Tum dee Dum

I’m annoyed at my parents for not being billionaires. That has forever cut me off from two career paths: “Gentleman of leisure” and “Wasted youth.” Both of these I could do very well. Sadly, this is not to be. Apparently I have to have a career and goals and stuff. Bah! The world does not know the treasure it lost when I realized that I could not be a Gentleman of leisure.

Apparently Disney has turned every one of their cartoon movies into a Broadway musical. I think that this is a capital idea, and only hope that this will not be restricted to movies like the Lion King. I’m looking forward to Terminator 2: Judgment Dance. The terminator goes back in time to stop the creation of boy bands and any show that has the word Idol in it. Robocop, the Musical won’t be half bad either. It’ll be a stretch, but the explosions will make it work. Explosions can be musical…right?

I’m too tired to sleep. That makes no fucking sense. It’s just that I put off going to sleep as long as possible and so when I stumble into my office I’m practically dead. A zombie one might say. I should roam the corridors going “Brains, brrrrains, brainssssss.” That would liven things up…Or considering that I’d be a zombie, deaden things up.

Sleep’s a funny thing for me. I like the middle parts of the sleep bit. The ends, not so much. I hate going to bed and getting out of it. The whole transition shit does not work for me. (That was today’s random fact about Rajneesh. An irregular feature of this blog.)

(I do fucking wish that Word would figure out that the word blog has entered the lexicon and stop doing the red squiggly line shit.)

I was going to write something about toothpaste. I can’t quite remember what. It was pretty good. And somewhere along the way I was going to segue into me dueling a tube of toothpaste with a sword. (Actually a light saber, but that is a bit too geeky).

(It seemed funny at the time. I’m glad I did not put it down on paper…um…screen.).

Robocop the musical. Part man, part machine, all music. I like Robocop. It is as guy a guy movie as a guy movie can be. Why did I share that with the world? Well, I've have railed before against needless explosions in movies. Not in Robocop. Each one of those explosions was crucial to the narrative flow of the movie. And that egregious body count added to the subtle subtext of death and decay in a hyper-capitalist world. Or something. But still cool.

Robocop should fight zombies in the musical.

Musical zombies.

Contestants from shows with words like “Idol” and “Next Superstar” in them could be the zombies. Robocop could use real bullets. Musical bullets.

(No, I am not drunk, merely spaced out.)

Facial Hair

Once upon a time, in ( a galaxy far, far away) the distant past, I would be content to do a trip in five hours if Mapquest told me that the estimated driving time for that trip was four and a half hours. Those days are no more. They have disappeared. Gone poof, like a magician's rabbit. These days, I set out on a trip with the express aim of beating Mapquest’s estimated time. And I usually do. Except when driving to Maryland from New Jersey. There I meet my bete noir, the Delaware Memorial Bridge

The Delaware Memorial Bridge hates me. Apparently it believes that I burnt down its farm and stole its sheep. Or maybe I stole its farm and burnt its sheep. You may think that this is an baseless anthropomorphization. If you do think so, hit yourself about the head and shoulders repeatedly. I have my reasons.

These then are my reasons. Tons of people, millions of them apparently, use the bridge to cross the Delaware. I know people who have used it on multiple occasions without any problems. I am not one of them. (It would be strange if at this point in the post I claimed to be one of them. There would be this lead up to the blood feud that I and the Bridge have and it would fizzle out with me saying, “But, I’ve never had a problem with that Bridge. That Bridge for all its faults has not pissed me off.” Anticlimactic!)

No, definitely not one of them. To our left we have the “Never had a problem with the Bridge” group. That group consists of most of humanity. To our right we have the “Hated by the Bridge” group. Me. Just me. All on my lonesome. Holding a sign saying, “I’ve been caught in a traffic jam whenever I’ve tried to cross that Bridge.”

And it’s true. A mile from the bridge everything is fine. Traffic flowing along at a steady clip, and the moment I get to the Bridge, traffic slows to a crawl. Three of the four lanes on the bridge will be shut down. And traffic volume multiplies just to fuck things up even more. And I’m sure that all that is a special production just for me. A few thousand cars and their android drivers stored away for them to spring on me at the right moment, and sensors to detect my arrival and shut the lanes of traffic down.

It is clear to me that the Bridge has a malevolent personality. It sits there twirling its mustache and evilly grinning at me as it plots to have me waste pointless eons crossing it at five miles an hour.

So yeah. I was late.

The Ides of March

I am a master of the raised eyebrow waggle. Some people use the waggle indiscriminately but the discerning waggler (me) waggles sparingly. Sparingly but effectively. I use it as a wordless greeting. Lesser mortals may go “Hi” or say “Hello, how’s it going?” I don’t. I waggle my eyebrows. A quick up and down motion to signify that I am aware of the other person’s existence and that I value them enough to twitch my eyebrows at them.

And it goes so much more than mere words. Words are easy to say. Say these words out aloud: Rhinoceros Animatronics Juggernaut Necromancer Enigmatic Elegiac Sphygmomanometer Haberdashery. That was easy wasn’t it?

Now try twitching your eyebrows. See, that took so much more effort. Quad Erat Demonstratum. (Pax Romana. Veni Vidi Vici. More Latin Words. Some classical Greek. A forrsooth and a thou. More random Latin words.) And people appreciate this effort. Well most people do. Some don’t. Sadly this is not a perfect world.

