Something Swift this way comes…

Alright,

VH1’s a buncha bastids. They didn’t show any of Wil’s material last night, so that makes me the monkey. Pour pitch on me and set me ablaze. What can I say? They’re a bunch of bastids, that’s all.

In other news, Sugarmama mentioned the bloggies again today, I think she’s obsessed. I know I am! Actually, I didn’t get nominated for any of the bloggies, as I suck and I’m not famous in the world of blogs. That’s okay, I’ve come to terms with my inner suckiness. Was never really at war with it to begin with. I’ll never be a Sour Bob, Sugarmama, Tequila Mockingbird, Sarsparilla, Trench, or Mark. I’m okay with that. And You, my dear 4 readers will have to be okay with that too. I’m not going to go into the whole selfdepricating thing here today, everyone knows I suck, and that’s okay, no need for me to elaborate on it. *laughs* However, I’m glad that I’ve got the readership that I do have…means at least 4 people in the world give a shit, and that’s a good thing. There may be hope yet. Maybe, in 15 millenia, we’ll have 10 people in the world that give a shit, and that’s real momentum folks, glacial, inevitable momentum.

I also wanted to mention while it’s on my mind, steve-o took my idea and ran with it. I’ve snagged this from his page without permission, but that’s okay, he put my post up over there in its entirety for people to read and he gets so much more traffic than I do that it’s not even funny. Maybe I’ll actually pick up a person or two from his page. Anyways, the thing that he came up with is calle dthe Swiftocratic Oath. We don’t have a membership, and we don’t have dues (yet *evil grin*), hell, we don’t even wear an apron or a fez. That’s okay. You’ll see why we don’t have any of these things as soon as you get to the oath itself. And if you’re wanting to take the swiftocratic oath, all you simply have to do is copy and paste the oath and put the appropriate information in the appropriate blanks and put it on your webpage or blog, or print it out and hang it over your monitor…hell, use it to line your bird’s cage for all I care. You’ll understand why when you see it, and here it is:

My name is _____Swift_______________. I am hereby taking the Swiftocratic Oath. By swearing this oath, I am forever sealing my rights to sit at home, do nothing, or anything, that I choose to do. I declare my freedom from the pressure of people who call themselves friends to socialize, not to be anti-social, but to be myself. I am a recluse. It is my God-Given right to sit at home, and I’m choosing to take that oath. I pay __$500.00________ per month for my home, and there’s nothing better to do with my home but sit in it.

Signed

_________Swift______________________

If you want do put the swiftocratic oath on your own page or blog, hit me and steve-o with an email with the link and I’ll browbeat Steve-o into posting an ongoing list of Oathers. Here’s the blank form and our email addresses are below it:

My name is ____________________. I am hereby taking the Swiftocratic Oath. By swearing this oath, I am forever sealing my rights to sit at home, do nothing, or anything, that I choose to do. I declare my freedom from the pressure of people who call themselves friends to socialize, not to be anti-social, but to be myself. I am a recluse. It is my God-Given right to sit at home, and I’m choosing to take that oath. I pay __________ per month for my home, and there’s nothing better to do with my home but sit in it.

Signed

_______________________________

Me and Steve-O

Let us know how it comes out for you.

More Later.

S

WIL WHEATON DOT NET: possible heads up

Hey readers! Wil Wheaton may be on VH1 tonight at 11! Tune in and watch him! You’re a monkey if ya don’t.

S

You know, I’ve realized something in the last year or so. I’m a hermit. I like being at my home. I don’t like having to go out in public and deal with other people. I prefer to be home. I’m paying 35,000 dollars for it, why shouldn’t I spend as much time in it as possible? This realization comes as no startling fact. I’ve been told by several of my managers that I’m a good salesman, and I suppose I am (present job notwithstanding for bad location, low traffic and such). I get my salesmanship from my father. He could sell a bottle of shit to a priest. I don’t know why he’d want to, but he could if he needed to. Anyways, back to the point: I’m fairly good at sales, but I’m a very private person. I really don’t like having to interact with anyone outside my little cadre of friends. I much prefer sitting home blogging or working on MUSH for hours on end instead of going out to the movies or shopping or even to other people’s houses. I’m a recluse. And I’m happy being a recluse.

