accordingly.

Dude, next time? Give the guy behind you some sign that you’re still alive. Preferably before he starts CPR.


Dear seven-piece country band playing at the Des Moines shit-kicker bar:

Stop that. Just stop it.


Dear Des Moines shit-kicker bar:

My God, are you for real?


Dear seven-piece country band still playing at the Des Moines shit-kicker bar:


Stop it right now. I’m serious.


Dear guy practicing his line dancing by himself:

It’s admirable to try to hone a skill until you’re the best you can possibly be at it. But once you are the best you can be, you’re allowed to stop. Seriously. Maybe someone will be impressed that you’re able to click your bootheels together four times in one leap, but is that really the kind of person you want to date? Broaden your horizons a little bit, and I’m sure you’ll meet a nice woman who appreciates you for your finer qualities like your patience and determination. But not if her first impression of you evokes the image of a speeded-up leprechaun trying to perform the choreography from HMS Pinafore in its entirety in sixty seconds flat. And since you look like one of those little handheld trapeze artist toys anyway, you don’t have to start over every time you miss a step. Nobody noticed, I promise you.

Actually, let me amend that. If you start over from the beginning one more time, I swear to God I’m going to push your face in.


Dear seven-piece country band who will not stop playing at the Des Moines shit-kicker bar:

Okay, I asked you nicely. Did you think I was kidding?

When I paid my two-dollar cover charge, I was expecting some innocuous Alabama and Sawyer Brown covers in exchange for my hard-earned money. And yeah, there was that, but this? This? Which one of you seven morons decided that a good idea was to do a dance-club megamix extendo-version cover of the Beverly Hillbillies theme in the style of the Beastie Boys? Two days later, I’m still tortured inside my head by the sound of you repeating “Bub-bub-bub-bubblin’ crude! Bub-bub-bub-bubblin’ crude!” over and over again, for, like a half hour. There’s no reason for you to have left the place alive after that. I’m going to have to get that surgically removed, and I’m sending you clowns the bill. I don’t care if the keyboard player thought he was in a classic rock band, I don’t care if the fiddle player made less noise than I did, I don’t care if the bass player was the J. D. Salinger of live music, you’re all equally complicit in the scars I’ll bear for the rest of my life. And when the singer ripped the front of his shirt open all the way down to his gigantic belt buckle, came down off the stage, and gave some poor woman a lap dance, for the love of Merle Haggard, the rest of you all forfeited your claims to humanity by failing to throw down your instruments and storm out on the spot.

And you do this every weekend? How is it that you’re still at large?


Dear Minneapolis:

Hi, there. It’s good to be home.

posted by M. Giant 4:11 PM 0 comments

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Friday, August 16, 2002  

One of the personal items at my desk at work is a "Zen Rock Garden" kit. Maybe you've seen these things in the store or at some of your coworkers' desks. Basically, it's a little 6" x 10" wooden tray, with some rocks, a funny little rake, a slim volume about rock gardening, and some white sand. I'm fine with everything except the last part.

Trash and I got it for Christmas, and she sent it to work with me to put on my desk. It wasn't going to her office because she has a little Zen fountain there already, and it wasn't staying in our house because we already have two catboxes to scoop out, thank you very much.

So this box was under my desk for a month or so with the shrink-wrapping still intact. At some point, the women in my office started noticing it.

"When are you going to open your Zen Rock Garden?" my boss asked.

"I don't know," I answered distractedly.

"When are you going to open your Zen Rock Garden?" asked T. Rex, one of the managers.

"I have to figure out where to put it first," I said.

"When are you going to open your Zen Rock Garden?" asked the other manager.

"You know, I hadn’t thought about it," I said straightfaced.

It quickly became apparent that this shrink-wrapped box was like catnip to these people. Apparently it had become a whole topic for speculation in our department. I am many things, but a topic for speculation is not one of them.

I got back from lunch one day, and T. Rex was there. "Can I open your Zen Rock Garden?" she asked.

I don't like people messing with my stuff at work. It's probably because I sit at a desk (5/20) that has to be staffed all the time, even when I'm gone, so other people have to spend time here. I understand that, but it just makes me more protective of my space. Don't move the reference sheets I have hung up. Don't change my computer wallpaper. And don't even think about adjusting my chair unless you want to be the target of a multi-agency statewide manhunt. T. Rex has been known to ignore all of the above rules because she knows it makes me crazy. Also because she knows she’s one of the few people who can do it and survive.

But I decided it was time to stop putting off the Zen Rock Garden, for its own protection. "I'll open it today," I promised.

A bit later, I broke the seal on the shrink-wrap. A tiny puff of dust escaped. Made sense, I figured. There's sand in there. Obviously some of it is fine enough that it escaped the hermetically sealed plastic bag in which it was packaged.

Have I mentioned that I'm an idiot?

I got the rest of the shrink-wrapping off, and about a quarter-teaspoon of sand spilled onto my desk. Now I was nervous.

I started trying to pull things out of the cardboard sleeve, but a gritty hiss from within cautioned me. I slid the book out, and more sand spilled.

By the time I figured out where the tray was, the thing was starting to look like a prop from The Mummy (1999). It occurred to me that the good people at Acme Zen Rock Garden Company appeared to have dumped the sand in there loose, like two scoops into a package of Kellogg's Raisin Bran.

Actually, the sand was in fact intended to be contained in a plastic bag, as I was able to ascertain once I’d succeeded in digging to the bottom of the small dune that had formed on my desk. Except there was a hole in the bag. A hole through which nearly all of the sand had escaped into the package, and thence to the surface of my desk. As for the bag, it now contained the ideal amount of sand for seasoning pudding.

I did manage to salvage a lot of the sand and get it into the tray; there's enough to cover the bottom. But now my desk was all gritty, I had to take my shoes off and dump them out like I’d just been walking on a beach, and there was even a grain stuck between two of my teeth. To this day, the mouse on the computer closest to the rock garden doesn’t slide across the worksurface so much as grind across it.

I finally got the thing situated on my desk and plunked the rocks randomly into it. I know I did it wrong, but I don't care. Okay, that's a lie. I do care. I kept the book so I could look at it later and figure out how to fix what I did wrong. This rock gardening shit is hard, man. If T. Rex hadn’t stepped in and figured it out, it would still look like ass.

For something that's supposed to relax me, it's not freaking working.

posted by M. Giant 3:27 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, August 15, 2002  

Short entry today because, much to my chagrin, I found myself in the position of actually having to work the entire day. That’s a heck of a way to mark the date of my eight-year anniversary with the company, don’t you think?

Pretty much all I have for you is this link. My friend and reader Corpkitten sent it to me yesterday with a brief note of warning. If you don’t already know about Florida’s new “stealth cops,” you should click on it because I don’t have time to explain it to you right now.

Now I’m a little embarrassed about all my complaining last week. Remember how I was carping about how hard it is to speed from Minneapolis to Chicago? I didn’t realize how lucky I was that I don’t have to drive between Jacksonville and Miami instead. These stealth cops are sneaky with a capital eek. Hey, do you suppose it’s a coincidence that they’re focusing on violators in roadwork zones, where the fines for speeding are doubled?

Yes, the article his heavily laden with propaganda about how this program is aimed at reducing traffic accidents and fatalities. And no, I’m not coming out here in favor of accidents and fatalities, although I can’t imagine that doing so would hurt my hit count in the short run. I’m just saying that I wish people would admit that speeding tickets also serve as an arbitrarily applied tax on highway users. I don’t mind paying taxes, but I’d just as soon get them taken care of all at one time rather than getting pulled over without warning for a chunk of them, which in turn gives my insurance company an excuse to gouge me even further.

I’d be more upset about this, but I’ve only had two speeding tickets in the past thirty-five months myself. Last week, you would have had to peel me off the ceiling.

Don’t bother questioning my objectivity on this, because I don’t have one. It’s a good thing I’m not a real journalist or something.

posted by M. Giant 3:02 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, August 14, 2002  

As regular readers know, earlier this year Trash and I gave a lot of thought to moving out of our overvalued house and trading it in for a much larger house in a cheaper neighborhood, wiping out most of our other debt in the process. Logically, it would have made a lot of sense, so naturally we decided not to (6/20). We’ve been much happier ever since.

The only problem was that the huge chunk of equity we were sitting on wasn’t doing us a lick of good. I realize the word “problem” is a crashing misnomer here, to the point where I’m wishing the same “problem” on everyone I know. It’s just that as nice as it is to know that we could clean up if we decided to sell, it’s not like you can easily convert equity into shiny metal disks that you can feed into vending machines or something. Or send to creditors, for that matter. Sure, we could take out a home equity loan and have plenty of dollar bills to slip into g-strings all over town, but that would just mean more debt, and more payments, and I’m willing to wait until the next model year of Lamborghinis comes out rather than commit to signing away another slice of our paychecks every month.

