Jericho: The Ghost of Frank Wolk

Halloween, my favorite holiday. I've toned down my pursuit of this holiday as the years have gone by. As much as I love the dress up and the assuming of characters for one night of fun, people around me seem less and less interested in the holiday. "It's for kids," they say. I couldn't disagree more, but it's no fun if I am the only one playing.

However, beyond the candy and costumes, there is something more to this holiday. The veil between the world of the living and what is beyond does somehow seem thinner. As a younger man I denied all of this as hogwash and poppycock, but in my dotage, well, let me tell you what happened to me today.

I like sunglasses. Max can tell you I have a long history with the things. I like big, cheap, dark shades. If you put them on, they take up your whole face, you can't see out of them and they cost less than $10 - they are perfect! If welding masks were a little cheaper and a little more stylish, I would just wear them.

But, I have problems. First, I have a HUGE head. Just big. So, I have to find really large glasses. Second, they are never dark enough. It would seem these days that people want to see out of their glasses. I hate sunlight, the darker the better. And, last, there's cost. I just can't bring myself to pay $60 or more for a pair of shades. I wear my glasses hard and I would be replacing the expensive ones probably as often as the cheap ones. So, why fork out $80 bucks and have the things get dropped and scratched, when I can buy a pair for $15 and replace them a year later when I can stand the scratches any more?

Anyway, in the last few years, I have had a succession of cheap shades. I have kept the dead soldiers in my drawer at work after they broke or whatever. This has been handy, as I had been buying a particular cheap brand and using the dead shades for replacement parts.

Today, I opened that drawer for another reason and found the pile of left-over bits. I have a pair of shades now, they were $6.50 (woo hoo!), and they are fairly dark, but not big enough. However, as I looked at that pile, I had a feeling come over me. The spooky part was, I knew instantly what that feeling was!

My grandfather, Frank Wolk, was an infamous tinkerer. The man had an entire garage full of tools, he even used some of them. He often had two if not three cars that all ran at least some of the time. They were held together with duct-tape, wire clothes hangers, bubble gum and prayer. He could, and would, jury-rig anything. The thing might only work for a little while, but by gum, it worked! Now and then his fixes would last and last. There was a bit of magic in his madness. Sometimes, when I'm working on a computer problem, I like to think some of his magic rubbed off on me.

Today, I had proof that Frank Wolk's genes ran in my blood. I looked at that pile of broken shades and at the little glasses screw driver I keep around to keep my shades in tact, and before I knew it, my fingers were working on their own. When I was done, the bits from three different pairs of sunglasses had merged with three screws and had become one new and rather nice looking pair of shades.

Now, I know they may not last, but, even if I only wear them once, it will have been worth the effort. On this sunny Halloween day in the Pacific North West, I felt the presence of my Grandfather and I created something new and good from a pile of plastic crap. Thanks, Granpa.

Jericho: Letters from the Lib on the Looney Left

Lies! All Lies!

My liberalism has never been in question. I am so left I scream "Conservative Creeps" at the Libertarians marching around the post office on April 15th. For goodness sake, I'm a card carrying member of the following organizations:

SADD

MADD

RADD

BADD

GLAAD

ACLU

UNCF

IMFF

NOW

PBA

"BOB"

I'm so left of left my right hand goes numb at the very mention of the Republican Party - see! There it goes, I'm typing with my LEFT hand!

Max: The Shocking Truth

I can no longer be a a party to deception. My partner in weirdness, the lovely Jericho, is hiding a shocking secret. Behind his freedom loving exterior lies a closet fascist. For example, look at some of the titles he suggested for Irate Weirdos:

1) Authoritarian Chronicles

2) The Strong State Follies

3) Laugh At The Appropriate Times Or It's The Re-Education Camp For You

Jericho: Excitement

At one point, Max nailed my personality dead on. He said "There is no project like the new project you haven't started yet." He was trying to get me to work on something I wasn't too hip about at the time by giving me crap about the other projects I wanted to do. As per usual, Max was right, the fire I felt about those projects, I forget what they were, faded and I got nothing out of them.

But, the project I'm working on now has caught my attention and has lit a fire under my imagination. I'm pretty excited about it. It will never make me rich and I'll probably get sued over it, but it's just such a fun idea. I hope I can keep my enthusiasm long enough to see it to fruition.

I'll give you all some hints. It's going to be a web comic strip. I'm not sure if I'm going to buy my own domain or use Keenspace. I won't be drawing it - I'm going to use photos. So far, I have 15 story boards, and they are all cute at minimum, with a knee slapper here and there. I want to pull together sixty or so finished strips, which works out to two months of daily content, before I post anything. So, I'm in this for the long haul before it will ever get posted. This might not be up before the end of the year.

I've thought about doing a strip for IWDC for quite a while - and I'm still considering adding the strip to this site. The problem is that I have wanted to do a strip for IWDC that fits IWDC. This strip I have in mind does not fit. I haven't been able to conceive of a strip that would fit IWDC without simply doing strips of previous posts and trying to weld that into a story line. I think that would stink. A political cartoon might work, but I also fear diluting the site. IWDC has a certain purity to it that I want to preserve. I dunno.

Anyway, I'm very excited and I can't wait to announce that I have finished here on the site. Cross your fingers for me.

Max: Two Steps Forward, Three Years Back

Today, I officially returned to the wonderful world of tech support. For two years I climbed up through the tech ranks before losing my network management gig. Now I am back where I started, front line, tier one support. It is still a step up from what I have been doing.

I am making about 2.5 times what I was making at Guitar Center. I am making less that I did when I was in network management. Though I also have a great deal less debt. So, I am a bit better off that I was even then. Hopefully, it will be up from here.

Jericho: Creative Drives

Fertilizer is a good thing.

I have been spreading the compost around for a week or more now. Wallowing in the fact that my creative juices have seemed to dry up. I don't have time. I don't have the gumption. Waah!

However, for whatever reason, some creative things are suddenly happening for me. I am pulling together a project that I have been thinking about for a while - I'll pass on details when there are some to pass. (Think: $20 of cheap action figures and modeling dough ... ) Max and I are pulling another project together - again, details as they become available. Then, there is IWDC, week three of very frequent blogging is in the Archives! I love this Blogger jazz!

Now if my job doesn't go off the deep end and if I can keep my attention focused long enough to make these projects happen, I might be in good shape. We'll see.

