This is week 95 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing 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 658): Throwing Things At The Parade

I woke up at 7AM and lay there thinking about all the things that were going to need to be fixed now that the warm weather was rolling around. #1GF! lay there sleeping peacefully until she realized that I wasn’t. The weather was grey and cloudy like my thoughts, and if it wasn’t so warm, I would’ve expected it to snow.

I made bagel sandwiches for breakfast, but beyond that, I didn’t feel like doing anything. #1GF! kept offering suggestions, no matter how many times I told her that it was unnecessary. I wasn’t interested in a solution. I just wanted to sit and ignore the list of things that needed doing.

In the afternoon, we went to a St. Patrick’s Day parade. We didn’t go because we like to go to parades, but because #1GF!’s mother likes to go to the parade. The St. Patrick’s Day parade has become somewhat of a required attendance event over the years. I have no idea how I got roped in to the process, but I did, so I go.

It’s a small town parade, so they throw candy like mad from every car and float. The kids bring gallon ziplock bags and easily fill up one per child. I didn’t bother with the candy unless it was merely to throw stray pieces at the kids and look the other way like I didn’t throw anything. Every once in a while, I would catch a stray Tootsie Roll, or #1GF! would hand me one and I would chaw on it to pass the time.

We not only saw little Michael on his candy quest again this year, but we had the fortune of standing next to a comedian. I didn’t get the guy’s autograph, but maybe I should’ve. If a coffee float came through, he’d yell out to ask if they’re going to throw free coffee. If a ice cream truck came through, he’d yell out to ask if they were going to throw ice cream. If a bank came through, he yell out to ask if they were going to throw money. Would the hilarity ever stop? I was in danger of shooting liquefied Tootsie Rolls out of my nose every time the guy opened his mouth. If only an obliging ninja star salesman were in the parade, we could’ve taught the guy about irony.

#1GF! and I went home after the parade, watched a movie, and then went out to an early dinner. Dinner was less of an event than an excuse not to cook. When we came home we watched another movie, Pineapple Express. The movie was funny in a Dumb and Dumber sort of way, but I ended up falling asleep because the climatic scene went on forever. How do you rate a movie that you laughed at a few times, but fell asleep during? Is that a C or an automatic fail? I don’t know.

Monday (Day 659): LOR All Day

I wrote LOR until 3PM, and then made a quick trip to the grocery store. I put the groceries put away, and thought about starting in on the taxes. It was after 4, and I knew that taxes always end up taking me a lot longer than I estimate. I knew that they had to be done, but I didn’t want to be working on them all night.

Instead, I prepped dinner, and within ten minutes of #1GF! walking through the door, a batch of chicken, broccoli, and ziti alfredo and a side salad was ready for her. That was my crowning achievement of the day: a well-cooked, well-timed dinner. Yea. I know. When your main achievement is dinner, and you’re not a chef or a housewife in the 50’s, the day is pretty much a bust.

Tuesday (Day 660): Robot Modification Proposal

I didn’t turn the PC on in the morning. The first thing that I did was to sit down at the kitchen table to recheck and finalize the taxes. I expected it to take a couple of hours, but it ended up taking until the middle of the afternoon. I realized that I made a good choice by not starting them the night before.

I had a quick sandwich and ran out to the library to make copies of all the tax forms. I thought about scanning and printing all the forms, but I think that I did that last year, and it took twice as long as photocopying. I copied 35 pages, and gave the librarian $3.50. She barely looked at the money before sweeping it into a drawer. I guess photocopying is not a high theft business.

When I got home, I called the fire alarm company to tell them that I thought that I found the defective fire alarm. They pointed out that I didn’t know what I was talking about and had me put the alarm back online to test for a couple of days. That process took twenty minutes and resulted in more than a couple of situations where the goddamned alarms let me know that there was no carbon monoxide present in the kitchen. This was not something I needed to know at full volume. It was like someone walking up to you at your desk and yelling, “THE BUILDING HAS POWER.” By the time I got off the phone it was 4:15.