Fortunately, I married a smart lady.

Trash figured out that if we simply refinanced, we could save a fair amount of money simply by consolidating our various loans into a new mortgage. That way we’d be paying down the same amount of debt, but at today’s low, low mortgage rates rather than the usurious interest payments that we’ve been paying to that unibrowed guy named Bandsaw over on East Lake Street. We’d have less debt, lower payments, and still get to stay in our house. Brilliant! We free up more of our income and everybody wins. Theoretical funds change hands and the world keeps turning. This is what a free economy is all about.

Trash has years of experience in the mortgage industry (so do I, but not as many, plus that was years ago, plus I’ve put a great deal of effort into forgetting everything I learned there), plus she’s able to do math, so she was kind enough to take care of getting the whole thing set up, from getting the house appraised to scheduling the closing. All I had to do was show up and sign a bunch of papers. Naturally, I couldn’t even get that right.

We’ve refinanced before a couple of times, and the closings have always been in an office building twelve blocks from where I work. That’s where I went today. I was waiting for the elevator before I realized that I was in the wrong place. Oops. It’s not Trash’s fault. She told me last week that the closing was at a different location this time, but I learn by seeing and doing. When my brain does a Google search on “mortgage closing,” my experience and place memory will trump a conversational exchange every time. Hence my ending up at the wrong place. Fortunately, I had a letter from the title company with me, and they had been thoughtful enough to provide the correct address on the letterhead for the benefit of morons just like myself, lest we show up at the front desks of random offices all over the metro area demanding mortgage closings. Even more fortunately, the correct place was just another eight blocks up the road. Unfortunately, I overshot the entrance to the parking lot and had to sit through three traffic lights just to get back. Oops. I was about ten minutes late for the closing time. I spend precious seconds glaring at a red left-turn arrow, threatening it with dire punishments if I didn’t get to the closing before all the money went on its lunch break.

Trash was already there, of course, and we went into the closing and its standard intensive session of signing and initialing. Early on, it became apparent that one of the institutions involved had failed to execute a small but vital step. This was the stuff by which deals are broken and closings are postponed and names are called, but Trash simply whipped out her cell phone and got it taken care of in ninety seconds flat. She’s my hero. I, meanwhile, facilitated the process by refraining from drooling all over the paperwork and remembering how to spell my initials.

And yet, as stupid as I am, they’re still going to let me stop by the office to pick up a check for a nice sum in a few days. I love this country.

posted by M. Giant 3:19 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, August 13, 2002  

One of the tenets of my personal code is, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” It’s a pretty easy one, actually. It’s not that I can’t say anything nice, it’s just that I generally choose not to. Big difference. Gives me a lot of leeway.

And I’m ready to prove it, in case yesterday’s entry wasn’t enough. Here are a few things I really dig, and why.

Simon Delivers: It’s like Netflix with groceries, except you don’t have to send the food back when you’re done with it (which would be pretty gross, now that I think about it). You log in, select your groceries, and on the next delivery day there’s a stack of green plastic bins on your doorstep. I haven’t seen the inside of a supermarket in two years, and I miss it not at all. The only way this could possibly be more convenient would be if they put the food away for you, then waited around in the kitchen to cook it for you when you’re hungry. But that would be a little creepy. It’s a bit more expensive than getting your own, but we had to ask ourselves: is it worth four or five extra dollars to not have to drive to the store, navigate aisle traffic using a rickety cart with a wheel that’s stuck sideways and leaves a long black mark on the floor tracing your movements like Billy from Family Circus, load up several weeks worth of provisions, stand in the checkout line for seven hours, bag everything up in the five-second window between the garden slug ahead of you and the walking aneurysm behind you, load it out to the car, drive it home while trying to keep the bags from tipping over, and load it all into the house? We really think it is. Of course, we’ll starve to death if anything ever happens to our Internet access, but we’ll worry about that when the time comes.

Bonus: they pack the frozen food with dry ice which you can drop into a pot of water on your stove and then play mad scientist. Bwa ha ha.

IKEA: We don’t have IKEA in this town, so I really didn’t know what to expect. When we drove up to the Schaumburg, IL store, I had two thoughts. One: nothing that big has any right to be that blue. It’s, like, hyper-blue. It’s blue all the way down to the subatomic level. It’s so blue it makes the surrounding sky look yellowish by comparison. I mean, holy cow, it’s so blue it actually bends time. Two, obviously that can’t all be store, so most of it must be factory or something. Wrong. No factory. Just three sprawling, airplane-hangar-sized floors of things I didn’t even know I needed, but which became an absolute necessity the moment I laid eyes on them.

Yes, I’ve heard all the complaints. Their stuff is cheap, the stores are elaborate shrines to a cult of acquisition, the company is a front for the Swedish Mafia, whatever. Whether those things are true or not, I don’t care. We spent most of a week there and escaped only thirty-seven dollars poorer. Our friend Bitter, who just moved into a new apartment, was able to buy shelves, lights, kitchen stuff, wall art, a dresser, some chairs, a bed, and a leather sectional sofa with a fold-out, king-sized bed for less than a hundred dollars. Try that at Target.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind: One of my favorite things to do in Chicago. A handful of ridiculously talented men and women who call themselves “Neo-Futurists” perform thirty plays in sixty minutes. You heard me. No, that’s not a typo. These people write thirty complete plays, list the titles in the program, and the audience yells out the number of the one they want to see next. When the hour’s over, the show’s over. It’s like punk theater or something. And it’s hilarious. On any given night, you might see a ninety-second version of Hamlet or the complete works of Jane Austen, get pulled up on stage, hear something inexpressibly sad, see the funniest thing you’ve ever seen anyone do, and watch any number of theatrical and storytelling conventions turned unceremoniously on their ossified ears. And in the unlikely event that you don’t like one of the plays, it’ll be over in two minutes anyway. So I think you can hang in there. The roster of plays changes constantly too, which is why they say that “if you’ve seen the show once, you’ve seen the show once.” Normally I’d give you details here, but I don’t have to because you can click on the link. I will tell you this: get there early, because it’s a dinky little space above a funeral home that fills up quick. The space, I mean, not the funeral home. You’ll love it. If you’re in Chicago, see it. If you’re not in Chicago, go to Chicago so you can see it.

Did I mention that some of their alumni were behind the Tony-award-winning musical Urinetown? Well, that’s only because I couldn’t figure out a smoother way to work it in there, not because it isn’t true. Because it is. True, I mean.

See? I can be nice. Don’t worry; I’ll try not to do it very often.

posted by M. Giant 3:32 PM 0 comments

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Monday, August 12, 2002  

For a while last year, I had a little side gig where I would review DVDs for a movie website. It was a pretty good excuse to spend way too much time watching a lot of movies, but it didn’t exactly keep gas in the Bentley, if you know what I mean. Especially since we had to supply our own DVDs to review. Seriously. Even that wouldn’t have been so bad if they could have assigned movies to us. But we lowly freelancers were on our own. What we had to do was log on to the website and look for DVDs that hadn’t been reviewed yet, then snap up whatever was available. There were any number of occasions when I went to Blockbuster while Trash stayed home to plug titles into the website’s search engine. You know those people at the video store who browse the aisles with cellphones clapped to their melons, rattling off movie titles? We hate those people, right? Yeah, I was one of them. It was embarrassing. Especially since people heard me asking about films I would never, ever, rent. Angel Eyes? No. Driven? No. Dick? Score!

Then I’d get the movies home, and I’d have five days to review them before I they were due back. That’s five days to review, on average, three movies, four commentary tracks, two hours of deleted scenes, twenty minutes of “making-of featurettes,” a dozen theatrical trailers, and every other menu option they decided to toss on there. Think I was able to do that every time? Think again. I started doing daily cost-benefit analyses:

“Okay, I’m done with this one and it’s only one day late, so I can bring it back today and still get paid enough to hold onto these other two a little longer and still be ahead, but only if I finish this one tomorrow, because it’s a two-day rental, but it has more features, which means it’ll take me longer to get to the third one, by which time my late fees will be more than my fee, so maybe I should do this one first after all, and while I was thinking about all this I forgot to return the first movie and someone else got a review of it up before I did anyway. Crap.”

I know it’s not easy to get rich doing freelance writing work, but I didn’t think it was supposed to actually cost money. When they started requiring us to get our review selections approved in advance, that was pretty much the only excuse I needed to quit doing it.

Then, last month, Trash and I signed up for Netflix. Dude, you need to do this, unless you don’t own a DVD player, in which case you need to get a DVD player and then do this. It’s a totally different model for renting movies. It’s like the movie renter’s version of TiVo.