Max: Humor in (Prison) Uniform

Master criminals in our midst.

Jericho: Dangerous Awakenings

Everyday we all do stupid and dangerous things and we call it "just part of life". A calculated risk. We probably shouldn't start thinking about it, but there is nothing I like better than causing a good mental break down.

Just take an ordinary day and look at the silly things we all do. Start by getting out of bed. There are statistics that show that most heart attacks begin first thing in the morning. The mere act of getting out of bed, showered and off to work may be too much stress for any one of us. Add the blast of stress from the load of emails we get first thing or the pile of work left by the night crew and a strong cup of morning java, you have a sure fire coronary in the making. Just getting out of bed is a deadly risk. Makes me want to smash my alarm clock and never leave the safety of my comforter.

Then, we have our morning hygiene ritual. Again, statistics show most accidents happen in the home and most of those in the bathroom - little wonder. In one room we have water, electricity, cleaning agents of various strengths from tooth paste to DrainO, razor blades and detal floss - your bathroom may vary. I was shocked while staying in a hotel recently, they had a hair-dryer mounted on a wall. There was a tag on the cord warning of the dangers of mixing water and electricity - yet this device was hung less than six inches from the shower. How close is your dryer to your sink? Close enough it could fall in? Bathroom sinks are usually crowded with electric razors, tooth brushes, hot combs and any other number of devices that plug in - what foolishness! Every year people are electrocuted when they instinctively reach for a device that just fell in the water. They set fires with curling irons left on towels. Poor wiring and sleep deprived brains are a bad mix. I'm personally waiting for the morning our wiring lights our home up like some kid's science fair project. How many times have you gotten a jolt or a minor burn because you were stupid? Take he next logical step - could what happened have been worsened?

Then we get in the shower. I looked around my shower not too long ago; to the right eye, it's an iron maiden! Start with a slippery floor layered in lubricants like water, soap and shampoo. Then you have metal protrusions of various types, from faucets and spouts to shower caddies and door handles. Then there is the door - glass no less. Slip, fall, break the glass, impaled with no chance to free yourself before you hemorrhage to death. Oh, yeah, I've been whacked in the head with a falling shower rod or two. Good clean fun.

Okay, you make it out of the shower and now it's time to shave. Applying a surgically sharp blade to scrape the hair off our skin - we all do it. Most of us do it at least a few times a week, some daily. Be it legs, face, pits or other areas. Does it ever strike you as odd that you are doing this? Does anyone worry, as I do, that they will slip, cut themselves very deeply, maybe really hurting themselves? No, just you, Jericho. Everyone else's arteries are made of titanium, Flesh Boy!

Fine. Now you are out of the bathroom. You are cleaned and scraped and blown dry. Time to put on clothes. I'm not the least nimble person I know - I'm pretty good on my feet when I need to be. But, I can't tell you how many times I have nearly killed myself trying to put on a pair of underwear. Okay, maybe I am a klutz - but I am not the only one. I have seen plenty of interesting body moves and practices in the name of getting into clothing. Women and tight jeans or panty hose. Men and suspenders. The shoe dance! Then, there is the neck tie - nothing like wearing a silk noose to make one feel like a man!

Two words: contact lenses. Yeek!

Then we go get in to our vehicle of choice for the ride to work. This is the most unbelievable dance of death I can imagine - but we all do it everyday. Take a few thousand people, each one wielding a ton or two of steel, plastic, glass, gasoline and other corrosives. Each one of these people are trying to get to where they are going as fast as possible without alerting the law, spilling their lattes, messing up their makeup as they try to apply it, missing their favorite song or interrupting their cellular phone call - oh, right, and trying not to hit each other. We have a wide variety of skill levels from expert driver to novice, with a healthy mix of distracted, angry, frustrated, rushed, oblivious, insane, intoxicated and stupid. Throw in road hazards like rain, ice, pot holes, car parts, farm animals and add to that the ever present old-lady-turned-on-her-right-blinker-while-merging-into-left-lane and car-died-blocking-three-lanes-of-traffic-in-rush-hour. How any of us ever get to work is a complete mystery to me. I hug my seat belt and wait for the flash of the pyros setting off my air-bag as my face punches into it at sixty miles an hour.

There is also a trust element we have to start examining at this point. We trust that the guy in the next lane is smart and not suicidal. We do this all the time. If we didn't trust other drivers, we couldn't have multi-lane highways. But, we all agree that those little yellow and white lines are like walls and we all need to stay between them. We trust that everyone can read - I was once in a car that had to dodge an oncoming car who must have gone up the wrong ramp because they didn't read. Instead of turning around, they just decided to balls it out and keep flying down the highway at full speed going against traffic. I bet that person lived, too. We all trust that the traffic lights are working and that they won't all go green at the same time. We trust that when we cross the street, the drivers will actually stop (well, they don't here in Seattle, they creep into your back pocket, the moment you are half an inch out of the way they peel out behind you to be stopped ten feet away by traffic. Oh, and it's legal to run a red light if you are forced to stop by traffic on the other side of the crosswalk - people in the crosswalk are not even thought of - unless their lifeless bodies ruin the paint job).

We trust that the last guy to maintain the elevator actually did his job. We trust that when we put our hand between the doors they will stop and open for us, not chop off the hand or carry us up six feet by our wrists and drop us. We trust that the elevator is in working order, that the cables and brakes are all fine and that they won't break and send us hurtling to our deaths. We trust that the coffee urn hasn't been poisoned, spat in, and that the decaf is far away from us in that strange orange pot.

We take all these risks and trust all of these people just to get to work. Think of what we do just to get through the day.

Then, there's the drive home.

Max: Risk Taking Thrill Seeker

Gator is spyware. It is used to gather information from computers without the user's knowlege. It's bloody, fucking spyware.

Max: Immortality

This is awesome. As long as you think you can go for half a millennium without getting laid.

Max: High Larry Us

Herr Gröpenfuhrer. Classic.

Max: What's Going On

Yesterday was my last day at Guitar Center.

It is no secret that I have long craved a life of adventure. Selling guitars was a thrill for a while. But the edge has long since worn dull. I was afraid I would never again feel the thrill I felt when I sold my first set of nickel-plated, stainless steel bass strings. Then, came the offer that would change my life.

