Still Figurin' Out Who I Think I Am

This one's about elimination, wall art, and crime.

Elimination Day.

Hey guys...sorry for the prolonged absence and everything. I just really needed to finish judging the Official January Round of the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  (again, congrats to abcoachnz-Sometimes around , Elle - on hiatus , Fran 💜 💜 💜 , skeason , and Charlie ~ ). And for some reason I keep wiping out entries accidentally while typing...it happened twice on Saturday, so I gave up, and that usually leads me to not wanting to write for awhile, which is hard for me to pull myself out of. To make matters worse, I'm on my second attempt now at this entry because I tried to switch tabs for a second and wound up hitting the back button instead. My fat fingers are uncoordinated morons.

And in all of this mess, I've come to find out that I've been one of the last to be eliminated from Brother Nature 's Unofficial Elimination-Style Fundraiser Challenge Event Thing...I've never felt more confused and alive at the same time. Does that mean I still have to write about today's prompt? Did we even get a prompt? Feels like there's been too my emails, IM's and forum posts since the last prompt I remember seeing, and I'm too lazy/spent to go back looking.

But do I get an exit interview? Any parting shots gifts? Anything? I'll just take the satisfaction that my end of the participation chain is over, and I can see how this plays out over the next two days if I so choose from a safe distance. Good luck to the fortunate few still stuck in this madness duking it out for the sake of the blogging community...as the good doctor Hunter S. Thompson once said, "Buy the ticket; take the ride.", and I have and did and will.

"What items do you put on your walls? Posters, pictures? I am curious."

Huh...never thought I'd be asked that question. Might sound silly, 'cuz I'm not expecting any of y'all cats to come around here anytime soon, but I just figured whatever you guessed would be on my walls is what's actually on them.

Although...this is a rental, and I'm not into puttin' holes in the walls that I'll have to worry about at a later date. I actually don't have a whole lot goin' on in this place...some adhesive hooks for jackets and hoodies, a wooden clock my uncle made, and a calendar which ironically doesn't do much to help me remember what day it is. Oh, and a mirror, in case I ever want to see how terrible my hair looks on any particular day. That's it.

I'm not going crazy on decorating because I don't plan on being here forever, it's a small space, and I don't really have a whole lot of stuff to begin with anymore. Plus, I pretty much outgrew posters after high school, and most of the photographs I own are of people I don't wish to be reminded of on a consistent basis. If I want to look at pictures I'll go on Facebook.

And I've always been a bit of a minimalist anyway with the decorating. Let someone who's more capable at it do the damn thing. I couldn't really be bothered; I'd rather be sprucing up the place with language anyway. Playing to my strengths. I'm not out to impress anyone right now...if you're looking at what my walls say about me for clues as to who I am, maybe you should take a closer look at me instead. Jus' sayin'.

"Tell us about the crime rate in your area. What sort of crimes seem to happen most often?"

Again, not a question I think I've ever been asked before. It's not like people have thought to visit by pondering the statistical chance they'll be robbed or murdered in my vicinity. It usually doesn't come up in conversation.

And I'll speak on this topic in Buffalo terms, because that's what I'm most familiar with even though I reside in Cortland (which is much closer to Syracuse)...for some reason I still seem to get more news updates from Western NY than the central part of the state, but that's what happens when you rely on Facebook as your primary news source on most days. Also, most of the crimes around here seem to be more petty, like chickens getting stolen and meth-heads fighting over their last few teeth.

And like many places, some years are worse than others, but if I had to guess (and I am because I'm far too lazy to Google any actual statistics) I'd say murder is the biggest problem as far as reported and known-of crimes. Buffalo isn't the murder capital of the world by any means, but someone's always gettin' shot up or stabbed if you pay any attention to the news. The only plus to that is there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of "white collar crime", but that's probably due to the dwindling amount of white collars in the area.

But that doesn't mean it's an unsafe community. Crime happens everywhere unfortunately, and often it's the most sensational of occurrences that become the ones you hear the most about. It's not "who died", but "who's watching" that broadcasters seem to focus on. Ratings trump results; details are secondary. If you're basing where you want to live on what you see during a half-hour news telecast, you wouldn't move anywhere. And you might laugh at that, but you know it's true.