Maybe you’re not familiar with Netflix, in which case I can only assume that its banner ads are somehow being blocked from appearing on your browser by the walls of your cave. Here’s how it works: you pay twenty dollars a month. They send you DVDs in the mail, up to three at a time, as many as you want. When you’re done, send it back. There are no late fees, and the only limit on the number of movies you can rent is the speed of the Postal Service. You can only have three movies in your possession at a time, but if you can’t make those last a couple of days, you’re spending too much time with your DVD player in the first place.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Twenty bucks a month? What a rip-off! Who spends that on movies? For that to be worth it, I’d have to rent, like, six movies a month! Six! A half-dozen!! That’s one or two a week, for cryin’ to Jesus! Okay, where do I sign up?”

Did I mention there are no late fees?

I’m a little worried that they won’t be able to do this indefinitely, and here’s why: tens of thousands of DVDs are being shuttled furiously back and forth in the mail, protected by nothing more than a couple of flimsy paper envelopes. I don’t know how long they’ll be able to take that. I know, digital media is supposed to be practically indestructible, but tell that to my friend The Engineer (7/12), who had to quit using CD wallets to cart his hardcore between his house and the radio station because the music was getting damaged in transit. I can’t help thinking that the same phenomenon is going to catch up to Netflix eventually, at which point it’s going to get more expensive. So don’t wait around on this, people.

Now that I’m in a place where movie rental has joined the “utilities” category of the monthly budget, I’m seriously considering going back to the reviewing gig. A good deal is even better when you can make it pay for itself and then write it off on your taxes. Of course, I wouldn’t be doing it for the money, but for the writing practice. Right now I’m only churning out about a thousand ‘Net-published words per weekday and I’m afraid I might lose my chops if I keep stagnating like this.

* * *

Okay, this cracked me up. Sometimes compliments make me blush. Oddly enough, the blush from this one is shaped a lot like the back of Ana Ng’s hand. Heh.

posted by M. Giant 3:28 PM 0 comments

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Friday, August 09, 2002  

My wife’s coworker MC is having a little bit of car trouble. Oh, it still starts and runs fine. Everything’s totally hunky-dory under the hood. The problem is that the back of his front seat has fallen off. And, as Paula Poundstone has rightly said, the back of the front seat is a piece of driving equipment easily taken for granted.

Now MC’s daily commute has taken on a new dimension, as his new cockpit configuration forces him to abandon the everyday “casually guiding the wheel” style of steering with a “white-knuckled deathgrip” style of steering. Pretty much the only thing keeping him from sliding into the backseat every time he accelerates or goes uphill is his hold on the car’s directional control interface. Hence a commonplace activity—like, say, eating a banana on the road—becomes fraught with peril should he come to a curve.

I met Trash and MC for lunch today, and Trash was still laughing when we got our food. Apparently her favorite part—and I have to agree—is that MC still straps on his seatbelt. That’s kind of unfair of us, because what are you gonna do, not put it on? It’s bad enough that you have to drive perched on the seat like a milkmaid on a rollercoaster without also worrying about flying through the windshield in the event of a head-on collision. This way is much better, because a head-on collision will turn his seatbelt into a slingshot that will launch him through the rear window instead. It’s a lot safer back there, after all.

You might imagine that driving in this position would get a little tiring. You would be right. MC told us about how he came to a stop at a red light and just lay back for a minute to give his arms and stomach muscles a rest. From that vantage, he watched the sky and the top of a semi-trailer in front of him. When the top of the semi-trailer pulled out of his field of vision, he knew it was time to sit up and keep driving. You gotta feel bad for the guy when you hear something like that. With the shape I’m in, I would just have to follow semi-trailers everywhere, whether they were going to my destination or not.

MC is starting to feel a little self-conscious about it, because other drivers notice. Imagine pulling up to a red light next to a sporty little car that seems to be empty. You curiously look over to confirm your suspicions, and there, staring back at you balefully, is a pair of eyes just above door level. It’s hard to look cool when the only thing people can see is the top of your head. Even Schwarzenegger couldn’t manage it after he ripped the shotgun seat out of Rae Dawn Chong’s car in Commando. MC says he keeps wanting to roll down his window and yell, “Shut up! My seat’s broken!” Too bad his window won’t roll down far enough.

I asked him if he plans to keep it that way. He doesn’t, but it’s going to be pretty expensive to fix because the seat has electrical adjustment controls. In the meantime, Trash is tormenting him at the office by playing an mp3 of “Low Rider” by War on her computer over and over again.

* * *

I don’t know what you people are doing about the Clear Channel thing (7/19), but obviously it’s working. Keep it up.

posted by M. Giant 2:54 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, August 08, 2002  

Today’s kind of a big day for me. It’s an anniversary of sorts, really.

Those of you who have followed the link on the right to my Hissyfit from last June already know that my driving record is a bit…shall we say…checkered. Another way of putting it would be to say that I’ve gotten three speeding tickets in three years.

I deserved the first one, so I didn’t fight it. Even if I’d wanted to, I didn’t feel like traveling to Utah just to go to traffic court. In hindsight, maybe I should have, because that ticket made it impossible for me to get out from under the second two, which I absolutely did not deserve. From that experience, I learned that you need to fight every ticket that comes your way, whether it’s justified or not, because it’s the only way to ensure that you won’t be sent spiraling uncontrollably into a chain of events that will eventually threaten to deprive you of all rights of the road. I’ve already told the story, so I’m not going to bore you further with it today. I’ll be boring you with something related instead.

The reason today is a big day is because it’s the thirty-five-month anniversary of that first ticket. That means that as of tomorrow, as far as car insurance companies are concerned, it never happened. From here, it’s only four-and-a-half months until my next ticket never happened, another month until my accident never happened, and only one more year after that before my driving record is totally clear! Today marks the beginning of the end of my long nightmare. Not only will I be able to stop driving under what is effectively a suspended sentence, I’ll get to stop paying monthly insurance premiums that would get me a spacious three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.

Being this close to the final lap made me extra nervous during the drive to and from Chicago last week. I don’t know if you’ve ever driven across Wisconsin, but since that state’s primary export is speeding tickets, it’s not a trip to be taken lightly. The 289-mile corridor from Hudson to Beloit is a terrifying gauntlet for any scofflaw. Every time I run it I feel like Rosie O’Donnell sneaking behind the back row of seats at an NRA convention.

So far I’ve been lucky. I can’t tell you anything firsthand about getting pulled over in Wisconsin, but I’ve heard horror stories. Most states, they give you a ticket and you have two weeks to pay it by mail. Not in Wisconsin. You have to pay immediately, and if you can’t cough it up right then, you’re subject to getting summarily shot through the head. At least that’s what I hear.

We do have a radar detector, of course. Wisconsin hates radar detectors. I can tell because they’ve not only made them illegal, they’ve deployed a statewide jamming field to prevent them from actually detecting any radar. Plus they’ve equipped their cop cars with instant-on, undetectable, detector-jamming, laser-powered speed-gauging technology that was reverse-engineered from crashed UFOs. That’s the only explanation for the fact that my radar detector never makes a peep when I drive past any of the seven or eight hundred State Trooper vehicles crouched malevolently on the side of the road between Minnesota and Illinois.

And I know it’s not my detector, either, because it works fine at home. I know something's going on in that little electronic brain. It's not just a paperweight with some LED’s on it. Even in Wisconsin, it screeches at me every time I drive past a bank. I assume it's being set off by whatever high-tech burglar-proofing they have surrounding the vaults. You know, the laser beams you can only see when you put on the special goggles, but if you interrupt them a glass cylinder drops down over you and instantly fills up with phosgene gas or something. I don't know. These countermeasures must be pretty dangerous if my radar detector deems it necessary to warn me about them when I'm passing within two hundred yards. And while I appreciate its concern, I want it to be a radar detector. Not a bank detector. Banks tend to be not very furtive, what with the solid looking brick buildings and large signs announcing not only their name and function, but frequently the time and temperature as well. It's not like my radar detector is doing me a favor by warning me about a bank that's hiding behind a bridge support just waiting to pull me over and give me a home equity loan. But if I set it on a Wisconsin State Trooper’s hood, it’ll just stare innocently back at me while the officer paints my chest cavity with a tachyon beam that could read the registration numbers on the side of a cloaked Romulan Warbird.

As of today, though, things are getting better. A crushing weight is being lifted from the stack resting on my chest, and the ones underneath it won’t be there much longer. It’s only a matter of time before I’ll be able to safely get on the freeway, set the cruise control to ninety-four, and relax. Because, hey, what’s just one ticket?

posted by M. Giant 3:15 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, August 07, 2002  

I don’t claim to be a numismatist. I also don’t claim to be a coin collector. I do dig those state quarters, though. I collect those.