I wanted to take the detector down and wire it directly to my robot because I thought that they’d get along famously together. Maybe they could be the basis of a Disney film where the talkative fire alarm and useless robot go on a quest to save a puppy from the clutches of an evil paper shredder or something. It would be the Dumb and Dumber of household items.

I then considered that being both useless and talkative could land the robot a job before me, and decided against it. If the robot had an income, there’s no telling what it might do with it. I’d have robot entourages rolling their plastic wheels all over the basement at all hours of the day and night, punctuating my sleep with the hollow tonk of their plastic tubs when they fell over.

It did not seem like a good idea. If you’re going to be outranked by the useless and talkative, you might as well get a job at a large corporation and get paid handsomely for it.

I put the taxes together in the proper order, marked places for #1GF! to sign, and filed the copies away. I looked at the empty table and felt more than a little satisfied. I took my mechanical pencil back to my desk where it belongs, and turned on the PC for the first time of the day.

I started looking for jobs and came up empty. I don’t know if it’s because I’m looking for a good job, or that there aren’t that many jobs out there, but I wasn’t very successful.

I decided to read some of my favorite feeds to cheer me up, and found a couple of items that I threw into posts of my own, even though I know that it isn’t a good idea. Posting every day is fun, but pulling back from blogging is one of the most important things in getting me a job. I get immense satisfaction from writing and interacting with readers, and if I take that satisfaction away, I’m forced into a position where I need to seek that satisfaction elsewhere. Only when you’re truly dissatisfied will you seek earnest change.

When #1GF! got home, we had leftovers and watched sitcoms until bed. I don’t know what was going on, but I was more amused than usual. I rarely laugh at sitcoms, but I laughed out loud a number of times. I’m not sure if it was because the shows were funny or because I needed a laugh.

After I fell asleep, I dreamed that I going to my first day of a new job. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I suddenly wondered why I hadn’t at least put on a dress shirt. “Maybe I’ve been out too long,” I thought.

Suddenly, I was in college. I was starting to set up my dorm room, when I realized how old I was. I realized that it made absolutely no sense for me to be in college. Instead of realizing it was a dream, I wondered if I should use the time to get a second degree, either in English or Engineering. I weighed reading Elizabethan poetry against the thought of taking physics again, and decided to get the hell out of there.

As I walked across the street, I saw a woman get hit by a car. I ran out into the road to wave down any traffic so they wouldn’t hit her as she lay there in one of the lanes. I waved my arms over my head at the oncoming headlights in the distance, and turned my head to yell down at the woman. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”

Her eyes suddenly popped open and she said that she could. She said that she was fine, and I dropped my arms to my sides, thoroughly confused. She got up and ran away leaving me in the road wondering what the hell just happened.

Wednesday (Day 661): Too Close To The Source Of The Problem

I checked my mail and then drove to pick up some new lenses for my glasses. Despite driving around the block a couple of times, I eventually had to park a couple of blocks away. I ran across four lanes of traffic without getting run over, and went into the small office.

I didn’t know how long the wait would be, so I sat in a chair and grabbed the first magazine within reach. It was called South Shore Living or something close to that, and felt unbelievably small town. It was full of local interest stories and local advertisers, which seemed strange for something that had the look of a national magazine.

When my ophthalmologist grabbed my lenses, she didn’t think they were any thinner than the ones I had. She said that she was going to send them back to the manufacturer so that they could see what the problem was. I left with nothing.

From the beginning, my plan had been to pick up my glasses and go to a nearby home megastore to exchange a couple of things. When I hopped into the car, I realized that I had forgotten both my megastore gift cards and the item that I was to return. I drove home feeling extremely inefficient.

After the half hour ride, I ran into the house, grabbed a bag and started cleaning up the glass that had worked its way up out of the soil over the winter. There was a lot more of it than I expected, and I wondered how many of the original windows made it into the dumpster when the new windows were being put in.

I put a bag full of glass and debris in the trash, grabbed the megastore gift cards, locked the house, and jumped in the car to head to the home megastore. I got a mile up the road and realized that I forgot the item I was going to return. My efficiency rating with the general public dropped eight points, according to current polls. I turned ROCKET CAR! around and headed home once again. I grabbed the item (that was sitting by the door so I wouldn’t forget it), and headed back out.