I have been asked to join a super secret, ultra-clandestine, way undercover government operation. Now, instead of selling guitars, I will be out in the world, bringing death to America's enemies, fighting for fast food, blandly innoffensive television, sexual purity and all our sacred American values.

Of course, none of my nearest and dearest will even notice my absence. Using Technology ™, my organization will ensure that all my loved ones will never know I am gone. Only noble, loyal, dependable Guitar Center will feel the cold emptiness of my non-being-there-ness.

But, perhaps I have said too much.

Max: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Everything old is new again. The following is from a online column/blog I had on an old web site. I posted it in August of 1998. Because I am years ahead of Jericho.

One of the most traumatic experiences of my life happened to me last year around Christmas. I was entering my local Walgreens when I was confronted by the worst horror I think I have ever seen. It was a two foot tall plastic Christmas tree wearing a Santa Claus hat. It had large plastic eyes and a huge plastic grin. I tried to walk as far around it as I could, but still it managed to spot me. It cried out, "Merry Chrismas! HO HO HO!" and started to sing Jingle Bells. I was so scared I ran out of the store and didn't come back until after New Year's.

That was a horrible day. But that was nothing compared to what happened recently. A month ago I went into that self same Walgreens and to my horror, again found myself face to face with The Tree! For a moment, I froze. Is this a flashback? I asked myself. This can't be here. It's still summer, isn't it? I checked my watch to be sure I hadn't in fact slept the last four months away, that El Ninó hadn't resulted in an unseasonably warm December. It was still August, still summer. I reached out and touched the demon tree to make sure it wasn't a hallucination. I think it would have been better if it had been.

I could not believe my eyes. It was only August, the height of summer, and already Walgreens was decking the halls with boughs of holly. I could have lived with it if it had just been Walgreens. I can get cheap cigars and economy sized packages of Starburst (Opal Fruits to me mates in Britain) anywhere. But it wasn't. It was only a week later when Laura and I were in our friendly, neighborhood Wal-Mart when I found yet more Christmas decorations. Admittedly, they were tucked away in the back corner of the store, but they were there, openly displayed.. And it was just the other day when Laura and I were at one of her fave art supply stores and I saw Christmas decorations a mere aisle away from Halloween decorations.

It used to be that store owners waited until after a holiday was over before they started whoring the next one. It wasn't so long ago that the day after Thanksgiving (a day when we in the US celebrate freedom and turkeys) was the official start to the Christmas shopping season. It was a day when the sheep flocked to crowded shopping malls while those of us who prefered the thrill of doing our shopping on Christmas Eve stayed home and ate turkey sandwiches, made turkey soup and wished a swarm of locust would descend and carry off the rest of the previous day's leftovers.

Over the last few years, that tradition has been eroded. Slowly, almost subtly, stores started putting up decorations and advertising holiday sales earlier and earlier. I commented once that we were only a few years away from perpetual Christmas, from signs put up in stores on December 25 that say, "Only 365 more days until Christmas." I was joking. Once again, I am paying the price for confusing prophetic vision with sarcasm. It is still summer (or early fall, depending on which day you read this), but as far as the stores are concerned, Santa is already packing his sleigh.

But it is not just Christians who are being made to suffer. It only took them 5000 years, but marketers have realized that Hanuka can be gelded and turned into yet another annual sale. Unfortunately for African-Americans, it didn't take them quite as long to jump on Kwanza. Next thing you know, stores will be pushing their semi-annual Solstice sales.

I know the winter holidays are an important time for stores. It is the only time of the year my brother's tiny little guitar store actually shows a profit. But let's be reasonable. In my humble opinion, there was nothing wrong with waiting until late November to start the holiday push. It gives stores a month make their money. And it allows scrooges like me to not be driven mad by an endless holiday.

Jericho: This Christmas crap has got to go!

Okay, I'm a card-carrying grinch. Bah-humbug and all that. Granted. Admitted. Guilty!

But, it's October. Since October 1st I have seen more and more Christmas paraphernalia displays in the retail outlets. Folks, it's not even Halloween yet.

We're at the local big-box grocery store and they have a section of the store that is a mixture of Halloween and Christmas. Devil horns and Santa Claus - it should be illegal!

I know most of you get all gooey about X-mas, but, please, can we just confine it to November and December? Do you really need to buy your tree before the Halloween candy goes stale? Is anyone going to put up their tree before Thanksgiving?

And this crap keeps getting worse. It used to be that it was just after Thanksgiving. Then it was November 1st and somewhere in the last five years, as Christmas sales have continued to WEAKEN, that the retail chains have started displaying this spray-painted plastic Fah-la-la earlier and earlier. If this keeps going, stores will go from Christmas to Valentines to July 4th (gotta sell dem plastic flags!) to Halloween and right back to freakin' X-mas! And I bet sales will continue to weaken! If we aren't careful, they will just eliminate some Holidays and go Christmas, Valentines and right back to Christmas. Joy to the world!

Catch a clue, Corporate America, if sales are weakening, make the holiday more special. Put the trees out three nights before the event - not three months. If it's the night before Christmas and Daddy needs to buy a tree and stocking stuffers, he will pay damn near anything to not have to hear his kids whine. If he can pick up Clearance Christmas items on December 1st, we're looking at a soft market.

Let's put the "sometime around the end of the year" back into Christmas!

Max: This Is A True Story

The pain was greater than anything he had ever experienced. It was greater than the pain from the bullet that had torn through his knee back in the war. Greater than when his lung had collapsed in mid-heart attack. It felt as if his soul was being torn from his body, which is all well and good as it was.

Just when he was ready to beg God, Buddha, Krishna, anyone to blank him into non-existance rather than to feel that pain one millisecond longer, it was over. The next thing he knew, he was standing before... well, the only thing he could call it was "God". That silly little three letter word was an utterly unapt a description of the infinity that sat smiling before him. He could only hope that it would let the slight go.

"I'm here," he said to everything. "I'm in... heaven," another meagre, unfit word.

"Yup," it said.

"I get to spend infinity, worshiping your very presence," he said, knowing that it would be bliss. Hell, bliss seemed like a bucket of day old spit by comparison to the prospect.

"Nah," it said.

"Oh," he said. "I'm... going to the other place?" He looked at it and he knew he deserved damnation. These mere minutes spent in it's presence were far more of a reward that he could have hoped for. He was ready to accept it's judgment.

