This is kind of important.

I ain't interested in your fucking money games. If the only alternative is to knock myself off, then so be it.

Yeah, I'm not even bothering with warning about the expletives anymore. This competition culture ain't taking me alive. I'll sooner sit in a dank cell until AARP targets me than get involved in this shit. Selfish motherfuckers, the lot of you.

I don't have recordings of them, but I should go ahead and at least post the lyrics to two of my songs....... (they'll appear under this post)

Cheshire Adams - Society's Waste (lyrics)

(completed early this past Tuesday evening)


Set me aflame
On somebody's porch
Stamp me flat
Tryin' to put out the scorch
Hose me down
Wash me to the curb
Down the sewer
Where I shall not disturb

'Cause I'm society's waste
Created by man, given no plan
Society's taste is
Just do me away, however they can

All on this earth
Got a purpose to serve
Somewhere, someone
Got a hell of a nerve
To say I ain't got
Nor do I deserve
And so, with that
Down the toilet I curve

'Cause I'm society's waste
Got my own special zeus, gave me no use
Society's taste is
Gather the juice, and just let it loose on me

Leave me alone
Where nobody goes
Where I can just lie
And decompose
I'll just give way
To whatever grows
Could be a fungus
Or a nice bright rose
Or maybe I'm just dog food
Who knows? Who cares? Why should they?

'Cause I'm society's waste
Got creators who gave me nothing to do
Society's taste is
To have me just go POOF right into the blue
Society's waste, babe
Created by man, given no plan
Society's taste is
Just do me away, however they can

Cheshire Adams - Conundrum (lyrics)

(dated the end of September of 9)


People who don’t want to share
Impose their rules on those who do
If you just want to take it easy,
Well that’s just too bad for you
We gotta run like a pack of sled dogs
You step out of sync, get cast into the cold
If you survive until the end, you’ll be set free
To be pain-wracked, worn and old

It makes me not too keen on living
But I sure don’t want to die
Life could just be so much better
It makes me cry

Soulless sheep forsake the world
For goods that appeal to them
They see a member of their own kind
And somehow mistake them for an ATM
But I ain’t no bank or mint now
Never was, and I’ll never be
But they wear their legal shades ‘round
So that they don’t have to see

It makes me not too keen on living
But I sure don’t want to die
It makes me stew in stupefaction
And wonder why

I’ve learned of societies of yesteryear
Who could join their hands in song
They worked together and got on just fine
Until the white man came along
No antidepressant can bury the angst
Brought on by what we’ve become
Is there a chance at all for humanity
Or shall we beat the funeral drum?

It makes me not too keen on living
But a good life need not die
We can drown here in our sewage
Or we can fly

Actual Sign

Of course, much to my disappointment, they've changed it since I took this picture of it. The location is/was right on the outskirts of the town in which I make my home.

Maybe so many people are into "reality" shows as much as they are because their real lives are so bloody plastic and fake.

Honey I Shrunk the Attention Span

Here's a thought about the belief of the shortened attention span of the average person today....

I remember reading somewhere that the average person today receives more "new information" in one day than, for instance, people of 1830 received in their entire lifetimes. I say that maybe, just maybe, there's a link here. All kinds of crud are being rapid-fired right into our brains with no way of stopping it. Our brains are now devoted to all this crud, leaving little, if any, space for extended indulgences in speeches, novels, plays, etc. If there's any hope for getting a point across to the masses, the point will basically need to be made in a short, digestible manner. Hour and half-hour commercial-broken increments on TV, three-to-five-minute pop songs, brief blog posts.....these are the things that will successfully get a point across to masses who are, by and large, involuntarily unable to handle any more. This may also explain my, and others', aversion to writing long professional or academic papers and similar works; clear and well-supported arguments though these things may contain, who's going to read it and be able to care?

Hour and half-hour segmented increments on TV, fairly short pop songs, brief blog posts, and maybe a meandering verbal conversation. The way of the future — the way of now.

With Halloween out of the way, we get to move on to something scarier: Election Day.

In my neighborhood, garbage pick-up is on Wednesdays, which means we prepare for it the day before. Isn't it nice how Election Day and Garbage Night coincide?

Some people seem to perceive not voting as a form of protest. I just posted this as a reply to someone on Facebook, and I think it's worth repeating here:

The problem with that is, as far as I can tell, "no votes" aren't counted. Unless that somehow changes, the status quo votes will simply proceed without the non-voters, and the system will carry on with or without them. It seems to me that our best hope is for gradual change within the established system. So, yes, I vote, even if it is a lesser-of-two-(or-more)-evils choice.

