I hate posting videos two days in a row, but this one was too good to pass up. Whether love or hate Kevin Smith you have to respect his response to an audience member’s question at Comic-Con 2007.

The question was, “Do you ever plan on making an original movie without rehashing any of your old characters that doesn’t suck?”

Kevin Smith Strikes Back

While I enjoy and appreciate the effort that goes into the 100+ blogs that I chew through daily, there are a number of things that grind my gears. Here’s my top 10:

10. Put in huge blocks of text and never break them up

I don’t care what that big, fat, snotty ass of an English teacher told you about writing. Writing for the web is different than writing for the approval of a washed up author. Most of the time, people don’t read your site, they skim it. Newspapers traditionally break up their paragraphs into smaller chunks to provide multiple places for your eye to rest on your way down the page. The web is exactly the same. When you give me big blocks of text, I lose my place a lot and end up getting aggravated. When I get aggravated, I read something else.

Maybe you barely even noticed it, but as a tech worker, I can tell you that a lot of effort went into making sure that there was minimal impact from the government’s decision to move up the start of Daylight Savings Time. I can’t even begin to estimate how much time and money were spent to make sure this change happened without a hitch, but in the tech world, moving Daylight Savings Time was a miniature Y2K.

According to the government, the whole reason for spending the effort was that it would result in substantial energy savings. Personally, I just don’t see it.

It’s sad what a cliche I’ve become, when after a shit day on the job, the only thing I want to do is pour myself into the couch and bleach my brain with the deluge of prepackaged, lifeless programming until it’s time to go to bed. And worse, television had become such a constantly available crutch in my life that I found myself looking to live humans for entertainment less often.

And I guess that was the point of shutting the box off: Make the house more boring and force the need for more human contact. Reawaken the brain. Get out of the house. Make the strangers acquaintances, the acquaintances friends, and the friends into good friends.

Today is a day that I’m pretty embarrassed to be a Masshole. For those that don’t know the story, Turner Broadcasting paid two guys to put up LED signs as part of a viral ad campaign for their upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie. The signs featured a picture of a Mooninite giving the finger. Turner arranged to have signs put up in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle. They did this two or three weeks ago.

In my haste to avoid any actual writing by cramming this blog full of crappy video links, I failed to mention a few things recently…

One: MABeGroMo

I failed to mention the start of MaBeGroMo on December 1. I started on November 7th to beat the holiday rush. Like women synching their menstrual cycles, Team Beardo at work started around the same time without discussion or provocation. My beard is now two months old. How’s yours?

I spent this weekend trying to knock off the Xmas shopping, and it didn’t seem like there were as many people out as in past years. Until I got to the nerd paradise that is Microcenter, the lines didn’t seem any longer than at a Walmart on a Saturday afternoon.

While we stood waiting to spend less than the length of this particular line warranted, a checker in the next aisle opened her register with, “I can take the next person in line.” The Russian Neanderthal in front of us quickly walked around the front of the registers to be first in line, while the two gay dudes in back of us bolted around the correct way, just missing the pole position.

Saturday

What do you get when you combine a wireless mouse, a PC that’s hooked up to the TV, and a bunch of flash based games? In my house, you end up with a stinky, bleary-eyed couple who skips showering and orders out for food because they are so focussed on beating each others scores. Good times. Gooooooood times.

Sunday

After washing off a days worth of gaming stink, we raided Michael’s and Home Depot, gathering ideas for all sorts of new and useless projects to eat spare brain cycles. Although we did not go so far as to buy a soap making kit, we bought plenty of stuff that will probably end up being pulled from the back of a closet in a couple of years with a quizzical, “Now, what the hell did we buy this for?”

Reason #1: Data Deletion

You might remember that in September, IPOWERWEB shut down my site and rolled it back 2 weeks without telling me. Like a fool in a bad relationship, I decided to stay with them when they promised that they would fix their backup process. I even gave them another year’s fees in early September.

This week, they decided to shut down my site and delete three months of data. When I called them with the big, “What the fuck happened and how are you going to fix it?”, they just batted their eyelashes, squeezed their jugs together, and shrugged.

