Don’t know why, but the cron job that’s supposed to post shit here from like remote locations has shit the bed. Computers suck.

I just sent a bunch of stupid pictures that were on my cell phone and just itching to be deleted here. Sadly, it’s a mishmash of unsorted non-chronological stuff, including pictures of workmen fixing the power outage here that seemed to be a blip on the radar screen of my neighborhood only, unnoticed by all others, a couple of shows and letting a drunk friend play with my phone one night at a bar.

Other than that, I continue to excavate the bombing of Dresden, which is how I have now come to think of my apartment.

Is this an example of two wrongs not really making anything?

Last night, I’m driving down Prospect onto Mass Ave right when a big wave of rain started pelting. A dude on Mass Ave getting ready to cross Prospect picked up his pace and jogged into the street. Right then the light changed to green and the car in front of me started moving into a left turn. (I can’t remember if you can turn left onto Mass Ave from Prospect; I know it is illegal to take a left from Mass Ave to Prospect.)

So, on a dark and rainy night, the pedestrian speeding up because of the rain and the car driver concentrating on the light having just changed both ended up occupying damn near the same space. The walker was bullshit at the car for moving into the crosswalk at all, judging by his gesticulations and his next move. Suddenly, oblivious to the pouring rain, he just planted himself in front of the car and shook angry fists.

This seemed to amuse the car’s occupants, because they were visibly laughing and smiling, and though they had stopped completely it looked like they might start inching forward just for the giggle.

The now enraged pedestrian took the fast-food container in his hands and whipped it at the car with much indignant force and ran off into the wet and the night. The car just rolled on through.

Sadly for me, watching this tiny movie from the safe distance of my car, there wasn’t any food in the container to creat a satisfying splat. An empty and smashed container just dropped to the pavement.

The most righteously angry pedestrian had littered.

I stayed up late last night working on this little animated gif:

When it started to rain at around 7 a.m. or so, I seriously rethought the wisdom of not retiring earlier. I gathered my strength and hauled shit from my back porch under shelter as the rain pelted and poured around me in those giant, splashing drops common to this season. I then went back to bed.

I awoke to this:

Yeah, what the hell was I thinking?

The skies just handed me both of my cheeks.

I couldn’t decide whether I would have another yard sale. In my decisiveness, or lack thereof, I left all sorts of treasure on the back porch. I kept looking at the sky and thinking “one more day, the weather will hold one more day before rain.”

How many New England Septembers have I lived through?

While digging through my vast accumulation of junk and treasure, I just had an epiphany about “antique” and it’s meaning and time’s passage.

Because of the platter pictured below, I was reading up on Staffordshire pottery, and thinking, “Shit, it’s my mother’s stuff, so it can’t be from the 1800s,” when the pottery scene was kicking and people like Wedgwood and his sons were doing their thing. You know, I’m an American in the new millenium, so how the fuck could I have any reach all the way back to back in the day.

But, duh, here’s the epiphany. My mom was born in 1929, right into the Depression. Her dad served in WWI as a doughboy, circa 1914 or so, right. I knew my grandfather, and again, duh, for him to be a soldier in that war, he was born in the 1800s, right? As was my aunt Mary, who was already in her 80s when I graduated high school in 1981.

Ergo, I’m a moron. Not only is it only two generations back that I can get back a hundred years or so, but I even knew that generation. It’s pretty easy to imagine my grandfather’s parents or their families shopping for some dishes back in the hey day of the dish-making scene in the middle of the 19th century.

Hell, I even have a certificate from St. Gabriel’s Monastery in Brighton offering a prayer for the dead in perpetuity for my great grandmother starting 1/10/1924, which must have been on or around when she died. (Oh wait, the fine print has prayers for both the living and the dead, so all I know is some time some one spent $5 for perpetual membership.) So, yeah, safe to say she stretched back a bit crossing centuries.

That reminds me, I gotta give the brothers of St. Gabe’s a call and make sure they’re still at it. It does mention “perpetual” praying. Although, I guess the two loopholes are the whole chucking of purgatory and purgatorial praying in the 1960s and, of course, maybe her soul was light enough to not need that much praying to move her into heaven. Hard to say, I guess.

Boston is too fucking small, anyway. Once I’m done getting my shit and my house together and have fully used every aspect of medical insurance I got, it’ll be fucking great to get the hell out of Dodge.

Leastways, that’s what I was thinking when I ran into someone at the VW dealership from the evil place I used to go to every day. It wasn’t that bad, since I’m too old to have hidden and felt shame, but it could have been more fun.

With the shooting dental pain and all and the extra pleasant, sunshiney stroll I had leaving the dealership, I was pretty grateful that I’m not pounding the workaholic hours to which I had once grown accustomed. I would have likely taken a fistful of naproxen and not called a dentist, while cabbing from the car place to the office.

Fuck that noise. From now on, my needs and those of folks I care about come first. A hard lesson to learn, but let’s hope the second half of my life re-prioritizes shit by actual importance and I never spend another 60 hours a week serving no final purpose.

Had fun at the Comedy Connection last night. I really should try harder to post about shows in advance of their happening, you know, like promoting them. But, ah well, some of us are marketers and some of us just date them.

Hanging out with some other comics afterward, I had shooting pains radiating through my head. In and of itself that’s not unusual, as anyone who has hung out with comedians will attest. But rather than the psychic pain of “funny” people, this pain was organic. For a long time, I’ve had a gaping hole in a tooth where a filling used to be. Finally, the nerve is making it’s presence truly known.