"Nah," it said.

"Oh...kay. Then, what?" He asked, hoping it would not take offense.

"Well, the thing is, I created the universe for two reasons. One, I thought it would be a laugh to watch. Two, I thought it would be pretty cool to have my creation worshiping me for eternity. So, the universe part of it worked out great. It is a real hoot. But the eternal worship thing was just kind of annoying. It got so bad that it was distracting me from watching the universe. So, I decided to just start blanking you guys out. Nothing personal."

"You son of a..." was all he got out before he ceased to be. Somewhere, well, everywhere, infinity chuckled.

True story.

Jericho: Maybe it's not "Writing" as much as "Creating"

Anita started me down this road. I was happy moaning to myself that I wasn't writing in my paper journal, drawing in my black book, playing Role Playing games. But, no, she had to come along and introduce me to HTML and on-line journaling. It's all her fault!

One of the first things I did on my first web site, before the journal, was a stupid animated .gif of myself. Come to think of it, I think I had a bunch of them and I thought they were pretty bitchin'! Already, art and my ideas about the web were coming together. I had some odd ideas about pages where there was no text, things would animate and make sound as you moused over them, an interactive web sculpture. Never got around to those, I started journaling.

Oh, yes, I thought journaling would get me going as a writer. And, in a way, maybe it did. I had some gaming material published, they paid me and everything! But, mostly, journaling gave me the chance to bitch. Poor me. Boo hoo. Not a good enough writer. I hate everything. Waaah!

Okay, some of it was darned funny. I'll repost those pages one day and you can judge for yourself.

Then, and this isn't Anita's fault, I found on-line comics! I was bored at work. I found the two most popular, still there today, User Friendly and Sluggy Freelance. It was Christmas break and I was working one of the few available shifts. No calls, so I was surfing the net and found both of these places. I was floored! And, they were so poorly drawn at the time I figured I could do it, too.

But, I didn't. I kept journaling and I waited for a while. In there, Steph moved in with me, I lost one job, started another and I kept journaling. Finally, I figured out how to get a domain, get hosted, get advertising and draw a strip. When it came together, I was so excited; fuzzycomix.com was the coolest thing I had ever done. For three months, every weekday, I published the best art and gags I could come up with. My job got bad and I started getting terrible headaches. I let the strip go and I found a new job. I miss Fuzzy, I miss the creative outlet. I still get friends and family who ask about it now and then - they were the only readers, but we were set to grow. Too bad.

I settled into the job I am at now. For nearly a year, all I had was my journal, which I rarely updated. I hadn't published anything in forever, my job had settled into a routine and so had my life. I started talking to Max about putting together a site that reflected what we emailed back and forth to each other. We constantly sent each other links, argued about stuff, etc. Anita again lead the way, she had a blog. Weblogs were brand new to me. But, I saw it as a way to do a different spin on the journal, and having two guys write it seemed great. Because of IWDC and the fact that we have been doing it for two years, Max and I rarely talk to each other outside the blog, but it's lasted this long and I'm proud of it.

But, this has still not been the creative outlet I seek. I've tried to make it what I need. I've started fiction for it, but it always seemed to be a waste in my rusty bucket of a brain. I have been mucking around with a "Choose Your Own Adventure" type game for the site called "Being Jericho". It's on it's fourth or fifth incarnation and I still don't have enough to make it worth releasing. I've talked about doing a web comic for the site - as if it wasn't crowded with enough other crap.

In the time IWDC has existed, I have actually bought the domain and hosted a sci-fi web mag that never saw it's first issue. I have plotted out at least two other web sites that never quite saw the light of day and I have come up with ideas for a dozen or so web comics. I bought army men for an idea I had using the digital camera. On my pad, right next to my PC, at this instant, there are a pair of robotic characters I drew that I am debating if I should do something with them or not!

I don't have enough time and I don't have enough energy and I don't have enough drive. I don't want to invest time, energy, effort and emotion into something if I don't think it's going to go somewhere. IWDC is throw-away. Sure, I could stop tomorrow and I would miss it, but it's just a hobby. I tried to throw it away before, but I missed it too much. It hurt to stop working on Fuzzy. It was like something curled up and died inside me. Every night for three months I posted a comic. I was constantly creative. It felt really, well ... wonderful; to have that creative thing happen. My muse was getting off right and left and I had a funny thing on the Internet. It was totally groovy and an addiction I miss terribly.

I want to write, I want to draw, I want to make music, I want to create! Not having the time or gumption is driving me crazy and I don't know what to do. I don't want to start something and not finish it. IWDC is not two years old yet and it seems like it's been around forever. How could I ever do a daily strip or write a novel? Arrrrgh!!!!

Jericho: The Need to Write

Now and again Max and I moan about wanting to be writers and not writing and needing to write more and blah, blah, blah-blah, BLAH!

I am currently reading a book by Michael A. Stackpole; Rogue Squadron. This is a book set in the Star Wars universe, you may be familiar with the movies. Up to this point in my life, I have always been a fan of the movies, but never realized they have what is called "The Expanded Universe". All of the books and comics and roleplaying games and computer games fall into this world beyond the films. All of the producers of these works try to work with each other and keep it all within the same boundaries. All of this work feeds back into other works and even into the movies themselves.

I read a couple of Star Trek novels a while back, but they were very stand alone and unsatisfying. I have recently begun to collect the books from the new Star Wars role playing game; the materials from the movies, the previous incarnations of the RPG and all the novels are in this game.

The Expanded Universe is fascinating. I can cite one instance where an item was created for the Role Playing Game, the same item was used in a Star Wars video game, it was used in a comic book, rewritten into the next version of the RPG and there is now an action figure of this item. Kick ass! As someone who wants to write fiction and work in the RPG industry, the possibility of having an action figure of my work someday makes me swoon!

So, I went and looked for some of the novels.

So far, this novel has been a heck of a page turner. I look forward to some of the other Star Wars novels and other work by Mike Stackpole. But, last night I looked Stackpole's bio at the back of the book. This guy has been in the role playing industry for as long as the industry has existed. He has written material for everyone, all the way back to Flying Buffalo, TSR, WotC and my boys at SJG. Then, he has tons of novels to his credit. The man rocks the world!