Hey Jon, what happened to the site? Everything ok?

It seems my web host, ipowerweb.com, blew away my site on 9/1, and decided to roll it back to 8/15. They then locked me out of my site for 9 hours (violating their 99.9% uptime guarantee) and set my space quota to 0 MB. I spent the last 4 days talking to 8 different techs who brushed me off and misinformed me about the issue. They never responded to my e-mails and they even tried to charge me $50 to do a restore of a database they blew away.

Nice, huh?

Finally, today, four days later, despite prior assurances, they admitted that there was nothing they could do to restore the data they destroyed. They also suggested that I keep regular site backups, which I think is a good idea, but should you have to keep backups to prevent data loss by people who you pay to host your site to protect it from data loss?

Fuckin’ A.

A few posts, 25 unpublished CD reviews, and a lot of other writing down the drain. This is not to mention the time spent trying to get answers from their technical support. I know it’s just a blog, but it’s a lot of fucking work to write these posts. I can’t imagine if I was some sort of store and they had lost 2 weeks of orders with no explanation.

I need PHP and MySQL, and some reliable web hosting suggestions…

The sun came out for the first time in weeks, which I thought would be a good omen for things to start swinging my way. Unfortunately, that fantasy ended abruptly when I got a call from my credit card company this morning saying that some douchebag tried to use my credit card to make some charges. When I reached back to get the card out of my wallet, my wallet wasn’t there. That gave me a good five hours to wonder whether the douchebag had grabbed my entire wallet, my credit card, or just had the credit card number.

When I got home, I luckily found my card in another pair of pants, and since the credit card company caught it in time, I’m not responsible for any of the douche’s charges. I suppose things could’ve been a lot worse, but come on. My jaw is tired.

I’m not one for wishing ill will on people, but I hope another douche gets a hold of this douche’s credit card and charges up a years supply of anti-douche cream. Then, his credit card company won’t bother to call him about the uncharacteristically large charge because, well, the guy is a big, fat fucking douchebag. Then, the douche will spend the rest of his life paying off not only his karma, but a massive credit card debt. And he’ll still be a douche.

Douche.

(Douche count: 12)

I have been irritated all day today. I don’t know if it was springing the fact that the odds of me having kids are just about zero to my Mom on Mother’s Day, or leaving for work in the pouring rain for the 900th day in a row, or the mind-numbing tasks that I’ve been working on for eight hours a day for the last two weeks, the complete fucktards in my commute who don’t seem to know or care what lanes are, or the fact that a CD trading site I recently joined didn’t accept an address change, causing 3 CDs to be lost in the mail and locking me out of any trades for at least 14 days.

None of it is a big deal, but man, I find my jaw is clenched an awful lot.

Rather than do something constructive, I will now attempt to drown any issues in hours and hours of video games.

*This title came to me in a vision from Jebus.

After hitting the gym and then picking up the fixin’s for a nice fetuccini alfredo, I headed home like I normally do. Most of the way, it’s a winding road with two lanes on either side, and I can practically drive it with my eyes closed. I know by rote the sections where it’s faster to be in the left lane and the ones where I should stay to the right, so I can get home in about 35 minutes without breaking the speed limit. And that’s what I do, because I enjoy my time in my rolling listening room.

Today, while I was passing through Hingham Harbor in my normal left lane approach to the rotary, a driver in an SUV couldn’t decide if she felt like stopping short or changing lanes. Being the skilled driver that she was, she failed miserably at both tasks, forcing me to stop short as she plugged up two lanes. My next impulse was to get the hell away from her before she rolled me into her pile-up, so I shot up to the speed limit, went through the rotary and headed for home.

Then, “Slow Ride” by Foghat came the radio. For the next mile and a half, I was cruising along, semi-oblivious to the outside world singing, “Slow Ride… nah nah nuhnuh nahnuhnuh… Take it Easaay…” when all of a sudden, the blue lights of a police car filled my rear view.