More Election Day thoughts as they occur to me.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

—John Lennon

We've been studying Dante's Inferno in my class, and so, not unnaturally, religion is kind of a big topic on our minds of late. Well, long story short, this thought has occurred to me.....

God is a scapegoat.

If things never went wrong for us, we'd not have to blame anyone for those things. As it is, though, far be it for us to take responsibility. It must be the responsibility of someone or something that we cannot control or fix.

Think about it: if everything always went well, would you feel any need to attribute it to someone else? The existence of God in good times is an afterthought — a cover-up, if you will.

John Lennon had a rather mixed-up sense of politics and the like, but he nailed this one. Probably.

Why is it called "taking a $#!^"? We're not acquiring the stuff, we're getting rid of it!

Edit: I guess it's because the expression "giving a $#!^" was already taken....

It can hardly be a coincidence that the name "Feta" cheese so closely resembles the word "fetid".

So if the purpose of soap is to get things clean, how can it leave "scum"?

The central theme of the class I'm taking this semester is forgiveness. Meanwhile, my mother is still refusing to speak to me.

Cheshire Adams - So Far From Home (acoustic)

One take. Slight fade-out at the end and noises chopped off either end.



Your comments are welcome.


Woke up
Thought I'd have a nice cup of tea
Turned out
I'd no clue what lay before me
Whisked off
From my home before I could think
Not even granted
So much as a drink

And I try to find peace of mind
Everywhere I roam
But it seems this crazy universe
Will not leave me alone
And it pains me so to blindly sail
Into this vast unknown
In the face of all this rampant madness
So far from home

Shot at, insulted
Battered and bruised
Hung up and weary,
Dazed and confused
Wondering
If all this is really necessary
Crying out
For help with this load I must carry

And I try to find peace of mind
Everywhere I roam
But it seems this crazy universe
Will not leave me alone
And it pains me so to blindly sail
Into this vast unknown
In the face of all this rampant madness
So far from home

I'd like to know
Just what all this is for
Is this all there is
Or is there something more?
I'd like to make peace
Before I am through
If only I knew
What to do

And I try to find peace of mind
Everywhere I roam
Over desert sand and tundra
Soil and foam
But it eludes me still just like a
Dove that has flown
And I could probably find it again
If only I could get home

Woke up
Thought I'd have a nice cup of tea
Turned out
I'd no clue what lay before me
Still don't
But I know that it don't look good
I'd be
Right back in your arms if I could

And I try to find peace of mind.....

Eruption Pending

Once again, I may use some "swear" words here. You've been warned.


I came to realize: as far as my own life goes, the present sucks, and the future holds all the promise of Lindsay Lohan claiming to enter rehab. So, that leaves....the past.

High school, naturally. A time and place where I felt at home. Loved. I wasn't all that actively social at the time, something they attribute to Asperger's Syndrome (also their chosen explanation for why I feel like my home planet has much longer days and years than this one), but, by golly, I was kind, smart (then), full of friendly vibes and jokes. Nary an unkind word was said to me.

In the past.....I don't know how long.....weeks? months?, I've seen two or three familiar faces for about a minute at a time, maybe longer if we're on the bus. (People at my old job at the text conversion office, it's nothing personal; I dig you, but I haven't been feeling like I've been meant to be there. Only today did I finally convert a document after who knows how long.) The rest of the time, as I think I mentioned here earlier this semester, I've been feeling like a spectre in a sea of unfamiliar, basically indistinguishable faces bathing in cell phones and headphones. I especially feel it when I get out on the quad and jam on my acoustic. Headphones and cell phones. People may physically be there, but they might as well not be. It's like the old iPod commercials. Completely black shadows of people in headphones. No actual people. Just shadows.

I got no drive and no recognizable future. I already dropped one class this semester for a failure to get along with the professor (first time that's been the reason). I've wanted to leave academia altogether for a few years now, but then I won't have my text conversion job, because I have to be a student to work there for some reason. I've been all over Craigslist and other classifieds outlets, but nothing's appealed to me. I'm cat-less and dessert-less, though I haven't been that hungry the past few days anyhow, my traditional sense of humor seems to be largely slipped away, and, some hours ago as I lay kind of three-quarters asleep, my mother.....my proudly white suburban American mother, making it clear that she, too, has more or less hit a breaking point, proclaimed as loudly as possible that she hates me. (Talking to my father: "I HATE HIM, AND I HATE YOU!!")