I went to the store and returned the item without issue. I looked for a couple of towel racks, but the ones that they had looked like they had been left in a gorilla cage for a couple of days. Instead of buying something that looked like it would end up needing to be returned, I bought a few items to create my own towel rack.

I was going to go home, but figured, “Why not hit another megastore and get this done?” It was inefficient to drive another half hour to another megastore, but sometimes you need at least one checkmark for the day. I jumped on the highway, although “jumped” is an improperly used term because once I was committed to my route, the highway ground down to a dead standstill as all traffic was forced to merge into a single lane. I sat wondering what the hell I was doing with my life that a small checkmark made this worth it.

I finally made it to the megastore, grabbed a towel rack, and headed out. It was an hour of driving for five minutes of shopping. On my way out, I walked by a bunch of grills. Whoever started the trend of raising grill prices to $700 should get a swift kick in the ding ding. I mean that. Pot boiler or not, a grill should be a hundred dollar item.

I went home and realized that the towel rack I got might be too big, and the secondary rack that I was going to make was never going to work at all. I threw them both into the laundry closet and decided to deal with them later. I grabbed some leftovers for lunch and looked up some jobs. Everything I found seemed like a six year setbacks in any career I may have been working on. To bring a little spice to my day, I looked up some mortgage refinancing options. You couldn’t stop this party if you wanted to.

#1GF! came home to pick me up, and we met the rest of the family at the hospital for a doctor’s appointment. It can’t say that it went well, but it went better than I expected.

Afterward, we went out to dinner. #1GF!’s mom got picked up a booby trapped salt shaker and ended up wiping a pile of salt off of her meal.

When we got home, I turned the PC on and made some beats with Hydrogen, just to play around a little to take my mind off of things. The beats ended up overly complex, but I let #1GF! listen before we went to bed.

“Hmm. It sounds like ‘Jam up the volume, jam up the volume’.”

“Pump up the volume? Dance Dance?”

“Yup.”

“You know, I could’ve just sampled that and saved myself an hour.”

“How did you not notice that?”

“As usual, I’m too close to the source of the problem.”

Thursday (Day 662): Big, Green Donkey Dicks

I went to take the garbage out, and saw the sun rising up out of the ocean like a huge orange ball. It was halfway out of the water, and I don’t think my timing could’ve been better if I was in the mood to see a nice sunrise. Oddly, I looked at it as I walked back in the house, but didn’t stop walking. I wondered if people in Hawaii felt this way about sunsets. If you can see sunrises over the water a few days a week, you might still appreciate them, but there’s a draw to spend about as much time on them as you would on someone else’s vacation photo.

I got on the PC early to check my mail and site comments, and got an expertly written comment on my Metallica article on Death Magnetic. Like all good comments, it started eloquently and boldly. “All you fags suck big green donkey dicks”.

At first, I thought that it was just randomly worded spam, but then realized that someone actually took the time to continue on for a full paragraph about how awesome Metallica was because they are known in Europe and the rest of the commenters weren’t. With logic and genius bending to his will, I thought better to delete the comment than to let him convince my readers to move on to more popular web properties. Hey, with traffic comes dissent, and with dissent come the trolls. It’s all part of the game.

I tried to help a friend out with simple WordPress template tweak, but her site was a hosted WordPress.com blog where templates can’t be customized. The only way that she could fix the issue would be to move the site to a paid webhost. I was really expecting a quick fix of satisfaction on that one, but got denied.

I looked for jobs for a bit, and then floundered on what to do next. There were a ton of things I could do around the house, and a number that I could do on this site or the web, but I didn’t want to do any of them. And they all seemed pointless in comparison with getting a job.

No matter what I did, it felt like I wasn’t doing the right thing. Every action that wasn’t about getting a job felt like I was doing something wrong, but when there are no more job descriptions to read, you have to do something else. I threw some energy into fixing some errors on my site, and then I worked on something musical and useless. I felt strangely guilty about it the whole time. Like I wasn’t doing enough. And maybe I’m not.