Morningwood – Self titled (rock): I discovered Morningwood while looking for new bands online, and put it on my possible buy list. During my most recent CD buys, I was more than a little disappointed to find my “discovery” on the top 25 rack at a local store, downgrading it from “possible” buy to “improbable”. While looking for the other CDs on my list, I somehow got within earshot of one of the local hipsters gushing as if Morningwood were the best band since sliced bread. Maybe it’s the way hipsters ac-cen-tu-ate ev-ery syl-la-ble, or the way they are soooooo into everything, but by the time I could get myself out of earshot, I wanted nothing more than to choke someone with a studded belt and set the bin on fire.

Even though I felt like I was validating hipsters everywhere, I somehow ended up with the album in my hands right before I hit the register. And trust me in that I felt more than a little dirty handing over that ten spot for it. The only small way that I felt could wash off some of the shame was to avoid listening to the album until after I got home…which seemed to work for me.

I was reading an updated “privacy” policy that I received in the mail. I read the following:

Q. What choices do I have about information sharing?

A. We offer you the following two choices about sharing information that identifies you:

Choice #1. You may tell us not to share information about you with non-financial companies outside of our family of companies. Even if you do tell us not to share, we may do so as required or permitted by law. Also if you have authorized us to share information in connection with a particular product or service, we will continue to share information about you in connection with that product or service. For example, you might have a credit card with one of our airline, retail or university partners that offers rewards programs.

and

Choice #2. You may tell us not to share the following information about you within our family of companies:

Information from your applications to be used to determine your eligibility, such as your income.
Information from credit reports, such as your credit history.
Information from sources used to verify information you provide us, such as outstanding loans or employment history.

Even if you do tell us not to share, we may share other types of information within our family. For example, we may share name and address, information about transactions or balances with us, as well as survey results.

So my choices are: Tell you not to share, and you ignore me and share info as long as it is legal, OR tell you not to share and you’ll share info if you feel like it. I’m wondering how long it’s going to be before privacy policies just say, “You’re not the boss of us. If you don’t like it, hoard cash.”

I think that if you participate in a $20 Yankee swap, you should actually take $20, go to a store, and spend it on a gift. You should not be allowed to throw in crap you have laying around your house or things that you got for free from vendors that you think could be valued at $20.

The spending of the $20 should be a required, not optional.

I spent 1.5 hours driving the 9 miles to work this morning because some fucktard in a ship needed the fore river bridge opened during rush hour.

While I was sitting in heavy traffic approaching a merge, the contact in my right eye decided that it had had enough and leaped out of my eye, presumably because the wind could’ve carried it to work faster than I was moving.

I tried unsuccessfully to put it back in a couple of times before deciding to be safe and pull off the road to take care of it. The particular stretch of road that I was on had a median to prevent turning around, there were no auxiliary roads connected to it, and traffic had moved a mere 8 feet in the five minutes that it took me to get the contact in.

Now, when I tried to pull back in, you’d think that one of the cars would let me back into the clogged traffic right? It was obvious that I wasn’t trying to pull a dick move like cutting through a parking lot to get a few cars ahead or something. I was actually trying to pull in a few cars behind where I had been.

So you’d think they’d let me in right? No. No, they didn’t. Ever get to the point where you just starting uncontrollably blurting out random explicatives? That’s always fun, isn’t it? I think I said, “Fuckin’ cock nobber ass shit pole frig neck fuck.” really loud before regaining what little sanity I had stored away for days like this.

Ugh.

I finally got let in by someone else who realizes that merges aren’t competitions, and jockeying for position in heavy traffic is pointless. I finally made it to work, thinking that I could put the whole thing behind me. If I didn’t get a good annual review and have another CD for the CD challenge dropped on my desk today, there’s no telling what pseudo swears I would’ve come up with.

Then, on the way home, the bridge opened again, costing me another hour and a half. 1 day. 18 miles. 3 hours. 6 MPH.