So, that's the bag I'm in. I'm willing, but I'm having trouble finding my ability. I keep having ideas for songs and then never get around to fully writing them. I equate success with happiness and consider them independent of social class or anything like that. Either way, I am not successful right now.

I'm just kind of here. I'm around. Around, in a square hole. Or sticking awkwardly out of it, because I don't fit. And so I'm here. I'm here. I am here. I....am.....



GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH! I'M SO ALONE! WHERE IS EVERYBODY? WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME? AAAAAUUUUGGGGHHH.......


*collapses in a heap of incoherence*

Found this in a drawer

Let me know if you can't read the sticker on the back, 'cause that's the reason I post this here.

Anyone else have that dream where you still remember the combination to one of your high school lockers, and you open it, and your stuff is still there, even though you're well aware that you're years beyond graduation? Lucky I don't actually remember any of my combinations.


Hmm, Firefox is telling me that "combinations" isn't a word. Odd. It's certainly not "combinatia."

#&¢% Censorship

We seem to have gotten to the point where it's become standard to give television shows names with expletives in them ("Who the Bleep Did I Marry", "Bleep My Dad Says"). I don't know about anyone else, but I see absolutely no point in making the censored words so blatantly obvious with bleeps, be they in audio form or visual (the latter called "grawlix", according to Dribbleglass). We're in the digital age, and, in short, I propose this:

We got standard-def and high-def versions of the channels on our systems; perhaps we should have censored and uncensored versions of the channels as well. The TV service can put an option in the guide for a "censored only" list to please the Christians. We got an HD-only list option on our system, we should be able to do a censored-only list. The puritan-descendants can use that list...put a lock on for the kids...and the rest of us can kick back and enjoy the shows as they were meant to be.

'Cause let's face it: some of these shows have characters speaking in sentences that are nearly completely made of obscenities, and we hear an occasionally interrupted beep. What's the point of airing these things in the first place? Viewers of these things know what they're watching and are perfectly comfortable with all the violence, sex and general dysfunction. What difference will a handful of (frequently used) four-letter words and their variations make?


Those are the [words] that'll infect your soul, curve your spine, and keep the country from winning the war.

—George Carlin

If you're happy and you know it, whoop-dee-doo
If you're happy and you know it, good for you
If you're happy and you know it, and you really want to show it,
Well I recommend you do it somewhere else.

You know you've grown up when you identify more with the coyote than the roadrunner.

The time at which you get to the bus stop is the additive inverse of the time at which the bus gets there.

I think I said that right.

Okay, the Geico ad with the pig can go away now.

Does this lawn need mowing?

If clicking the small image below doesn't let you see the big, hi-def image, please say so.

Courier

An Indian chef.

A bus driver started this bit of stuff

I let my mind drift.

It can get rather oxygen deprived in space. I gotta supply it with a spacesuit and a good-sized O₂ tank.

It's gotten to know that suit quite well.

So many wonders it can see beyond that suit.

But it can never touch them.

Most of it seemed to make some kind of sense at the time.

—Arthur Dent

False premonition in that last post. Maybe. Or really early one. Hey, who else has a sudden strong craving for milk?

This whole "academia" scene isn't quite for me, I think. I'm sure one current professor of mine would be quick to agree. That person rather rubs me the wrong way, despite being familiar with Can (link to my review of Ege Bamyasi). I'm six years into college now, twenty-four credit hours (eight classes) from a bachelor's, and still the thought of crawling to the finish line just to trade in the ribbon for forty-some-odd years down another, horrendously dull, desert road doesn't turn me on. I say "crawling", because given my state of mind since roughly 2006, these days officially documented by a neuropsych doctor and some accomplices, I'm only taking a class or two per semester.

I don't need a whole lotsa money, I don't need a big fine car. Hell, I don't need a TV of any kind. Telephones can stuff their minutes up their charging end too. I'm perfectly happy with Internet, music and cats. (...as "Year of the Cat" comes on my system.) True, there are some other things I think are rather groovy, such as heating/air conditioning and indoor plumbing, but do I really need the sort of job that requires an official degree for me to be happy?

I also wouldn't mind some traveling, but I'm sure that will come.

Happiness. It's all we need.

I appreciate the valiant efforts of some—some—folks at the university, but I'm just not feeling it there.

Well, while I work with someone to figure things out for me, anybody got any thoughts about the portrayal of human nature in The Iliad?

Something is wrong.