That doesn’t make me at all unusual, I realize. Lots of people collect them. They’re not exactly difficult to come by. According to the U.S. Mint’s website, over seventeen billion of them have been minted. Of those, maybe half are actually in circulation. The rest are in a jar in my bedroom.

What, you thought I was just collecting one of each? Heck, everyone can do that, and probably is. God knows how many unassuming little eighteen-coin stacks are hiding in drawers, just waiting to be joined by Indiana so they can see daylight again for one brief moment. Think about those cardboard maps they sell at the drugstore, the ones with the fifty quarter-sized sockets. If everyone has one of those, imagine how long it’s going to take before an everyday one-coin-per-state collection is actually worth something.

That’s right. Seven thousand years.

Since I’m hoping to retire sometime in this millennium, my project is a little more ambitious. I plan to collect an entire roll of each quarter. It’s the perfect compromise; it’s hard enough that not every United States citizen who handles currency will be doing it, but it’s not so hard that I actually have to work at it.

Here’s what I’m doing: keeping state quarters that come into my possession and my wife’s, and occasionally buying state quarters off of friends who work in the service and retail industries. Then I put them in the aforementioned jar. That’s it.

Here’s what I’m not doing:

· Buying state quarters just for the sake of buying them. I’m not ordering rolls from the mint. I’m not going into banks or stores to trade cash for brand-new rolls still in the shrink-wrap. That might be a perfectly valid way to collect coins, but it would take all the fun out of it for me. I only want quarters that come to me in the course of everyday circulation. What? It makes sense in my head.

· Worrying about the condition of any of the coins. And I’m not just talking about not putting the coins in little Mylar envelopes, either. Right now I have in my pocket a Virginia that in its short life appears to have been sandblasted, dipped in acid, and sucked through a jet engine. I don’t care. It’s going in the collection. I’m aware that to serious coin collectors, condition is everything. That’s why I’m not talking to them about this.

· Paying attention to the little letter under “In God We Trust” that tells me whether the coin was made in Philadelphia or Denver. If I thought about that, I’d have to collect twice as many rolls, and I’m just not up for that kind of commitment. Life’s too short, dude.

Here’s what I plan to do but haven’t yet:

· Actually count how many coins I have so far. I have a general idea, sure; I’ve got enough Connecticuts that I could use those the wood from those little trees to build a second home. Georgia has mooned me so many times that I’m beginning to wonder if the state prohibits pants. On the other hand, I only have a couple of Ohios (am I the only one who finds that faceless astronaut a little sinister?) and Louisianas. So maybe those will go on the ends of rolls that are stuffed with Eagles. Don’t tell anyone.

· Get a hold of some coin rolls. I know where to find them; I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Hey, it’s not like there’s any hurry. We’re only a third of the way done here. It is, however, slightly embarrassing that I don’t know how many coins fit into a roll. Maybe I should research that.

Obviously I’m not actually serious about getting rich off of this quarter-assed hobby of mine. But maybe someday my eccentric little collection will be something worth passing on to my grandchildren. Just think of all the laundry they’ll be able to do.

posted by M. Giant 3:17 PM 1 comments

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40 in a roll. Are you still doing this?

By Anonymous Anonymous, at September 4, 2007 9:08 PM  

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Tuesday, August 06, 2002  

Most people who live in a city with more than one Chinese restaurant tend to have a favorite. Trash and I don’t. We used to. It was about two blocks away from where I work, and I would often call in a takeout order and pick it up on my way home. We would also meet there for lunch. We would also take friends there for dinner. Not for nothing did we call it our favorite Chinese restaurant.

Late one afternoon, I called to put in an order. The owner of a heavily accented voice answered: “He-oo?”

Somewhat discombobulated by the other person’s failure to answer with the name of the restaurant, I asked, somewhat hesitantly:

“Is this the Dragon Jade restaurant?”

“Wee ow binness!” he shouted, and hung up the phone before I could take a breath.

I was disappointed, but not surprised. The place had weird hours, it had never been full, and there had been any number of occasions where we were the only ones there. It had only been a matter of time all along. I called Trash and broke the bad news. Our favorite Chinese restaurant was no more. She took it a little harder than I did. I think we ended up eating from Leeann Chin that night. And no, it wasn’t the same.

For weeks afterward, every time the subject of Chinese restaurants came up, we would sigh wistfully in memory of our favorite one. I would call Trash towards the end of the day to ask her what she thought we should do about dinner, and she would say “Dragon Jade” in tones of either sadness or frustration. She was having trouble letting go.

Finally, one day she couldn’t take it any more. She insisted that I call again to make sure they were really and truly gone. She pointed out that the sign was still out front, after all. I pointed out that that only meant that there wasn’t a new tenant yet. But Trash wasn’t prepared to abandon hope. She prevailed upon me to try, as if together we could somehow will the place back into existence.

I dialed the restaurant’s old number with the air of a trauma surgeon standing over a patient who has been down for twenty minutes, but his wife is begging me to shock him just one more time. Fine, I thought. One more jolt, and then I’m calling it.

Clear!

“Dragon Jade, how can I help you?”

What the…? We have a pulse!

“Are you open?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to put in a takeout order?” I said, in the same tone one might use when asking Bob Hope to breakdance.

“What would you like today?” he asked, completely unaware that his words were having the same effect on me as if he had said “Phil Hartman is alive and well.” I was so gobsmacked I had to tell him I didn’t know what I wanted and I had to call him back. Which I did.

Needless to say, that evening we had one of the best Chinese meals of our entire lives.

Over the next few weeks, we packed away plate after plate and box after box of yummy Dragon Jade fare. Our near-loss had only enhanced our appreciation of the place. Until the day came when I called in one of our last orders. I heard the ring on the other end. Somebody picked up.

“He-oo?”

My stomach dropped. “Dragon Jade?” I said, but there was no force behind the words. My stomach had shredded my diaphragm, what with the sudden dropping and all.

“Wee ow binness!” he bellowed. Click. Silence. The light on my phone console went as dark as my soul.

“They’re out of business again,” I told Trash once I had her on the phone.

“No they’re not,” she said confidently.

“They will be soon if they keep answering the phone like that,” I said.

“Just stop by and order it in person on your way home,” she said, and that’s what I did. While I was waiting for the cooks to whip up our tasty, tasty food, I sat in a chair next to the podium that held the cash register and the phone. During those ten minutes, I never heard anyone answer that phone by announcing “Wee ow binness!” That may be because the phone never rang.

The nefarious saboteur of Dragon Jade was doing his work well. He was getting the word out. People were giving up on them. There weren’t that many people who knew about it in the first place, and even fewer people who would continue trying to get food there even in the face of a peremptory announcement of bankruptcy. It was, in the words of Midnight Oil, the end of the beginning of the end.

I decided to take action, although it would turn out to be insufficient. The next time I called the restaurant and got a hold of someone who was willing to, you know, actually sell me some food, I intended to warn that person that someone was answering the phone without the restaurant’s best interests at heart. Somebody was not only secretly dragging his feet, he was also sticking branches in the spokes and spraying glue on the bearings. He had to be stopped.

But the next time I called, there was no answer at all. I was too late.

Maybe there was no malicious intent. Maybe there was just a Dragon Jade employee who only knew two phrases of English: “Hello” and “We’re out of business.” Maybe if that guy hadn’t been allowed to answer the phone, we’d still have a favorite Chinese restaurant.

Instead, now we just eat a lot of Thai.

posted by M. Giant 3:31 PM 0 comments

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Monday, August 05, 2002  

The regular readers of this blog know that when I tell stories about people I know, I generally give them pseudonyms. This story is about a guy I'll call Steve, because a) it's his real name, and b) I hate him.

You know a guy like Steve, or at least you used to. He's an asshole. We met him because Trash used to work with his then-fiancée. Everyone at their workplace liked the fiancée, but then they met Steve, and they would all say to each other, "Wow, she should not marry that asshole." But these were work friends, not close friends, and they thought it inappropriate for them to say, "hey, don't marry that asshole." That was a job for her close friends. The work friends (including Trash) didn't realize they were the close friends until they got to the wedding reception and there were no other friends there, by which time she had of course already married said asshole, and nobody had ever told her not to. Oops.

Anyway, about this time, Steve and his wife move into a new house. They throw a housewarming party. We go to the party. I complain like the whiny bitch that I am the whole way there, because I don't know if I mentioned this, but Steve is an asshole.

We get there. We're among the first people there. Some other people show up. We get introduced. Nobody cares.

At some point, Steve rounds up the guys for a tour of the new house. Just the guys, because Steve is a guy's guy. Not the way you're thinking. He's one of those guys for whom men are men and women are pets. And, you know, if he spends any time with women, people might start to think he is one. Yeah, you know the type.

