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 497): Amost A Complete Wash of A Day

I made breakfast and watched Baby Mama, which should’ve been funny because of Tina Fey, but wasn’t because of crappy writing. It was a chick flick full of chick music, and like most SNL films, if you’ve seen the ads, you’ve seen the funniest parts.

We went out to buy a couple of bulbs for #1GF! because both of her tail lights were out. I thought it was a fuse, so spent some time looking into that before realizing it was two burned bulbs. I thought the odds were higher on the fuse, but hey, you can make the right first guess every time.

The day was turning out to be a bit of a wash, so I decided to make a French version of Carbonara for dinner. I found out that the leeks were bad only after they hit the pan, so I had to chuck all the bacon grease and start over with an onion. Then, I wasn’t paying attention and curled the eggs for the sauce. The whole thing ended up like a bacon and egg omelet over pasta. It was pretty much the worst version of the dish that I’ve made.

We ended the day watching L’ Auberge Espagnole, which was rather pointless, but I realized that there is a way to write something entertaining without actually having a point. I might not do that, but I realized that it’s possible to slip in some sort of point at the last second.

Monday (Day 498): Battling With The Painter And Writing A LOT

We worked out and then went to the house in the morning to have another discussion with the painter. I was tired of dealing with the guy, so I let him go on and on while trying to keep the peace. On the other hand, #1GF! hit her breaking point and refused to let the painter act like he was doing us a favor for finishing the job. I was way past the point of giving a shit about his motivations as long as he finished the job. He assured us that he would finish up that day, but might have to run an hour into the following day.

At the end of the conversation, the painter requested that we give him half of the money that we owed him because he was broke. The guy has been crying foul about how he’s going above and beyond the contract (which I disagree with), so I wanted to make a concession to show him that I was willing to give a little to get this done.

Not a couple of hours later, I got a call from the painter telling me that he should be paid in full. That saved me a trip to the bank, so I had no problem with it. The odd thing was that he wanted a check, not the day, or the hour that he was done, but the minute he was done. That didn’t sit right with me, but I repeated what I’ve been saying to the guy all along: when he was finished, he’d get paid.

I went home and wrote all day, cranking out almost 6500 words in the last LOR. In publishing terms, that’s 26 pages of text in a day. I know it’s not the best writing in the world, but to sit down and write 26 pages of text that are reasonably edited is pretty good for me. When I look at the text, it really needs editing to make it more interesting and coherent, but even a 26 page rough draft isn’t bad for a single day’s work. It’s so long that I can’t see many people reading it, but I think it’s excellent practice for writing longer material.

When #1GF! got home from work, we went through the house trying to find mistakes as a the painter requested. There were still plenty of them, so it took us about an hour to go through. The painter called and said that he’d finish off the job the next day if he had to work 25 hours. It was almost an argument, but I let him go on and on because I just want to the guy to finish. I had to pick my battles, and his motivation didn’t matter as much as results.

Tuesday (Day 499): A Cup of Tea

I opened the house and dropped off a list of paint issues in the morning. I was going to write and go to the supermarket as I seem to do every Tuesday, but I couldn’t keep the painting issues from jumping around the back of my mind. I was having mock conversations and going over past conversations at random, and I was tired of it.

I needed a break, so I blew off all writing and drove to my parents’ house. Maybe it’s an old Irish thing, but sitting around having a cup of tea and talking has been something that has been a thread running through my life since I was a child. My grandparents would sweeten the hell out of our tea when we were kids, and sit us at the table to talk to us like we were normally sized even though our feet didn’t touch the floor. That’s sort of what I needed. When you’re constantly in battle mode and you’re way past the age where you’re allowed to resolve conflicts by punching, no amount of weight lifting will get you the relaxation that a cup of tea and a willing ear will.

I brought my parents a set of googly eyes that I had made out of ping pong balls, and my dad’s reaction was exactly the same as mine. He looked incredulous at first, but once I stuck them on the faucet, he started laughing and looked for other places to put them. Inevitably, he put them over his own eyes and stumbled around with them, just as I had done the day before. It’s called genetics, folks, and it’s a strange thing to witness in action.

I ended up trying to fix a couple of minor issues on their PC, and even though I knew what I was looking for, my lack of familiarity with Vista had me hunting for where Vista hid it. I finally got the PC patched, did some spyware sweeps, etc. and it still felt like their PC was slow. Maybe I think my PC is fast because the only thing that I use it for these days is typing and surfing the web, two extremely low resource activities.