You’d think there would be a law against opening a bridge on a major artery during rush hour. There are 16 hours that are not rush hour, so why do we accept that a single ship should be allowed to inconvenience a few thousand people? Shouldn’t the majority rule? Bah ha ha. I know. I’m a fool. Puny humans.

I just read an interesting article about the Warner/Chappell Music Limited issuing a cease & desist order to PearLyrics, an app that searched the web for lyrics to songs playing on iTunes. It didn’t have a back-end database of lyrics that users could search: it merely found them for the user by searching known lyrics sites on the web. As lyrics are copyrighted, the Warner lawyers issued the complaint based on the idea that the application was aiding in lyrical piracy by locating lyrics similar to the way peer to peer sharing apps aid music piracy.

The guy doesn’t have the resources to fight a lawsuit for an application that he wrote for free, so he complied with the order and took his app offline.

If everything published on the web is copyrighted once it is published to a public web server, then my question is: When a search engine like google spiders my site and picks up all this incredibly well-written, copyrighted material and provides it to anyone who cares to search for it, aren’t they then aiding people in copyright infringement the same way that pearLyrics was?

Every time a search engine caches one of my pages, aren’t they infringing on my copyright by copying my pages? Doesn’t every computer on the net and, in turn, the internet’s servers themselves, have the capability of creating a copy of this page, which violates my sole, irrefutable copyright to this work? If the Warner lawyers are correct in their assumptions, maybe we can assume that they are.

And if it were possible or advisable to enforce my copyright to this site, I’d be, how you say, offline. I’d have the only copy of this material, and you’d never read it. Even if I could figure out how to get you to read this page with a single, non-downloadble copy on the web, you’d never find it, anyway. If caches were illegal copyright infringements, all search engines would be out of business, not just the ones that are convenient and cost-efficient to bully. Then, the internet could go back to the way I remember it back in the early 90′s.

If you’re old enough to remember dialing into bulletin boards or not being able to find a single fucking thing on the internet because you had to remember if it was on the world wide web, gopher, or some private bulletin board, you are aware of what a blessing search engines have become in recent history. If not, you might remember having to search 5 different engines because they all worked differently and cached different information. If you don’t remember any of this, you’re either not old enough, not nerdy enough, or just plain lucky.

If these lawyers want to get copyrighted lyrics off of the internet, they should seek to take down the illegal lyrics servers rather than make bogus claims about the legality of searching for information on the net. If they really want to control the flow of information rather than the information itself, then they need to stop bullying the little guys, grow some nuts, and sue Google for caching lyrics sites. I’d like to see how far they get with that one.

Fuckers.

Not to sidetrack, but do people really think there is an original thought left in the world that they really can claim that no one else has said it before? Is information so unquestionably original that a dead person has more of a right to copy a work than someone that outlives them? How can the dead have more rights than the living? It’s getting to the point where copyright is as rotten as the corpses that it serves.

Maybe there is something wrong with me, but do you ever momentarily come into contact with someone that you don’t know, and catch a tiny part of their conversation that causes your inner voice to just start screaming, “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP NOW! PLEASE!!”?

This happened today when I caught a mere 15 seconds of a 20 something young woman who’s college mouth had yet to catch up with her business look. I couldn’t tell you a single word of what she said, but the way she like um totally said it was like you know ugh [eye roll] like um these girls who are like all like believe that they are like the like made of like the greatest like ingredients in the world, but like under the surface, they’re all like you know ugh [eye roll] venom. what. ev’r.

Maybe it was simply a reaction to the venom or the maintenance contracts, but even if the outer me did remain as cool as a lunch gathering ninja, there has to be a better reason for such a strong reaction.

Co-worker1 walks up to Co-worker2 and starts talking to him as if they had been conversing for the last 15 minutes. You know, he sort of hits the ground running in mid conversation.

Co-worker2, diligently wading through a bog of server support, turns to him and in a very even and almost ethereal tone means to say, “You need to slow down. I’m having trouble shifting gears and understanding what you’re talking about.”

What he actually says is,

“Every time you open your mouth, my. Fuckin’. Head. Wants. To. Explode.”