So anyway, he drags us all on this interminable tour of the house, from top to bottom, pointing out all of its remarkable features and its infinitely more numerous unremarkable ones. Eventually we get to the basement. The very last stop on the tour is the water heater.

I don't know, I think Steve is enjoying this tour guide thing to an unhealthy extent. Maybe it gives him some kind of control buzz. Anyway, he doesn't seem to want the tour to end. So he starts rambling on about the water heater, and how his grandpa told him that every once in a while, you need to drain the water out of the bottom because it gets dirty. I've never heard this pearl of wisdom before or since, but I and the rest of Steve's all-but-captive audience watch as he gets an empty bucket, sticks it under a valve on the heater, and opens the valve.

"Uh, yeah," someone (not me) observes politely. "That water's pretty black.” We all nod in agreement.

Steve, reveling in his vindication, shuts the valve. Except the water keeps coming out.

Nobody says a word.

Keep in mind, I think I'm an outsider here. I assume all of the other guys know each other. I won't find out until later that the only other guy each of them knows is Steve. Who is starting to lose his cool in a big way. Not that that’s hard, because his “cool” was a very small thing to begin with. Steve gets another bucket. He gets a hose, so he can direct the flow of water out through the basement window.

"Boy, do I ever not need to be here for this," I say to myself, and I head up to the kitchen, where life is much better because the kitchen contains spinach dip and my wife. I tuck in, grinning fiercely and not saying a word about what's going on downstairs.

"Is the tour over?" Mrs. Steve asks me.

"Pretty much," I tell her gleefully.

She's in the process of preparing a meal for a houseful of people. Which sort of hits a snag when she goes to turn on the water in the sink and there isn't any.

"What's going on with the water?" she asks the room in general.

"This is really good spinach dip," I say.

After about ten minutes, guys start trickling up from the basement, one by one. While they didn't abandon their host to his fate as readily as I did, they make up for it in their lack of discretion. Our hostess asks each of them what's going on as they come up the stairs, and she eventually puts together what's going on.

I've never enjoyed just sitting and eating spinach dip so much in my entire life.

Since cooking in her kitchen is obviously over for the day, our hostess calls her mom to try to arrange some sort of backup for providing food. While she's working out the details, Steve brings up the rear of the upstairs caravan. "Get off the phone," he all but yells at her. Because how dare she try to cover their ass after he's idiotically disabled their indoor plumbing? His only option in this situation is to be unconscionably rude to his wife in front of everyone they know. Except the opposite of that.

Clearly, this was the worst housewarming party ever, as a bunch of people who didn't know each other milled around upstairs, while the "host" cursed a blue streak that encroached on his neighbors' property, stomping up and down the stairs with his dad and his dad's plumber friend.

The best part is that we later learned that that night, Steve and his wife had the following exchange:

Steve: Do you think people thought it was weird what happened today?

Mrs. Steve: Uh--yeah.

Steve: Well, it wasn't.

Mrs. Steve: What?

Steve: It wasn't weird.

Mrs. Steve: Okay, whatever.

We don't so much hang out with these people any more. Not just because Steve was an asshole. Also because his wife did what so many other women do after they marry assholes: she became an asshole as well. The moral?

Ladies, don't marry assholes.

posted by M. Giant 3:18 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, July 31, 2002  

Before I get started in rooting through this month’s reader mail, I need to make a correction. Yesterday I made some unkind statements about U-Haul when it looked like their incompetence was going to force my friend to make fifty trips in a four-door sedan between here and Chicago to get all of her stuff moved. That was my mistake. It turns out she had actually reserved her truck with Ryder. Which is probably why she got the truck only seven hours late instead of sometime next week. So, sorry, U-Haul. It’s not your fault my friend got screwed, other than the fact that it’s an indirect result of your relentless quest to lower customer service standards throughout the industry. And so, as a gesture of good faith, I’m going to do something about that inflammatory search engine bait I posted yesterday:

Screwed by Ryder.

Are we cool now, U-Haul?

Good. Now on to the mail. Things picked up a little this month, possibly because I put a clearer e-mail link over there on the right. As a result, this is the first time I didn’t have to make up any letters. Now, if I were a real journalist, that kind of thing would have gotten me fired. Fortunately, I’m not getting paid for this. Wait, did I just say that? Never mind. On to the mail. Again.

After I carped about a misbegotten systems upgrade at my office (7/15/02), you might expect that I’d get deluged with e-mails admonishing me that upgrades are an important part of corporate life and we all have to adapt to change and blah blah blah. You might be wrong. First of all, the only e-mails I get deluged with are spam about the “three D’s”: diplomas, debt, and dangly bits. And secondly, I’m obviously not alone in being unimpressed with the new stuff. Right, SillyRed?

This morning I came into work to find 2 pieces of paper attached to my screen monitor. One read: "Magic has been upgraded to Version 7.5 your password is now XXXXXXXXX." Then a list of all the problems that we are now having (which ran on to the second page).

I work for a helpdesk for a health insurance company. The helpdesk is the "call center" for the computer problems of the employees who work here- a call center for the call centers. I feel your pain. Last Thanksgiving they upgraded the major system that our customer service reps use and today we still can't tell users why they keep getting "visited" by Dr. Watson then get kicked out of the system and locked out simultaneously. Isn't that crap? A skill that I have had to hone is the one where I can come up with complete crap that sounds technical so that the user will believe me instead of just telling them I have no idea why their system keeps getting a blue screen and the people who are supposed to be researching the problem are coming up with nothing. The nice thing about my job is I don't have to fix the problems, I just pass them on to the next level.

Clearly, the people who make these kinds of decisions for your company and mine have forgotten an important lesson, which is this: entropy always wins. You try to take the battle to it with some damnfool tactic like an upgrade, and it’ll just smack you down all the harder. And then what? Another upgrade? Soon we can all look forward to a time when we spend our workdays huddled around a wan cube-divider bonfire in the middle of the office while the freezing wind whistles in through the blank, gaping windows, and we’ll have no way to even produce documents other than scratching our bloody hangnails across ripped-up scraps of carpet backing.

On a less optimistic note, let’s move on to Clear Channel (7/19/02) and how they need to be brought down, like, yesterday. Mcgyver5 can barely wait to get to the barricades:

Yes. I will join you in your war against Clear Channel. What are my orders?

Okay, the first thing you do is stop listening to broadcast radio altogether. Instead, get that satellite radio thingy for your car, so you can—wait, hang on, this just in from Tim:

I share your seething, utter hatred of Clear Channel. The worst thing ever EVER is that they own (though they attempt to hide this fact) XM Satellite Radio. SO…let me get this straight… I can pay ten dollars a month after spending hundreds on stereo equipment for my car so that I can hear the same dreck with alarming digital clarity? Lovely. Sign me up. Except, don’t.

Oops. Okay, forget about the satellite radio thingy.

As I told Mcgyver5, I wouldn’t ask any readers to do anything I wouldn’t be willing to do myself. So your orders are to do a great deal of public bitching. If you want to go further, buy music from independent record stores, and buy stuff you never hear on Clear Channel stations. Listen to your local Clear Channel stations to find out who advertises on them, then call those companies and tell them you’re through doing business with them until they can confine their advertising to radio stations whose owners don’t have a base of operations in the foul, smoking pit of Hell. Write letters to your congressperson about the results of deregulation. If your congressperson at time of deregulation isn’t a congressperson any more, tell him or her that that’s why. Tell your congresperson’s successor that, while you’re at it. Become a tireless evangelist against the Clear Channel cause. Just don’t blame me if they end up taking over the whole world and arresting you for sedition one day, because I’m going to be in the cell next door.

From that, I have absolutely no idea how to segue to Obb, who kindly explains the meaning of a business card I found at an ATM last week (7/23/02):

The HU business is courtesy of the eckankar people. They're like a really relaxed cult, into lucid dreaming and stuff. They attract a lot of elementary school teachers for some reason. Anyway, they say HU is the magical key to controlling your dreams and reaching God, who according to them is actually a strobe light, and getting in touch with the Living Eck Master, some creepy guy in South Africa who is supposed to come into your dreams and chat you up, which frankly would creep me out. It's all kind of like Scientologists on valium.

Oh, good. That means they’re less likely to sue me for having made fun of them. Thanks for clearing that up. Also, thanks for giving me the clue I needed to figure out that the weird dude I keep dreaming about is speaking Afrikaans to me. Time to call Berlitz, I guess.