The painter was supposed to call when he was finished painting, but I never got a call. When we went over to the house, some progress had been made, but the painter was nowhere to be found and the job certainly wasn’t finished. While we were there, the painter called to let us know that he had to leave early that day to price out another job. So much for the 25 hours to get it done. It almost blew up into an argument, but I sort of gave up, and let the guy go on and on again because I just wanted him to finish. He kept acting like he was doing me a favor by finishing the job, but that stopped once I mentioned that I was doing him a favor by not asking him for $600 to repair the three floors that his employee spilled paint on and then sanded. There was no more favor talk after that.

Wednesday (Day 500): Making Up My Own Game

We worked out in the morning and #1GF! went to open the house without telling me. That’s typically my job, but I think she wanted to give me a break because I was constantly sparring with the painter. Instead of doing something useful with the extra time, I put googly ping pong eyes on different things around the house, and eventually went outside to put them on the bushes. I figured that the neighbors might be looking at me out their windows and thinking I was insane, but I figured if they were home in the middle of the day, then they were probably too busy laying out outfits for their dog, Mr. Yappers to notice some guy laughing at ping pong balls on bushes.

Once the pictures were done, I spent way too long reducing their file sizes in case the post actually got picked up by a larger site. Because I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve gotten shut down a few times for using too much bandwidth (not a bad problem to have), I wanted to maximize the time before my host shut me down by shrinking the file sizes the best I could.

During this time, I forgot that my phone was in file mode, so I missed calls from the painter and the contractor. I bolted over to the house to meet with them. The mason was there fixing a door, and he pointed out some other issues that I had. He also mentioned that it would be a good idea for me to seal all the brick as soon as I could because it was going to deteriorate year after year. I thought people got brick houses to avoid painting.

I also asked him about the brickwork in a non-leading way to see if the issues from the last mason were avoidable. He said that they were completely avoidable. I suspected that the original mason did a shitty job, but having a professional confirmation was good. And bad. It’s never fun to stockpile ammunition because it implies a bigger and bigger battle on the horizon. This project will never be done.

I went out and did the food shopping and then came home to pay the bills. When I got a look at my dwindling accounts (thanks to the house), I said out loud to no one in particular, “Fuck this. I’m getting a job.” Traffic has been down, but even when it’s up, it’s not making me any serious money.

I’m on my 500th day of being unemployed and I’m no closer to earning an income from it than I was a year ago. I’m tired of bleeding money. I’m tired of having nothing coming in. I’m tired of busting balls to get people to do their fucking jobs. I’m tired of having to think about every little purchase. I’m tired of busting my ass writing and having one successful post a year.

I think this is where people hang up the dreams and go back to work. It’s like failing yourself, but I just want to go to the store and blow a fucking wad of money on crap and not worry about it. I want to put money into a 401k. I want to take this down market and fucking buy everything so that when the market comes back up, I’m sitting on a stupid pile of money.

It’s not really about the money though. It’s about putting some marks in the win column. If you can mark some wins, then the money doesn’t matter much. You’re uplifted by the idea that your wins are leading you somewhere. When you don’t have wins, money is an excellent distraction. It’s easy to forget that you waste eight hours a day on bullshit if you can walk into a place and buy yourself whatever you want, or go on a trip to Hawaii. It’s only a temporary solution to a larger problem, but sometimes having some duct tape around can get you through the rough patches.

This could be the end of the road for the pro-blogging fantasy. I’m not willing to be a douche and set up pages that trap and trick people into clicks and subscriptions, I’m not willing to niche this site, and I’m not willing to conform to the rules. I’m doing the same shit that I always do: trying to change the rules because I don’t like the game as it’s laid out. The older I get, the more blazing my own path seems like a massive waste of time. And yet, I feel like it’s the way that I’m built. I’m meant to resist. I’m meant to blaze a useless path. I’m meant to fight to get people to do their fucking jobs.

There has to be some sort of point to this. I need a “tah dah” moment where everything falls into place. I’ve always thought that if you stick to it and keep plugging, you’ll eventually figure out what the point is, but after 500 days, I can’t say that I’ve found it.

Later in the day, we went to the house to check on the painting, and it looked like things were moving forward. By the time we got home and started dinner, it was pretty late.

Thursday (Day 501): Mr. Sparkle And The Punk Rock Zombies

I opened the house in the morning, and when I got home, I found an extra set of ping pong balls that I didn’t know I had. I then spent way too long trying to make a set of Mr. Sparkle eyeballs, and then spent even longer writing about how I did it. Once I was done, I checked my stats, which were about half of what they were the week before. They were five times higher than they were last year, but I didn’t think of that at the time.

I spent the rest of the morning searching out virtual instruments (VST’s) for Aodix in the hopes of getting some sort of music related post out for Friday. I found some good ones, but ended up blowing off the writing in favor of playing with Aodix for the rest of the day. I missed two posts this week, and oddly, it didn’t seem to bother me. It was like I was fed up with writing or possibly everything. In either case, diving into some music was a good break.

