The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 434): What It’s Like To Live Here

The weathermen told us that it was going to rain, so we stayed in to watch The Golden Compass. By noon, we realized that it was a pretty nice day out, so we took a walk down to the pavilion to see The Fabulous Mel-Tones play all the standards while the old people danced. The band had an accordion, various trumpets, a sax, drums, and a clarinet, but there were only three guys in the group.

We watched them for a bit, and I found out that old people really like the hully gully, because once it was announced, the dance floor was suddenly packed. An old guy lifted his eyebrows and nodded to the floor as if to convince me to take #1GF! out there to destroy the age curve, but we were happy watching. I couldn’t begin to do the hully gully, anyway. It looked like it was the forerunner to the electric slide, and I can’t do that either. If a dance doesn’t involve robotic movements, I won’t go out of my way to do it.

Thanks, 1980′s.

We stood in the glow of the happiness radiating out of the dancing old folks for a while, and I wished I could capture the feeling on my camera phone. I just wanted to say “This is what it’s like to live here” and show the beachside dancing that seems like it belonged to a long gone era, but I knew that relaxed smiles and cordial atmosphere drawing in young and old would never survive the transfer to the bits of a grainy video. It was as enjoyable and difficult to capture as smell of the salt air on the breeze.

Once they they started playing waltzes, we walked over to visit my parents, who were house sitting for their friends. We sat on the porch looking out at the ocean as storm clouds rumbled in the distance and tried to make a crossword puzzle a group effort. We had as much luck with the puzzle as I would’ve had with the hully gully. The answers we gave never fit, and I kept accusing my father of making things up, even though he turned out to be right a few times.

#1GF! and I left there at 5PM to get some dinner and make a donation to Fascination. My parents aren’t old enough to want dinner or bingo at 5PM, so they stayed put. They did, however, offer us a ride home because a storm had been threatening all day, but we decided to walk. Even though the skies looked ominous, the storm skirted around us long enough that we took a leisurely walk home without getting soaked. This is what it’s like to live here.

Monday (Day 435): Out With The Old…

I wrote LOR in the morning and kept getting distracted by a picture that I was trying to stitch into a panorama. In the afternoon, I met a new plumber at the house to see about replacing our heating system. The cost was a fat chunk of change.

From there, I went home, grabbed a sandwich, and went to the town building department to see what I needed to get the contractor off of our permit. The building inspector said I needed a letter describing the issues and saying that I wanted him off, so I went home, typed up the letter, and had it back to the building department fifteen minutes before they closed. I felt a little nervous about doing this, but this chapter has to end. The guy did a shit job on everything and stopped calling me back. I can’t be at the mercy of people. I need to get this house chapter closed.

When I got home, I worked on LOR for an hour, and then at 5:30, I went back to the house to meet with the floor guy. I waited until 6:15, but he never showed up, so I left him a message and headed home. a few blocks away, I saw a work van heading in the general direction of my house, so I went back to see if it was the floor guy. It wasn’t. No sooner had I gotten home and sat down, did I get a call from the floor guy saying he was at the house but no one was there. I put my shoes back on and went back to the house. I was frustrated because I couldn’t seem to get LOR finished, but it had to take a back seat to getting the house done.

I found out that fixing the floor wasn’t going to be cheap either, and if we wanted to fix the stuff that the contractor did, it was going to cost us as much as a do-over. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “Well, it would be easier and cheaper if he never did anything,” but we’re moving forward, right? There’s no time to look back. We’ll get it done and then deal with being broke and angry later. #1GF! unexpectedly showed up because the meeting started late and ran a little long.

When we got home, I started back in on LOR and didn’t finish up until after 9PM. Even though I spend a fair amount of time putting the posts together, I realize that they can be a boring list of events a lot of the time. Sometimes there’s a paragraph included that might be interesting, but I wondered if anyone actually reads the whole thing. If you do, you should know that I appreciate you spending your free time on this.

Tuesday (Day 436): Meeting Neighbors

I set up a meeting with a door guy for 5PM, and then wrote up a quick post on whether Black Sabbath was heavy metal or not. The question sparked a discussion with Digital D, and I wondered what the resident metalheads would think. The rest of the day was spent researching heavy metal.

I went over to meet the door guy at 5, and ended up introducing myself to a couple of the neighbors while I waited. One recognized me as the nut who ran into the house with a flashlight a few weeks back when I had a freakout about the contractor installing the bathroom cabinets incorrectly. He mentioned that he almost called the cops, which I thought was a perfectly rational reaction when it’s late at night and some nut is swearing and swinging a flashlight around in the abandoned house across the street.

