Same as it ever was.

Tonight I was reminded of the last days at my childhood home.  I’d had a rough patch, the kind of thing where you had to grow up way too quickly in the months prior, and life took a turn that you’d never intended or thought that it would.

I had all my stuff piled up in the den, some clothes, a radio, odds and ends, the things you accumulate by the time that you’re 17, or 18, or 20, that you consider the things in your life that are “yours”, and the things you want to carry with you.

I don’t remember what I did that night, its been lost to the years that have accumulated after (not too many years, sometimes, sometimes more years than I’m willing to admit), but I remember the feeling of finality.  I was the oldest, and the first one to leave, and I knew that I was breaking up “the team”.  That when I left, things in my little house that had been the same for a lifetime weren’t going to be the same.

I remember the sadness, the bittersweet feeling that because of this freedom I was taking, that I was almost wrecking the lives of my Mom and Dad in a way that is inevitable, but profound. Its a sadness that tinged the excitement felt by taking a new life and making it mine.

I had a mohawk.  It was a crappy little mohawk, my head wasn’t shaved, and the thing only stood up about 4 inches, and thats what finally hit me THIS night, 15 years after my night, when I watched a kid who’s practically my little brother, with the same crappy mohawk, say goodbye to me, and to friends, and to family, on his last night before his life.

He’s joining the Navy tomorrow.  I met him a few years ago, when he was in high school, the son of a family friend.  He calls me his big brother, and I’ve loved him like a little brother in that time.  I’ve watched him be a dumbass and a hero.  I’ve watched him, like me years ago, lose sight of what he wanted at times, and clasp on what he wanted at other times.

He has always reminded me so much of myself, that first child, with the combination of brains and reckless independence that ends up keeping him from meeting “potential”, as they like to say, and the damnedest thing is that I never realized how much we’re alike until I watched him with that mohawk, and his brown eyes watching a chapter close.  Just like mine did, years and years ago.

Life is amazing.  I’m so glad that I’ve been part of his life, and that I’ve been lucky enough to be as close to him for the time that he’s been here, and I can’t wait to find out where life is taking him next.  I’m going to miss the boy, miss him more than I can say, but I’m SO EXCITED for him, because he’s going to find himself, just like I did.

It wasn’t easy.  The boy I know intimately, who wore that dumb mohawk 15 years ago, had a rough time.  But the rewards, oh man, the rewards of that life he took for himself are more than could ever be spelled out in letters.

I pray that Tripper finds rewards, even if he has to go through the hard to get them.  I can’t wait to find out.

Love you, Tripp.

So, seems like I read something somewhere about how Facebook and Twitter and whatnot has been rendering blogs obsolete. There might be something to that…

Joyeux Noël to all our friends and loved ones out there.

So this is a lazy Sunday (not necessarily a Lazy Sunday) with coffee, cinnamon rolls, and sitting around in the den on various electronic devices.  Bell’s on her desktop, Wildcat’s on the couch with the DS, and I was on the couch with the lappy.

I was doing my Wikipedia excursions, and today my wanderings had brought me to the SubGenius entry to check on ol “Bob”, when I found a link to Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

Sure ain't, Rene

I don’t know how I’d gone 31 years without fully appreciating this work, but upon finding it this morning I realized that I had to get a big ass print of it and either hang it in my house or maybe in my office (did I mention I have an office now with 4 walls, a door, and no windows? no?).

I told Bell about it, cuz I wasn’t sure if she was familar with it, when Wildcat piped (heh) in, without looking up from the DS,  saying “Hey, I know that painting!  Its got a picture of a pipe and it has words underneath it saying that ‘this isn’t a pipe’.  Its weird.  Its a surrrrealeeeism painting.”

…

I stared at him for about 10 seconds with my jaw gaping open.

Once my brain had worked enough to get past the fact that my second grader is schooling me on surrealism, I asked him what else he knows about it.

He said “Its usually weird paintings that don’t make a lot of sense.  I think that Sarvoladore Dali is my favorite surrealistic painter.  He likes to paint melting clocks.”

Melty clocks for the win

So I pulled up some Dali (now, I’m not as much of a rube with ol Salvadore as I am with Rene) and he pointed out Persistence of Time, saying that he recognized that one from his art class.

“See the thing underneath the clock [on the right]?  Thats his face peeled off.”

…

Wow.

So we went through other surrealism paintings, and he recognized some, and I had an intelligent art conversation with my 7 year old.

Before he went back to the DS.

So, holy crap, Oak Ridge public schools for the win.  I emailed his art teacher something babbling about how “OMG MY CHILD IS KNOWING TEH ART TALK !!!!1111!!”

