The Life of Riley

Laura Zinger of Brown Finch Films is putting the finishing touches on Proceed and Be Bold, her documentery of printing press artist Amos Kennedy. It’s set to premiere in Chicago on May 9th.

Warning: Trailer is not G. Or even PG. I’m gonna have to go with PG-13, or maybe R, for strong language. Yeah. F-bombs are dropped.

And I’ve been too lazy to fix it until now.

Here’s a little story that I wrote as a myspace comment for a friend.

It was another day in the Rosten neighborhood, and Janet woke up with one thing on her mind. She didn’t have enough money for a rock, but she was certain that she could perform a couple of odd jobs on her way. People always seemed happy to give her a couple of bucks in return for the odd favor. People helping people. That’s what she loved about this neighborhood.

She knocked on a couple of doors on her way out of the project, but nobody answered. It was only noon, she reasoned, and even she, the epitome of industry, would still be vacuously slumbering if not for the little sickness that (she knew from experience) was only just beginning.

As she stepped out of the building, she almost bumped into an older gentleman on his way in.

“‘Scuse me,” he inquired, “but d’ya know if dis here’s one one oh one five Rosten?”

Ah, a stranger in distress, she thought to herself. This was great luck.

“Why, yes it is,” she said, “but will you be going higher than the first floor? I only ask because there’s a separate entrance over to the side of the building that provides much easier access.” (She asked this knowing full well that the first floor contained exactly one apartment, currently unoccupied.)

Five minutes later, Janet was walking out of the alley $23 heavier, having disposed of the nice gentleman with a knife. She was in high spirits. She now had enough money for a rock, the extra three bucks would cover some smokes, and she hadn’t even had to do any real work! Feeling a bit queasy in spite of her elation, she quickened her pace.

It was another three blocks to the shoes. She stopped in to a corner store on the way to buy smokes and she was even able lift a Snickers. At the shoes, she traded with a young, hoodied entrepeneur. She then hurried back home to enjoy the fruits of her labors. And to take care of the baby who, it occurred to her, may have been crying.

The End.

You should go through the entire xkcd archive. Here are some representative samples.

Hobby
Stacey’s Dad
Paths
Parallel Universe
Baring My Heart
Centrifugal Force
Sandwich
Cryptography
Angular Momentum
Words That End In Gry
Not Really Into Pokemon
Command Line Fu
Small Talk
Floor Tiles
Conspiracy Theories
Wikipedian Protestor
Goto
Orphaned Projects
Exploits of a Mom

19 is a prime number.

Also, I’m thirsty. Think I’ll have some water.

Today I watched The Godfather part 2 on Bravo. With the commercials and everything.

Today my youngest niece turned one.

Today I ate twice. Spaghetti with garlic bread the first time I got hungry. Ben & Jerry’s Half-Baked the second time. I’m hungry again, but for food…?

Today I watched part of Pulp Fiction, also on Bravo. Commercials, etc.

Today I doodled on a canvas drawing pad. Outlined random objects on my desk. Followed up with uninspired connecting lines. A couple of conversation bubbles.

Today I watched Flipped Out on Bravo. Before Pulp Fiction. After The Godfather part 2. The dude (term used loosely) had a psychic bless a house he was selling.

What a great idea.

Today I thought about the girl who must have known she was unnatractive who approached me and Dan at Harvey’s last night. She distracted from her looks using bad conversation and worse make-up. Our one-word answers used up her conversation quickly.

Today I lacked motivation to surf channels.

Today I had the great idea to hand my next paycheck to the first psychic I see. I assume that, knowing what I am about to do, one will introduce himself to me on payday.

Today I watched Top Chef on Bravo. Played solitaire on my phone during the commercials.

Tomorrow, I think, I will go for a walk.

My 8-year-old niece asked me last week why I don’t have a girlfriend. “I don’t know,” I said, “I just don’t.” She seemed to let it drop after that, and I continued to talk to my sister.

My niece, however, was not content to let it end with that. She walked away for a couple of minutes and then returned to deposit a slip of paper on the kitchen table in front of me.

She wrote me a ticket for $1,000. The crime: “Not Having a Girlfriend”.

I played along pretending to be mad for a couple of minutes, and then continued once again talking to my sister.

It was a little warm in the house, and I began to fan myself absentmindedly with the “ticket”. Apparently this behavior fell outside of the bounds of proper respect for the ticket because I soon found myself holding a second ticket, this one for $2,000. This crime: “Using the Other One as a Fan”.

Later she was kind enough to draw me a $3,000-bill, providing me with the funds to pay my fines.