"The Soundtrack of Your Life" 

Earlier this week it was announced out of nowhere that Blur is dropping a new album in 2015  , which is quite a surprise because everything out in the press had been leaning toward this not happening for quite some time, if ever. It's pretty exciting, because they're one of my favorite bands.

And I think that during the whole mid-nineties Britpop explosion that crossed over to the US, which gave us Oasis and Radiohead primarily, Blur got overlooked. They were just the band with the "Woo Hoo!" song   that played at hockey arenas whenever the home team scored.

I really dug "Song 2" though, and as a young adult consumer I wanted to check out more of this band, but with minimal risk in case all their songs didn't sound like that one and I didn't like them...so I joined a record club. And I selected Blur's greatest hits compilation.

Y'all know record clubs...you've seen the ads: "Get 12 cds for a penny!" and you rip off the stamps depicting the cds you want and tape a penny to a card and mail it in, and six weeks later you get a box full of cds with a bill for $32 because shipping & handling...and you have to buy more at ridiculously marked up prices, because suddenly it's a commitment and the more you buy, the more they give you, and there's almost no end in sight.

But there is...because no one pays them. Don't be lookin' at me like you ain't never stiffed a record club, because everyone's done it at some point...I don't care how innocent you are or how perfect your damn credit is. Oh sure, they might send you a collection notice, and that $32 s&h charge becomes $57.28 after awhile with interest, until it gets sent to another agency that's willing to settle for $17.45, and you pay it no mind because eventually it gets written off. It costs them more to try and track down your delinquent ass than what you owe them, or even the actual value of the merchandise you received. But you didn't hear none of that from me .

And this is the first song on that Blur compilation, which I listened to in heavy rotation when my extended family took that Caribbean cruise many Easters ago. "Beetlebum". I know what it's really about (heroin), but to me it's also about not doing anything...being lazy, letting life get out from under you for a bit, and not worrying about any repercussions. There's a nervous sense of enjoyment I attach to this song...maybe because of what I was feeling when I was really getting into the music along with the situations I was in between family and the girl I was dating at the time back home and being on a vacation of that magnitude. I could just wake up, have breakfast, pop in my earphones, grab a spot down next to the bar on the boat for awhile with some Long Island Iced Teas, and lay in the sun with zero fucks to give for a week. Sure, life would catch up to me eventually...but it'd have to catch me first, and I wasn't gonna let it for as long as possible.

"She turns me on and all my violence is gone...
Nothing is wrong.
I just slip away and I am gone."
Lyrics.  

Special shout-out to all my people who have worked in bookstores before and had to write recommendations   or "Staff Picks". Sometimes it's not that easy, and not everyone wants to force you to read something you're probably not interested in. Sure, we're enthusiastic about our favorite titles, but more often than not it's upper management wanting us to push certain books because companies make deals with different publishers (but rarely come around to see what you really think).

Because I haven't written an entry all week, I've got a slight backlog of bizarre little nuggets of human hatred things I've come across on the internet that have, ummm, touched me in a way the average story might not, for lack of a better set of phrasing...and the following link appeals to my longtime retail background. Apparently there's a segment of Target shoppers who have failed at the very basic task of carrying a basket throughout a store  . And you know what really makes me sad about this? That I'm never there in person when something like this goes down.

Why is it, speaking of crime, that more often than not when you come across a news article regarding some kind of ridiculous, absurd, deviant behavior, the headline always seems to start out Florida Man Accused Of...? Why does the weirdest shit happen in Florida? What's wrong with them? No, seriously...something is not right in the Sunshine State. It's gotten so universally accepted that there's a Twitter account specifically dedicated to Florida Man   (which of course I follow, because it's that trainwreckish). I've been to Florida a couple of times, and thankfully have never had to witness the crazy that happens down there, but like I alluded to earlier...if I were basing where I wanted to live on what I read or saw in the news, forget Florida. Except this guy  ...he seemed kinda cool, but he's dead now anyway.

And I think that's as good a place as any to end tonight's conversation with you. Maybe I'll see ya again sometime. Peace, because you're young, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!