#1GF! went out to dinner with one of her friends, and I couldn’t deal with the computer anymore, so I flopped in front of the TV because I lack a good book. I happened to catch Return of the Living Dead, which I haven’t seen since I was a teenager. I used to have the soundtrack, and it was probably my first exposure to TSOL, The Cramps, Roky Erickson, and other punkish bands of the time.

It was so long ago that I had the soundtrack on vinyl, not because it was cool to have vinyl, but because vinyl was the cheapest and most common option at the time. 20+ years later, the movie was laughably awful, but I couldn’t help but watch it the whole way through just to enjoy the music. #1GF! came home at some point in the middle, and I said to her, “Send more cops.” She had no idea what I was talking about, until a few minutes later, when a zombie said the same thing into a police radio. I can’t remember to take out the garbage, but my brain has been storing a line from a movie for the last 20 years just in case I happened to need it. My brain needs better garbage collection routines.

Friday (Day 502): VST’s, DNS, and Branching Out

We worked out in the morning, and #1GF! went over to open the house to give me a break. I fully intended to write about all of the VST plugins that I found the day before, but I ended up searching for more of them and played around with Aodix all day. Once again I had so much fun playing that I didn’t bother writing.

The internet went down in the middle of the day, so I troubleshot the issue from the PC on out, and came to the conclusion that Comcast must’ve been having DNS issues. The issue eventually went away, but when #1GF! got home, she mentioned that people from neighboring towns had been complaining about the outage all day. I felt like my troubleshooting skills weren’t all that rusty.

#1GF! and I went to the house to check on the painting progress, but I think we stopped caring about quality at some point in the last few days. The painter was going to get paid and moved out in the next couple of days whether the paint issues were solved or not. We were running out of patience and time.

We went over to the local pizza shop to pick up some dinner because I didn’t feel like cooking and #1GF! didn’t feel like going out. We have basically two orders when we go in there, and #1GF! ordered our typical non-pizza order. Right before she ordered it, she said something like, “We’re branching out today” to the kid taking her order. I said “What? We are not,” and the woman who is always in there suddenly appeared from behind one of the ovens and said, “Yea, just because you’re not ordering a pepperoni pizza, that doesn’t mean that you’re branching out. You’ve gotten this order before.” I gave #1GF! a look that is the equivalent of an “I told you so” that was just slightly more mature than a child sticking his tongue out. I think it’s great to be a regular somewhere. It’s something that everyone should experience.

We watched In America while we ate, which was a decent movie despite having no real point. After it was over, #1GF! said something like “See, not everything has to have a point. Write your book.” I still am mulling that one over because I still think creative fiction should have a point. If I want pointlessness, I can look out the window.

Saturday (Day 503): Call The Cops On Me

The minute that I got into the shower, the phone rang. Normally, I’d call whoever it is back, but with the house issues, I have to allow the phone be entirely invasive or I’ll pay for it later. #1GF! brought the phone in, so I shut off the water and I brought the phone an inch away from my face to see who called. It was the painter, so I called him back in case he was on the way to the house.

The conversation devolved into another argument when the painter told me that he was ready to call the cops on me because he hadn’t been paid. I hit the roof. Standing there like a modern Celtic warrior battling it out with a phone instead of an axe, I was completely oblivious to the fact that I was yelling and swearing while buck naked. I think it was one of the lamest threats that I’ve ever faced, but it got right under my skin. I told him to go ahead because the cops couldn’t do anything to make me pay for a job that wasn’t finished. Circle did not get the square. Once I was dressed, I made sure to call the contractor to thank him for referring the painter.

Later, I got a call from someone looking for a reference on the painter. I’ve had four (?) throwdowns with the painter, so I declined to offer a reference. I also declined to say anything bad about the guy either, insisting that the person call someone else on their list. That’s when I found out it was a crank call. Good times.

We went out to look at furniture again because after a year of construction, the new house is going to look like two college kids live in it because everything we have is either going to be mismatched or ruined after all these years in storage. We got to the first store at 1PM and although it’s usually crammed, it was almost empty. There were no people bumping into us, or standing so close that you wonder if they consider hugging strangers to be invasion of personal space. It was so quiet that you felt like you had to talk softly, and because I wasn’t fighting with the painter or dealing with the house at that particular moment, I felt inexplicably relaxed. I knew that the battles were still raging, but because I wasn’t in the middle of a firefight at that moment, I took relaxation where I could find it.