All I really wanted to do was sit and play QuakeLive all day. And that spells trouble. When I’m zoning out and looking to video games for a bit of quiet time, there’s something wrong. It’s escaping lack of achievement by donating time to something useless that feels like achievement. Quakelive is pretty damned fun though.

To escape the video game desire, I looked up mortgage rates and called the mortgage guy. It was a very poor substitute. He wanted three grand to refinance. That seemed high to me, but I asked about a bunch of different options, anyway. I couldn’t be sure, but it felt like I was being rushed off the phone. The guy has been good to us, so the feeling could’ve been a result of a slowly dropping mood.

When #1GF! came home, I made her dinner. I didn’t feel like cooking, but it was the biggest accomplishment I was going to get for the day. #1GF! asked me what was going on and I explained it to her.

“You don’t have to feel that way,” she said. “We’re fine. You don’t even need a job.”

“But, I do. The baby is coming, and I’m getting a little nervous. Your company doesn’t seem like the most stable place on Earth these days.”

“I’m sorry you’re feeling this way.”

“I’m sorry about feeling this way. It’s stupid. Life is what you make it. I can’t look at things negatively just because they’re not going the way that I expect.”

We ate dinner and watched Wall-E, and it made me realize that I really need to start managing my Netflix queue more. Watching a two hour, animated robot love story was a little much. Even if it was excellently animated and generated a few laughs, I’m not seven. Seriously. I’m not.

Friday (Day 663): Acting Is Easy… Until You Try It

I started the day off by testing out a new feature that I’d like to add to Better Blogroll, but then gave up before turning the a working hack into widget code. I don’t think that the addition would’ve been hard, but it seemed like a waste of time.

I undid the Better Blogroll hack and started looking for jobs again. I got lost and irritated by the uselessly synergistic style of some of the postings. I can’t tell you how many that I’ve read that leave me wondering what the job is and what the qualifications are. Some of them, I have to read twice before realizing that they don’t actually say anything.

You’d think I’d apply for jobs that don’t list any requirements, but I don’t. Bad postings make me wonder if the way people write job postings is indicative of their corporate culture. When I see a long posting that doesn’t say anything, I see a long career of doing nothing. And that’s not the proper way to look at things. Apply to everything and sift it out later. Otherwise, you’re acting like you don’t want a job. Or you’re hoping that the perfect job will present itself. That’s a great idea, but if experience tells me anything: it won’t.

I worked on a song idea briefly before filming the first scene of a short film. I put did it on my camera phone just to see if it could be done. Acting, directing, and positioning a camera are really easy until you try them. To get a minute filmed and edited took me an hour. Both the song and film are entirely useless, but seemed like they might end up being funny, so I had to spend a little time on them because funny is good for everyone.

#1GF! brought home Chinese food, and we watched Wristcutters: A Love Story. The food was good, and the movie turned out to be one of the more interesting movies I’ve seen lately. After the movie, I showed #1GF! the scene that I had down, and she burst out laughing. I don’t know if it was because it was really funny, or because she was amused by the fact that I was trying to do a short film. Either way, she was laughing, and that was sort of the point.

Saturday (Day 664): Antiques, Chewing Tobacco, & Big, Brown Glasses

I woke up naturally at 5AM, which is no time to be awake on a Saturday. I couldn’t get back to sleep because I started going through all the things that I needed to get done around the house. I lay there in the half light thinking about the act of thinking about things. Sometimes it’s so useless. Endlessly going over lists of things to do, or things to buy, or people you need to call, is useless when you’re laying in bed. Do or do not. Don’t think. I realized that when you’re thinking about thinking, you’re thinking too much. I got up and got in the shower.

While I was in the shower, I thought of an ending for a short film that I was writing. I don’t know why, but I seem to do my most useful thinking in a hot shower. I’ve written three rap albums, several book plots, and a metal opera in there. Because of the lack of paper, most ideas are lost like suds down the drain. The ending for the film somehow stuck with me, and I went and wrote down the minute I got dry enough to sit in front of the computer.

After about fifteen minutes, I sent the script and the first scene over to a friend over at Burning Snowman. I was feeling pretty satisfied that the skit might actually be worth filming. Once it was out the door, the PC returned to its normal weekend no power state.

