Respect for the elderly

This week's Monday Doodle is the Tommy Gun Granny, proving that you're never too old to kick ass and take names.

Strange Currencies

I'm home from a night of revelry amongst the glitterati of the Portland social scene. The movers and the shakers of what tomorrow brings are never as larger-than-life as they seem in print. Random firings of my cerebral cortex fill my mind to distraction, as is the way of things at this hour in the morning when I should be well ensconced in the protective bunker of my bed sheets.

Is it unethical to sleep with my boss, whom I'm dangerously attracted to, so long as I make it abundantly clear that I would be mortally offended should our mutual gratification cause any change for the better (or worse) in my work schedule.

I think about the man with whom I'm madly in love with. I imagine the two of us wrinkled and satisfied, reminiscing about days gone by and both knowing that we've made the right choice in sticking it out through thick and thin. Is what I feel (and truly believe in the core of my being that he feels too) enough to last us into our dotage even though he's several states and degrees of social perception removed from me?

Is it wrong to be a drunken make-out whore? Do I demean myself by enjoying what the moment presents? Or am I simply adhering to a sexual revolution that I fear is meeting it's death at the hands of a generation that was raised ignorant of the prudish values that made that sort of destructive social anarchy a necessity for the evolution of the American psyche?

Will I ever truly make good on the promise of the talents given to me by my forebearers? Or will I simply allow myself to slip into hubris and result in nothing as so many have before me? I was born with so much more than obscurity inside of me, I need to be true to that.

When all is said and done, I think I've made the best choices that I knew how given the circumstances. Why, then, do I still feel sadness over the way certain threads of my life have developed thus far? Perhaps I need to take my own advice and look at my life from the perspective of several hundred years, rather than the paltry handful of decades that we are all given.

I know I've faced the reality that my mother, to whom I will always look up to because she is human and fallible rather than being an uplifted Saint, will some day die. Am I kidding myself that I can take the visceral fact of it with quiet dignity? Or will I collapse, blubbering, into the arms of any friend that will take me, when the time finally comes and she moves on to whatever comes after the heart stills and the breath grows cold?

Like I said, it's late at night, and Jagermeister is a harsh and unfathomable master. This, children, is why I generally stick to Jack Daniels. He's a surly, cantankerous lout; but at least he's simple in his motives.

PS: On the existential note: Is that smell me, or have I missed a corner of my room in my semi-annual cleaning cycle? Whatever it is, "musky" is a rather generous word.

I make drawerings...

It's been brought to my attention by pretty much everyone that knows that I'm capable of holding a pen long enough to draw a line that I don't draw nearly enough. The truth is that I do draw a lot (usually at work on Mondays while I stare at the empty bar), but most of what I do is just doodles. So here is the first of what I'm thinking might become a weekly doodles posting. Enjoy, or not, it's out of my head now either way.

iSuck

Recently iTunes came out with a mandatory update. It's one of those updates that you don't technically have to download, but the program screams at you like a wailing toddler every time you access it until you finally submit to it's infantile tantrums and just download the damn update. What the updater failed to warn me was that it was a complete program overhaul. What was once a nice quiet program that played my music when I needed it to and burned a few CDs once in a while has hit puberty and turned into a cantankerous beast that eats up inordinately large amounts of my processor speed for no discernible reason, and has decided that the large spacious drive I installed it in is not to it's liking and has planted itself in my already overburdened C drive causing my entire computer to turn into a sluggish beast whether iTunes is running or not. The fact that my nice little music player has sprouted a multitude of annoying bugs like acne on a grease-fryer's face isn't helping what has become a very strained relationship.

My short patience with technology is compounded by the fact that we recently updated the POS at work which was basically like giving our completely functional register system a lobotomy. The tech geeks who sullied our baby have spent the last month trying to get the system back to where it was before they violated it. So far, I haven't seen anything I'd call an upgrade.

Why must geeks constantly seek to fix what was clearly not broken?

On the plus side, with the weather turning to snuggle temperatures my bar business is picking up. It turns out a cave is less depressing when it's not sunny outside anymore.

I'm A Bad Homo

"I support gay bashing, I just don't think we should leave our dirty work to straight people."

It's true too, I think every now and then someone needs to get their butt kicked. Not because I promote violence, but because there are some modes of behavior that cross the line. The bitchy twink who sweats glitter and treats everyone he perceives as not being hot like shit, the cracked out muscle-headed circuit queen who's life revolves around uninspired cookie-cutter dance music and consuming enough drugs to be just a hair shy of an overdose, the tragic, bitter old troll who feels he's wasted his life and wants everyone else to be as miserable and self-hating as he is, the drag queen who thinks that putting on 8" heels and a 6' wig gives him the right to act like someone who can actually sing or dance in real life and therefore deserves some kind of special recognition, and soap-box homos who denounce other folks without recognizing their own glaring flaws (it's true, I'm a hypocrite sometimes). These are all examples of people who should probably get a boot to the head, and then an intervention.

