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 |  If you havent ever read my blogs, give them a go! You will be amused at my journey! |
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Me and Holo-Zoo are building a submarine here next to the pond. We're determined that we're gonna find out what's at the bottom of this damn thing... ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ... If you're new to my journal, you've got a lot of catching up to do. So, don't be a slacker, get the full story. Here are my first two journals for your reading torture.
You don't have to read them all at once. Print 'em, and take them to that little reading room with the white chair. You know you love to read in there. Or print 'em out and use them as doorstops, bookends, or paperweights. You may prefer to leave a message on my voice mail. I award weekly Gift Points for clever, and or entertaining messages left there.
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| I have one of those cool, stainless steel, travel containers to drink coffee out of. It has a black plastic lid that can be rotated slightly to let the liquid out, or to keep it in. When it's closed, you can turn the thing upside down and it won't spill. If you're one of those, like me, that drinks coffee every day while driving to work, it fits in your cupholder and won't slosh around even while running over speedbumps or small unfortunate rodents. I don't use it, though. Because if I did, then I'd have to wash the stupid thing every day, remember to bring it home every night, etc.... It's just too much maintenance. Nope. As marvelous as my thermos is, I never use it- for the same reason I try to discourage grass growing in the front yard. I'm too lazy to fire up the lawnmower, and will only go there in dire emergencies and under extreme duress. Like, if Marv asks me to. Zoo - Salted and Roasted   ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| On a Monday, the coffee is darker and the cream sucking whirlpool pulls with it, the remnants of a drunkard's weekend; drink it down to the grounds for a chance to see what your life is really like. On a Monday, the foul taste of responsibility is tempered by peppermint candies perched on twin spoons, lowered into the cup like staring bloodshot eyes, searching your face for broken capillaries as they go down. On a Monday, the machinery in the brain slowly comes to life, gears grinding away at the rusty bits; bones and joints reminding themselves how to walk with purpose, jaws unhinging to speak with clarity and confidence once again. Shed the straw hat and don the tie, it's about time to get to work. And we do, we always do. On a Monday. Zoo - Salted and Roasted ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Okay, to start off with, I'll just come right out and pretend that I understand why women are crazy for Johnny Depp. And the purpose for pretending to understand is so that I can start off by saying... I understand why that unshaven, creepy little pirate is making women all over the world melt, but in the rest of this entry, I'm going to pretend that I don't get it at all. What's with this infatuation with grubby little weasly-looking buccaneers all about? Depp plays a drunken sot, whose teeth are rotting out of his head. He pulls women around by handfuls of their hair, and generally treats them and everyone else like crap. His clothes look like he slept in them for about a two months straight, and I'm nearly positive that his body odor could knock the first mate down from the tallest crow's nest. Johnny Depp seems to be all the rage lately, but I don't understand it. Grown women find him attractive. I find him weasly. Middle school girls say he's hot. I find him weasly. College girls think he's bitchin', too. I find him weasly. Everywhere I look, it's Johnny Depp this, Johnny Depp that. Where were all these swooning fans when he was on Twenty One Jump Street or acting like a freak on Edward ScissorHands? Turn the guy into a swarthy, raping and pillaging pirate, all the things good, honest men are not supposed to be, and all of a sudden he's a showstopper? Which begs the question,... "What do women really want in a man?" Apparently today's woman want these things on their list of qualities for potential coupling candidates: ... five o'clock shadows, uneven moustaches, greasy unwashed hair styles, skanky unbathed bodies, sweaty unclean clothes, bad teeth, constant drunkeness, bad manners, inappropriate behavior, squinty weasly eyes, low opinion of the fairer sex, terrible potty-mouth, and hopeless social skills unless those skills include the proclivity to rape and pillage ad nauseum forever and ever amen. Women just like their bad boys, I guess. But I don't get it. My wife always prefers me to be bathed, buffed, polished and socially correct, even if we're just going to grocery store, and I don't get half the respect that Johnny Dip gets. It sucks. I'm going to start wearing an eyepatch and a sash from now on. I'm such a swashbuckler. edited to add .. and because PC kindly reminded me, Johnny Depp looks like a girl without the beard and mustache. A girl. Zoo - Salted and Roasted ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| All I really want to do on this Friday is tuck and run. I don't really feel like being in the office, listening to a "Tone from the Top" meeting that is actually scheduled for today and not