Steam Engine Interlude

Transubstantiation used to come easily to me, but these days I just can’t seem to get my beans flowing uphill, if you know what I’m saying. Too much centripetal interference or something. Every now and then I manage to close the window, but even then things tend to get viscous. My kingdom for a menhir!

Still, this is no job for Mysteries Inc. Every now and then you just gotta shovel some dirt into the toilet, you know? And if that doesn’t do the trick, well, you can always intensify the context. Otherwise all you have is circumstance, and nobody wants to go down that road without a return ticket. Like they say, there’s no undoing what can’t be done. They say a lot of things though.

But all viscosity aside, bulk realizations are usually nothing but trouble. One day you’re shucking shrimp on the interstate, the next day you’re churning ice cream in a dixie cup, and all the while the Magic 8-Ball just keeps saying “outlook not so good”.

I dunno, sometimes I think I should just let my hair grow.

Whoa….

Does everybody see the same colors? Does my blue look the same as your blue? Or if I were to see blue the way you see it, would I say “that’s not blue, it’s red!” Or to me would it be some shade completely unrecognizable and possibly indescribable?

Because if you think about it, it really doesn’t matter how we see colors. All that matters is that we learn to recognize them the way we’re taught. I point at a color and tell my daughter “green”, and she learns what green is, but that doesn’t mean her green looks anything like mine. I only know what green is because my mom pointed at a color and said “green”. No one can see through another’s eyes (or with another’s visual cortex) so we have no way of knowing.

Think about that the next time you’re really high.

SUV’s Down Under

Are most SUV drivers selfish yuppie fucks? That seems to be the case in Australia anyway.

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo

So I’ve been seeing commercials for the new Deuce Bigalow movie a lot lately. Every time I see one, it raises two questions:

1. Who the fuck green-lighted this and why? Was there pent up demand? Were there a lot of people out there saying, “You know, I wish they’d make a sequel to that shitty movie from six years ago“?
2. In a universe governed by the laws of physics, would it actually be possible to make a movie worse than the original Deuce Bigalow? It seems like to do so would require the discovery of a unified theory of suck, but judging from the commercials, that discovery has been made.

So anyway, I’m watching TV with my five-year-old son the other day, and a commercial for it comes on. Toward the end is a scene of a cat biting Eddie Griffin on the penis. My son burst into violent laughter and loudly proclaimed “A cat bit him on the penis!” It seemed like it may have been the funniest thing he’d ever seen. It was at this point that I realized maybe I’m just not this movie’s target audience.

And possibly worst of all, I know that six months from now I’ll be in line at Best Buy, and the dumbfuck in front of me will be buying a copy on DVD.

Employee Discounts

OK, I don’t remember exactly who started this, but some car manufacturer decided they were going to offer their employee discount to the general public. Now every car manufacturer in the country, and probably a few outside of it, is saying the same thing. You don’t see a car commercial any more without hearing how they now give the employee discount to everyone.

Well this is bullshit if you ask me (which you didn’t). If everyone gets the employee discount, then it is no longer an employee discount. Employees are now paying the same price for cars as the general public. Employees, therefore, are getting no discount.

So, what these guys have done is taken away an employee benefit and spun it into a marketing strategy. That’s pretty amazing, really. They must think their emplyees are pretty fucking stupid to not notice.

Free Clamshells at Best Buy

So, ever since getting a DVD burner a few weeks back, I’ve developed about a 25 disc a week habit. So I was at Best Buy replenishing my stock of DVD-R’s. Seems like every time I’m in there, the person in front of me is buying DVD’s of shitty movies. I once saw a guy buying Big Momma’s House. You know, at what point do you need to own Big Momma’s House? Was renting it not enough? Last night it was a dude buying a copy of Aliens Vs. Predator, which by pretty much all accounts, sucked. I figured it must’ve been priced to move, $1.99 or something. I made sure to check out the tag. It was $29. You know what buddy? Next time just give me the $29, I’ll kick you in the balls, and we’ll all be in about the same place. I mean fuck, I wouldn’t waste the time it took to download Aliens Vs. Predator illegally.