I’m in a shuttle bus riding to Rochester from Minneapolis right now. (I’m blogging from my phone.) So we just drove past a truck packed with cages which were, in turn, packed with chickens.

As we passed the truck, I watched the chickens. Some were poking their little chickenheads out of the cages as if trying to see where they were going. Others were huddling deep inside, pushing up against other chickens, trying to avoid the wind, but succeeding only in becoming a fluffy mass of wind-blown feathers.

I reached deep inside looking for those feelings of guilt and sympathy that I was sure would be there. I found only two thoughts: food, pillows.

I collect talented people.

One day I will buy an island and invite them all to move there.

Or perhaps I’ll grow large enough that the earth becomes my island.

So I woke up this morning and bought this, authored by the illustrious Zach. Now I have to forget about it so I’m surprised when it shows up.

I love surprises.

Last night I dreamed that I was running around a place where I lived, not my current apartment, but a place with blue overtones and lots of shadows. I couldn’t open my mouth, and I was having trouble breathing. My teeth were stuck together, and I was panicked. Every time I tried to open my mouth, the connecting joint of my left jawbone clicked and I gave up. Trying any harder might have popped it out of socket. I drew full breaths, but it was with definite effort.

Then I woke up. It was 2:20am. I was lying on my right side, and my left arm was wound around my right shoulder as if attempting to grab my right shoulder blade while I slept. My left bicep pushed hard enough against my neck to cause trouble breathing and hard enough against the underside of my chin to hold my mouth closed.

I wonder what my left hand was reaching for.

I’m excited!

So I’ve spent the last week trying to decide whether to go to a birthday party in Madison or to visit my sister in northern Iowa. I really wanted to go to the birthday party, but my sister’s house is always relaxing for me, and I feel like recuperating a bit. As it turns out, I did not have to make this decision.

I’m flying to Las Vegas tomorrow. First class.

Unfortunately, the flight will be the best part of the trip as I’ll spend the next two days working.

But: I’m flying to Las Vegas tomorrow. First class.

It’s just fun to say.

Stars. Floyd came to looking at stars. He stared, uncomprehending, at a black sky bright with stars, spanning from his left periphery to his right, from below his feet to above his head. Stars filled him from his subconscious impulses to the top of his decision making processes, clogging his his ears, his eyes, his nose, his brain, filling his pockets, his hands, his throat, his soul. They were beautiful. They sparkled.

They moved.

As one, the stars shifted. Clusters of stars displaced clusters of stars. And the movement shot pain into the back of his head. Then, after only an instant, the stars again found their original position. Dimly, Floyd became aware of the movement of the earth under his head. He was being dragged face up along the ground. Somebody was pulling him by his feet.

With the awareness came panic. In his mind, Floyd screamed and twisted, grabbing clumps of grass, dirt, and rocks, handfuls of nightcrawlers, grub beetles, and snakes, pieces and inhabitants of the earth found their way into his hands, moved toward his feet, and formed a barrier, impossibly large and growing, between himself and his captor. In reality, Floyd twisted halfway around, throwing his right arm, weakly, over his left while opening his mouth releasing unformed and undisciplined phonemes that had been hidden away, unspoken, ever since Floyd had learned to speak real words.

And then his knees were against his chest, and eyes were looking at his eyes. Floyd’s mouth didn’t close, but the wordless syllables stopped. Those eyes. There was no intensity there, no hard staring. They regarded him lazily, rereading a book for the thousandth time. They didn’t need to look because they already knew what they would find. The act of looking itself was a sham, Floyd realized, a show put on for his own benefit. An indolent, unmotivated show, but a show still.

With that realization, the panic leaked out of Floyd. The eyes, having read the expected paragraph, backed off, becoming part of a face, and rotated up to the stars for an instant before the entire face turned. Floyd’s knees left his chest, and the ground began moving underneath his head once again. Floyd began counting stars, attempting to empty his mind.

For a while, he succeeded. He pushed thoughts out of the center of his mind, stacking them higher and higher toward the edges. Every time a new thought found its way in, he strapped it to a number and threw it toward a star, and each throw brought one of those stacks closer to tumbling down. Number five hundred thirty-two, a sort of morbid curiosity about where he was headed, added its weight, no more than a piece of straw, to a stack of memories that Floyd never saw collapsing. It may have been his position on the ground that bade this particular memory. Certainly, Floyd had no other reason to remember it…

“Gitch’ur clothes off, Myra.”