We walked through the whole store and didn’t find anything, which is pretty normal. We went into their mattress section, and I played with the remote control on one of those sleep number beds. I wasn’t interested in laying on it, but it had a remote, and I’m a man, so I couldn’t resist messing with it. After a minute or so of pushing firmer, softer, firmer, softer, I pressed the “full” button and play time ended. Sleep number beds adjust by some sort of compressor that fills the bed with air to make it firmer. By pressing “full”, the thing started to sound like it was preparing for takeoff. After a minute of listening to it go through its pre-flight engine checks, I dropped the remote and got away before the thing sprung a leak and went sailing around the room like a giant, but dangerous, deflating balloon.

We walked by a coffee stand, and for some reason, the smell instantly transported me back to summer camp.

“That smells like camp. The coffee. I have no idea why.”
“What camp?”
“The one my family lived at one summer.”
“What? When?”
“When I was six or so.”
“What?”
“I dunno. We lived at a camp. My mother was the camp nurse. We had this tiny cabin and all had to sleep in one bed.”
“Who are you?”
“I wish I knew.”

We left that store and headed for another. On the way, I saw a Nissan that I had never seen on the road that I couldn’t remember the name of. I left a message for a friend of mine. “Hey, I just saw a Nissan and it was that one from the video games and was only made in Japan. I’ve never seen one on the road before and can’t remember the name of it. Call me back.”

“You didn’t say it was a car.”
“He’ll know what I mean.”
“Oh, does he speak Jon, too?”
“Har Har. Yea, I think he does.”

Within three minutes, “South of Heaven” started playing on my phone, I had my answer. It was a GT-R, formerly known in Japan as the Nissan Skyline. I told the guy that I knew it was him because this was the first call he’d made to me since I changed his ringtone to “South of Heaven”. He told me that I was assigned to Slayer’s “Death’s Head.” Nice. It is a nice honor to be assigned to a Slayer ringtone and to be able to bring Slayer to the world one call at a time. It is for me, anyway.

I talked to the guy as we walked through the furniture store, using my typically colorful language that seems to have fewer and fewer filters as time wears on. I was only half paying attention to my environment, but I thought it was weird that #1GF! was leading me through sections of furniture that we’d never buy. After I hung up, I found out that she was merely leading me through unpopulated sections of the store because I dropped a couple of f bombs and I may have even said, “This is dildos” a couple of times. Hey, ask me about the house. If I’m not making up triple score swear combinations in favor of mildly offensive terms like “this is dildos”, then things might actually be looking up.

After getting to the point where we thought a spool table and a few milk crates would be fine as long as we didn’t have to shop anymore, we dropped by my parents’ house. I ended up giving my dad a haircut, which was sort of cool because when I was a kid, my grandfather would cut everyone’s hair in our family. When he stopped cutting hair, I got his barber tools, and I’ve given haircuts to a bunch of different people over the years (including one very brave girl). I’ve learned my barbering limits as I’ve gotten older, but I still use my grandfather’s scissors to trim the hair off my ears every few weeks to stretch out the time between haircuts and keep a channel open to the past.

Once my dad was all cleaned up, we all went out to dinner. At the table right next to us, sat a girl who was probably one of my earliest “girlfriends”, from a time when “going out” was a merely a fleeting set of words because there wasn’t really anywhere to go. I think the only real requirement was that you couldn’t use the words with someone else.

The woman never made eye contact, and I didn’t bother her even though she was only a few feet away. I look a lot different than I did in those days (early Jon vs. recent Jon), so I doubt that she would’ve recognized me anyway. Of course, I kept looking over every now and then, and seemed to have caught the eye of one of the women at the table who smiled at me on her way out. #1GF! saw it, but said that the woman had a huge rock on her hand, so maybe she was someone from 6th grade who I didn’t recognize.

After dinner we went to the house to check on which paint errors had been corrected. They weren’t all fixed, but the place wasn’t destroyed, so we took it as a victory.

What I Learned

• Metal riffs are a pain in the ass to sequence by hand. A midi controller might make things a lot easier, but free is free.
• There are a lot of good, free VST’s available.
• Sleep number beds are loud.
• The standard for judging manuscript pages seems to be 250 words per page.
• I’ve yet to find a free bass VST that beats the bass sound of the Mini Moog Lexus.
• Putting eyeballs on inanimate objects makes me laugh.
• Mr. Sparkle eyes are easy to make.
• Return of the Living Dead has become more funny than scary.
• Being assigned a Slayer ringtone on someone’s phone is somehow a proud moment.
• Unchecking “save thumbnail” in Gimp will cut jpg sizes almost in half.
• I can crank out 6500 words in a day and have them end up semi-coherent. I consider this an unintentional victory.

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