But anyway, it turned out that they were giving away free DVD clamshell cases with every purchase. Just the thing for a loser like me buying a stack of 50 blanks. Technically, there’s some shitty movie preview in ‘em, but those are going straight in the garbage.

So anyway, I ask the cashier, a hot young black chick, if I can have more than one. She gave me that “you did not just ask me to do that!” look that only black girls can pull off just right. I said “Hey, but they’re free!”. She said, “Yeah, but I have to give one to everybody!”. I figured that, considering she scanned it along with my spindle of blanks. Then, a funny thing happened. As she was putting my receipt in the bag, she grabbed another one and chucked it in, without scanning it. I confessed that I really just wanted the cases. “Why?” she asked. “Um…to put DVD’s in?” Kind of a silly question really.

Thing is, now I feel guilty. Not for getting an extra free DVD case, and not for throwing away the shitty preview disc, but because I probably got her fired. She’s gonna come up short on her free DVD’s, and they’re gonna go to the tape. Best Buy surely knows that most of their loss comes from within, and they’ve surely got cameras trained on the cashiers. When they see her chuck that extra one in my bag, it’s curtains.

So, in the unlikely event that you’re reading this, hot ex-Best Buy cashier, I’m sorry I cost you your job. I never expected you to actually give me any extras, and was really just messing with you, making small-talk as it were.

I Loves Me Some Codeine

So my entire family’s been sick for the last month. We all had the flu around mother’s day, got better, then all got sick again. One of my sons got an ear infection that came on so fast and strong it ruptured his eardrum. Apparently a ruptured eardrum isn’t unheard of and will heal on its own in a couple weeks with no hearing loss, but it’s a little disconcerting to find blood coming out of your child’s ear.

He’s been on amoxicillin and prescription eardrops for a week or so and is doing fine. I’ve been sicker than shit though, with no sign of getting better. Finally I decided I probably had something worse than a cold, and when my temperature broke 103, I figured it was time to see a professional.

So it’s saturday night of memorial day weekend when I decide this, and I know my doctor’s not going to be around until tuesday. I still haven’t learned to get sick during normal business hours. Luckily one of our local hospitals has an after-hours care place, kind of an emergency room for non-emergencies. They have a separate emergency room, so you can go to the after-hours place with something like severe cold symptoms and not worry that you’re wasting time that could be better spent on that guy with the heart attack and the knife wounds and his kid that ate Raid.

The doctor I saw was a very cool black woman with dreadlocks. She checked me out and said that even though she didn’t see any bronchitis or ear or throat infection, it was probably there given the length and severity of my symptoms. So some antibiotics, and prescription antihistimines. Then she asked, “How’s your cough, is it bad?” Of course what I heard was “Would you like some codeine?”

I didn’t have to lie, because my cough really was bad. It was keeping me up at night and my body ached from the repeated convulsions of my coughing fits. So she says not only is she going to give me codeine cough syrup, she’s going to give me a couple refills on the prescription because it’s “good to have around”. Well shit yeah it is.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever had codeine cough syrup, but this stuff is one of pharmacology’s greatest inventions. I’ve had Tylenol 3’s plenty of times before, and I don’t know if the codeine dose in those is lower or what, but they’re nothing compared to the cough syrup. Not only does the stuff stop me from coughing, but I get to go to bed wrapped up in a fuzzy velvet blanket of opiate peace. Give me some cough syrup with codeine in it and everything’s all right, my troubles melting away into a ball of engulfing, drug-induced warmth.

And this is why I must never try heroin.

But I’m set for codeine for the next few months or so, after which I’ll need to get sick again to maintain my addiction. Oh well, life’s full of little challenges, isn’t it?