After the meeting, a neighbor asked me if I was going to use the floor guy who was at the house the day before. I expected a problem (because that’s all I know in this job), but she said that the guy had done her floors years before and was really good. I’ve had enough personal recommendations for contractors go bad over the years that I took it with a grain of salt, but it was nice to hear.

Wednesday (Day 437): Metal Reseach: Thrash & Death

I spent the morning researching thrash metal, and then went over to the house to mow the lawn. I met a snake, a cricket, and three mosquitoes who didn’t introduce themselves. I met another neighbor and had a quick conversation. I was supposed to go food shopping, but by the time I was finished with the lawn it was 3:30, so I decided to go home and spend an hour researching death metal. That hour lasted until 10:30PM, so there were no groceries to be had in the house. #1GF! was out, so I just kept on researching at the expense of dinner and everything. I don’t know why I kept going, but I suspect that it’s because metal has become so fragmented that it feels like researching all the different genres could take an incredibly long time if I don’t sit down and crank it out.

Thursday (Day 438): Hoboic Reflections

While walking by the bathroom, I noticed #1GF! standing at the mirror. It was before 8am, and she was staring silently down at her Crackberry. She was oblivious to the fact that I was standing four feet away from her and smiling. It’s a fact of the world that the line between business and leisure has become blurred, but when business invades your bathroom at 7:30 in the morning, it has crossed the line into invasive.

Once #1GF! was off to work, I paid the bills and watched my account drop a little bit more. This jobless thing can’t last forever, and I’m not really pursuing any web based money making opportunities, so it may be time to get back into the working world. #1GF! hates that I think that way, but it may be a reality in the future if I can’t figure out how to pull a living from words without becoming one of those web whores who writes only enough to support ads.

I left the house to pick up a book on heavy metal from the library. I showed up at around 9:45, but when I pulled on the handle, the door’s refusal to budge told me that I had arrived before the library was ready to accept visitors. I went back to the car to sit for a few minutes and watch the other people doing the same thing that I did: Pull door. Look at sign. Look at watch. Look around. You would’ve thought there was a promotion going on because by the time the library opened, I counted 13 people waiting to get in.

I grabbed a sociological study of heavy metal, and within five minutes I was trying to make my way from the library over to the grocery store. I know how to get to the library, and I know how to get to the grocery store, so you’d think I’d be able to piece together how to get to the grocery store from the library. You’d think. I went the wrong way a couple of times, and ended up back at the library at least one time that I’ll admit to. I didn’t care though. The day was nice, and the only other people who saw me driving around lost were ladies walking babies, and they were too busy thinking about how above average their kid is to notice a dork like me zipping by a few times.

I finally made it to the grocery store and then home to whip another post. I ate a quick lunch at 2:30 when #1GF! called to remind me to eat. It’s not hard to have a whole day blow by when you’re not working because you’re either on the go or doing things that you enjoy. Unless you wear a watch, there isn’t often a clock staring at you taunting you with each passing minute.

As I was driving, I wondered whether I had done the unemployment thing all wrong. It seems to me that I could’ve better used my time enjoying the weather or hanging out with cool people instead of blogging, blogging, blogging. Or maybe I should’ve written a damned book by now. Despite becoming internationally famous for my beards and entertaining a few of you, there haven’t been any earth shattering achievements in the past year.

Friday (Day 439): Photo Retouching Day

I spent most of the morning re-doing the soul patch pic from the beard quest page because I really didn’t like the way the original came out. I don’t think the new one is fantastic, but I think it’s says “I’m on the prowl for music” rather than “I’m on the prowl for cock”. The picture took a lot more time that I expected because of the albums in the background, and still wonder if anyone would be able to identify any of the albums pictured or if I wasted my time picking certain ones. Now that the soul patch is posted, I’m officially clean shaven for the first time in many months.

Being on a photo editing roll, I re-edited the rap industry standard beard for color and re-posted that, too. From there, I made calls to various workers to get estimates on the house repair, and to the apartment complex to request another month on the lease. I can’t wait to not have to make either of those calls.

I finally sent a retouched picture back to BonzoGal, which I had forgotten to send. It was one of two retouches that were sent in by readers from my Alicia Silverstone post. I thought it came out ok, but I never heard back about it.

Once those were done, I tried retouching some photos that a friend sent over, but they ended up looking like crap, so I gave up and started combing through WordPress code to find where the number of posts in the admin panel can be changed. I found it in an older version, but they hid it away during the 2.5 upgrade, and I still haven’t been able to find it despite days of looking. That sort of thing makes me feel like a geek failure.

I made dinner for #1GF! and some kids woke us up at 3 AM by screaming and throwing all the chairs into the complex pool.