Maybe all bloggers are a little bit reclusive…maybe it’s that turning inwards that is the touch of grit that produces the pearl. Moreso in published writers perhaps. Maybe it’s that touch of the introvert that allows us to depart from society and look inwards with that third eye. If so, proclaim yourself a recluse, enjoy being antisocial, and defend your right to sit at home if that’s what you want to do!

S

Alright, after seeing that the template that I was using was under use by another blogger, I decided to try a different look. (Actually, I’d wanted a different look all along, but was too lazy to get off my ass and do it.) So, now we have this new look, and I hope that you, my dear 4 readers, enjoy the look of the page. A little bit cleaner, a little closer to what I wanted it, with earthy tones and a nice trim look. Let me know what you think, either via Email or the Comments.

S

Steve-o had an epiphany. He now swears up and down that I’m Silent Bob. The link will explain it. I wish. Then I’d have money.

Silent Bob indeed…

S

Ah…where to begin.

7am, I wake up, get ready and get in the truck to take my wife to work. about 1/2 way there the heat suddenly stops working and the truck starts making a weird clanking noise. Yes….it’s overheated. So I pull over by the side of the road and wait a bit for it to cool down, try it again and get approximately 500 yards before I have to pull over. Billows of steam. Clouds and clouds of the stuff. I could build my /own/ cloud city out of the clouds coming out from under the hood of that fucker. So, I walk up to the house where we stopped in front of, and the lady was nice enough to let me in to use her phone. Phoned my father and said “Dad, I’m just past mile marker 10 on 133 between Morven and Valdosta…the truck’s overheated and I’ve gotta get Angie to school (she’s a teacher) ASAP. He says “Alright, I’ll be there in about 30 minutes”. well, she’s gonna be late, but at least she knows the number to the school, so she calls them and lets them know what’s going on. The lady who was sweet enough to let us use her phone actually offers to take her down to the school. (This is the only redeeming feature of the south, we really are that nice, on the whole) The lady takes Angie in to work and I sit back in the truck to await my father.

So, 30 minutes later he arrives and asks me a couple of questions about the truck and we open the hood to take a look at it. He informs me that he dosen’t have a towing strap and wants to know if I have one. Shit. Well, of course I don’t have one. At least not in the truck. Ah well. Fuck. So we take the breather manifold off and take a look at where the steam was coming from, somewhere behind the engine. There are two hoses there. A heater hose and a ‘throttle body hose’ (whatever the hell that is). He feels on both of them and declares it’s the hose on the bottom that’s bad. Says he can feel it. So we fight with the hose for a bit, trying to get it off. End up having to spit both ends to get it of the pipes it’s hooked to. After about an hour or so, we finally get it off. I take a look at it. Turning it over and over in my hands, studying it, looking at it…”Um, dad? There’s no holes in this pipe.” Fuck. So he plugs the hole on the engine where the hose came from and I pour water into the radiator (the lady was nice enough to let me borrow a bucket and her faucet) and I can see a stream of water shooting out of the back/bottom of the top hose. *sighs* So…we fight the top hose for another 30 minutes before getting it off the truck…and yep, it’s fuckered. So we pack the tools up and the two hoses and I’m thinking “Well, it could be worse…we can fix it ourselves and save me the cost of labour, but those hoses will be at least $20.00 a piece. Ah well. At least it can be fixed.”

Napa – Long story a little longer…they don’t have the hoses. They can only get the top hose, which is the one I need, but they can’t get the bottom hose at all. Fuck.

Advanced Auto – They can’t get either of the hoses. Double fuck.

Dodge dealer – They don’t have either one, and can’t get them. Wtf?!?

Back to ‘Harvey’s Garage’. Harvey owns the Napa store, good friend of my dad’s. We talk about it and he says, “nope, you’ll not be able to get those hoses” he sits there for a minute then says, “But if it’s on a par tof the engine where it’s not gonna be hit, you can always use regular heater hose for it.” The man is a solid gold angelic genius. Heater Hose is flimsy, but being on the back of the engine there’s nothing there that it’ll hit. Yes!!! So we buy two feet of heater hose ($1.00/foot) and four hoseclamps ($.20/each) and head back out to the truck.