In most situations the waggle will suffice, but sometimes you may need to respond to a question. For instance, “How’s it going?” An eyebrow waggle at this juncture, while always a wonderful thing to behold, cannot quite get the job done. It does not quench your interrogators thirst for information. You need to verbalize an answer. Some people try to get away with a shrug.

Sometimes acceptable, but not something you can do more than once or twice a day. Shrug to every question and you will look like…um…a person with shruggy, twitchy shoulders? (Analogies are not my strongpoint, okay?) Or like a person who thinks that dancing like Michael Jackson is cool! (Answer the question by grabbing your crotch, giving out a high pitched yelp and mooonwalking out of the person’s line of sight. This is how the question should be answered. Trust me. I’m a doctor. I know these things. Well…I’m not really a doctor, but you can trust me. Really. Honest.)

It helps if you have actually heard the question. But, if you haven’t and you’re not quite sure if the query was, “How’s it going?”, or if it was, “What’s up with you”, or “Who let the dogs out”, or “Who the fuck is Alice”, the best response is to grunt. “Mrmgr”, “Byazh” or “Gahk” are all acceptable. But feel free to explore our artistic boundaries. A grunt should be something that you can cherish and an look back at with pride. It should be able to let the other person know that you were paying deep attention to them, that you reflected deeply upon their question, that you considered all things and that you have reached a measured conclusion. All this can be summed up with “Pzangkrut”.

Practice it. See how easy it is.

A note of caution. Inexperienced people caught on the wrong foot may try to grunt and waggle at the same time. Don’t do this. You just might sprain your face.

Part Man Part Machine All Cop

I like airports and railway stations and bus terminals. The crowds I ignore, but the spaces that they occupy appeal to me. High, high ceilings, large rooms, echoes, public address systems, bright lights, people hurrying to and fro.

Well, I like them in principle. I like them when I’m there for ten minutes, picking someone up or rapidly exiting the building.

Not when I’m there for four hours. Perhaps at three in the morning.

Apparently you can turn up a little too early for your flight. When the flight leaves at a quarter to seven, you do not need to turn up at the airport at a quarter to three, full of smug satisfaction that there will be no lines, you will breeze through security and can then nap for a couple of hours until your flight.

The first snag in that plan was the fact that the check-in personnel do not turn up until a half past four. Ergo no check in. Fine, I could snooze on the chairs in the cavernous waiting area.

Except that the chairs seemed to have been transplanted from some medieval torture chamber. One of the more unpleasant ones…where people would be subjected to hours and hours of home movies of the torturer and his family on vacation. The poor victims would be forced to flip through the torturer’s photo albums. Pictures of the torturer and his hideously ugly family besmirching the landscape, grinning up into the camera lens as they obscure the beautiful countryside behind them.

Except that video cameras hadn’t made their appearance until the Renaissance. So that wouldn’t be a medieval torture chamber. It would be a Renaissancical… Renaissancified… Renaissancificated…um post-medieval pre-industrial age torture chamber.

(Again, I have no fucking clue about where I’m going with this. When I set off to write this post, I was going to describe falling asleep on the chair in the reception area, waking up at five and being confronted by a huge line at the security checkpoint.

Right after that would be long rant about me having to dump a can of deodorant in the trash because of the new restrictions and then being pulled aside for extra screening because of my contact lens solution.

That was to be followed by me describing the long and arduous trek to my gate only to find that my flight was taking off from another gate, the one that I had passed by on my way to the gate I was currently at. The new gate was next to a Starbucks, one that had deliciously unhealthy espresso brownies that I just cannot resist.

And I would have wrapped up with a few well chosen swear words against the people who insist on sitting next to me at the waiting area (New waiting area next to the gate). I spread out for a reason. I need my space. When I sprawl it mean: Do not sit next to me. You will take up valuable armrest space.

That’s another thing that puzzles me. Armrest etiquette. Say at a movie theater. How do you decide who gets the shared armrest? Do you take turns? First come first serve. Possession is nine tenths of the law? Tactical nuclear weapons? Puppy dog eyes? A dance-off? Low intensity urban conflict? Televised debate?

Or we could all decide to give up the right one and use only the left one. Or vice versa. A wonderfully balanced socialist system. But then one person in the row will have twice the number of armrests as the rest of the proletariat? Does that make them a member of the politburo? Is Big Brother watching? Does non conformity to the established armrest line mean opposition to the Party? Is war peace? Is the Truth False?

(Again, I have no fucking clue where I’m going with this little sidebar. I’m guessing that today’s theme is incoherence. I do believe that every day should have a theme. And not easy themes like Casual Fridays, or Hung-over Mondays. We need greater challenges, Nihilistic Wednesdays. Split Infinitive Thursdays. Mild Discomfort Saturdays. Got Out Of Bed and Tripped Over a Laptop-Bag Tuesdays. Filibustering Second Sunday Of Any Month With The Letter S In It. Pretend That You Are a Large Head of Lettuce Mondays.))

I think I should stop now.

So I did.

Pretend That You Are Robocop Wednesdays.

Well I’m done.

Really.

Hop At Work Thursdays.