I don't know exactly what it is. I'm in Chicago, and I'm going back downstate tomorrow. Likewise, my cousin, her boyfriend and Newton the cat are driving back to Cookeville from here tomorrow. We had a lovely dinner at Koi. It's a bit wet out now. The Rs (cousin and boyfriend) are asleep now, and the others are looking at magazines downstairs. Everything seems fine.

I don't know what it is.

Something is wrong.

I have trouble comprehending the works of Homer. It's all Greek to me.

First Day of Class

....Since some time in December. Hadn't been in a big crowd of students for a while. It seemed like every eighth person I saw reminded me of someone I once knew......another day, another lifetime, to quote The David. Didn't actually know anybody I saw today. Except one of the bus drivers.

See, because I'm, well, weird, I've been a college undergrad since August of 2004. The first few semesters, I actually did occasionally see someone I knew. Those days seem to have faded now, and I feel like an early primate among the more evolved (theoretically) humans. "What? No one wants to climb the trees with me and throw bananas at each other??" Well, maybe I don't do anything like that, but you get the idea.

As some readers and (cyber-)acquaintances may have guessed, I'm not that social. I have no interest in sporting events, I don't go to bars, and, in truth, I don't know what else there is that draws a good chunk of people. There's not that much local music downstate here, and I'm not sure I could afford to make a habit of seeing it if there were. Basically, I stay home, snuggle my quadrupedal friends, play some music (digital or guitar), and dig my pads in cyberspace. And sleep.

Which, incidentally, I should probably get to doing now. It's 00.47, and the semester's under way.

To sleep, perchance to dream. (Shakespeare does loom in one of my two classes this semester, but no Hamlet.) I seem to be dreaming of my dear, departed cats with increasing frequency.........

I said I wanted to "get the hell out of Illinois." So it occurred to me, that sounds like I'm ridding Illinois of a "hell." I am trying to remove something...a hell...out of Illinois. Get it out. Only, the thing being removed from Illinois is me. So.....am I.....a hell?

I'll have it done in about thirty, thirty-five.

Hours? Days?

Anno domini.

Life's simple pleasures: Spraying whipped cream directly into your mouth.

The prices at the hardware store are wrong on so many levels.

Aunt "Cookie"

She always had that nickname, long before whatever it was that happened to her happened to her. She was....normal, as it were. She had a job; she drove; she was healthy; she was as groovy as anybody could expect anyone to be.

I'm not sure how many years ago now the youngest of my paternal grandmother's three children began her descent into what I can only call mental oblivion. I only saw her two or three times a year to begin with. I'm sure there was plenty of discussion of her as my made my way through school and adolescence. I tend to live in my own little world anyway, so, add those two things, and see you in a decade, more or less. But I did notice when she consistently failed to get Dinah the dog's name right after a number of visits. ("Diane"...."Dayna"....) I had heard about her (Cookie) being in the hospital for a little while, but only sort of in passing. A short time later, we met again, and it was obvious — she was grooming herself very poorly, if at all, and my mother was miffed at being identified by her as "Jim's sister." (As far as I know, Jim was an only child and only ever married to, and divorced from, my other aunt. It's all my father's family in Chicago; all my mother's family is in Israel, England, or Florida, except Mom.)

All this time, Cookie is very much being looked after by her husband. Jack is rather different from most of the family, with motorcycles and guns among his favorite topics, but he loves Cookie. Always has.....still does. He's been by her side all the way.

It went on. A Thanksgiving or two later, after Jim had died, she was a very nervous wreck. She moaned the phrase "Oh no!" at regular intervals when there was nothing apparent happening. At the dinner table, she would ask "Where's [insert family member here]?" of everyone. I don't remember how we responded when she asked about Jim, but I do remember my other aunt saying "I was waiting for her to ask." I was still kind of semi-oblivious, I guess; when she asked about me, I gave a friendly wave, grinned, and went back to eating my drumstick. (We take food seriously in our family.) After the meal, she and Jack found it necessary to have her collapse in my bed for a while. I kept an eye on her as I sat at the computer, which happens to be in that room.

From this point until Christmas of last year, my memory is dim. I don't know when it was that she started falling and badly bruising herself. There are photographs of her in the hospital with nasty bruises and, I think, a number of teeth missing. Not pretty. I believe she's been in "the hospital" ever since. She's changed places a few times. I've only seen her twice since then myself, but I think she was in a place or two that I never saw. Christmas of last year, we went to see her in a place in Glen Ellyn. Or Glendale Heights. Whichever it was, it's three expressways and then some from West Rogers Park. In Chicago snow and ice. But that's beside the point.