yesterday. I'd like nothing more than to spend the morning digging into my brain, plucking out witty things to say, and imaginative ways to say them. Creativity is knocking at my door this morning, and I am sad to say, I must not answer it. It feels like ages since I sat down at the computer and fiddled with words. I could easily begin a short story today, one without any initial direction, just a beginning, like... I met a man on the bus today. He was a tall, angular chap, carrying something bulky, and odd-shaped, wrapped in burlap under his arm. A folded piece of paper fell from his pocket, and as I reached to pick it up for him, he did too, and our heads smacked, as the bus-driver lurched us all forward away from the curb. I would have no idea at first where the tale was going, but would enjoy every step of the way, making it into something, letting it make itself into something. That's what I would prefer to do today; melt the hours away selfishly writing and creating something that only I can produce. I've always liked that about the individuality of thought; the fact that my thoughts are mine alone, and nobody in the entire world could ever think what I think, in exactly the way that I think it. My thoughts are mine. My creations are mine. My hands, fingers, thoughts and ideas were given to me by God, left for my own mortal pursuits, and nobody else's. If today were mine to waste as I please, I sense I would write pages and pages of something really neato. But KK should have been here 15 minutes ago, which actually means that he'll be walking through the door any minute now, and more accurately, he just did as I was typing this sentence. So, off I go, into auditland again. One of the only places in the universe that has little room for imagination. Adios, muchachos. We go to Laredo in a few weeks. What fun that will be.... Zoo - Salted and Roasted ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Nothing like driving down the road well before the crack of the rooster's ass, feeling the cool autumn air blowing through the windows, watching an endless stream of red tail-lights stretch out in front of you, winding their way purposefully into the city. The cow pastures and fence-lined highways give way to an over-abundance of pavement, concrete creeping ever skyward, and the sun pops up behind us reaching past us to glint off the windows of the office buildings downtown. We pull our visors down in unison, cursing silently at the reflective window tint of the driver in front of us. "Why'd you have to start listening to country music?" Stephanie asked me last night while I was drilling her on the spelling words that she already knew."I like to think of you as the cool parent, the one that listens to rock, and plays guitar and drums, instead of the old fuddy-duddy that listens to country music in the car during long trips." I told her that I was trying to broaden my horizons, an effort to be well-rounded, that I like all kinds of food and all kinds of beer, and that now, I listen to all kinds of music, too. "Even rap?" "Sure, even rap." "Do you know this rap song?" and she started reciting a long string of rhyming sentences, leaning on the rhymes a little too hard, in case I somehow failed to hear them by myself... "I don't know the words to any of them," I said, "but every once in awhile I'll hear a song I like and say,'wow, that's a pretty cool song, what is that, rap?'" It sure as hell ain't country. There might be a little dust on the bottle, but don't let it fool you about what's inside. I'm fermenting. Zoo - Salted and Roasted ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| It's "in transit" this week is all we've been told. All I wanted to do yesterday was practice throwing numbers on the page, practice working my brain around the intricacies of payroll periods vs. pay dates, and reconciling with quarterly filings. We didn't have any audits scheduled, so it was an office day, but I wanted to be out in the field getting some experience. Instead, it was incredibly slow and KK was busy with some of his managerial tasks and couldn't afford time away from those chores. It was dull, to say the least. Today will also be dull, no audits scheduled, instead we get to go into the conference room at 11:30 and watch a teleconference from California called "Tone From the Top". It'll be the CFO or some other such important fellow talking to all the employees across the country. Dull. Gun-metal dull. I need to go sharpen something. Or shoot myself, one. Zoo - Salted and Roasted ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Last week, I was building office furniture every night, thinking, "Man, I'm glad I don't do this kind of thing for a living." In retrospect, it wasn't all that bad. Holy crap, what a day yesterday turned out to be. We had three appointments scheduled, and I spent the first two-thirds of the day thinking, "this is going well, I'm becoming more familiar with this pesky excel worksheet, not having to ask as many questions, motoring right along, no sweat!" Then, after a quick stop at Sonic for lunch, we went to our last appointment. It was an RV dealership, and we soon discovered that the horrid DOS based payroll system they used was not exactly user friendly, nor was the office manager who was nice enough but clueless as to how to help us. When we asked her, "How often are the employees paid?", she told us semi-monthly, when in fact