That’s a wrap for this month, and it’s a wrap for this week. I’m going to be helping friends move to Chicago for the next few days and we’ll be spending the weekend there, so no updates until Monday. Feel free to check back anyway, not because I might unexpectedly get access on the road, but so I can keep my traffic up. See you next week.

posted by M. Giant 1:46 PM 1 comments

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Thank you for the great blog. As I was looking for UHAUL comments on the net, I stumbled upon your blog. I have also found a great site that has collected a lot of UHAUL Complaints. Check it out - you will enjoy it as well

Regards

By Anonymous Anonymous, at October 8, 2007 7:14 PM  

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Tuesday, July 30, 2002  

Here’s a question. It’s a bit sensitive, and I don’t want anyone to take this the wrong way:

When Tim McVeigh blew up that rental truck, are we sure that the building was his real target?

Let me back up a bit.

On Sunday, my brother-in-law, his wife, and his six-month-old daughter Deniece moved to Iowa. Trash and I joined a small army of friends and relatives who had volunteered to load up the U-Haul. Everyone was there, everyone was ready, everything was packed and ready to go. Only one problem.

You guessed it. No truck. The customer service wizards at U-Haul had informed him that they should have a truck for him in about 24-48 hours. Which would work out fine, as long as he didn’t mind MISSING THE CLOSING ON HIS NEW HOUSE. Since he didn’t feel like forcing his family into homelessness to cater to the convenience of U-Haul, other options needed to be explored.

Forces were mobilized, and somehow he managed to procure the use of a truck that belongs to a friend’s dad’s ex-cousin’s roommate-in-law or something. Disaster was averted, but through nothing U-Haul did. If he didn’t have a friend whose dad’s ex-cousin’s roommate-in-law didn’t own a greenhouse that could spare a truck for a few days, there’s no telling what this might have cost my brother-in-law and his family in terms of time and money. It was bad enough that this was not exactly a moving truck, and therefore lacked a loading ramp or a truck bed with a reasonable elevation. If I’d known that I was going to have to help lift an upright piano five and a half feet straight up off the pavement, I don’t know that I’d have gotten out of bed that morning.

There were perhaps twenty people there to help with the load-out, and I’m pretty sure that all of them had a story about how they or someone they knew had been screwed by U-Haul. I’m going to use that phrase again just to make sure the search engines pick it up: SCREWED BY U-HAUL. Eventually they got on the road in their borrowed truck, looking forward to their new life of getting screwed by U-Haul in Iowa.

We told BuenaOnda (you know, the friend who’s moving to Chicago this week) what happened. She was already tense abut the move, but this news caused her to metamorphose into the Amazing Human Guitar String. She spent the rest of Sunday trying to get a hold of someone, anyone, at the rental office, to assuage her increasingly reasonable-seeming fears. No luck. By the time we met her at the bowling alley, she was emitting a constant high C#.

I don’t know if she reached anyone yesterday or not. Today is packing day. With the help of any number of people, the plan is for BuenaOnda and Astroboy to load all of their worldly possessions into the truck which will be on the road for Chicago tomorrow.

Do I really have to tell you what happened?

As I write this, BuenaOnda’s volunteers have had to abandon her to attend to other obligations, and the truck is not yet in her possession. Sadly, BuenaOnda doesn’t have a friend whose dad’s ex-cousin’s roommate-in-law can lend her a truck, and even if she did, the truck is in Iowa with my brother-in-law. U-Haul has promised her that she’ll have her truck in an hour, but I’ll be surprised if that actually happens. If it does happen, it certainly won’t be because of U-Haul’s legendary commitment to customer satisfaction. It’ll be because BuenaOnda called them on her cellphone in June and has been on the line with someone almost continuously ever since, like some kind of stressed-out Verizon guy:

“Do I have a truck now? Good! Do I have a truck now?”

U-Haul’s shameless policy of deliberately and recklessly overbooking is pissing a lot of people off, but it hasn’t reached critical mass. It’s probably still cheaper for them to pay off settlements for the breach-of-contract class action suits that get tossed at them than it would be to implement some kind of cost-prohibitive program of actually renting trucks to people whose money they’ve taken. God only knows how many people have stood helplessly in front of an apathetically powerless U-Haul employee while desperately doing the “Anyone can take a reservation” arm flail from Seinfeld. But U-Haul doesn’t care, because the impotent rage of their customers hasn’t affected their bottom line yet. And I say “yet” with a great deal of hope for a future in which my six-month-old niece doesn’t remember getting—say it with me—SCREWED BY U-HAUL.

Oh, yeah, I should probably come back to the Tim McVeigh thing. I know he used a Ryder truck. If he’d tried to rent a U-Haul for his twisted observation of the anniversary of Waco, he wouldn’t have been able to blow up the Federal Building until the following Saturday. So there’s that. Maybe U-Haul just consistently tries to torpedo people’s carefully planned moving schedules in hopes of preventing the next Oklahoma City bombing. But I doubt it.

posted by M. Giant 2:17 PM 0 comments

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Monday, July 29, 2002  

Until this weekend Trash had never seen L.A. Confidential all the way through, at least in one sitting. She’d seen it the way I’ve seen Beetlejuice, i.e. in ten-to-twenty-minute chunks spread out over a couple of years and several cable channels. As everyone knows, the plot of L.A. Confidential is demanding enough when you don’t have to piece it together in your head using information from a previous scene you missed today but saw on TNT four months ago. Plus I wasn’t much help at filling in the blanks. Not only do I not remember everything that happens, but I also have this annoying reluctance to tell people what happens, because I enjoy seeing their reactions to stuff they don’t expect. So we put the movie into our Netflix queue and she looked forward to seeing it in its unedited, uninterrupted entirety.

I looked forward to seeing her see it in its entirety as well. But by the time we put the disk in the player on Saturday night, I was feeling a bit run down as a result of having a long day and perhaps a beer or two. What follows is my experience of seeing L.A. Confidential again, for the first time (warning: Spoilers!):

Danny DeVito’s voiceover prologue. Credits.

First act. Introduction of main characters, riot in police station, Guy Pearce gets promoted. In about the time it took you to read that.

By this point, I was thinking, Wow, I don’t remember the movie getting started this fast. The next thing I knew, there was a gunshot and Kevin Spacey was saying “Rollo Tomasi.” Almost immediately thereafter, the movie was over, the TV was off, and Trash was telling me that our friends had left and we should go to bed because our sofa isn’t drool-proof. Sorry, friends. Didn’t mean to crash on you there.

I don’t feel too bad about missing the movie because there are very few movies I need to see more than once anyway. But the experience got me thinking about how many other movies there are out there that could be drastically improved by a judicious infusion of unconsciousness:

Star Wars - Episode One: The Phantom Menace: Sleep through entire movie. Like you need me to tell you that. Optional: open one eye during moments when Jar Jar experiences pain or humiliation. Close eye before he starts talking about it.

The Matrix: Drift towards awareness during Morpheus’s speech about dreams and reality. Undergo a minor freakout without ever opening your eyes. Wake up for lobby shootout, and forget about sleeping for another four hours because that scene is so damn cool and you really need to see it again now, okay? Same with every scene thereafter.

Airplane: Drift off during every ten-second lull between gags. Not advised if you actually need sleep.

Titanic: Wake up when the ship hits the iceberg. Go back to sleep when Leo hits the Atlantic. Why won’t video stores sell me just the second tape?

The Sixth Sense: Just conk out ten minutes before the end. Once the kid and the mom have their little moment in the traffic jam, there’s nothing else you need to see.

The Usual Suspects: Doze vigorously throughout the film until the last three minutes. Compare Chazz Palminteri’s final, flashback-drenched epiphany with your own disjointed experience of the film. Decide that Keyser Soze was really, all along, Dan Hedaya.

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels: Wake up halfway through, insisting that you completely understood every word of dialogue up to that point, but now it’s just total gibberish.

You think I’m kidding, but there might be something to this. What we need now is a narcoleptic film critic, so the moviegoing public can make the most of its entertainment dollar while minimizing fatigue from lack of sleep. Someday the nation will thank me.

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Friday, July 26, 2002  

I gave up on being a movie star a long time ago. That’s not just because I’m short on talent and charisma; lots of people with less talent and charisma than I have are doing just fine in Hollywood. No, the main factor was a lack of commitment. I could never reconcile the opportunity cost of starving and spending years in a tiny apartment totally devoid of right angles just so I could regularly get shot down at auditions. I have nothing but respect for people for whom it’s actually worth it, people who are out there paying their dues to get into the business, not least of all because I don’t have their determination and drive. It’s just better for everyone if people who don’t have the fire in the belly (me) stay out of the way of those who do (people who aren’t me).