I have a weird dental fear, though. It’s not so much the drill and the pain and the drill and the pain, as the sense of shame. I can tolerate pain, as evidenced by my continual use of in lieu of actual medical treatment. And, no one I was with last night knew what electric shots of numbing, excruciating, throbbing pain forced me to put the tortilla chip down and swallow my beer gingerly (not to be confused with ginger beer). Yeah, I’m pretty fucking macho when it comes to pain.

But, when the hygienist picks away and picks away and tsks and murmurs and mentions adequate flossing and brushing and rinsing, I wilt. I hate that whole rigamarole worse than the pain. OK, I also fucking can’t stand the novocaine needle. (But judging by the stuff I found when I tried to find a picture of the typically gi-normous needle, I’m hardly alone.)

I fucking hate the lectures, though. Worst thing about dental shame was I found a dentist a while back who I liked treatment-wise. However, his secretary or billing company or whatever kept fucking up every single payment that I made, as well as those made by my insurance company. So, I was continually getting dunning notices and a few times the dentist himself called looking for his cash. After the third time of sending off copies of my cancelled checks and insurance statements, followed by another imploring phone message explaining how his practice was small and he counted on people to be honest and pay, I gave up and stopped going.

I almost could live with someone thinking I lacked oral hygiene, but erroneously considering me a deadbeat was more than I could bear. You combine both a tsking hygienist and a secretary saying you’ve stiffed them over the cashola, and I am long gone.

Sooo, now years have passed, and left on my own I do brush and rinse and try to floss, but I don’t go for checkups.

Faced with the inability to enjoy a scone this morning, though, I screwed up my courage and made an emergency appointment. A nice dude with very little attitude packed some temporary shit in the hole and tried several times unsuccessfully due to a machine in need of something or another to take a diagnostic X-ray. I’ll go back, since he didn’t seem like a dick, and, in fact, after a quick going over the other teeth, which do need some work, said something like apart from the lost filllings he would have thought I did regularly get checked.

‘Course the flipside is, assuming he wasn’t lying just ‘cuz I said I hate getting lectures on oral hygiene, if I can keep the plaque down on my own, why the fuck do I need to go back, once the holes is plugged?

So, I’m unemployed, and the reasons are no longer relevant or a topic for discussion. My former place of employ is in the past, and I look forward. Fucking Yay for me.

For the most part, access to this little portal of air and bluster has dwindled from over in that direction. Like any good invented drama, the shelf life couldn’t sustain, and folks moved onto other things. Web watching from that group has since peaked and waned into sporadic, spasmodic gasps of not caring. Yay for folks and their limited attention spans.

One stalwart soul, however, is still dogging my pages. Friend or foe? Some totally shitty, shitty work task assigned like a security guard in Nome, Alaska painfully waiting for nothing to happen? Maybe it’s someone in the whirlwind of bullshit and angst and rancor and rumor and saying “adios” to me the worker bee, who got hooked on my prose?

Just about every single day, he/she looks at me, and like my brothers in my taunted kidhood, I can’t fucking tell if the look is good or evil. Like with my brothers, I suspect malevolence.

Wouldn’t a friend have emailed by now?

So, I’m left with the rather tepid and weak reply, which is a paraphrase of a comic’s story about another childhood, “KNOCK IT OFF.”

Or maybe the more generic copspeak, “Nothing to see here.”

Craig’s list ad hot off the virtual presses.

Ahh, the morning after some drinking and hanging out. I really must go to the bank and deposit my unemployment money. There’s something fitting in the idea of drinking and then depositing such a check. Next one I’ll buy some crack.

Can’t decide if the brutal headache I awoke to is from pollen or fermented malt. Probably a little bit of each. I am not immortal, I now realize.

By the way, I think it’s interesting that in last night’s late night post, I spelled “kitsch” and “kitschy” correctly, but I misspelled “homemade.” Says something about my brain, I think.

Today, I’m going to make up a couple of anti-Bush T-shirts and see if they’ll sell for a couple of bucks at the yard sale. Yup, week two of yard sale entrepreneur extraordinaire. I’m a glutton for punishment.

By the way, speaking of yard sales, from this craig’s list ad, I got an email asking about my Weber grill and patio furniture. I already sold my patio furniture last week, and I’m keeping my grill to continue burning shit a while longer. I sent an email back explaining these facts.

I got another email back from the same guy, sorry for the mistake, blah, blah, but he’s interested in the unicycle and turntables and LPs. OK, cool, no problem. But, then there’s the kicker, could he swing by today to check everything out a day before the sale?

Dude, what would make anyone think by planning a yard sale that I want random strangers coming by when it’s more convenient for them? Really? Why would I do that? The beauty of a yard sale is you put it all out there all at once, and you sit back as people come to you. It’s not that active, like, say, putting a classified with your phone number for one or two things and making appointment after appointment. If I wanted to do that I would.

I’d rather just relax on my porch with a beverage, thanks dude, than make appoinments with folks like you.

Oh, and for the chick who responded to my craig’s list ad looking for a HOUSE CLEANER that she would happily take away any of my unwanted clothes, but offered no help or response to what I asked for — Good for you for being so bold, but, ah, NO.

I have never in my life responded to an ad for anything, carved out my own needs and asked for them instead. I guess it’s good that the world has such forthright people in it.