After the peals of geek laughter died down, all I could say was, “I’m putting that on this little scrap of paper so that you can’t claim that I misquote you later on.”

I forgot to mention this, but when I went to BestBuy last Friday, there was some moron and his GF admiring a Subaru WRX parked crooked in one of the spots. They both were wandering around it for a period that was too long for anyone over the age of 17. I pulled my Evo to the farthest spot away from them and every other idiot and started my 10 minute walk to the door.

When I was within 15 feet of the door, I hear the WRX fly up behind me and come to a fast stop within 3 feet of my right shoulder in a “I saw your car, and I’m showing off” sort of way. I just turned and looked at him like the fucktard that he was, and kept walking.

Then, from the passenger seat, his GF said “What’s up?” in that challenging way that only fat ass, tight pants wearing, wet curl bitches that get a cheap thrill from watching their boyfriends get punched in the face can.

Reaction 1: Put my fucking lug sole hard enough into the door that it dents it enough that he can’t open it and then either smile at him or punch him through the window.

Reaction 2 (too late): “Oh, you should dump her. She’s the kind of girl who gets guys like us punched in the face.”

Rection 3: “Cute Blue car.”

But, the funny thing was that the guy just turned to her and said “Don’t do that” really fast and wouldn’t turn back to me, completely extinguishing the situation.

For some reason, I felt like I won something.

Later, the whole thing sort of struck me. I haven’t been in a fight in years, yet 15 years of having to know how to deal with getting jumped or picked on have left me with instincts that are about as useful to an adult male as his appendix.

Sunday
Today, we got to go see #1GF!’s cute-as-a-button niece who is just crossing the age where children are wary of me. She’s still in that “pick me up and hold me” age where #1GF! is more appealing than climbing on the jungle jon. Soon, she will cross into the age of of “chuck me around the room” where Jon will dominate. Enjoy it now, auntie. The End is neigh.

I then somehow developed a motherfucker of a migraine and spent 4 hours hiding from light and sound, recovering just enough to go to a cookout with some of my friends. Even though I’ve known them for at least 15 years, no one hit me in the nuts once. That shouldn’t have to be counted as a benefit for a cookout, should it?

Friday
We went kayaking with my parents and I accidentally swamped my kayak while goofing off. A dry hold is where you store all the stuff you want to stay dry when you swamp your kayak. The air pocket that it creates also stabilizes the kayak while you get back to normal. When you treat a regular hold like a dry hold, you will have to drag all your wet stuff to shore before you can even think about emptying it out.

Thursday
We went to the beach all day. While walking around…
#1GF!: “Jon!”
Jon: “Huh?”
#1GF!: “You look like you’re going to kick someone’s ass.”
Jon: “Me? [guy sidesteps me] I think it’s just the way my face is.”

On the way out the door, I saved a worm from frying on the walkway. It took me a good minute to move it into the mulch because it was wiggling like mad. I was actually saying things like, “Come on, stupid” as if worms had ears.

That was probably the best part of my day.

After that, I agreed to attend a party which I is something that I rarely do.

Some notes:

• If you intentionally hit me in the nuts and spit water on me, you had better be a really good fucking friend of mine and we had better be 17.
• If you ask someone why they don’t drink in front of a group of people that they’ve just met, you will, nine times out of ten, force the person to reveal something personal that will make people uncomfortable.
• If you disregard the last rule and the person gets uncomfortable and says something like “Oh, I liked to drink, it’s just that other people didn’t really like me when I drank,” you are free to read “Alcoholic” between the lines.
• If you don’t read “alcoholic” and keep pushing the person to drink by handing them glasses of wine or saying things like “jussht shmell thish wine,” the alcoholic will inevitably assume that you are either stupid, an asshole, or both.
• If you missed the last rule, please don’t make “mmmmmmm” noises and waft the smell of your chocolate cake to a diabetic. They will assume the same about you that the alcoholic does. And they could die at your party. And nothing fucks up a party like a dead guy.
• If someone you just met is sitting quietly listening to a conversation, you will inevitably confuse the shit out of them if you break into the conversation and yell across the table, “You said people didn’t like you when you drank, and your personality sucks now.” This goes double if there isn’t a hint of jesting in your voice or demeanor. For this, you will probably not have the benefit of being assumed stupid.