I feel like I have been missing out on something good. But, I also feel like I have opened up a treasure chest of cool schtuff! On top of all of that, Stackpole's career gives me hope for my own career and makes me want to go write. That's the most important part to me.

Max: Trouble In The Family

Daddy Bush ain't happy with Shrub.

Jericho: When it rains ...

Max is obviously having a bad time of it, but I found some other bad news from a friend that has me rather concerned. My friend, Anita, may have ovarian cancer. I just found out about this yesterday.

As some of you are aware, Anita and I dated several years ago. Wow, it's been nearly six years! She introduced me to on-line journaling and blogging. She helped me write my first HTML codes. She is my digital goddess.

This stuff scares the beejesus out of me. I know that most cancer is at least curable. Some have it once, it's caught early and they never have to deal with it again. Some deal with it for a few years and it's over. More and more people survive cancer every year and the percentages keep getting better. But - well, there is always a "but" ...

I feel like I'm bringing this back to me, but, I don't want to start losing friends. I'm too young for that - and so are my friends! It's not fair. Anita started to sound like she was really happy. I couldn't make her happy, but Jack has and does. They have just been married a year. It's totally unfair.

I really hope she doesn't read this. I'm sure it will depress her. I shouldn't publish this.

Anita, Jack, if you guys read this, Steph and I are hoping for you. We wish you the best of luck. If you need anything; house sitting, food, general companionship, give us a call. All of the IWDC readers will keep you in their thoughts, I'm sure.

Geez. Yeah, that wasn't depressing ...

Awww Yeah!

This here is da bomb, yo.

Or at least it would be if I had money.

And an iPod.

Max: War In Ellis

This just goes to show that not all deeply disturbed people are entirely bad.

Max: That's It. I Quit.

This is just lovely. We don't have enough religious nutballs in government. What I don't is why every sane Christian in the world does not rise up to shout these freaks down. If I had anything vaguely resembling faith, I would not stand by while some loon used my religion to further his twisted agenda.

Max: A Little Kaka

My life is shit right now.

The only things worthy of comment is I picked out my daughter's tombstone and possibly blew the one real chance I had to get a better job and get us out of the mess we are in. And I am so sick of worrying about both of those that I have no interest in going into detail about them right now.

apologies to my legion of fans.

Jericho: Bevo Dorks

I was hoping this type of thing would happen. If you look at the blabber-board/guest book to the right today, you'll see the roots of this discussion. Primarily, I put the tag "The Life and Times of the Dorks from Bevo" on this blog. Laura disputes that, reminding me Max is from Holly Hills.

My latest reply was more than 500 characters. So, here we are, the first bloom from the blabber board blossoms on the Blog. Groovy!

Anyway, Laura, I should have been clearer. Yes, where my mom lives now, near Delor, is Bevo. However, I spent the early part of my life just off Broadway. South Broadway that is, Keokuk and Illinois. I spent the first 15 years of my life spitting distance from Highway 55, in the shadow of the City Incinerator's smoke stack. I was also within nose range of the slaughter house, where they nightly cooked off the remains from the killing floor. And, on a good day, I could smell the hoppy sickly-sweetness from the Anheuser-Busch brewery. Quite the lovely combo!

The apartments we lived in were a step above white-trash. But only a step. They were built on what was the City Dump just a hundred years before. Tomatoes grew like weeds there! The closest "landmark" was the Lemp Brewery. There's a whole history of paranoia and murder in the Lemp Mansion, but the brewery is abandoned now - last I heard they were talking about building a mall.

If we didn't have three 7-11's in walking distance there would have been no culture at all. Unless you count Alexian Brothers hospital. Ya know, the place they brought the kid that "The Exorcist" was based on before they took him to SLU.

But, even with all of that, no one cares. Outside of STL, it doesn't matter squat. We're not talking about Manhattan or the Bronx. We're not talking The French Quarter. We're talking St. Louis. Have you heard of Belltown, Pioneer Square or Alki? Probably not, outside of Seattle no one would know or care about these areas, but they are major points on the compass for the locals.

"Bevo" just sounds funnier!

Jericho: I don't wanna go to bed!

Remember when you were a kid and you would fight with your parents about going to bed? You didn't want to go! You would refuse to go, deny you were tired whilst yawning. It was a nightly big deal with a lot of drama.

Then, you were a teen-ager and you stayed up well past your bed time. You fell asleep in class but you never fell asleep before Letterman or SNL. They recently did a study that says teens require more sleep. Some school districts have started their classes later to compensate. (Wouldn't it be great if everyone's job started two hours later to give ADULTS more sleep? Starbuck's would go out of business!)

Then, in your twenties, you stayed up all night. You partied or watched all night movie fests or just failed to go to sleep. I got in the habit of waking up at 3 PMish and hitting the sack, when I actually went to bed, at 6 AMish. I was still living at home, my mother didn't see me awake for nearly a year!

Then, somewhere in my late twenties or so, I gave up missing out on sleep. The term "sleep-debt" came into my vocabulary from somewhere. At some point going to bed at midnight faded into going to bed at elevenish then tenish then anything after ten seemed like I was doing something wrong, knowing I would pay for my sin of sleeplessness.

Why the hell did this happen to me? It not like sleep is any fun any more. I used to love to sleep. I thought dreaming was so cool. Now, sleeping is just a slight break between life and more life. It's almost useless anyway. Most mornings I wake up more tired than when I went to bed. It's like throwing away six to eight hours. I watch my caffeine intake - I don't drink any in the afternoon or evening so that I will be tired at bed time. If I'm not too tired, I'll drink a big glass of milk for the tryptophan. There was a big serotonin craze a few years ago - I didn't participate in that, but I may start. People go to all kinds of extremes for better sleep.

When I was a kid I slept great, but I always fought my bedtime. Today, I sleep like crap and I plan my day around my sleep schedule. Hmmmm .......

Either way, I'm off to bed now. I have to get up early for the gym.

Max: Falling

I like the Fall too. I am a Fall and Spring kind of guy. I don't like it as cold and rainy as Jericho seems too. Sun and temperatures in the mid-70's do fine by me.

Fall brings on a certain reflective melancholy in me. It is perhaps because it is a time of transition that I feel the need to think about my life and where I am going - and not going. Because the temperatures are more comfortable, I do tend to get outside more. Walking, driving, or just sitting outside gives my body something mindless to do, freeing my mind to wander.