When they eventually let us in to see her, the person they presented to us seemed incapable of speech. Of whether or not she recognized everyone we couldn't be certain. Occasionally she would emit a sort of moaning sound, and she often pulled the covers of the kind of mobile easy chair she was in over her face. At the time, the surest sign of the aunt I knew was at the very end of our visit, when I went alone to bid her farewell and she waved.

That was in December of 2009. Fast-forward to May or June, I don't quite remember which, of 2010.

The location now was, and from all reports is, a nursing home in Des Plaines. In the corner of a dimly lit room that smelled unnaturally like a high school chemistry lab lay a figure. She was essentially a skeleton without teeth. She could not make any vocal sounds at all, and she seemed oblivious to our being there. In fact, we stood outside the room for a little while as someone, um, changed her. During that time in the hall, another patient approached us and asked where she was. I told her, "You are wherever you wish to be."

I'm not so sure I believe that, mind you. It sounds nice, spiritual, optimistic, and all that stuff. But I sure didn't want to be seeing my 57 or 58-year-old aunt reduced to what many people cheerfully call a "vegetable."

And, apparently, nobody knows why she's become a vegetable. There is no explanation for her descent from a full-fledged, vibrant adult into mental oblivion. All I hear from my family is that she's "the same," and that "the sooner she goes, the better."

Lest you wonder, Jack still goes to see her about three times a week, or so I'm told. I'm not sure when I last saw Jack, although he does keep in touch over the telephone with my other aunt, who happens to be an award-winning palliative care nurse.

I don't remember much about Cookie's personality as a mentally healthy individual. But the prompt for my posting all this is a dream I had last night, in which a young, healthy Cookie was alive. There were some distant relatives that I'm not sure who they were, but Cookie was alive, and she was pleasant. She smiled, she spoke with just a hint of Chicago accent, and, oddly enough, she was cooking something.

Also starring in my dream was a sweetly curled Lucy. Lucy seemed to be in fine mental shape, if slightly bent and frail physical shape, when she made her midnight exit documented here a few posts down.

After lying in my bed for a while, feeling like I'd been in a matter transference beam that messed up, my head was quite filled with thoughts of life, death, spirits and the threads that make up the fabric of the universe. And so I hope you've been able to dig the expression of my thoughts here in cyberspace; after all, that's what I believe this blog is for.

Peace and love.

A caption in search of a cartoon

"Hey, Mom, when's it gonna be my turn to use the mood swings?"

Here's a question for you: If people with Attention Deficit Disorder outnumber people without it, should we stop diagnosing people with ADD and start diagnosing the others with Attention Surplus Disorder?

Who's the more out-of-time....

....the child who sings a song from Frank Zappa's debut in the year 2010, or the child's mother who asks him/her, "Why can't you sing any normal songs?"

Lucy — 1993 - 2010

“Laughing and crying ... it’s the same release.”

—Joni Mitchell, “People’s Parties” (from Court & Spark)

“Even when you look for [weirdness], you’re never prepared for it.”

—Hobbes the tiger



What a long, strange trip it’s been.

I had been remarking of late that I hardly saw family anymore. It seemed like everyone was either sick, hundreds of miles away, or flown from this mortal plane. I needed to see people. I needed to feel love and life. And what better time to see people than the weekend of my twenty-fourth birthday. My cousin was in town, and we would get to see a couple of lesser-known-to-me relatives in Arlington Heights, as well as a couple of long-time-unseen family friends. And that’s not to leave out some family quadrupeds — Dinah and Stella from downstate, Tazzy and K.C. in the suburbs.........and Lucy.

We talked; we laughed; we smiled; we ate; we caught the end of a rare Cubs victory; all was good.

It’s always abrupt.

I neither heard the cry nor saw the break. For a little while, we all thought everything was fine and all was clear for the consumption of Princess Torte. Then we decided we should check on her.

A forearm should not bend like that when she walks.

The emergency vet’s diagnosis and our resulting decision thwacked me like a one-two punch. How the heck could she get stuck in a chair she should know so well? Had she really been that sick this last week?

It was a bizarre and surreal moment when she came in for the last time, wrapped in a towel with an IV through a bandage on her other leg. She clearly wanted to drift to sleep as we snuggled and admired her one last time. Curiously, she had not shown signs of being in pain since the original cry. I remained fixed on her.

This was more than a house pet; this was the lone representative of my whole conscious life to this moment.

