Yea, How Prophetic I Am

Quote from the third book of NostraNeon Chapter 2 Verses 5-8:

5: "And it shall come to pass in the fifth month there will be great financial woes and a multitude of collectors of bills will ascend from below bringing hellfire and brimstone and a copy of 'Anne Murray's Greatest Hits' and you shall be sore afraid."

6: "These collectors of bills shall be relentless and should you strike one down they shall multiply three and forty-fold and sell your name to certain third-party companies that will offer credit you no longer qualify for. And their frequency of offers will be abundant, so let it be said."

7: "Where once there was a job there shall be none instead and there will be moaning and gnashing of teeth and even many (many) shots of Crown Royal will not soothe the burden. Alas, you should continue to try lest you waste the bottle."

8: "Do not despair, sayeth the Lord, for Ramen Noodles and processed cheese shall be plentiful. And you shall be gassy, yet content. Forever and ever. Amen."

Gee, I wish I had pulled this out of the attic earlier this year and I could have at least got myself in the right mindset for losing a job. Well, I honestly don't believe all this nonsense.

I mean, I still have a job. I'm doing fine.

Wait, what's that noise?

[music coming from outside]
"And even though we ain't got money
I'm so in love with ya honey
Everything bring a chain of lo-o-o-o-ve"

....Ummmm, honey....we still have that bottle of Crown don't we?

New and Used

I am a "new" whore.

No, not as in "I have recently started selling my body on Magnolia Avenue", but meaning I have this strange fetish for "new" things. This applies to CDs, video games, movies, cars, etc. Not that used items are necessarily bad (unless you're talking about condoms or tampons - ewwww) but I feel like I'm either inheriting someone else's problems or the item has been somehow tainted by the previous owner.

Am I such a self-centered bastard that I think I'm that much better than everyone else, like my shit doesn't stink too? Yeah probably, but to put that in some kind of context you have to understand that my girlfriend is convinced that I never shit at all...and we've been together 6 years.

Not only do I always have to buy brand new items but I have to buy the most expensive item available. God forbid I ever buy a generic product for fear of getting a defective item. I did break my own rule however, and bought some Kroger brand cough syrup this weekend and it nearly killed me (the buying part, not the syrup). I blame it all on the foggy, mind-numbing effect of the dose(s) of Nyquil I had taken at the time.

Funny, I don't really recall driving to the store...or paying for the cough syrup, hmmm.

Anyway, I finally paid off my car around August and by November the piece of @$#!% died and I had to buy a new one. It would have been so simple to buy a used car at a reasonable price, but nooooooo, I just had to go and buy the most expensive ride I could find. Now don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my 2005 Mazda Tribute, but my monthly payment is almost as much as my part of the house payment.

Of course I never have the insight to plan ahead in the event something should go terribly wrong and as luck would have it my hours have changed at work and I'm not bringing home quite as much. So now I'm contemplating a second job (again) to try and compensate for the loss. Wait a sec...if I'm always right how did I get my math so screwed up on this one? Oh yeah, I almost forgot, my control is so complete that the laws of mathematics bend to my will.

Unfortunately, all the bill collectors seem to be impervious to my methods.

[snippet from conversation between Mazda Credit and myself]

Me: I have 20,000 Camel C-Notes.
Mazda Credit: Camel C-Notes?!? Camel C-Notes are no good out here. We need something more real...
Me: I don't have anything else. (raising my hand) But Camel C-Notes will
do fine.
Mazda Credit: No they won'ta.
(I wave my hand again, using my mind power)
Me: Camel C-Notes will do fine.
Mazda Credit: No, they won'ta. You do realize that we can't see you waving your hand over the phone, don't you?
Me: Crap...well, how about Marlboro Miles?

[end snippet]

Is there some kind of detox method to get me off of these "new (and most expensive) items" only purchasing habits? Maybe I could start with buying boxes of stale crackers from Big Lots (that only sold in Canada over 5 years ago) and work my way up from there.

Remember...small steps.

My Mazda still even has that new car smell. Mmmmmmmmmmm. [drool, slobber]

You realize this is a cry for help don't you?

HaloScan

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

I only asked Harvey (twice) about this like a month ago and I finally got around to it. I think I did the code right. Let me know if you notice anything wrong. BTW, thanks for the assistance Harvey!

[edit]Actually I noticed that new comments appear in both the "Comments" and "Pre Haloscan" sections. Is that supposed to happen?

[edit]Evidently it's not working correctly because I logged into Haloscan and it said I had zero comments. Harvey, you'll be hearing from me soon. Help!!

[yet another edit]Nevermind, I think I fixed it. I even changed the formatting a little bit.

Card Flopper or Dice Chucker?

If you're scratching your head over this title then you've obviously never played an RPG before...in non-geek terms that would be "Role-Playing Game".

I work at a game and hobby store so I'm surrounded by a world of fantasy every day and I started thinking about how I could really classify everyone here into two groups, card floppers or dice chuckers. There should actually be a third group for the employee that farts every 5 minutes. Of course, if I wanted to I could just use the one classification of "freak" and that would pretty much take care of everyone, myself included, but I was overcome by a sudden feeling of compassion (mark it on your calendar).