That’s not to say I didn’t go to an audition or two after high school. My last (and, really, only) big one was in response to a newspaper ad that said they were doing an open casting call for 16-20 year old guys for a Disney movie. This was right about the time that I’d heard that Robin Williams’s follow-up to Good Morning Vietnam would have him playing a high-school teacher, so I figured what the heck. If I didn’t take a shot at it, I’d never know. Well, now I know. I made it to callbacks and my video audition actually went pretty far in the process from what they told me, but they went with the other tall, skinny guy. Now, whenever you see James Waterston on the silver screen, know that that could have been me if only I’d been cast in Dead Poets Society instead of him. Ah, well. Now I look at Robin Williams and I think, “It would have been cool to work with Peter Weir.”

So, yeah. No movie career for me, which is fine because I don’t want one anyway. No, seriously, I really don’t want yer stupid fame and fortune and life of luxury and adulation. Not if you gave me a million bucks. Who needs it?

There is one part I woudn’t turn down, though.

There’s been talk of trying to make a biopic on the life of the Who’s late drummer, Keith Moon. Mike Myers’s name has been mentioned as a possible lead, and I can see it; not only can the guy do more British accents than Peter Sellers, his gifts for physical comedy will translate well in reproducing Moon’s frenetic flailing behind the drum kit. I’m thinking James Franco (warning: popups) would be a pretty decent Daltrey, with the chin and the cheekbones and all. I’m stumped on Townshend; dude’s been accurately described as a nose on a stick. As for my personal hero John Entwhistle, there’s a picture on the cover of the rarities compilation Two’s Missing, in which he looks exactly like a certain actor. Unfortunately that actor is a youthful Steve McQueen, so that just leaves me.

Not that I look at all like Steve McQueen, youthful or otherwise. And not that I look that much more like Entwhistle, come to mention it. And not that I’m English, or a good enough actor, or a good enough bass player, for that matter, to convincingly inhabit the role of the Ox. But come on, it’s not like Entwhistle’s going to get any lines in the movie anyway. He barely got any lines in real life.

I just think it would be a lot of fun to get to be onstage in reenactments of some of the Who’s greatest performances. I’d just have to stand there, completely expressionless and motionless (except for my hands) while guitar and drum shrapnel whickers lethally past my head. What a great gig. Plus I’d get to meet Myers, which would be a trip. And it would help me bring my bass playing to the next level, because I’d refuse to mime it. Of course, they would have to play my footage back at quadruple-speed, but you can’t have everything.

I wanted the part a lot more a year ago, when Entwhistle was still alive and getting the part would have likely meant getting to meet the man himself, maybe even for a bass lesson or two. But I’d still be willing to don a giant-mixing-bowl-haircut wig and a wardrobe of fugly-even-for-the-seventies outfits and that desperate “Boris the Spider” necklace and strap on one of those curvy, pointy space-basses he insisted on playing if it meant I got to meet Pete Townshend. There’s actually not much I wouldn’t do for that chance.

So who do I talk to about this? Can anyone out there hook me up with an audition? I promise I’ll stay away from the business for good afterwards.

* * *

Speaking of me strapping on basses, in case you’re wondering how our gig went (you know, the one I had a nightmare about in the 7/10 entry), you can read all about it here, at the band’s website. It’s like two entries for the price of one! I don’t think you people realize what a bargain you’re getting here.

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Thursday, July 25, 2002  

A week from today, Trash and I are going to be helping our friends BuenaOnda and Astroboy move to Chicago. Me? I get to drive the moving truck.

I actually have a little experience at this kind of thing. Trash’s aunt moved to Des Moines a couple of years ago (yes, it’s a pattern) and I found myself behind the wheel of a Great White Beast for that project. Now that I’ve logged four hours or so at the helm of one of these Diesel-fueled, terrifyingly blind-spotted schleppers of households, that kind of makes me the expert. At least in our little group.

As you know, the most important thing to be aware of when renting a moving truck is that something will be wrong when you try to pick it up. They won’t have the right size, or they’ll overcharge you somehow, or something else will happen to completely throw your brilliantly conceived moving strategy and schedule clear off the rails. Uncle Bob knows what I’m talking about. Once Trash and I went to help one of her ex-professors load up her rental truck for her move to Kansas. One problem: no truck. So this poor woman had all of her stuff boxed up, including toiletries and a change of clothes, and she ended up not being able to leave the city for another two days. Not to mention the small army she’d drafted whose once-eager recruits were left standing around helplessly in her kitchen.

“Maybe we should all go down to the rental place and threaten to crack some skulls,” someone suggested.

We looked around the room at each other, a physically unimposing assortment of English majors and graduate students.

“Maybe at least one of us should take off our glasses first,” someone else pointed out.

Obviously, no skulls were cracked that day. Equally obviously, BuenaOnda has been calling the rental place to re-confirm her reservation ten times a day since she made it. They love her over there.

But I think the most useful knowledge will be something I learned during an experience about six months ago, when I wasn’t even driving the truck.

We were helping our other friends Dirt and Banana move into their new house. At some point during the afternoon, Dirt had to drive the U-Haul they were using out to one of the southern suburbs and pick up a table that somebody was giving them. Since the table was constructed of marble and cast iron, Dirt brought me and another guy along to help hoist it into the truck.

This was the first time Dirt had driven the truck on the freeway, and it wasn't what you might call the ultimate driving experience. Apparently, someone at the rental office had put a "governor" under the truck's hood, making it impossible to drive over fifty miles per hour. We figured this was something they do when the renter is moving within town and thus shouldn't be on the freeway much anyway. Not that Dirt was at all happy about this. After having to pay ten more dollars for the truck than the original quote, his feelings toward U-Haul were not rendered any warmer or fuzzier by virtue of the fact that other cars were passing us so fast that we saw them visibly redshift, while Dirt made helplessly apologetic gestures and the engine screamed like Jennifer Tilly on helium with her foot in a garbage disposal.

At one point he had to switch feet on the gas pedal, because his right leg had gone numb attempting to push the pedal through the floorboard. He was seriously talking about getting a cinderblock for the return trip.

After almost an hour, we finally arrived. We heaved The Heaviest Four-Person Table In The World up into the truck, which now rode so low we wondered if we should take off the muffler before it got scraped off. I'm serious, this was a round table maybe five feet in diameter, but some bright spark at the factory had decided it wasn't heavy enough and had therefore affixed a singularity to its underside or something.
So the table was loaded, doubling the weight of the otherwise empty truck. Dirt put the truck in reverse and we backed down the driveway. But then the truck stopped. Dirt gave it more gas, but the truck just revved ineffectually, with the back tires stubbornly settled in the gutter between the driveway and the street.

I'm like, "Dude, how heavy is that table?"

At this point, Dirt figured out that while the needle on the transmission indicator thingy clearly told him he was in reverse, he was in fact in neutral. Reverse was actually somewhere between park and reverse. Dirt put the truck in reverse--or more accurately, "perverse" (Ha! I kill me!), and finished backing into the street.

The bonus of this situation was that we also figured out that what looked like "neutral" was in fact "drive." Which meant, in turn, that we had driven all the way from the city in second gear.

Needless to say, even with The Table That Nearly Fell Through The Crust Of The Earth in back, the return trip was much quicker.

I’m hoping I get a chance to take BuenaOnda and Astroboy’s truck for a little test drive before we hit the road. I’d hate to get halfway to the Wisconsin Dells and suddenly find out some kind of unpleasant factoid, like maybe that the engine only works when you change the oil every fifty miles, or the wiper fluid reservoir is filled with ink.

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Wednesday, July 24, 2002  

A couple of nights ago, Trash and I spent the evening with someone special. I’d spent the evening with her before, but that was half a lifetime ago. Half of her lifetime, that is, because she’s only six months old. I’m speaking, of course, of my brother-in-law’s daughter, Deniece.

When her mom brought her in on Tuesday night, she seemed to be little more than a wide pair of eyes in a baby car seat, just goggling up at our ceiling. I “beeped” her gently on the nose and she smiled hugely at me. Ready to puke yet?

Deniece spent a while taking in her surroundings, looking as if she was trying to swallow the whole world with her eyes. She was clearly thinking, “What’s going on? Where am I? What the hell is that? Who are these people?” But then babies are always thinking that, at least when they’re not thinking “HUNGRY!” or “WET!” or “VAGUELY AND INEXPLICABLY BUT ENTIRELY INCONSOLABLY PISSY!” That last one’s my favorite, by the way.

She’s focusing quite a bit better than she was last time I took care of her. She noticed things more this time. I was holding her while standing in the living room, and she tirelessly tracked our cats’ movements around the floor while cutting her eyes back and forth between them. In turn, the cats seemed to sense her attention somehow. They were more interested in her this time, even regarding her with slight suspicion. “Hey, Orca,” I said to our congenitally prickly female kitty. “What do you think of your replacement here?”

My cats never think I’m funny.