These words were spoken by Floyd to Myra on the eve of their marriage. Floyd was lying face up on the bed, and he was almost fully clothed. “Almost” because his pants were around his ankles. Myra had stood and watched while he rotely unbuckled his belt, pulled down his pants, and laid down. Whether she had expected something different was unclear, but she did as he said, took all of her clothes off, and they spent the next three minutes consummating their marriage.

The next day they both went back to work.

I’ve finally migrated my blog completely to my new site. I skipped an entry here and there, but I’ve moved everything that I intend to move.

Raises Glass

Here’s to the past; may it administer lessons gently.
Here’s to the future; may it comfort us to our dotage.
Here’s to beginnings; may they bring stories both fulfilling and uninteresting.
Here’s to endings; may they bring satisfaction and closure.

So after a long trip to watch my younger sister get married (congratulations, Caressa!) followed up by a disturbing Christmas party. I got back into town just in time to win the weekly poker game, which I’m quite proud of since it was the final game of the year, and 10 people showed up. Meanwhile, I’ve also been working on several blog entries, some of which will hopefully see the light of day soon. Add all of this to a couple of long social nights out and to work, which, though I absolutely love what I do, has become quite taxing, and you’ll understand that I’m tired.

Last night I slept for 12 hours. And I do feel rested. But, as I discovered on my way into the office today, I’m still not completely recovered. I should probably be banned from speaking to people for the next day or two.

So the bus was about 15 minutes late, and I was about 5 minutes early in getting to the bus stop. It should have arrived at 12:43pm. At 12:45 pm, a gentleman approached me and asked me for the time. I don’t know why this caught me off guard, but it did. And it took me a while to answer. First I had to process whether I wanted to talk to him. I looked him over. He was black, decently well dressed, and he was wearing a work badge that said “government”. He had a friendly face (though his expression would become annoyed by the end of the exchange), and he was shaped as if somebody had forcefully shoehorned a giant pair down his throat and into his body. Of course I would talk to him.

But what did he say, again? Oh yeah, time.

“Yeah, ” I replied without thinking, “it’s aboooouuuuuuut.” Me, realizing that I don’t have a clue what time it is. A pause. Me, thinking really hard. “Hold on, I’ve got this.” Me, fumbling into my pocket, trying to grab my phone. Failing. Trying again. Succeeding. Looking at it. “It’s 12:45.”

He decides to continue the conversation. “Ah, so the G should be here soon?”

Now I’m stumped. G? Aren’t the buses numbered here. Some of them have letter suffixes. He’s still standing there. I wonder which number has this G suffix that he’s referencing. Also, was this a rhetorical question? Should I even answer it? He looks like he’s expecting an answer. “I’m not sure?” I say. It was an answer. But it had the little inflection that indicated a question. The guy smiled and walked over by a bench to wait for the bus, a bench right next to the road. I saw at least two cars splash him with bits of icy road slush. Apparently that was preferable to being within speaking distance of me.

And then the 4G bus came, and he got on, and a blind lady got off.

I grew up in a small town. We didn’t have any blind people that I knew of there. I have a suspicion that we shipped all of our blind off to bigger cities. But that’s beside the point. The point is that, while I’m not sure what the social etiquette of this behavior is, I typically shuffle around or clear my throat or cough, making just enough noise to let the blind person hear me, just so that she knows she’s not standing alone. For some reason, I didn’t do this today. I should have, but I didn’t. I just stood there and stayed quiet. There was enough ambient traffic and wind noise that she couldn’t have heard me breathing, especially since I was standing a good 15 feet away from her.

She thought she was alone. She had gas. The first one caught me totally off guard. I’m second guessing what I heard, thinking that surely a blind lady would know better than to assume she’s alone at a busy intersection. But, wow, that was definitely a loud and drawn out breaking of the wind. I was glad that I wasn’t standing downwind.

Some people walked by shortly afterwards. Then, so far as she knew, the blind lady was alone again. And she totally farted. Again. This one was a little louder and longer, and it had that little out-of-steam-but-still-pushing-it slow-down toward the end, causing the sound to gain in depth and texture what it lost in sheer machine-gun energy. I wanted to laugh out loud, but I felt bad about possibly embarrassing her.

So I stood there quietly for the next couple of minutes until my bus came. Once it was close enough to cover the sound of me moving, I walked lightly away from the lady for a few steps, and then walked back toward her and the bus, making enough sound so that she could hear me.

When the driver opened the bus door, he called out “This is the 6U!” for the blind lady’s benefit. She hears it, and exclaims “Oh, nuts!”. It wasn’t her bus. I happily boarded.