Lucy was adopted as a kitten by my grandmother Lila in 1993, as was her twin brother, Linus. I was in second grade at the time. When Lila died the following year, my uncle Jim took up the young felines. For a few years in the middle, Jim had his own place in the suburbs, and so that’s where Linus and Lucy went. The rest of the time, everyone stayed with Lori......and Loki and Abby.

Lucy tended to take a back seat to the other cats. Loki was the alpha, and he and Abby ruled the upstairs. Of the two “Van Pelts,” Linus, being bigger and more sociable, got the lion’s share of, well, most things. This may explain the distaste that Lucy expressed toward the other cats. But I gave Lucy as much attention as I gave anyone. She was primarily Jim’s cat; anyone else had to specifically look for her if they wanted to see her.

I couldn’t resist that eternally youthful kitten face. She didn’t seem to think me too shabby myself. She was the most enthusiastic of the four about claiming me as hers. The more enthusiastic the rubs and snuggles, the better, I say.

I kind of figured she would outlast all the others — the others being two diabetic big boys and a lady some three-and-a-half years her elder. By the time Jim died, Loki and Abby, the kittens of 89, had also gone, granting the “Van Pelts” the whole house. Lucy’s behavior changed from that point: she became more social, stopped hissing at her brother, and, for some reason, stopped grooming herself. I didn’t think to call her a “Rastafurrian” at the time; I just thought of it now. Anyway, I spent a few hours over time attempting to comb some of the mats out of her fur. She was quite resistant to that the first few times, but I believe she came to realize that it was a “necessary evil,” and so I could get away with it while she napped.

Lucy changed her behavior still when Linus departed. The spotlight was all hers now, and she claimed it calmly, quietly, and gracefully, although one person whose bedroom she now shared would beg to differ about the “quietly” part. She’d get a bit bossy after a while, and, out of the blue, she’d pick up some of Linus’s old tricks. Also, for no apparent reason, she would soak the underside of her face in her water (a long time habit of Dinah the dog, from whose schnauzer beard water drips all over the floor).

That cat had brains. She and I could communicate, and I swear she figured out how to open the basement door.

For about seventeen years out of my twenty-four, Lucy remained, a consistent sweetheart and an anchor to the best of my days.

As we drove back home, just after midnight, I could momentarily see, between the tears, a full (?) moon masked by lightly hazy clouds. I think there was one small lightning fork beneath it as we came down McCormick. I don’t know if it means anything, but it seems somehow poetic.

Lucy changed her behavior with each close death. Now, with Lucy’s passing, perhaps it’s my turn to change behavior just a bit.



Lucy, exact date unknown, 1993 – June 28, 2010.

Rest in peace, my Angel.




(This is my final photograph of Lucy, taken on May 31, 2010.)

I need food to give me energy to open a jar of food.

Idea For a Corona Ad

For those who haven't seen the Twilight Zone episode "Eye of the Beholder": SPOILER ALERT! (You can look it up on YouTube and watch it before you read on.)

And for those who haven't seen the Corona beer ads on TV here in the States, they tend to base themselves on dialogue-less perspective tricks using the Corona bottles at a relaxed scene on a beach. And the more recent ones involve a couple on the beach (shot from behind) silently going at each other for ogling passing members of the other sex.

Anyway, my idea: Start with that same scene of the couple in their chairs. The camera zooms in kind of semi-slowly on one of the Corona bottles. Eventually, it gets too close and knocks it over. A voice says "Oops!" The camera zooms back out. The couple simultaneously turn their heads to glare at the camera, and it is here that they turn out to have the sort of faces that the majority of the people in the "Eye of the Beholder" world have.

I enjoy going to restaurants, asking for a "cherry soda," and listen to how most waitpersons instantly repeat back to me "cherry Coke" or "cherry Pepsi." On a couple occasions, I've gotten something resembling plain seltzer with grenadine.

The "Trend Watch" has been removed from my browser's home page.

Am I the only one who never got anything out of 3D glasses?

Advertising Round-up (Cinco de Mayo 2010 installment)

I love poking fingers at advertising. It's a nice, reliable target, and I figure any debate that may emerge will be nicely light-hearted and not blow up in a hideous ball of flame. So here I go.......

.....Starting with the Progressive Insurance saleslady. She's annoying. Please, someone make her go away. Fakely (is that a word?) perky salespeople are annoying and, as far as I know, virtually nonexistent in real life. Why would anybody who sells insurance (the very idea of which makes at least one portion of my brain blow up in a hideous ball of flame, but that's my problem) be that perky?