In an attempt to find a table or some stuff to decorate our empty, white house, #1GF! and I went out to antique stores and used furniture shops. I wasn’t sure if we’d find anything, but I thought that it might be worth a shot.

The first antique store we stopped at was like a long country barn. There was no drywall, and every wall and floor surface packed with old and generally useless items. There was an overwhelming amount of stuff, all organized in a disorganized sort of way.

There were piles of old irons, a whole section of fireplace equipment, stacks of ancient skis, boxes doorknobs, and even a shogun helmet. There were large, (severely) amateur paintings of Teddy Roosevelt, George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and even Jimmy Carter. There were steer horns, moose horns, bull horns, a ships wheel, and even a full sized replica of King Tut’s sarcophagus. Records were randomly crammed into spare cracks without regard to what it might do to their condition. I had to walk extremely slowly to avoid missing anything. Every price tag was like a little inside joke that I was too cheap to get.

“I love places like this,” I whispered to #1GF!.

“I know you do,” she said while trying not to let anything touch her.

We left the clutter of the inside behind and walked around the outside of the shop looking at rusted wheels and grey, weathered boxes. We jumped into the car without a thing.

We traveled a little way up the road to a furniture consignment shop that had rotated most of its inventory since our last visit. It was less crammed than the antique barn, but there wasn’t anything we were interested in either.

We grabbed a caramel latte for me at Dunkin Donuts. I know, it does seem a little foofy for a guy who drinks generally drinks his coffee as black and bitter as his heart, but you can’t kick ass all the time. The weather was too warm for black coffee and too cold for iced, so I went with something different. Like life, the latte got sweeter as there was less of it. #1GF! got an iced coffee to join in the fun of afternoon coffee time, but got it decaf so as not to affect the future guitar shredding abilities in the mini metal goddess growing inside of her.

#1GF! tried to avoid it (by purposely passing by it and pretending to miss a turn), but I dragged her into the Salvation Army. As a twenty something, I would make regular trips to the Salvation Army or GoodWill to dig through their records or see if any toys from my childhood (Blip, electronic football, etc.) had shown up. I was probably in there every other week in those days, but I haven’t been to a Salvation Army in a long time. Maybe it’s because I’m older, or maybe it’s because once you see thousands of hours of record hunting fused together in a black mass of burnt goo, you don’t have a high desire desire to start the process over.

When I got in the door, I went directly to the records out of habit. Unless you love Mario Lanza or classical music, there was absolutely nothing of value. Again, out of habit, I made a mental note that there must be other collectors picking this spot regularly, and I cursed them for getting there first. I stood up and decided that I was done with the Salvation Army. Maybe on another day, but not then.

“You ready?” I asked #1GF!

“You’re done? It’s only been five minutes,” said #1GF! with more than a little surprise.

“Yea. I think I forgot about the smell. It’s like mothballs mixed with something.”

“Sweat,” said #1GF!.

“Yep. Could be. ‘It’s the smell… if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it’…”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Let’s get out of here.”

We left and went to a couple of more furniture consignment / antique stores on the same road, one of which was having a “staying in business” sale. Or so the banner read. It was essentially an old barn that smelled like cigarettes, but the furniture looked like it had been refinished better than in other shops. Unfortunately, There was nothing of interest in there for us.

I called my parents from the parking lot to see if they wanted to go out to dinner. It was 4PM, which I knew was too early for them, but wanted to see what they’re reaction would be. They said that they’d meet us, but at more of a dinner time.

We had two hours to kill, so it was either go home for an hour, or waste the time on more shopping. Thinking that stopping might kill momentum, we kept going. We headed north to a baby megastore to look through cribs and other baby stuff with price tags that all had trailing double zeroes.

We picked up my parents at around 6PM and went to a new restaurant that they wanted to try. My dad hopped out and put in our name. Despite being early, it was a forty minute wait. He hopped in the car, and we drove across town to another restaurant. That place was mobbed and had a forty-five minute wait. We headed back to the original restaurant, having killed off ten minutes of our wait with driving.

