The Spectacular 7

I have a terrible habit. It’s not really a habit, more of a unfortunate casual occurrence.

I get a lot of bugs in my food.

I don’t get them, as if I’ve asked for them, and I don’t refuse to wave off the flies and gnats that inevitably circle my plates during evening dinners outdoors. No, I often and unexpectedly get dead roaches, flies, and other critters in my otherwise wonderfully prepared food.

On a first date that I desperately wanted to go well, I got a roach in my pasta salad. The tragic part is that I didn’t discover this fact until after I put the thing into my mouth. On another occasion, hoping to make another solid impression with the ladies, I found a roach in my beer. Once again, it took my actually putting the thing into my mouth in order for me to find him out.

There have been others less disgusting. But the point really is that one person shouldn’t have so much extra protein in his food. I submit my latest encounter as yet another impossibility on the road to consuming most of the exo-skeletal creatures in the northern hemisphere.

On a flight back from Italy, midway through a delicious salad that I had hoped would rival the previous week of greens and tomatoes, I flipped over a leaf to find a caterpillar gnawing on some of my greens.

That’s right. At 32,000ft and change, somewhere over the edge of Western Europe, I had a live caterpillar in my salad.

For a moment, I was flabbergasted at the idea: a worm has no business eating anything at 32,000ft. But then again, neither, really, do I. So I passed my salad off, ordered another Leinenkugel, and waited on my chicken.

Fortunately, it was bug-free.

There’s always next time.

Tags: Misc., On the Weather // Add Comment »

I know this will be grossly offensive to most of you, but it’s for your own good. Someone has to say it. Someone has to stand up and brave the masses to speak the truth. That person is me, I am Spartacus. And so here we go…

Family Guy is awful. American Dad is ten times worse.

Whoa there! Hold on, don’t fight it….let it settle….there you go. Family Guy is not as funny as your friends say it is. Even they don’t think it’s that funny. They just think that the rest of the world thinks it’s flippin’ hilarious.

“Oh man, how great is Stewie!” “Dude, Brian says what the rest of us are afraid to say.” “I love Peter’s flashbacks….toooo funny.”

No. None of that is true. It’s a cartoon. It’s novel. If it were a sitcom, it would rank somewhere between a  MASH spin-off and a documentary on Slurpee cleaners.

God, Family Guy is awful. Sweet Mercy, American Dad is borderline suicidal. Give it up, try books. Try gambling. Try the Internet. Just stop trying to like them.

Let the damned, awful things die.

Tags: Misc. // Add Comment »

As you may have noticed, my theme changed today. Why you ask? It has a lot to do with me being a raging idiot when it comes to the techno-science that occurs in order to make a website widget-ready. That said, I am working hard to enhance my old theme in order to revert back to something more comfortable, something safe, something….wow. You know, this water thing is kinda peaceful. What was I saying? Oh yeah, converting themes. I plan on…wow, heh heh, it’s kinda cool this dark water, very relaxing. I think I’ll just let go of the side of this boat for a while and drift, maybe check out what’s under the surface…sweet…..blurb, blorp, bubleeleraapbeparpbap*.

(Author’s note: I realize someone drowning would have neither the time nor the technology to physically type out his or her demise. But it’s cyberspace, so I did. Suck on that, motorheads!)

Tags: Housekeeping // Add Comment »

I’m not a real sentimental person. OK, I’m a real sentimental person. But I’m not a crier, at least not in public, or without a stick of cookie dough. There are a lot of things that get me close to tears….the movie Love Actually for one, and really, really great personal stories of triumph over adversity. Those get me close, but rare is the moment that breaks the dam. And of course I would not be writing this if there wasn’t a “but WAIT!”…

And so here it is…

Many of you will laugh. Most of you will probably just say “eh” and move on with your day. But for me, there is a great intersection of so many personal loves in this one minute that I cannot help but be overcome with a general welling up and overflow. Summer camp, nature, space, explosions, astrophysics, sharks, oceans, fire, Discovery Channel, and a heavy dose of gratefulness for being alive and aware.

In the end, I think that’s about all sentiment and sadness and joy really are: a crossroads of experience, desire, and the present. I’m the same way with pictures of the Earth, 1000+ year old churches, and the Garth Brooks song “When You Come Back to Me Again“. If I’m paying attention -which I always try to be- I get that way when riding the I-85 South off-ramp onto J.R. Allen parkway; driving into Wewahitchka, Florida; crossing the Chattahoochee in Cottonton, Alabama; rumbling across the speed stripes in Cusseta, Georgia; and any smell of fir and wildflower in Western, North Carolina.

Those are just a few.

You have your own. Take time to enjoy them all (even if it means crying out loud).

The World is just Awesome…

Tags: On the Couch // Add Comment »

Is mine. Be prepared for a full-on, full-frontal, prepubescent assault of the bloggiest kind. As long as we can all agree that prepubescent means “funny, interesting, and readable”.

What? It doesn’t? It means what?!?!?! Oh good lord no. I should delete that. Damnit! The Delete Key doesn’t work! Neither does the Mouse!

Son-of-a-aljksd,kjehsfluihdhsdhkalrawerqewtfsahsgdh

Tags: Housekeeping // Add Comment »

Maybe I should post more often than quarterly. That, of course, would require me to manufacture things to say. I could shout VOTE FOR OBAMA!, but then I would be bandwagonning…and I would be betraying my own conscience. I could blog about the human need for fire, and my insatiable desire to have a fireplace in just about every room in the house. I could chat about human rights issues in China, the sleight-of-hand credit crisis, the failure of modern education in public schools, and the Godd#$%ed motorcycles and semi’s that barrel by my bedroom at 3am.