I’d have to say that Deniece’s favorite game that we played was the one where I would hold her at arms’ length right up in front of the mirror, then pull her back towards myself. Then I’d do it again. And again. I think the reason she dug this is because she got to watch herself getting bigger over and over again, which helped her to visualize permanently attaining a size where she can lay down a little smack. In any case, it sent her into gales of hysterical laughter. Baby laughter is of course much funnier than grown-up laughter, because babies don’t have any appreciable vocal or respiratory control. So where you or I might go:

Ha, ha, ha.

Deniece goes:

EEEEHHAAIIGGHGHGHHG! KHKHULLLGGNGN! [sound that would deafen a porpoise] YYAAAAghgeaiuiaghjWOAIGANGAA!

That may not sound happy if you’re just reading it, but you can tell she’s laughing because she’s also smiling. Now why would anybody want that to stop? Oh, yeah, there’s the fact that my arms just fell off. Six months isn’t exactly in the featherweight category any more, my friends.

She’s also learning how to sit up, and she can kind of stand, if you don’t leave the actual balancing and weight supporting up to her. Sometimes you’ll sit and hold her in your lap, and she’ll start wiggling around, alternatively going totally limp and totally stiff in an apparent effort to slide onto the floor. What she plans to do after that, I have no idea. It’s not like she can outrun you or anything once she hits the carpet.

Her other big new thing is rolling over. Used to be that you could put her down and she would just have to wiggle and grunt and accept being helplessly immobile on her back. Now she has the power to take control of her situation and become helplessly immobile on her face. It must be quite liberating. Especially since she doesn’t have to give up the wiggling and grunting to do it. We did a thing where she would roll onto her stomach, and Trash or I would flip her back over, and she would be all, “Dammit!” but in a good-natured way, and we’d do the whole thing over again. That kept her happy for a few rounds, then “HUNGRY!” I guess the baby version of pro wrestling made her work up an appetite.
Deniece’s mom says that she’s starting to crack the mystery of crawling. Except she can only do it with her legs so far. That means her front end just sort of slides along, making her look like the world’s slowest, smallest, softest snowplow. Obviously she’s not going to cover a lot of ground that way. In fact, she didn’t cover any at all while we were watching her. I hope it wasn’t because we made her nervous with all the cameras and studio lights.

Her mom came to pick her up shortly thereafter. She was asleep before they’d gone two blocks. The baby, not the mom. This would be an entirely different entry if that were the case.

Listen, I’m not going to apologize, but if you’re worried about these Deniece entries becoming a regular thing, don’t. The reason we were watching her is because her parents were busy packing up to move to Des Moines. In, like, a week. And they’re taking the kid with them, darn the luck. So no more evenings of taking care of Deniece in the near future. We’re going to miss the little peanut.

All right, you can puke now.

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Tuesday, July 23, 2002  

Nothing good happened to me today while I was spending my lunch break running some errands. Except maybe in my head. Wanna come along?

At the ATM:

Someone left a card here. It’s the size of a business card, but it says:

HU
A Love Song to God

It goes on to say:

“Singing HU can:
Expand your awareness
Help you experience divine love
Heal a broken heart
Offer solace during times of grief
Bring peace and calm"

There are more detailed instructions on the back. They basically consist of: “Sing HU. Sing HU again. Continue for up to twenty minutes.”

This is a new one on me. Is it a form of transcendental meditation with the text changed to avoid copyright infringement? Are they hoping that if enough people will try it they’ll be able to simulate an air raid siren? Is it a deceptively simple incantation designed to summon Scorpion King star Kelly Hu?

I kid, of course. I think I’m going to try this when I get home, but instead of singing HU myself I’ll just drop “Who Are You” into the CD player and put it on repeat. Same effect.

On the road

There’s a store called “Al’s Vacuum.” How does a business like that make any money at all? How did he get financing?

“Hi, my name’s Al and I need a business loan for my new store.”

“And what will you sell, Al?”

“Nothing. It’ll be called ‘Al’s Vacuum.’ It will contain absolutely nothing, not even air.”

“How do you expect to make money selling nothing?”

“It’s an entirely new paradigm.”

“Then why do you need financing?”

“Because airlocks are expensive.”

“Okay, sign here.”

At the Post Office

I can tell it hasn’t been long enough since the last postage rate increase, because I still have a bunch of one-cent stamps left over from back then. It would be fine if I had exactly three times as many leftover one-cent stamps as I do leftover thirty-four cent stamps. Then I could just keep sticking four stamps on everything until they both run out. But no, I’m going to have to buy a whole roll of three-cent stamps that I’m going to have to hang on to until the next three-cent rate hike, which, given the likelihood that the next hike will be one or two cents, probably won’t happen until 2168.

It would be even better if I had thirty-seven one-cent stamps left over. Then I’d cover the whole envelope with them, leaving just enough space for the address to show through. That’ll learn ‘em to hike the rates on me.

Oh, I can just buy six three-cent stamps and it’ll even out. That’s okay, then. What a relief that I’m not going to have to bust out the “going postal” joke, because I hate scraping off mold.

In the parking lot at work

Why are my coworkers staring at my car like that? Haven’t they ever seen a station wagon before? Oops, I guess this Bob Seeger song on my radio is a little loud. That’s kind of embarrassing. I didn’t mean to leave it there. Now they’re going to think I’m one of those guys who blasts classic rock out of my open car windows in the parking lot to show everyone what a “rebel” I am. Maybe if I switch back to the alternative station right now they’ll realize I really am a rebel. There, see? Dashboard Confessional. Quit looking at me, coworkers.

At my desk

Back in my chair, and back to work. I think I need a break first.

posted by M. Giant 3:15 PM 0 comments

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Monday, July 22, 2002  

Several years ago, I called up my wife to ask her something. It was mid-morning and we were both at our respective jobs. A question had occurred to me as a result of some idle work conversation, or maybe even something the hosts of the local morning show were talking about, and I thought Trash might be able to help me out with it. Mind you, this was before we had Internet access at work, so it wasn’t something I could research on my own.

“I have a question,” I opened.

“Okay,” she said excitedly, “but I have to tell you something first.”

Just reading that sentence doesn’t convey the excitement that was pouring from her voice while it was forming those words. Her electric mood galvanized everything it touched, causing my receiver to glow joyfully and the interconnecting phone lines to vibrate with unrestrained glee. I decided my question could wait in the face of whatever religious experience was going on at the other end of the connection.

“I know what I’m going to do with my life,” Trash announced.

The reason this was news was that we’d both been suffering a sort of career-related malaise for the past year or so. We’d both been laid off from our first real, “grown-up” jobs and we were feeling a bit discouraged, even though we had new jobs by this time. Trash’s situation was further complicated by the fact that her previous employer had been so negligent about matters ergonomic that she had been left with chronic tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome. Now she was working at an insurance company, nursing her injured arms and hoping that voice-recognition software would become standard before her hands were irrevocably palsied into gnarled, wizened claws that rendered her entirely unemployable. Any way out from under the situation was to be snatched at with whatever strength her atrophying fingers still possessed. She continued:

“You know how I’ve always dreamed about owning a used bookstore? Well, I’m going to go back and get a second degree, in English this time, and then I’m going to go to grad school and become a librarian. Then I can work in a library for a few years and learn all about it and then open my bookstore!”

This was about the best news I’d had in a year. She was actually excited about her professional future for the first time in years. She still had a job, but now she had a vocation as well. A long-term goal. One thing about my wife is that she does what she sets out to do. On the phone that morning, I didn’t know with absolute, one hundred percent certainty that Trash would make the Dean’s List nearly every quarter of her second undergrad career, or that she would get into the top Library Science program in the country, or that she would excel so brilliantly in grad school, or that she would finally end up years later with a Master’s Degree and a job she adores. I couldn’t positively predict that, but only because of external variables like whether the planet would continue to spin. And even the total destruction of all life on Earth wouldn’t do much more than slow her down. She’d been wandering in the dark career-wise when she woke up that morning, but now there was a shining beacon on the horizon, and with a direction in mind, it was only a matter of time until she got there.

“That’s wonderful,” I said sincerely. I congratulated her, shared her excitement, and assured her that I would do whatever I could to help her realize a dream that was suddenly, if not within reach, at least within sight. She told me what the first steps in her plan were, and how she planned to put them in effect that very day. It was electrifying.

“So that’s it,” she concluded, exhilarated. “Now what did you want to ask me?”

“Oh. That. Actually, never mind.”

“Why?”

“Well, suddenly it’s just not that important.”

“No, seriously, go ahead.”

“Uh. Well, we were just talking here, and we were wondering…”

“Yeah?”

“Um…Was Tori Spelling ever on Saved by the Bell?”

One of the best parts of having a librarian in the family is that now she can answer questions like that all the time. Being married to me, I’m not sure if she always considers that a good thing.

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