The restaurant was called the Fat Cat, and seemed to be frequented by men with sideburns and women that preferred tiny glasses. Oddly, all of these people seemed well past the age where sideburns and tiny glasses suited them.

We spent a half hour of being lightly jostled in a bar area and listening to the door slam over and over as people came in and out. Even though I grew up in the city, I never really thought of the city as hip. It was just a city. This felt like an attempt at hip, and seemed very foreign to the city I knew. It wasn’t quite pretense, but there was no shortage of bare brick walls and painted black furniture.

At the start of dinner, the waitress brought over bread and some sort of black bean dipping sauce. I’m one to try new things, so I grabbed a piece of bread and dunked it in. At a break in the conversation, I popped it in my mouth.

“Oh my lord,” I said accidentally and none too quietly.

“What?” asked #1GF!

“The taste,” I said, suddenly realizing that I shouldn’t be commenting on something that other people might enjoy.

“What about it?” asked #1GF!

“I like it,” said my Dad.

“It tastes exactly like chewing tobacco… Oh, that is not right,” I said laughing.

“I’ve never had chewing tobacco,” said my dad.

“I could see how someone who has never accidentally swallowed a lump chewing tobacco might like it.” I was looking for something else to replace the taste. I grabbed another piece of bread. “I’m suddenly 17 again.”

Despite the good reputation, I don’t think anyone was impressed with the restaurant. I had fish and chips, and had to use a knife on it. You should never have to use a knife on fish and chips. The food was nothing worth waiting for, but the company was good, so we had a good time anyway. We had a lot of fun talking and laughing.

On the way home, we drove past a bunch of twenty something kids getting into a truck. They were all dressed in a similar style, and they all had similar haircuts that were a mix between military and working class. One kid had a short goatee. He looked up as we passed by, and it was the same blank, defensive look that strange dogs give when they’re sizing you up. That’s the look of the city to me. That’s the look I remember.

We dropped my parents off at home and went in for a minute. As we were talking, my dad said to #1GF! “I know what Jon’s thinking. He’s thinking, ‘There are not the same people that I grew up with.’”

I smirked. “You’re not. Well, you are, but not really. I think you get more relaxed and fun as you get older.”

“You didn’t have a bad childhood…” said my mom as almost a question.

“Don’t think that I think that I had a bad childhood. I didn’t at all. You both worked and did what you had to do to raise a family. It’s a lot of pressure and no one tells you how to do it.”

“You’d tell me if I did something to hurt you, right?” said my mom as she gave me a giant, comedically overacted hug.

I laughed. “You didn’t hurt me. Just the opposite. I thought that I was really awesome. Then, I went to school with my big brown glasses and found out how not awesome I was.”

“Your glasses were fine,” said my mom.

“It was the 70’s. The choices were big brown glasses… or big brown glasses,” I said while weighing my hands out into an imaginary scale.

“When I was in 7th grade, we were on welfare, and I had no choice of glasses. I had to wear a pair of blue glasses with rhinestones in the corners.”

“Oh those were probably cool at the time…” I said to my mom.

“Oh, I hated those glasses.”

“Well, I think you did fine at raising me. I’m still here. And other than the inability to hold a job… Wait, I actually hold them a long, long time. Other than the inability to tolerate stupid people… Wait, stupid is ok. Some people can’t help stupid. Hmm. Other than the inability to buy up stupid when it’s packaged and sold as genius, I think I came out OK.”

We headed home.

What I Learned

• Acting and directing are easy until you try them.
• There are a lot of antique stores around here.
• My mother once had blue glasses with rhinestones in the corners.
• The Fat Cat doesn’t have food to back up its reputation.
• My brain instantly recognizes the taste of chewing tobacco. My body instantly remembers what it’s like to swallow a wad of it.
• The Salvation Army has lost its charm.
• Like life, a caramel latte gets sweeter as there was less of it.
• WordPress.com hosting doesn’t let you modify templates like hosted WordPress blogs do.
• Library photocopies are a dime each.
• I haven’t lost the ability to attract a troll or two.
• There is an amateur artist out there somewhere who loved Jimmy Carter so much that they painted a two foot by three foot painting of him.
• I might do my best thinking in the shower.

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