I will give an extra few sentences to that last one. Would it be OK for me to fire up my horn when I crank my car and NEVER shut it off until I parked again? OF COURSE NOT! But somehow we smile and look longingly at the morons who blow by us -sans helmet- belching their two-wheeled exhaust at all those who have the ears to hear it. Idiotic.

Iron horse? Really? Go strap a rocket between your legs if you want to feel “dangerous”. Keep that in-the-club low handed wave for the cop that scrapes your dying body off the median rail after I sideswipe your noise phallus for riding in my blind spot.

Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.

Tags: Housekeeping // Add Comment »

I am one to complain. To that end, though, I am also one to attempt change. However, I’m not so sure that my complaining will be heard nor my efforts at change felt any further than this web page, but nevertheless, here we go.

100 years ago, there were relatively zero cars on our city streets. There were exactly zero planes in our skies. There were no computers, 3 households had phones in them, and most cash registers were made of wood. Radios were the newest of the new-fangled technologies, trees were cut down by handsaws and big, burly men, and trains moved everything from one city to the next. We didn’t have firetrucks, jackhammers, or alarms signaling incoming tornadic activity.

Flash forward to now, and modern tech had produced a good gracious plenty of modern machines to ease our labor in life. And you know what else came along with it, burying itself like a tick into the flesh of all things space-age?

Noise!

[Read more →]

Tags: On the Couch, On the Weather // Add Comment »

Normally I don’t post news here. Normally I would post something more closely related to my life, a story about my recent trip to Hawaii, my high school shenanigans, Christmas Tree Season, etc. Normally I would post something far more tasteful. Normally.

But today is not a normal day. This post is not a normal story. The following link’s page title alone is sensational enough to be published worldwide on every single news site in every single language. There’s nothing I can say…really. No one, NO ONE is clever enough to follow this with anything meaningful or more hilarious.

So here it is. Feel good about yourself.

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I’m not sure what sparked this memory, or why it keeps pestering me, but it’s at once funny, wow-a-fying, and serendipitous.

I once watched a sunset, a moonrise, a moonset, and a sunrise all from the back patio of a friend’s beach condo. And while I remember those things in particular, and how conversations took their cues from each celestial event, four things immediately stick out in my mind: 1) only two of us saw all four happen, 2) there seemed to be an endless chill in my beer…or maybe an endless supply of beer…something to do with beer, 3) if it wasn’t for the knowledge of how things like that work, I would’ve put a lot of stock in time standing still, and 4) while we were watching the sun come back up, another friend of mine was throwing up blood by the front door, and laughing about it.

The magic of such moments rarely lasts long.

Tags: On the Couch, Short Shorts // Add Comment »

It’s taken me a while to post on this, not for any other reason than a need for some perspective. Fortunately, time helps provide for just such a thing.

I’d rather not be too cliche’, but if memory serves me correctly, I was 5 a few days ago. It’s amazing how quickly the moments and years pass by. 30 really hasn’t been that big of a deal, in terms of significance. I don’t feel much older, I don’t look much older, and since I am not what anyone would call “type-A” or “highly organized”, I don’t have a list of Things-I-Want-To-Accomplish-By-The-Time-I-Turn-30 to stare at and feel inadequate about.

I do have a list, though, of things I am grateful for, or am alive to appreciate, or simply find myself smiling about. I’ve included it below, some items with description, some without. Feel free to cheat off of my paper.

 (in no particular order)

1. Georgia Football, despite going 30 years without a National Title
2. A river, a kayak, a cooler, and nothing else
3. Christmas Trees, Kimi Farms, and fire barrells late at night
4. A tremendous family
5. A home I can work on, and on, and on, and on…
6. Nintendo Wii
7. My dogs
8. Guinness Beer, Oktoberfest, and Fat Tire Ale
9. Good wine, and if time and money permits, Great wine
10. Summertime
11. My Fiance’ (she’ll love that she was #11)
12. Running in the rain, in the cold, and in the middle of the night
13. Ipods, Itunes, and the de-cluttering of my music collection
14. My faith, or my journey of faith, or simply that spark that keeps my quest ever-going
15. My love of reading
16. HD Television - Seriously, have you seen it? I almost ate an LCD panel during a Wendy’s commercial yesterday
17. A job I love, even if it doesn’t really count as a job until something is published
18. Two-lane roads in the middle of nowhere
19. Flying - In an airplane. Although, if I ever wind up flying on my own, that’ll replace this immediately

And last but not least, my friends. My amazing and wonderful friends. I cannot imagine my walk through this world without them. They are the most genuine, caring, loving, honest, and passionate people I have ever come across, and I am thankful that I was able to latch onto them for as long as I have. The adventures we’ve shared, tears we’ve shed, and moments we’ve spent in fits of laughter, fear, anger, and passion, I will never be able to repay them for their impact on my life.

Stories abound, and I hope, one day, to tell them all. But having lived them and shared them with such wonderful people, it would be hard to say anything more fitting and anything less appropriate than ‘thanks, I love you all’. While barely scratching the surface, it is, at least, a start.

Tags: On the Weather // Add Comment »