I guess I’m not 17 anymore. People party, and some party hard. That’s cool with me. What’s not cool is wasting my life defending why I’m not following you off the cliff. I’ve done my share of drinking, and corked that bottle 9 years ago. If you haven’t, have at it. In either case, make a fucking decision and follow it. Don’t waste time trying to garner me as support for your decisions. The day that you get up, pour the shots, and bang in sick to work for a 3 day bender is the day that my respect for you actually goes up. Because even though you’re making bad decisions, at least you’re standing on your own two feet and making your own decisions. And on that day, call me. I’ve been there and might be able to help.

So, I’m not a party animal anymore. So, I have to waste 4 hours listening to why that’s wrong. Big deal. I’m actually really happy that 99% of the time I’m surrounded by people who don’t believe that my sobriety is the problem. I’m a lucky boy.

This morning, I woke myself up early to see if the recovery worked. I joyously discovered that the program detected 65 Gb of lost data. Unfortunately, because my slave drive was formatted NTFS instead of FAT32, the program couldn’t find a place to put it. Fuckkity shit crap poop. Good Morning!

On the next run, the drive died while reading, leaving me sitting on a floor saying things like “Don’t you die on my, you bastard!”

Now, I have to see if I can get a $200 refund and the drive is going back to Western Digital for replacement. Once I get a hankering to go near a computer again, I’ll need to buy something with a nice racing stripe or speed holes to help re-ripping all that music.

But for now, it’s all over.

Day 4:
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…

Day 5:
I can’t think, I can’t think, I can’t think…

Day 6 (today):
After 6 days, I finally found a trial program that could read about 65 Gb from my dead disc. It took 6 hours to do so, and then told me that I couldn’t save it and had to buy the full version. Fuck shit ass bitch nuts.

The full version of the program is $200, which is cheaper than sending the drive out to be professionally recovered, but wa-hay-hay more than a geek should ever have to shell out to save something he should’ve backed up in the fist place.

If you asked me 6 days ago to spend that kind of cake on the drive, I would’ve dismissed you with a wave of my nerd cape, but if you saw my clothing and hair style choices right now, you would agree that $200 is a cheap price to pay to abandon this kind of crazy. You can’t buy this kind of crazy from homeless Joe at the bus depot. And that’s a fact. I WHOOPED BATMAN’S ASS! Gagoulijibah.

So, when I wake up tomorrow, I might have blown $200 on a piece of software that wasn’t able to recover the months of music ripping and years of Perl scripts and web design on that drive. My hope, though, is that I wake up with a $200 backup that didn’t have to be sent to a lab.

In either case, #1GF! is completely done with me right now. I haven’t had a 10 minute stint without weaseling the words “hard drive” into the conversation, and I’ve spent more hours staring at the monitor than staring at her over the last 6 days. Plus, I blew off all phone calls and a cookout to work on this thing (Dear Geeks and Nerd, you may not see this as an issue, but that’s why you are reading this from a lab instead of from some naked woman’s apartment. In the relationship world, machine over human is a no no. Don’t attempt to explain the Matrix or the Borg, either. It will actually lose ground for you.)

It’s just that sometimes I lock onto a problem and won’t let go until it’s done. And sometimes, that’s just the way it has to be. Otherwise, I really won’t be wherever I’m standing until I’m standing where I think I need to be. In human relations, this is considered a defect. In problem solving it is an asset.

I solve problems. It’s what I do best. Humans, I’m working on.

Because we had a day off and no plans, we decided to revisit Cape Cod on our second day off. We drove alternate routes on the way down and back, traveling on the outside of the cape on the way down and on the inside on the way back. Normally the trip from bridge to tip is a couple of hours, but if you take alternate routes, it seems shorter because you see more than the typical highway monotony.