For many, Summer means road trips. I prefer to take road trips in the seasons of transition. I was fortunate last year. I was able to take a road trip out to the east coast. It looks like I won't be so lucky this year. I love to get out and drive the country, to see the transitions of the season alongside the transitions of the landscape. But lack of time and cash make it an unlikely prospect this year. I'll just have to settle for living vicariously through my favorite travel writers while hoping that my inner transitions lead me to someplace better next year.

Max: This Is Just Sad

Apparently our armed forces can't even run a decent propaganda campaign.

Max: Limbaugh Explained

This explain much of what he has said. He was stoned out of his mind.

Jericho: Fall - In Love

I know this isn't the greatest thing ever blogged, but I love Fall.

I have always loved Fall. It's cool, it's cloudy and a little wet here in the PNW. Jackets, those flab concealing fashion wonders, come out of the closet. And, yes, Walgreens breaks out the artificial Christmas trees, and thank the gods! I gotta have the tree up before Halloween or else it's just not the holidays!

Windy, wet, cool - without the harsh, sharp bite of winter. That will come soon enough. I'll enjoy my fall while it's here and laugh at my memories of heat and humidity in D.C. Ha!

Jericho: InAdSense

As some of you know, I have always hoped to make IWDC more than just another blog. We have two writers, we do celebrity interviews, we have fiction and other features. We aren't the ordinary blog - or so I thought.

Before the change to Blogger here, the IWDC main page was adorned with various forms of advertisement. We still have a few, but you may have noticed the lack of Amazon ads. I was hoping to attract a new advertiser, Google. Google runs a service called Ad Sense. Instead of the typical banner ads, they run text messages in the same banner spaces. The ads are cost per click, everytime someone clicks one, the publishers get some money - pennies, but they add up. For a publisher, there is only one better type of ad and those are impossible to get unless you get thousands of hits a minute. Ad Sense ads are all over the place these days, surf enough and you'll run into some.

So, I applied to Google. However, they felt that IWDC is just another personal site. In other words, not worth their time and a waste of their client's money.

I've worked for coming up on two years on this site. It may not be evident - but it's been pretty hard work. I know it will never make me rich, it will never give me a living wage. I've always hoped to spend whatever money comes in on advertising to get more readers - just to spread the love. I must admit - this hurts.

So, I guess we'll have to attract thousands of readers the hard way: Daily Content.

Max: The Beauty and Power of Geek Humor

This is classic. Skip all the babble at the top and scroll down to the list.

Max: Random Babblings of a Dangerous Lunatic

It is Wednesday. My day off. My weekend has been Wednesday and Thursday for the past 8 months. Saturday and Sunday are big days in retail sales. Peons like me have to man the stores so zombies like you can entertain yourselves by spending money.

My point? None. I am babbling. Stream of consciousness. From my brain to Blogger's interface to your screen. I have lost a certain sense of play with my writing. It is one reason why I don't write much. I am not as able as I once was to put myself in a self manufactured fantasy and belch it out into my word processor. The problem I had when I was able to do that more easily was that I didn't know how to write well. I had a vague idea of good writing. But the mechanics of a well crafted story I had not mastered. That mafe my writing uneven at best. I still have yet to master it. But I am better. Not that I am even slightly concerned about mechanices at this point. It is something I have to work on. But I also need to light and keep lit my creative pilot light. If I could somehow find a way to reawaken the screaming mad savage that lives under my medula, plug his mad rantings into a high speed linguistic mechanics processor, I may just earn myself the right to call myself a writer.

That is my goal. To put pure imagination, coupled with immediate passion, fully integrated with an ingrained sense of language to work on the page. Instead of endless revisions of poorly put together crap, I could put out almost passible work on the first draft, with only one or two further iterations and a couple week's of revision between unfiltered brain dumpings and readable product.

More than anything, that takes practice and study. Every day I read a passage from Strunk & White's Elements of Style. I will continue to do that until I have the book memorized, then I will start over and keep doing it until it is fully internalized, then I will do it again. At the same time, I need to do things like this, exercises in making my brain think about writing. I need to make writing instinctive, my primary mode of communication. Talk is cheap. A well written body of work is imortality. And I need to reawaken my imagination. I used to be a compulsive day-dreamer. I can't tell you the number of people who thought I was pissed off at them because I walked right past them on campus without acknoledging their greetings. It wasn't that I was pissed. It was rather that I was not there. My body was on automatic pilot, taking me from class to class. My brain was in another world, some day-dream or another. That doesn't happen so much anymore.

I need to shut off the TV. It crowd out my own imagination. There, it's off. It won't stay off. I like TV. But I need to watch it less, make time for my brain to think without interference. Maybe if I started walking more. I used to do some of my best fantasizing when walking. It could use the exercise. And now my wife has one more thing she can throw in my face when trying to get me to walk more.

How much have I written? Don't know, don't care. What does it mean? Nothing. I'm just clearing a little piece of mental ground where hopefully I will be able to soon start a mental bonfire, one that will rage out of control and consume me to the point when I will have either have to set the page on fire or let my head explode.

Jericho: "My Beef with Microsoft"

As most of you know, I'm a Mac user from way back. I love Machintoshes. I love their simplicity and Apple's stylistic pursuits have usually produced PCs that are works of art!
For the most part, I have never been an "Anti-Microsoft" Mac guy. I've never seen the need. Microsoft makes Internet Explorer - my preferred web browser. They make Mac Office, usually the Mac version gets features the Widows versions get later. It's kinda fun.
But, recently, Microsoft has started to slack. I first noticed this when they kept producing new versions of Frontpage for the Windows platform, but not the Mac. I really like Frontpage, I really wanted better versions for the Mac.
Last week, I went to Microsoft's website to see if I had the latest version of IE. Microsoft has a great area on their site called Mactopia. I jumped on and found that my year old version was indeed the latest. That seemed odd. I looked at the FAQ and found this bit:

I hear that Microsoft will no longer develop Internet Explorer for Mac, is this true?

Yes. In our commitment to the Mac platform and our Mac customers we our focusing our development efforts on MacBU products like Office for Mac, Virtual PC for Mac, MSN for Mac OS X, and Messenger for Mac.

WTF? Why must Microsoft find new ways to screw up things? They have something nice and they go out of their way to mess it up. Next, they will stop selling Mac Office all together and just sell Virtual PC so that we all have to buy the Windows version of Office. Bloatware over an emulator - yummy!