So, now I really, really want to get Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

This one ain’t bad either, and arguably more my speed…

OK, so drivin to pick the kid up a few minutes ago i got behind a pickup truck from Putnam County with some bumper stickers that have me pondering…

One of em says “The best government is no government.”

Cool. Old school anarchism. I dabbled with anarchism for a while, in my youth.  Its the kind of thing like the Atkins diet where you say “WHOA, awesome, I get to eat nothing but meat and lose weight!!” and keep on saying it until you die of a massive heart attack on account of cholesterol, or something like that.

While I’d like to go on the record to state that I don’t believe that a lack of government leads to coronary issues, I’m also not going to come along to say that it doesn’t.

It’s an attractive idea for folks that just don’t really think things through.

Anyway, I’m down with the truck so far.  I keep reading.

The next bumper sticker says something to the extent of “How is this a free country if everything is for sale?”

Well all right.  Anti capitalism.  Now I dabbled a bit with that in my day as well, cuz lord knows mo’ money mo’ problems.  I’ll pour a 40 on the curb for Biggie just for that one.  Or maybe it was Tupac.  Hell, I don’t remember (editors note: Wikipedia says Biggie.  Word). Point is, when you ain’t got money, you ain’t happy, and for some reason (although I haven’t experienced it myself) when you do got money, you ain’t happy.

Roll with it, little truck guy.  Dude from Putnum County is laying it to the man with his bumper stickers.

Thing is, I started pondering it because I was driving through a school zone behind him and the music on the radio wasn’t that entertaining, and started wondering if he’s thought his stance on financial leadership through all the way.  Cuz see,  I see a bit of a disconnect between the two philosophies of nihilism displayed on his truck window, in that I think it’d be hard to not have some sort of market system, and not have a government at the same time…

Cuz who’s gonna lay the road down that he’s driving on?  And then paint it?

By now we were starting to move a bit more freely out of the school zone so I didn’t see if any of his other bumper stickers had a clue as to what his solution to the by now oppressively intimidating intellectual gap between economic policy and legislative policy is.  I’m positive that somewhere between the gate latch and the Toyota logo there would be a faded sticker that would lay out, in detail, his manifesto for maintaining public services and infrastructure.  Maybe a point system?  Is bartering involved?  Goats and chickens?

The mind boggled.  I tried to get closer to read it, while at the same time looking somewhat casual, but our paths shortly diverged, and I had to pick the kid up.  I’ll be working that over in my head all day, like a piece of overcooked meat stuck between your back teeth.

Still, one thing is painfully clear.  The unclear, contradictory,  and rather excessive political and economic opinions  so prominently displayed on the back of his truck makes this guy an obvious candidate for immediate citizenship into the City of Oak Ridge.

He’d fit right in with some of these other dumb bastards…

beauty in the trees
passin by me at high speed
pickin up the boys

no sunshine in days
but all the clouds are swirlin
sparkles all over

and my cup is full
and it’ll be full again
and I think that’s great

Thursday a week ago the Oak Ridge Observer reported that Alex Moseley, the always bridesmaid, never bride political man about town, who recently lost a bid to be the Anderson County election chief, and who less recently lost a bid to to the Tennessee House of Representatives, has decided to throw a referendum out there because the Oak Ridge City Council recently voted to opt out of Tennessee’s recent law allowing concealed carry gun permit holders to go packing in city parks.

Now, for those not in the know, what you do in Oak Ridge when the local government doesn’t do what you want is to:

a) Go to the website of one of the local newspapers and leave halfway incoherent comments indicating how the town is crashing and burning

b) Start a referendum to try to overthrow the decision

This worked fantastically in keeping shopping out of Oak Ridge back in the halcyon days of ought six, saving us from the scourge of using abatements on the tax money that would have come in on a big ass shopping center, leaving us with the (preferred, obviously) no tax money coming in from the no shopping center that came up because the referendum was successful.

Therefore referendums=problem solved.

With that I boldly submit my own referendum.  Now, I might need some help with the legalese, and the fact that there isn’t really anything to appear, necessarily, but those things are just details:

We, the undersigned voters of Oak Ridge, pursuant to a stronger and more productive community, hereby protest the lack of assistance being made by the City of Oak Ridge in finding relocation for those whom have deemed Oak Ridge an unacceptable place to live.  We request immediate grant funds be placed, preferably from the election and city rehabilitation fund, to be immediately made available to allow for these poor bastards to get the hell out of town.

Something like that. See, theres a reason I’m not in politics.

Except now apparently, Mosely’s not allowed to do it?

Weak.

Yeah, I know, this is late. I was busy.  Um.  Yeah.

So its been like 40 years or something since Woodstock laid down some music and peace and love and whatnot on a dairy farm in New York, and in celebration of it, Bell and I are listening to the Woodstock soundtrack record I acquired from a relative (who figured out now that I have it and wants it back), and grilling meat.