Do you seriously have any idea how many mini golf courses there are on the Cape? No matter where you are, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a giant whale par 3 or a lighthouse par 4. The number of mini golf courses is only topped by the number of friggin Christmas tree shops, which you can’t spit without hitting. Which I would if I didn’t think it would fly out the window and come back and hit me in the forehead. I hate the Christmas Tree Shop.

If you are unfamiliar with the Christmas Tree Shop phenomenon, it has nothing to do with Christmas at all. It’s simply a place where women go to buy things to clutter up their homes. And if your a man, stay the fuck out of there. I don’t care if you share an effeminate side, a penchant for ladies’ undergarments or a craving for cock. No common ground will save you. If you are not dripping with estrogen, they’ll eat you alive in there.

The only time I set foot in a Christmas Tree Shop was with my ex wife. Because her family made such a big fuss about the place, I could only assume that they owned a special plow with which to plow the merchandise directly into their cars. As a flea market fan myself, I thought that the place sounded interesting and figured, “Why not?”

I’ll tell you why not: because it’s not a flea market. It’s like a craft fare/fire sale bomb exploded in there. I walked about 15 feet into the store and was so inundated with low priced crap that I was completely overwhelmed. There wasn’t a manly item in the store. Hell, besides the elderly, broken down shopping cart slaves that some women tote with them shopping, there weren’t any men in the store. It was like accidentally wandering into the ladies unmentionables section and getting stuck there.

Within 10 minutes, I found myself staring into a basket of wooden apples.

“What are these, wooden? Who the hell needs wooden apples,” I asked no one in particular.

No fewer than five middle aged women lurking in the aisle simultaneously turned to me and berated me about exactly why people need wooden apples, why I had my head up my ass, and why if my ex wanted to buy wooden apples she should not be questioned on her purchases because I was a stupid, stupid man.

They didn’t explain wooden apples to me in a gently, “you poor man” kind of way. They were not kind. They were vehement. They defended a middle aged woman’s right to squander their poor bastard of a husband’s paycheck on whatever useless horseshit they wanted. They were on the attack. Over wooden fucking apples.

I turned to the ex wife standing outside of the gauntlet and just said “What the fuck? I’ll be in the car,” and walked the fuck out of that store never taking the stamp to allow re-entry. And since then, I haven’t been back.

After a long Friday at work, I usually unwind by visiting the music or computer sections at the local BestBuy, Compusa, or CircuitCity (It’s not a pretty fact, but it’s a fact). This past Friday was really no different, except that I had just gotten my EVO back after 2 weeks in the repair shop. I really didn’t appreciate the pure grandpa floatirion suckitude of the rental Camry (alignment problem included) until I re-acquainted myself with the EVO’s bone-jarring goodness on its maiden voyage to the local CompUSA.

While traversing the 10 mile hike from my ding resistant spot in the far reaches of the parking lot, I simultaneously reviewed the drive down and pondered the gigs and gigs of storage lining the shelves of the store. Just then, as if to drag me back to an unhappy reality, some guy walked up next to me and just started talking.

DumbAss: WR6.
Me: [ignoring the ramblings]
DA: WR6.
Me: What?
DA: WR6. WR6.
Me: WR6?
DA: Yea. WR6. It’s a WR6, right?
Me: Me? My car? It’s a Lancer Evolution.
DA: A Lancer Evolution WR6
Me: No. You mean a WRX.
DA: Oh, right, a Lancer Evolution WRX
Me: The WRX is a Subaru. Mine is A Lancer Evolution.
DA: Right a Subaru WRX.
Me: No. The Subaru looks kinda like it, but it’s not a Subaru. It’s a Lancer Evolution.
DA: ROCKET CAR!! [walks off]

I have stood for hours listening to insane people that I don’t know rattle off their life stories to me often enough that I usually deal with it without getting the slightest bit annoyed. The 30 seconds that made up this whole exchange left me so annoyed that I was on the edge of actually using the word “fucktard” and telling him to “just shut the fuck up and get away from me.”