Saturday (Day 440): Money, Money, Money, MOney

#1GF! and I did the Yahoo Crossword and read and all morning without any extraneous background chatter from the TV or radio. It sad, but I thought it was a pretty awesome morning. I hate the addictive draw of the TV, and was happy to be without it. We headed out to the beach after high tide to avoid being chased up the beach. It was partly sunny and there was a good ocean breeze, so when the sun went behind a cloud it got cold enough for a sweatshirt. Being a man, I didn’t bring a sweatshirt. I resorted to being aggravated at the clouds as if this would change anything.

Once I had enough, I was taken for a little drive around town by #1GF!. I wonder what it’s like to be living with a grumpy old man who looks like a nondescript thirty-something? It probably makes her feel good to help the community by keeping me occupied.

When we got home, I cooked a stir fry for #1GF! before heading out to plunk $20 down at Fascination. I think I now live with a soft core degenerate gambler. Oh, you laugh, but this is how it all starts: A scratch ticket here, a bit of Fascination there, and before you know it, she’s playing 22 bingo cards at a time and surrounding herself with stuffed animals with names like “Cutesy Bunnyluckers” and “Winnie Winsalot”. After that, there’s nothing left but stuffed animals in the back window of the car. It’s a slippery slope.

We showed up at 8 or 9 PM and the place was packed enough to make finding two seats together slightly difficult. I will never go again unless it’s packed, because the same $.50 games that payed out $5 at off peak, pay $10-20 at peak. That means you only have to win once to get out with your original money. We also found out that they play some sort of $1200 game at 10PM, which sounded crazy, but not crazy enough to keep us there.

On our last game, there were a bunch of young girls at the end of the hall who were so excited that they kept calling out how many lights they had left. They had been trying to light a single light for a while, and I was slowly catching up. When I was one light from $20, #1GF! lit her final light and stole the win. When all the table lights went out and the buzzer sounded, all the girls cried out “WHAT?” and started looking around for the winner. Even though #1GF! is small, she’s hard to miss when she wins because she involuntarily throws her arms up in the air and practically jumps out of her seat.

We left with a tidy $1 profit and went home to watch 1408, which was no scarier than Disney’s Haunted Mansion. We turned on the news to check the weather and caught people talking about the tax free weekend that Massachusetts had on purchases under $2500. The weekend is supposed to boost sales, but I can’t understand why people get so worked up about it. Sales tax here is 5%, and if someone had a 5% off sale, people wouldn’t waste the gas to show up.

The segment included interviews with consumers, which underscored the mentality of the people who went out shopping during these things. When they asked the first guy how much he saved, he said “There’s $75 bucks in my pocket.” Hey, dipshit, did you know that $1500 had to leave your pocket to leave $75 in there? Whoopdy doo. You could’ve done better with a coupon or sale. Or, if you really wanted to pay less, you could’ve used this lower cost, generally tax free marketplace called “the internet” on any given day of the year.

They then went on to interview a woman who claimed to have saved “about a thousand dollars”. Really? You’re telling me that you drove to eight different stores to make $2500 purchases to total $20,000 in consumer electronics there, Seniorita Mathmatica? Either you skipped percentages in grade school, or you are high on fucking crack for blowing twenty large on consumer electronics in this economy for a measly 5% off sale.

What I Learned

• People won’t buy a sack of potatoes to get a free spud gun, but they buy a spud gun if it comes with a free sack of potatoes. People are irrational.
• To write anything, you need at least a few hours free from interruption or distraction.
• Only go to Fascination when it’s packed.
• Ladies seem to like to take their babies for walks at around 10AM. I have no idea why.
• I learned a lot about thrash and death metal bands.
• Because of the lack of early commercial success, metal evolved differently than previous forms of music. Metal bands gained fans by touring, so they didn’t have to rely on radio airplay to sustain themselves. Without having to pander to radio, they weren’t bound by the record industry’s choke hold on what got recorded and marketed, allowing metal musicians to experiment more freely with the theme, length, and style of their songs.
• I’ve read that most metal fans grow out of metal, or if they do stay with it, the older fan sticks to what they know and rarely explores emerging metal bands. I must be an anomaly.
• Boys form groups to be part of a masculine peer group. Girls form cliques to exclude other girls.
• Metal is less about what is being said than how it is being said. This is one of the reasons that I like metal so much: I completely ignore lyrics.
• Two prominent and possibly defining themes in metal are power and chaos.
• Metal in the 80′s split into two polar opposites. Glam stressed melody and hedonistic themes, and because it was a mass market product, the rhythmic and chaotic elements were ignored to make it as attractive to the widest audience possible. It’s nature was to seek out popularity. On the other side, thrash metal was formed, which ignored melody and hedonism to focus on the rhythm and chaotic themes. By it’s nature, the more unpopular thrash became with the mass media, the more popular it became with its fans.

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