some employees were semi-monthly and some were monthly, and not only that, but some employees fell into BOTH categories. It would have made our lives a lot simpler if she had told us that up front. She also told us that she didn't have Yearly Gros Wages, and that we would have to use monthly totals. So, I plugged along for an hour and a half totaling up each employee's pay, month by month, only to have reconciliation troubles at the end. I rechecked my work thinking I had made a keying error somewhere, but no, it was all correct. There was something wrong, and I had no idea how to find it. Thankfully KK was there with me, and he asked the right questions, and finally figured out the issued with the two schedules and a funny discrepancy between pay period ending dates vs. actual pay dates. I was lost. I had no clue what was going on, or how he figured it out. None. So, the day that started out pretty good found me standing around with my thumb up my bum from about 3:30 to 5:30 while KK fixed the problem and got everything to balance. I have to get better at problem solving, and trouble shooting. The audits that go smoothly are a piece of cake. All I have to do is get used to the worksheet that we use. But for the times that we have reconciliation problems, I just have to get better at finding where the problem is. KK knows instinctively what to look for, what to ask, and where to look when problems come up. I have no clue. But I will. It'll just have to come with experience, I guess. I was useless yesterday. I can't stand being the guy that feels lost, looks lost, and is just standing around while someone else does all the work. Oh well. That's who I was for that audit. But the more times issues like this come up, the better. I'm not going to learn how to overcome them unless I get the experience in dealing with them. It's a good thing that KK is going to these appointments with me. A day like yesterday sure makes me think that building office furniture for a living might not be such a bad idea, after all.  Zoo - Salted and Roasted ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| BigTiny is back in town. It was really good to see him again last night. Whiskey shots by his side, bigger than life itself, he had loud stories to tell in his sophisticated street talk. They finally found him in Nashville, and extradited him back to Texas where he served 3 months for violating his probation way back in the days when BT and the Lost Dogs were tromping around the Austin bar scene. Now he is free and clear, nothing hanging over his head anymore, starting over with his wife. Now they have four kids instead of just one, clear evidence that time keeps marching on for all of us. We sang a few of the old songs last night, gathered around the kitchen table at Bovet's place, tipping beers like the good ol' days, with promises made to hook up again real soon and see if we still have it. It. That elusive intangible that we all want. Let's go get it. Do we still have it? That certain something that describes the real or imagined gold at the end of the rainbow that we are all always reaching for. We don't know about all that, we just want to see if we can still write some good songs together without irritating the crap out of each other. ....If I get locked up, will you bring me home the next day? 'Cause my family won't have me, and I'm gonna need a place to stay... Good times. Zoo - Salted and Roasted ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Plenty of opportunity, but no motivation. Have you ever read one of those journal entries that goes on and on about how much there is to do, and how there is simply not enough time left to do it all? A great list of things is given in great length and detail, with attached explanations for each task just in case anyone was actually wondering why an appointment with the dermatologist was necesarry in the first place. I haven't been playing guitar much at all lately. I think I picked it up twice maybe two weeks ago, and there was a good week before that where it sat idle for days on end. This past week I haven't touched it, either, but I thought about playing it one morning while waiting for KK to pick me up. Then, last night I thought about it, too, but my mind was elsewhere... I really need to play it sometime, but where do I find the time? My point, exactly. Zoo - Salted and Roasted ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| This is like climbing a tree for a very long time, so that when you go out on a limb, any limb, it's a bit of a risk if you decide to jump to another branch or reach out for a higher one. It's hard to loosen your grip on what you already have, even when you see something you think might be better. Hard to let go of what you got. But we do. Why do we do that? Aren't we afraid that we're going to miss our mark and fall? Don't we care that we're risking everything if we make a mistake in judgement? I don't think we do. Not in that moment when our eye is on the prize and we're caught up in it. Caught up in the moment, face bright like a little kid. So, we reach for it. We let go of what's safe and trusty, and we dig for the toy in the bottom of the cereal box. Some of us even pour the damn milk straight into the box and eat it that way. Little kids do. Zoo - Salted and Roasted ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
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