Dave Littler's Tall Blog of Strength!

Anyone in the greater Vancouver area up for a game of Dark Sun?

13th Jun, 2009 at 12:44 PM

It seems that my regular gaming group has taken a little bit of a hit, having lost two previously- regular players to various uninteresting fates. This leaves us in a trifle of a lurch, as we find ourselves with but three regular players in total. As anyone with any experience in the fine art of Dungeons & Dragons is concerned, this is an entirely unacceptable number. We’re hunting around for two more players to fill this gap for our every-second-friday gaming sessions at my place.

( Details within! )

Pants

3rd Jun, 2009 at 2:23 AM

Today I had a conversation with a friend of mine on the topic of fashion.

As anyone who knows me knows, I dress exclusively in black, about 99% of the time. This is not a question of slavery to some external trend or movement; I’ve never considered myself a goth, for instance; I realized in high school that, as much as I liked the way that goths dress, it’s mostly about a music style which doesn’t speak to me in the slightest, and that in any case the idea of suborning my own sense of style to anyone else’s expectations of what I ought to look like or present myself was just sort of fundamentally ridiculous and loathsome to me.

Similarly, anyone who has known me for more than ten years – which is admittedly a vanishingly small list at this point – knows that this has not always been the case; my later days in high school were a process of experimentation for me, as they were for many people. In my case, I worked very aggressively to define myself along very personal lines so as to prevent anyone from being able to sort me into any group or clique at the time. One day I would show up in a suit and tie, wearing leather loafers and a briefcase. The next day, I would be dressed head to toe in bright green, including an elabourate facepaint design (which would come to be the foundation upon which my body painting skills would later be built). The day after that, a blue housecoat, tattered jeans, orange reflective safety vest and floppy brown leather hat. It was only very gradually that I fell into a single style which I felt comfortable with and which I felt represented me well to the world, and this is a style which to one extent or another I’ve stuck with ever since.

I’ve had any number of people attempt to dissuade me from this course, of which the most laughable was a horrendous little cretin named Jason Engel, who worked day and night to conform to every “goth” stereotype he could, and was among the most superficial adults I’ve ever met. He viewed my dressing exclusively in black as a sort of trespass into “his” territory, and one I wasn’t entitled to. He attempted to get me to dress more colourfully in the service of his own vanity. I laughed in his face and remained steadfast.

Today, I’ve had a friend attempt to get me to wear colourful t-shirts and bluejeans so as to make myself more superficially appealing to women. The thought was utterly repulsive to me; being told that in order to find that right woman, the thing to do was to toss aside my own individuality and sense of visual identity in favour of a sort of generic mediocrity; blending in with the anonymous and faceless crowd. I don’t deny that this might be effective if my intent was to find some woman who were attracted to the bland and the generic, and I needed some camouflage or disguise in order to deceive her into believing that I was one such person, but I daresay that this illusion, and the feelings built thereupon would be shattered quite swiftly the moment that I began to discuss virtually any topic with her. Besides which, what use would I have for such a woman? It would be a trying ordeal for me to be involved with such a lady, I fear, and a trying ordeal of a relationship, startling as it may sound, is not actually something I’m actively seeking out.

Besides which, there are practical concerns, ranging from the physiological to the psychological. My legs are twin pillars of rippling muscle, bulging against the world with seething power. There is a terrible cost to this, however; they also bulge against one another in a manner which is fairly destructive; as my thighs press against one another, the friction caused ends up destroying the inner thighs of any pants which I wear. Even this, though, is preferable to the fate which awaits me if I were to wear more durable pants; a pair of blue jeans would rub against my legs no less than my preferred slacks, but whereas slacks would give way, the heavy weave of jeans would cause my flesh to be worn away, leaving a pair of oozing blisters in their wake. Not only is the agony of this sensation – which is all too well-known to me – a significant disincentive to following this advice, there is the question of how attractive oozing and infected sores on my inner thighs would be to that prospective Miss Right.

Then there’s the psychological, and here I cite no less an authority than one Mr. Albert Einstein. Einsten decided early on in his life what fashion was comfortable and serviceable to him, and he stuck by it. So consistent was he, in fact, that he came upon a startlingly utilitarian approach: He simply bought dozens of identical suits, and they formed the entirety of his wardrobe. Every morning, he could simply pick any shirt, any pair of pants, any jacket, and not waste so much as a single moment, a single spare thought on the topic; there was no question of what mood he was in, what went well together or what the occasion was. This was a guy who had bigger fish to fry with his brain than a question of what to wear. “But Dave”, you may ask, “What about the ladies? What about making a good impression with the ladies? Don’t they demand of their suitors a sort of blind adherence to an arbitrary sense of style chosen for them, against their will, by the mindless pressures of the society around them? How could a man of even Einstein’s towering intellect possibly be a role model for you in this regard, given that he must logically have been a romantic failure in light of his decision to be happy with his own appearance, rather than abandoning his own principles in an effort to satisfy the mindless shrieking demands of the collective unconscious?”

Well let me tell you a little about that. Albert Einstein married his cousin Elsa. Most women would be like “Ick, no! I will not grant you access to my vagina! Incest is disgusting and wrong!” But Einstein, being the cockpunchingly pimpin’ guy that he was, was able to brush that shit aside and be all like “Shit, bitch! I’m Albert motherfucking Einstein! You gonna let a little thing like THAT get in the way of you gettin’ with my fuckin’ same-suited, no-haircut-gettin’, not-shavin’-my-moustachin’ self?” And she was all like “Aw, what the fuck.” Cause you know why? Because chicks dig confidence, that’s why. And a guy like that, as confident as he was of the way he looked and dressed and groomed himself had a lot going on in that regard.