Then, I visualized a key dragging across my new paint, and held my tongue to cut the stress level while I stared longingly at shelves and shelves of hard drives and other components.

Do you know why I don’t randomly walk up to strangers with baseball hats on and start shooting the shit about how the “Chicago Red Sox” or the “Cleaveland Cubs” are doing in the race for the cup? 2 reasons: I don’t bother people with questions if I don’t give a shit about the answer, and more importantly, I’d sound like a big, GODDAMNED FUCKTARD.

ROCKET CAR!

When someone gets their car smashed into, good responses are things like “No!” or “Dude, that fuckin’ sucks” or even “The next hooker’s on me, brother.” In no case where it is not your loss are you allowed to say something like “Well, at least no one was hurt.”

Ugh. I know you may not know what to say, but saying “At least no one got hurt” comes across like “It could’ve been worse, so look on the bright side!” And there’s nothing worse than a Professor Positive making light of your losses, when you’ll be spending the next month fighting the insurance company and driving a gray Chevy Impala that smells like ass and cigarettes.

I can tell you that after my house burned down, people would to say that all the time. And I’ll tell you, there’s nothing that incites the urge to burn someone at the stake than telling the story of how everything you owned was turned into a smelly, black pile of crap, and having people offer that pearl of wisdom to cheer you up. I mean this was only a small fender bender, and not a huge deal, so I was lucky that only a couple of people said this to me today. Being gracious, I only offered to light only one of them on fire, which was politely declined.

But, at least no one got hurt…

The next time you find yourself playing the Professor Positive card, just skip it. Instead, show the person a sympathetic furrowed brow and pony up the cash for the free hooker.

I had about 10 things that I wanted to write about today, but it was all trumped in fifteen seconds by a Q-Tip in a Buick. Being the wonderful employee that I am, I stayed a little late to fight a new virus that had come out. This put me in my car later than usual. You know my car? That black thing with the huge wing that I bought last November and I’ve parked insane distances away from anyone to prevent even the slightest ding or scratch? You know, the car that I really love driving with the tinted windows that didn’t have a fucking mark on it?

Yeaaaa, that one.

Well, while I was driving down Adams Street in Quincy as I normally do, a little old lady in a big old Buick decided that she didn’t like being parallel parked, didn’t feel like checking her mirrrors, and desperately felt like meeting a nice young man.

There wasn’t another fucking car on the road. Not one. And the distance of wide open road that she had to view my car coming down the street, had she checked any fucking mirror in her car, was 50 yards. Yet, the moment that my front bumber passed hers, she hit the gas and pulled out…right into the side of my fucking car.

Even though I swerved, she still managed to run the nose of that Buick right down the fucking side of my car. So, it’s not like she gently inched out just a wee granny inch. No. I was trying to get away from her like Hansel running from the old witch, and she was still stepping on the gas like Granny fucking Amphetamine.

That’s about the time that I think I just started yelling FUCK! at the top of my lungs. At one point I actually yelled it so hard that I bent forward at the waist. Then, I calmed down, and listened to the lady say little old lady things like, “I just don’t know what happened.” Well, I do, you fucking dumb ass. It’s pretty simple. You didn’t look, and you pulled out into the side of my car and kept going like it wasn’t even there.

I calmed the lady down, explained that these things happen, and even apologized for all the swearing. Then, I just drove the fuck home with no way to even get in touch with an insurance agent or a body shop tonight, which should be keeping me awake. I really should be stewing about this, but I’m not. I think all the yelling and the fact that I’m going to put some driving game into the PS2 to smash the fuck out of some Buicks is keeping me pretty calm.

I wonder if this will become so common as the baby boomers age that we’ll all just start buying crappy, Mad Max style cars to avoid the two weeks and twelve headaches that accompany dealing with the body shop.

But at least she smashed into my car rather than my apartment, right? Right?

Number of “fucks” in this post to this point: 11
To round it to a nice dozen: Fuck.
A Baker’s Dozen: Fuck.
And a few for the road: Fuckitty fuck fuck fuck.