I don’t know for sure that grilling meat is peace and love, but I operate under the assumption that the peace and love aspect of the hippie generation turned into the ‘me’ generation that still permeates society and whatnot, and which I kinda sorta attribute to some of the crappy things that happened with my generation, so we’re just liking the music.

Cuz damn, its some good music.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

So last night I couldn’t sleep.  Like at all.

We went to bed, and I was somewhat sleepy, but in the same way that sometimes when you really have to go to the bathroom, but once you get in there you try and try and try but nothing ever happens…

Um, I couldn’t sleep.  And actually that doesn’t have anything to do with going to the bathroom.

I digress.

So, I rolled around some, got up, got some water, got back in bed, rolled around some, kicked the dog (I’m on a silent campaign to make the doberman uncomfortable without Bell knowing about it, except now I think she knows about it), rolled around some more, flipped on the tv, and finally wandered into the den.

Where, evidently, I passed out watching something about the Big Bang Theory.

I woke up all ninja like with the dobie licking me in the face.  I’m pretty sure it was all ninja, it felt very ninja, and I seem to vaguely recall jumping up and flipping out all across the room until I realized that I was not truly in mortal danger.  Bell sez that I kinda flailed my arms and went “AAWAAWWAWAAWA” but I think she’s just trying to keep me from getting a big head, or maybe getting me back for kicking the dobie.

Or hell, maybe he’s getting me back for kicking him.  I’m looking at him now, asleep next to me on the futon, taking up roughly 8 cubic feet of space (I think that’s 30 bushels), and, well, I *do* have a vague urge to kick him, but I’m not quite flexible enough to get my foot up there.

Ninja’s aren’t flexible either, people. C’mon.

So anyway, the whole adrenaline rush thing upon waking up had to do with

a) I was in a goofy room
b) A hairy beast was putting tongue all over my face
c) The TV was no longer playing geeky science crap, but instead something about how you should give people with square breasts money to show you how to exercise
d) This weird ass dream I had about how those damn robots finally started killing off all of the humans, and my family and I were running through the woods trying to find the secret source of their robot power, which ended up being a pool that I had to jump into not unlike the climax of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (except that I was dressed, I think), and jumping into that thing managed to deactivate all the robots (whew).  But then my brain (because evidently I needed to know) decided to swing to a prequel dream explaining how the robots came to be, and turns out that it was all started because Iron Man and a bunch of other scientist people were hanging out at The Blueberry Farm (I think the family was somewhere else, since my dream didn’t seem to link culpability to them) and somehow ended up making a robot that looked just like Ali Larder, but she was evil (and I swear I’ve never seen Battlestar Galactica, ever), and then she turns everybody else there into robots and they end up going and subjugating and exterminating the human population.

Oh, and everybody were lego people.  I think thats the 7 yr old’s influence.

I don’t know where the hell the rest of it came from.

So, the moral of the story is I’m giving up sleep, because you end up having asinine dreams and waking up either with or without ninja skills.

Yep.  Dragon got his ass disabled.

Why?

What’d he do?

Not quite sure.  Thing is, with Facebook, much like with certain third world countries, you can wake up one morning and find yourself ‘disappeared’.  Where’d you go?

Don’t ask.

So, he logged into the account, and got a big ol’ THIS ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DISABLED RRRRAARARARRAR message.

Then he cried, and he called me in, and I said “Damn boy, you got yourself disabled.  What kind of pictures were you putting up?”

Once the picture issue was resolved (turns out he doesn’t know how to put pictures up), and we also determined that he wasn’t posing as William Shatner, or participating in hate groups, or prison riots, or third world dictatorships, we determined that we have no idea why the hell his account was disabled.

Copied this right from the internet. Kinda shocking.

Anyway, so Dragon emailed them, or more appropriately, an email from Dragon’s account was emailed to the disabled@facebook.com address, where I’m fully expecting them to send a canned response indicating that they got it (ding, already came), and then after about a week, I’d anticipate that we’ll just go ahead and make an account for Dhragon, and just pretend that its a completely different person (see the h? duh).

Yep.

Not that I have a specific beef with Facebook for this.  I can full on respect a web presence that offers something for free just to arbitrarily and unexpectedly remove it, because damn, isn’t that what we all do with our children anyway?

Hey Dragon, you wanna have something to eat?  TOO BAD!

(and everybody laughs)

Dammit, I spend all damn day dealing with broke ass technology, and then my own website has broke assness.

Did anybody else notice that theres two jakes listed under author?

Great.

And I’ve drunk like 7 beers and it still isn’t working.

And now its gonna look like Bell wrote this post, cuz damned if I didn’t go dancing around deleting random shit in the SQL table.

Get me another beer, somebody…