OMFG

Schwarzenegger won. We can throw California out of the union, can't we?

Oy!

Would someone, please, kick Fred Phelps in the nuts.

Thank God

This is the sort of leadership this country has been begging for. Why, without a government mandated week of protection, my marriage my might never survive my constant philandering and brutal physical abuse. Just because a couple of homos love each other and treat each other with respect they think they deserve to get equal treatment? If I let my wife speak out of turn, I'm sure she would express outrage at the very thought. At least she would if she knew what was good for her!

Desperation Looks Like Optimism

I've just sent my resume to the organization that just rejected me. It only took a few hundred tries to get this interview. A few hundred more might get me another.

shit

For the past year, I have been working a dead-end minimum wage job. Every day for that past year, I have watched as our financial situation got worse, as we fell further and further behind. In that time, I must have sent out serverl hundred resumes and filled out almost as many applications. Not one of them got me a call. That is, until a couple of weeks ago. I got called in for an interview. I thought the interview went well. I ignored my better judgement and let my hopes get up. They said they would make there decision today. All day today, I kept calling home to check the answering machine. Nothing.

It wouldn't have been my dream job. But it would have paid well. For once, Laura and I would have had a chance to not only pay our bills, but actually save some money, to get ahead for the first time since we got married. I let myself hope. I let myself think that maybe things might finally get better.

Stupid me.

Catching up with Jerigone

      Hey, folks! Today is my second wedding anniversary. (Love you, Honey!)
      I lucked out and have a day off from work on the same day. Steph's folks have bought us a new washing machine for our anniversary - guess what day it is being delivered? Yup - I get to sit here for the next four hours waiting for the truck to show.
      I thought this might be a good time to play a little catch up. Last I wrote we had just gotten moved into the house, then I told you I would be going on a series of trips for work. Boy did I ever!
      The house gets better by the week. Little things change and everything seems better. We bought a bunch of tools between my trips. We got a cordless trimmer. We don't own a lawn mower yet, but since we have a collection of weeds and not a real lawn, this isn't a problem. We bought a pair of hedge clippers as well. I'm not a professional gardener, but the side yard looks a sight better than it did when we moved in. More to come there.
      The front yard is a different story. The fencing is still there, we think we have a way to get rid of it, but I'll leave the details of that for another post - probably after I fail to get rid of the fence. I dismantled the dog house that was there - they make a crow bar called a Gorilla Bar. Yeah, I had fun with that. Imagine a heavy metal bar, about a meter long, with a couple of nice hooks and a chisel point or two. That dog house didn't stand a chance. I took a lot of my frustrations about this house out on that dog house - I feel sorry for the next thing I rip apart. I think by the end of the year the front yard will be much better.
      We bought a set of power tools, but I'm getting ahead of the story. This house is a piece of crap - I'm sure I have said that before. It has apparently had a succession of whacks living in it - we are merely the latest set. Somewhere along the line, one of those whacks was a lock-smith or simply a door closure junkie. Every door in this house has at least one additional lock. Some doors, the bathroom for instance, have a lock and a sliding bar. None of these locking mechanisms are all that well built, installed or maintained. Most are just there for looks at this time.
      The front door is the worst example of this. I'm not convinced that the lock is original to this house - I think it was recycled from a previous house. Considering this place was built in the 40's - that's saying something. The lock did not work well at all - you could lock it from the inside, but not from the outside as it will not release the key in the locked position. We were forced to use the rickety back stairs and go through the garage door on a daily basis - this did not make me happy. I've nearly killed myself half a dozen times on those stairs, and I'm waiting for them to give way under one of our weights, I think the cats might weigh enough to do it! I would bet that a lock smith could fix the front lock, or at minimum install a new one.
      As I said, someone was a lock-jock around here and they left behind a whole collection of odd bits. As I doing some cleaning, I ran across a full, new, never used dead bolt set and keys. Now, if I knew anything about doors or locks or carpentry, I could have installed this no sweat - but I didn't even have the tools nor know how to use them. Steph and I got to talking, Home Depot had a deal where if you bought a new door and installation, they would throw in a $99 lock set for free. This sounded like a plan.
      The doors we looked at were very cool! All of them made of steel, lock holes predrilled and ready. We found one we liked with a simple built-in window. All told between the door and install it would have cost around $500. Mind you, this would be a $1000 improvement as far as we were concerned, but we just don't have the cash. As we looked around, Steph found a neat kit. It had the two drill bits needed to carve a door for a modern lock. It was a good price, too, $10. But we didn't own a power drill. We solved this problem with a neat-o kit from Black and Decker (we bought the cordless B&D lawn trimmer the same weekend - we were a walking commercial for Black and Decker!). The kit has one base unit, and three modules; drill, circular saw and router. It's a 12 volt cordless, certainly not top of the line, but for $70, it was a place to start.
      I've been working these 4x10 weeks, which leaves me with an extra day off during the week - that is I've been doing that when not traveling. So, it worked out that I had a Monday off, rather like today. I grabbed the drill and gave a shot at the door. I measured and remeasured. I started cutting into the door. We have a pretty heavy door, so I had to cut from both sides. Sure enough, I screwed up somewhere. I came out with one chunk of wood, but it wasn't very centered. However - the dead bolt we found went in like a dream! I guess they figure dolts like me will be installing these things and they build in a margin for incompetence. The harder part turned out to be putting the hole in the door frame for the bolt - the screwdriver I used as a chisel will never be the same! But, by the time I was done, I had a working dead bolt. All told, for tools and all, $80 and less than two hours work. I guess I know more about doors, locks and carpentry than I thought! We'll still probably buy the other door at some point - just not immediately.