"I don't support gay marriage, or straight marriage for that matter."

It's true, I don't think that our government has any right to support or legislate what is an entirely religious institution. Civil unions are about as far as it goes in my book. Anything more than that is a clear violation of the separation between church and state, and we're all seeing how badly things go when that principle is ignored under our current overly-zealous christian government.

And finally:

"Cher is overplayed, Madonna's entire career has been self-derivative, and Barbara Streisand's singing sucks."

No really, it's true. Dolly Parton, on the other hand, is a Saint.

Sorry Guys

It's official and true, after years of devout bachelorhood I've finally found my one, true love. That's right, this brazen harlot of Babylon is hanging up his easy-access snap-on pants and trading them in for a wedding ring.

Who have I fallen for you ask? What paragon of manhood has snared my fickle attentions and bound my heart for all eternity? Surprisingly, not the kind of guy you'd think. You see, we haven't even met yet, and that's fine. Because this is love, this is real. It doesn't matter what that stupid judge says.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Michael Bublé. Combine his pouty bedroom eyes with a voice that's like a thousand clever tongues on the foot of your soul and you get this sultry young Canadian. His voice is a throwback to a bygone era when men were men and women were flawless beauties each and every one. Listening to him is like being a little kid again, staying up late and creeping through a darkened hallway to listen to the radio through the livingroom door while your parents spoke of important grown-up matters too boring to distract from the wild and strange world that came creeping it's way through the radio. He's a history of love and loss and all that's in between rolled up into the kind of package you'd like to wake up next to every morning until you're old and satisfied.

So yeah, as soon as that restraining order expires, he's all mine.

Update 10/13/2006 My friend LR is the one who exposed me to the infinite love that is Mr. Bublé, he deserves credit for that and so very much more.

The Crazy Train

At almost thirty years of age I have never once in my life owned any sort of motorized transport (unless you count that one time I hooked a guy up to electric nipple clamps and rode him around the back yard like an epileptic AT-AT). For the better part of three decades I've managed to get by on my own two feet and the odd bicycle when I can keep one from getting stolen or impressively falling apart underneath me. Aside from those times in life where getting from point A to point B is too far for my little legs to carry me I really enjoy not having a car. It's very affordable, parking is a breeze, and there's no such thing as having too perky a butt.

However, living up here in fair Portlandia there comes a time of year when riding my bike is just not very practical. I'm not the psychotically dedicated type that will try to ride my bike home through a blizzard. At least not any more, that's a mistake you only have to make once. As the weather turns brisk and the leaves all turn that lovely shade of almost-dead it comes time to put my bike away for the winter and exchange it for a bus pass.

And therein lies the problem. There are two modes of public transport up here. There's the high-tech and usually quite clean MAX system that ferries working stiffs from the outlying territories into the city proper so that they can be productive little consumer bees, and then there's the regular bus system. You know the one I'm talking about. This is where all the hard cases go, those burnt-out used up revenants of humanity who's only goal in life seems to be getting more cracked out than Whitney Houston. I'll grant that the MAX usually smells like pee, but the bus usually smells like the crushed dreams of people that haven't showered since the mid-80s. Personally, I'll take a little urine stink over the emaciated lady screaming and hollering about why the girls don't like her as she clings to my shirt hem. Pee odor is something you can at least tune out.

Had I my druthers I'd be riding the MAX to and from work, happily gazing at the world as it melts past my window, or lazily reading my latest collection of short stories as the automated voice on the P.A. system narrates my trip through life. But I live too close to town for that service. Instead, I get to wait in front of the Plaid Pantry trying not to make eye contact with the random black guy hanging out trying to sell me something. No, I'm not remotely racist, but I've yet to have a random white guy with a hard-luck story try to sell me a leather jacket or cell phone service on the street. The white people just ask for money or scream and yell at cracks in the sidewalk for talkin' smack 'bout their baby's mama. Only a great fool talks smack about someone's baby's mama, at least that's what I've heard from the mumblings around the methadone clinic located a few blocks away from my house. So I don my hoodie, plug myself into my iPod, and do everything I can to get through the winter without getting sandwiched between two overweight mongoloids having a marital dispute.

All aboard the Crazy Train, next stop: the out-patient clinic for the pathologically high-spirited.