A "card flopper" is anyone that plays collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh! or Pokemon and the such. Magic started in 1993 and it's the CCG (collectible card game) that all others have been based on. They even have a Pro Tour and World Championship which you can catch sometimes on ESPN2. Don't roll your eyes...it's at least as exciting as poker and they've been showing the same championship game on there for an entire year. Most of these Magic players tote boxes upon boxes of cards to trade with other players or decks to challenge someone with. My girlfriend calls it math with pretty pictures. Card floppers are usually competetive people that like math, which is weird because I hate math and would consider myself a "card flopper".

A "dice chucker" is someone that plays role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, World of Darkness, Vampire and so on. Does anyone else remember when people thought D&D was satanic? Oh wait, some people still do. The reason they are called dice chuckers is because various types of dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 - the number denotes how many sides are on the die, i.e. d20=20-sided die) are rolled to determine character stats and probabilities for most actions. These gamers aren't always the sharpest tool in the shed, but they can unleash a barrage of useless information unlike anything you've ever seen when spouting off statistics for any of the thousands of creatures in the D&D universe. Dice chuckers are usually highly imaginative gamers with strengths in science(fiction).

Normally a person is either a card flopper or dice chucker, but not both. A hybrid is possible but you would end up with someone that has coke-bottle glasses and the personality of a cashew nut. In the gaming community however this would be known as "a fine catch".

What does all this teach us...nothing in particular, but it lets me keep Harvey off my back (har, har) and you get to find out some personal details about myself. The reason I bring it up is to illustrate how even a sub-culture of gamers and sci-fi nuts can have very different interests and not just lumped into a "one-size-fits-all" category...although a large majority of them do fall into the "30 years old and never seen a tit" classification.

It's best not to question this oddball post lest you be assaulted by my mathematical onslaught of cardboard pictures.

Are We Ever Gonna Be Okay?

So a Cessna airplane puts the nation's capitol in chaos yesterday. It turned out to be absolutely nothing, but at the time it was enough to empty the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Supreme Court and other federal buildings (for some reason NOT the Pentagon) of nearly 30,000 people. One thing is for certain, if I was the student pilot that was riding with this supposed "trainer" I would ask for my money back since he obviously doesn't know how to use a radio or understand the concept of "restricted airspace".

I think it is nearly impossible for any American citizen to forget September 11, but are we ever going to get over it? Will there come a time when we see an airplane in the sky and don't think "Dear God, I wonder what building it's going to fly into?", or "That plane looks awfully low, I hope it hasn't been hijacked".

We are a nation ruled by fear and it will ultimately destroy us.

The reason I say this is once we stop trusting anyone then everyone becomes a potential terrorist. The constant media bombardment of "bad news" is just depressing. I honestly start to wonder if there is anything good left in the world today, and if there is would the mainstream media even report it? We are surrounded by murderous, molesting, deranged, celebrity terrorists...unforunately we can't manage to find or convict any of them. Our legal system has become so politcally correct and muddled in double-talk we can't even see the whorehouse for the whores anymore.

For one moment can't we stop trying to fix the problems with the rest of the world and concentrate on our own before we self-destruct?

Oh yeah, can we watch something uplifting in the news for once other than details about car bomb #91 in Iraq. Yes, we fucking know there was another one, enough already!

Unforgiven

I saw a really odd movie the other night and wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I'll admit that I have some strange tastes and I prefer to watch obscure artistic films occassionaly. My girlfriend Sarah frowns upon my choices most of the time, but honestly she can't complain too much because our interest in each other began when we discovered we both loved a largely unknown movie named The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

Anyway, that's a whole different story - back to the topic at hand.

The movie I saw was called The Woodsman. In this film Kevin Bacon plays a convicted pedophile who is released from prison after 12 years and is trying to rebuild his life.

Kevin Bacon did a great acting job in the film, but I couldn't quite grasp where it was all leading. It ended up being one of "those" movies that doesn't really have a story to tell and only succeeds in making you feel like you've just wasted 2 hours of your life afterwards. The movie boldly addressed delicate subject matter...but why, other than to make us squirm in our seats? There's no act of redemption or profound lesson learned by the end of the film...and it got exceptionally good reviews for the most part.

This brings us to the title of my post, "Unforgiven". The movie portrays Kevin Bacon's character as a victim (some people will disagree), which I completely don't go with. That characterization made me start wondering at what point can you forgive someone for committing a taboo act, if ever? In our legal system forgiveness can be measured by years in a prison term, but for humans forgiveness can take much longer. If someone is a convicted pedophile can you ever truly feel "alright" about them and treat with the same respect you would give to anyone else?

I don't think I can...or would...and I'm pretty liberal.

I say fuck pedophiles, fuck them right in the ear.

Maybe someone could explain the point of this movie to me (because I obviously missed it) and tell me if it involved anything besides the message that "Pedophiles are people too".