Another highly annoying trend in ads is that of things seeming as though they really ought to be funny.......you guessed it.....but aren't. That brings me to the Dairy Queen "lips" icon. I think I've mentioned that character on here before, but I never really explained why. Lips, if you're out there......you're not funny. Either stop trying or go away. Arby's Oven Mitt and the lady from T-Mobile both seem to have disappeared from our televisions, and I haven't missed either of them. They had the same problem.

One more major irritant to me is any use of the phrase "ooh-la-la" in an advertisement. As soon as I hear that, I make it a point to not buy that product.

And the big one that really seems to be in full swing these days: using words naturally exclusive to one part of speech (noun, verb, etc.) as a different one. I don't know if I ever actually noticed it that much before recently, when I first saw billboards for Droid (whatever exactly Droid is) over Chicago that read "A bare-knuckled bucket of does." When I first saw that, I was confused. I interpreted it for a moment as pronounced "a bare-knuckled bucket of d'ohs." I thought "Uhh...okay. What am I going to do with a bunch of female deer? Lucy doesn't get along with other quadrupeds that well. She hissed at her own brother for years." Then I got closer to the thing and saw at the bottom, in smaller print, "...In a world of doesn't." Suddenly, it all became clear: certain marketing people must be destroyed. I've noticed the phenomenon many times since then. I think Chex Mix is now calling themselves "a bag of interesting." In fact, one of the most recent ads out there features the promoter actually catching itself using "bacon" as a verb. Ironically, it was the Dairy Queen "lips" icon........

....Anyway, I happened to recall an old Calvin & Hobbes strip while I was thinking about that. I go along with Hobbes. Leave it to the cat to be the voice of reason.

All right. Um.....another one I just remembered: the occasional tag line describing something as "being the new (other thing)." That may have been clever once, but now it's just cliché. And confusing at that.

How should one advertise, you ask? Simple. Follow the example of Empire Today carpeting. Describe what you're selling in an easy voice....not shouting. Car dealers, I'm lookin' at you. Then, at the end, have a nice, simple, catchy jingle. Empire's been using the same jingle, recording and all, for I don't know how long. It's gotta be at least from the Sixties. I can tell you this: I don't know if I'll ever actually use Empire's services, but, by golly, I know their phone number by heart, thanks to their jingle.

On radio, meanwhile.........yeah, I still sometimes turn the radio on when my mp3 player's battery runs out or the Cubs game is on.......I understand they once would run programming alternating between one song and one commercial, rather than a handful of songs followed by seemingly interminable commercials. I wouldn't mind bringing that back. Or radio ads could be in the form of nicely crafted songs. I got a few vintage Coke ads by popular bands from back in the day, such as the Who, the Box Tops, the Blues Magoos, and so on. They're probably on YouTube somewhere. But a nicely crafted original song is good. The Kars for Kids song, on the other hand, is one of the most revolting sounds I've ever heard. I change the station as soon as that keyboard plays.

And that can be my ending note for this rambling: kids' singing is not pleasant. Keep that stuff on your own digital cameras, Facebook accounts or whatever. I don't care if he's dead; if Michael and the Jackson Five pop up on my radio, I change the station. If the kid writes their own songs, bleeding angst and oozing creativity, preferably with a psychedelic touch, then maybe I'll consider them. And, while I'm at it, that Just For Men ad with the little girls giving that stuff to their father is just creepy.

Right. Well, I'm off to dinner. I want my baby back baby back baby back baby back ribs. And maybe a Tommy James record.

Actually, no I'm not. I just remembered one more annoying trend in advertising: using re-recorded versions of classic songs in the ad, especially if the lyrics are altered to suit the product. I don't know if there's a connection between the Chili's jingle and "Draggin' the Line", but I haven't seen the Applebee's ads with the bastardized oldies for a while now, and I'm perfectly okay with that. (Although it was pretty laughable when Kentucky Fried Chicken was using "Sweet Home Alabama" for their ads.)

Okay, now I'm done.

(All company names are trademarked in the names of themselves. Blah blah blah.)


Edit, a few days later: I was just reminded of a groovy commercial character earlier when I saw one of the ads: the Miller High Life delivery (or, more frequently, revocation) guy. Go get them rich business @$$#*£&$!

I just discovered I have a "follower"!

Who are you? How did you find me?

Someone tell me again what people see in Joe Cocker....?

Re: One of those random bits that comes up in the upper right, or "Come, all Freudian disciples!"

Specifically: My train of thought hasn't really derailed so much as it has driven into a wormhole in the space-time continuum that opened up on the track, and landed on a strange planet whose predominant life forms closely resemble trains...