      As for all the traveling, that started, what, in July? I went to DC for two days and learned the real meaning of the word "humidity"! Mother! Those people swim to work every morning! I could barely breathe. My hotel was two blocks away from the office and it looked like I had showered in my clothes by the time I walked those two blocks - I don't know how they do it.
      Then, I went to Maine for a week for a family reunion. Now, I planned to work a few hours here and there because I didn't have enough vacation time to take a week off. The reality was that I spent most of the week waiting by the phone or answering email. My father-in-law, bless him, signed up for an Internet connection so that I could do this. I was pretty hacked about not being able to take time away from work, but this only got worse. I ended up with vacation time to spare after all the hours I worked.
      The next week I was back in DC for a voicemail system install. With the problems of the install, problems back in Seattle, viruses taking out my systems in Chicago and Hong Kong, and the DC building having a planned power outage the weekend of the cut over (that I knew nothing about until the day before), I put in 72 or so hours for the week. Sunday, after the power came back up, the voicemail system was still flaky. We were able to get it up and running and I was able to do all the things I needed to do to make the system part of the network. I walked out of the building at 2 AM, knowing that tomorrow morning no one would know or care how much work I had done but proud of what I had accomplished. That week I cannot count the number of times I nearly quit - but my boss did come through with kudos and praise from him and those above and managed to keep me from walking. Damn him!
      It took me two days to get home from DC. My original travel plans had me immediately going to the office in Portland, OR for their voicemail system install as them moved offices. As it turned out, they changed the date of their move by three weeks. I wish they hadn't - looking back I wish that I had been able to just get it over with that weekend. This was the second of five trips to Portland, about three too many if you ask me. On this trip, it was going to be about $700 to change my destination to Seattle. They figured it was cheaper to send me to Portland, put me in a hotel overnight, put me on a train the next day and pay me for the privilege than to just change the ticket. So, in Denver, I switched planes. I got off the plane headed for Seattle and waited around for two hours for the plane to Portland. By the time I did get home, I was really ready to just be done with Perkins. But, ah, this was merely the beginning. The Install that would not End hadn't ramped up yet!
      I'll cut this boring, annoying thing down to just this: I hate the Portland office. That install, now done, was three of the worst weeks of my job at Perkins. It paled only in comparison to DC. In all, the last three months have been the worst I have endured at this job. In the coming months, we have an install in Anchorage, one in Chicago, a theoretical install for our three California offices and two Super Secret installs I can't talk about or that may not happen. I have never worked at any job as hard as I am working at this one. I have never had this much responsibility. True, I have never been paid this much, but I'm starting to think that it's not enough.

      The phone just rang. The delivery people are going to be as much as an hour later than originally planned. Lovely.

Three Random Things

1) It is early in the morning. I barely slept last night. Now I have to go to work. There may be fatalities.

2) The spell check on Blogger flags the word "blog". It suggests "bloc" as a replacement.

3) Happy Birthday, Mrs. Dobberstein, wherever you are!

Oh. My. God.

This is deeply disturbing:

"A reading by Mrs. Bush was a highlight of the weekend. At a Friday opening gala, the first lady recited a poem she said President Bush (news - web sites) greeted her with when she returned recently from France, where President Jacques Chirac had kissed her hand twice. It read in part:

'Roses are red
Violets are blue
Oh my lump in the bed
How I've missed you.
Roses are redder
bluer am I
Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.'"

And this man has access to the button.

Why My Boss Sucks

My boss is a hyperactive, micro-managing nutball. Nothing is good enough for him. The biggest compliment I ever got out of him was, "It will do for now, I guess."

He has the gall to criticize other's people skills. Consider the following situation. An customer has brought in a vintage bass guitar he wishes to sell to the store. He has heavily modified the bass. While the modifications can only be considered improvements as far as tone and playbility are concerned, they have destroyed the bass's value as a collector's item. An employee brings the bass to your attention. You correctly suggest that the store would be willing to shell out $100 for this bass. The employee makes an offhanded comment that if the customer is willing to part with the axe for $100, he, the employee, may just buy it himself. For this employee to attempt to buy the bass for himself would violate company policy. Your response should be;

a) Haa haa. Yeah. But don't do that.

b) You do know that would violate company policy, do you not?

c) You do that and I will fire you!!!!!!

If you chose "a" or "b", you have decent people skills. If you chose "c", you are my manager. Get the hell off my blog, you fucknut.

The worst part is, I found out today that he make 7 times what I make.

Brave New World

Jericho is great. May death come swiftly to his enemies.

Welcome to the New World ...

   When we started here on Irate Weirdos almost two years ago, I looked at a lot of the available tools for blog-artists. I looked at a very popular tool for blogging called, creatively, Blogger. It looked like it would be an easy thing to work with, but there was a catch. Blogger was free to use for everyone - unless you wanted to make any money off your site. For the commercial set, they offered Blogger Pro.
   I was hoping to run some type of advertisement on IWDC, I knew it wouldn't make me rich, but I just couldn't cost justify not running ads or paying for Blogger Pro.
   So, for the run of this site, we have done everything manual. I think somtimes I don't take the time to make an entry because I do have to go through all the manual steps. For a while I couldn't do the manual steps from home, because I couldn't get my FTP functions to work - so I had to jump through even more hoops. I'm sure Max had similar problems with the manual process - I mean, both of us are lazy bastards with a busy life! IWDC comes very far down the list.
   But, now, Google, one of our favorite search engines, has purchased Blogger. Apparently, Google likes blogs and wants to encourage we blog-artists. Blogger Pro is no longer offered. The current Pro subscribers still have some features that everyone else does not have, but the rest of the features have fallen to the bloggin' masses. I have looked around, there are no proscriptions against we commercial blogs using Blogger. Woo hoo!
   I'm really excited. I hope that this will help Max and I get closer to our goal: daily content. Or, at least, give you all something to read more often than once a week.
   Other changes are coming. Today, they may come hourly or even more often. We're trying out a new commenting service - tell us what you think about it. I'm going to add a blabber board. The ads are going to change (improve?). Things are shifting all over. If there is something you don't like or miss - let us know.
   Well, enjoy and here's to more of us!

---

Old Comments:

Jericho @ 2:24PM | October 5th 2003

Let's see what we get ...


Liz @ 8:15PM | October 5th 2003

Well, not bad... I couldn't get it to work on Netscape, so had to swith over to Explorer, but now I can see everything.


Jericho @ 9:53PM | October 6th 2003

I'm on a Mac, Netscape and Explorer both work from here. I will jump on a PC later and see what I get. I have a chip on my shoulder about Microsoft right now, so it's important to me that Netscape users can see this.


Max Dobberstein @ 11:29PM | October 6th 2003

Looks fine from Mozilla.


Jericho @ 11:35AM | October 7th 2003

I'm on IE 5.5 on an NT machine here at work. I'll try this from my XP machine at home later.