After getting there and carefully measuring and cutting, we mount the bottom hose, clamp it down, and fucked if it’s not kinking up. Damnit. So we take and mount the top hose and will worry about the bottom hose in a bit. We get the top hose mounted, and it’s gorgeuos. On there perfectly. So I take the bottom hose off, trim a little more off and remount. No dice. Still kinked. Well sonofabitch. So after discussing it and smokin two cigarettes, we decide to trim the original hose and try mounting it. Fortunately we didn’t totally destroy the hose getting it off and it mounts snugly and works perfectly. God’s watching out for me!

So, I get in the truck, start it up, and head over to my father’s house. It heats up a little bit at first but then regulates back down again. The hoses work beautifully. We get there and proceed to fix ourselves some lunch – Tbones, frenchfries, buttered toast. Damn good eating. I spent the afternoon with him till time to go pick up the wife and enjoyed every minute of it.

In closing, I’ve found out over the last couple of years that my father is a wonderful man. He has a great sense of humour, is knowledgeable on many subjects, and enjoys my company. I enjoy his immensely and thank God for the time that He’s given us. I’m not going to go into it in this posting, but my father wasn’t supposed to live this long. He was supposed to’ve died 2 years ago, according to the doctors, but he didn’t. And it’s a miracle that he didn’t. Dad, I love ya, and enjoy every minute that I get to spend with you. God, thank you for my father. The 4 of you who read my blog will just have to accept that I believe in God and that stuff. I think in this case you won’t mind so much. And if you guys really want to know why he shouldn’t be alive, I’ll tell you, but I’ll wait for yall to show interest in it, otherwise it’s….well, it’s still a little scary and painful. But that’s okay.

S

I work in a mall. This is bad enough as it is, as the average Mall Customer isn’t actually human. They’re subhuman. Imagine if you will Homo Sapiens- Emptor with their sloping forehead, their lowslung jaw and a thin streamer of drool depending from their bottom lip, creeping around their natural habitat and looking through the windows at shit they know they can’t afford, and if they could afford it, their mulched pea sized brains couldn’t comprehend how to use the fucking thing. These creatures apparently have caves that they retreat to when the mall isn’t open, when it’s not business hours. Apparently these creatures have also figured out the intricacies involved in breeding and producing offspring. This, my dear 4 readers, is an unfortunate thing. This makes baby Jesus weep.

And of course they bring these inbred mutant idiot children to the mall. And what do these children do? Well, when they walk down to the middle of the mall and see the huge, pointless fucking /carousel/ there, they want to go on it for a ride. Of course they do! And the asshat parents are either too busy going into orgasms over the newest pair of shoes or the newest Chicken Soup for the Soul vendor in a kiosk that they completely ignore the child until the child has started to whine. Which pisses off Sapiens-Emptor Major to no end, so they deny the little abortion and drag them down the mall walkway (usually by one arm with the little turd dangling like some fucked up chicken from a predator’s mouth).

What happens next is the point of this post. The little puke doesn’t suck it up and say ‘Well, maybe next time’. No. Nor does he/she/it whimper quietly to itself until it sees the candy machines. Nope. What the little puler does is to start /Screaming/. Notice that the previous word is capitalized, surrounded by //’s, underlined, in bold, and italicized. There is a reason for this. The reason for this is because the little mongs scream at such an ear shattering pitch that dogs, over 10 miles away, have blood shoot out of their ears, assholes, eyes, noses, and mouths. Glass window panes not reinforced with steel start to vibrate in their casings. If they aren’t secured they must inevitably succumb to the little brat’s wailing. And the kid doesn’t just let out one ear shattering shriek and then continue on as if nothing happened…oh no. The thing just keeps shrieking and shrieking and shrieking and…well, you understand the term ad nauseum when you see this happen. Most other sapiens-emptor turn and watch the spectacle with a bemused quirk of the thick lips and a snort through the flared cauliflower nose. And then resume their tribal shopping frenzy. Not me. I have to sit in my store and listen as some little shitstain shrieks like a fucking air raid siren over and over and over and try to tell myself that the headache that I’ve lived with for the last three days is getting better, just to ignore it. But no, I hear the idiot child of their loins shrieking, yea unto the other end of the mall. And what does the parent creature do? Nothing. Just drags it slowly up the mall, torturing other mall employees like me into brain hemorrhaging frenzies of loathing and despair. Sometimes you just have to wonder why they don’t muzzle these little hellions. Why they can’t install a baffle or something. If you can stuff a towel underneath and around a washing machine to get it to stop making that annoying WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP, if you can inject a little grease into the guidewheel of an electric motor to stop the SKREE SKREE SKREE, why can’t you stuff something into these kids to make them shut the fuck up? Maybe Ritalin. Or Prozac. Something. Please God.