I just dreamt about this. The scene opens on a guy who appears to be riding a train that's running alongside another one. He's quite alone, evidently, and he shouts out his situation in the hope that someone will hear him and respond. "I'm an interplanetary explorer, and I've landed on a strange planet. Is there anyone here?" Suddenly, part of the train next to him seems to form a bizarre, kind of olive green face that speaks: "You have no idea how strange it is....." "I just got an idea," responds the human. "Kindly get off my friend," says the train. "Ow! What the hell?" says the train that the man has been riding. The man quite cinematically falls onto the sparse, dusty grass and rolls around until he stops on his back, gazing up at the trains, who have stopped as well. "Is there anything to eat in this place?" says the human. "Funny you should ask....." A lovely action scene ensues, in which the human discovers another "locomotive being," this one with humanoid life forms swarming all over, in and out of, it like an infestation of parasites. None of them speak or display any kind of "intelligence," nor do they notice him.

Flash to: something that appears to be a giant warehouse. Most of the people herein are oblivious to everything. Two are not. They run frantically in search of an elevator, which they eventually find. It seems to close and depart without them, but they manage to jam a bit of it and get in. At the wide-open top level, there's a giant sliding plexi-glass door with a wooden grid throughout—too large for a single person to budge. But, on the other side of the door.......a large group of people. Not sheeple. They work together with the two of us (oh, yeah, did I mention I'm one of the two?) to slide open the door. It gets more difficult the closer we get to opening it, but we do eventually produce a wide-enough crack for the two of us to squeeze through. The lot of us proceed to fly over the dull grey parking lot into the similarly dull grey sky.

I continue to see that grey light unique to a rainy sky. Except everyone else has disappeared. I momentarily remain in the sort of suspension that I sing about in "Frequent Flyer." The light briefly changes color just a little bit, but the same grey remains.....just on the other side of the sheets that have hitherto shielded my suddenly half-open eyes......

Well, I hope you enjoyed that bit of nonsense. Tune in next week when I investigate the printer at the end of the tunnel, or whatever that one says.

Relation or coincidence?

I took the train home yesterday, and I sleeplessly looked out the window most of the trip. I couldn't help but notice that, in a few of the small towns along the railroad and US 45, there's a little blue building next to the tracks. It looks the same in all those towns.....namely, it looks abandoned. I had to wonder if these small towns used to have passenger train stations and, therefore, nice little relatively local trains that stopped there. I'm a fan of public transit, and it seems a pity to not give small-townies the option thereof. I think if I were stuck in one of those small towns, I'd go ins—well, I'm already insane, but—I'd require a straitjacket, yeah. Kind of run-down looking pits of boredom, they seem.

These are the kinds of things you see on public transit.....pitiful small towns, and what seems to be a full square mile of a (one) Wal-Mart outside of Bourbonnais. (See it in Street View on Illinois 50 at "Indian Oaks", just north of the Interstate interchange.)

Anybody else hearing more sirens than usual recently, or is it just me?

Trend Watch Noticer

MSN changed their homepage recently, which I noticed for the simple reason that one of my e-mail accounts is on Hotmail. They have this thing now in the lower right called a "trend watch," which lists a bunch of nouns and whether those subjects are increasing, decreasing, or remaining steady in apparent popularity.

What would be the purpose of this thing, exactly? Is it a strong suggestion to readers of what to care about? The few times I've seen Chile on there, it's always been accompanied by a red down arrow. Or are they trying to expose the shortcomings of the sort of people who use Twitter? I don't even look at Twitter myself, much less use it, so I can't really offer any comment on the sort of people who use Twitter.

Either way, it seems totally useless to me, so what I think I'll do is add a nonsensical "trend watch" to the side bar of this blog. The graphics won't be as advanced, but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway.

Bump: I wonder if, just maybe...

....the story of Noah's Ark refers to an event that's yet to come....

I had a wicked dream about this last sleep....probably influenced by the peculiar amount of snow that the northern hemisphere has seen this winter (and is still seeing). It came on the heels of other dreams involving a stolen car, hopelessly drunken acquaintances (actually nobody to whom I can attach a name I know, but they were acquaintances in the dream), and finally my own being held hostage by a psychotic police state. And I don't mean imprisoned, I mean being in a large house and part of a group of people whose numbers were ever falling.

So I got to thinking once again about the possibility of global warming inducing massive floods to "clean up" the wholly messed-up world we're on. And I don't know if anyone reads this blog regularly, but I do wish that somebody would comment and let me know what they think.

I'm still here.

Just haven't had much to say lately, is all.