S

Thanks Rune for the title of today’s post.

I’m the headwiz of an online DND game, as I’ve stated here before. Sometimes in dealing with the people that play the game, some of their request and some of their inane chatter makes me want to stab myself in the face with a pitchfork. Repeatedly. I can’t believe that some of these people can actually be this ignorant. Not just ignorant though, blatantly obtuse and stupid. What do these people do in their daily lives? Are these all those telemarketers that call your house at dinner time, wondering if you want a new family sized set of stainless steel dildos with the complimentary tableware? Or maybe this is that idiot at the jiffymart that can’t grok the fact that you can want a pack of gum, a carton of cigarettes and a soda as well as to be able to pay for you gas with non-exact change? I don’t know what they do, but I’m sure that whatever it is they do, they do it poorly and with little excitement and no vitality. The one thing that I’m sure they’re out there doing is breeding. I can be sure o this because every time I stop and look around myself I see more of these mouthbreathing socially crippled dead people out there, participating in the economy as if they belonged here. Well, maybe they do. Maybe they are the best proof that man maybe did evolve from Cro Magnon. Who knows? Maybe they are cro magnons in fancy clothes. You apparently can dress them up, and make them walk upright, but you can’t make them use that gray slush inside their skull.

And BTW, Mark from Markmywords taught me how to do the strikethrough. Thanks Mark, you are also ‘The Man’

S

tequila mockingbird: a collection of random thoughts from a rather random chick has taught me, and the rest of the blogging community who are fortunate enough to read her blog about the little horrors of online plagarism. Unfortunately this kind of problem is rampant online and I guess hard to really control or do anything about (other than go into a bunch of legal battles and such). So my #351 thankful thing is that tequila mockingbird is out there, and that she has the guts to stand up when most people would say ‘Fuck it, it’s just the interent’. Well, she’s showing people that it’s /not/ ‘just the internet’, that some of us do act as a community and hurt when we are bled by others, trying to steal our words. So in her honour and to dignify the things she is doing by standing up to that little cunt Bryan Lamb and his unoriginal postings, I have claimed copyright on every single post that’s on my blog – you’ll notice the little © symbol at the end of each post, the year, and my name. For every thing that I write, even if I don’t publish it, is copyrighted by me, at the date I finish that work. Check out Tequila’s website on the lefthand column, she has some useful links detailing how to protect your work. If I post something that is not my original work, I will always give the credit to the author (and in most cases of the blog, will trackback to theirs so they can know about it) and would hope that people would have the common courtesy…no, the common decency to do the same when and if they quote my work. Yeah, I know all four of you are probably wondering what the hell I’m talking about, but that’s okay, stick around, you’ll get used to my litte inane ramblings.

For those of you who want to see why I hate living in GA, see Tequila’s post about the GA DMV. She doesn’t lie. And it’s not only the government workers down here. It’s everyone. And that’s a frightening thought.

S

WIL WHEATON DOT NET: good times, for a change

This entry on WWDN makes me think of the kind of father I want to be for my kids, if my wife and I are ever lucky enough to have them. All political and religious differences aside between me and Wil, he shows just what it is to be a father, a dad. I get so tired of seeing stories in the news about sperm donors (and even egg donors) who beat their kids senseless, treat them with contempt, or just neglect them because they’re too busy. It enrages me to think of someone treating a child worse than they would an animal. And it’s not just backwoods rednecks that do this sort of thing. It’s epidemic and probably has its roots in the ‘Latchkey Kids’ of my generation. I’m so glad to see that Wil is facing life head on and loving his kids. Even if he is their stepfather, he still loves them as if they were his own. It’s a hard road to travel – being a parent – but if we had more parents out there like Wil, you’d see half the problems of the world fade away.

S