I’m not trying to put myself in Einstein’s bitch-gettin’ league or anything here; he plainly had a great deal else going on that I could only ever asprire to. Why, he once had a three word conversation with William Golding!* What have I done that can compare to shit like that, right? But as far as role models go, I figure I could do a lot worse.

* This conversation, retold in Golding’s essay “Thinking as a Hobby”, took place atop a bridge over a small river at a time when Golding knew about one word of German, and Einstein knew about no words of english. As a fish swam under them, Golding remarked “Fisch”, thus expending the bulk of his german vocabulary. “Ja, fisch”, Einstein responded, entirely accurately (one presumes; in fairness I’m actually giving the two of them the benefit of the doubt here; they could have as easily mistaken a bit of garbage for a fish, in that neither of them are known to have been marine biologists of any repute).

The Drowning Moron

28th Apr, 2009 at 10:19 AM

A few years ago, I was living with a colossal douchebag named Aaron. He and I eventually grew sick and tired of one another (because this is the function of a room-mate), and he moved away to become a harbour hobo.

A harbour hobo is someone who lives in a boat and floats that boat just far enough off-shore that they're in, shall we say, communal waters, and as such doesn't need to pay rent to anyone. His theory was that he could get a loan, buy a houseboat, pay back the loan instead of paying rent, and then, once he had the boat paid off, he could live rent-free and have some collateral towards buying something which someone might conceivably want to live in. In the mean time, he would live in a little thirty foot box with his thirteen year old yowling, shitting, puking beast of a cat, floating out in the middle of the harbour for several years without electricity or the ability to have people over.

Aaron was kind of an idiot.

Amusingly enough, it seems that, as has so often been the case in his life, he's vastly overestimated his own abilities. In this case, predictably enough, he seems to have realized living in a floating box with no power and nowhere to dock kind of sucks, and has rented out some space at a marina. I know this because I've been getting mail from his marina at my place, some year and a half after his departure. I find this a trifle puzzling in light of the fact that he LIVES at the marina, and one would think that whoever is sending this mail could walk from the office to the boat and hand him the letter, rather than paying to have it sent to another city, and one which - and I feel this is an important element here - he does not in fact live in anymore.

In a fleeting moment of curiosity, I decided to try to figure out where he actually lived so I could have his letters and such sent there, and in the process of this, I checked out the marina in question and discovered, to my combination of amusement and seething contempt, that he's named his boat after his putrid, dying cat, after a fashion, and called it "The Cat's Meow." This, to me, is around as clever as naming his cat "Tigger" in the first place.

It did get me to thinking, though: If I were a boat owner, what would I call my own vessel? The answer came to me in a moment, and was blinding in its obviousness. I would call it "The Drowning Moron". I would then have a wooden masthead carved in the image of a drowning man, flailing about in the water, eyes wild and unfocused, and I would have it affixed to the front of my boat in such a way that the water line would be right around the mouth of the masthead, so that as my boat bobbed gently in the water, he would periodically surface and submerge in the water, his desperate, pleading eyes only occasionally meeting those of passers-by, his hands reaching out for aid he would never receive, because he is made of wood and physically connected to the boat along his hypothetical spinal column.

"Cat's Meow", indeed. Have a little dignity, you jackass. Name your boat something awesome or don't name it at all. If that's not one of the laws of the sea, if fucking well ought to be.

Tales of Vince: A breaktrough!

7th Apr, 2009 at 11:13 PM

I wouldn't keep posting about my semi-functional beast of a room-mate, Vince, if not for the fact that people seem genuinely fascinated by this situation. As it is, I find myself in an interesting state of mind on the topic; for months now, I had been... well, not content, obviously, but at least WILLING to sit back and observe the sloth of the man-child with whom I live and merely document the ongoing trainwreck which was and is his domestic existence. All of this attention you folks have been paying this saga, however, has motivated me to see if I can't make some progress here, as much for my own sake as for the sake of the audience which I know now waits with baited breath for each new installment in this drama.

I seem to have reached a small breakthrough today, and one with possibly far-reaching consequences. You may recall a post from a few weeks ago in which I spoke on his ever-accumulating pile of filthy dishes in this sink. The resolution to that one came around a week later, when I confronted him on the topic and he claimed that the reason why he had gone more than a month without doing his dishes was that he simply "hadn't noticed" that they were there. I at the time expressed some skepticism on this count; how could a man who was attentive enough to consistently remember to get dressed before leaving the appartment not notice the pile of disgusting, mouldering dishes in the sink for over a month while continuing to pile new ones on top of them? Nevertheless, I decided today to test the theory here a little bit. We have a recycling bin which we keep on the balcony, and which theoretically we're supposed to take turns taking out whenever it gets full. In reality what takes place is that I take it out one day, and then, two or three weeks later, when it gets full, I point out to him it's his turn to do so, at which point it promptly begins to overflow all over the balcony for a month or two, during which I point out to him four or five times that it remains his turn to take it out. This time, however, proceeding from his premise that he lets these things go for so long because he doesn't notice them, I took the full bin, placed it directly in front of his bedroom door, and then stood back and listened.

A few hours later, he returned home and evidently noticed it almost straight away, and indeed, actually took it out almost immediately. A remarkable accomplishment! I was so proud of him I almost considered breaking my personal "never speak to Vince about matters not pertaining to bills" rule. It did put me in mind of a few additional applications of this tactic which in the coming days I plan on testing; placing the kitchen garbage bag in front of his bedroom door; possibly hanging from his doorknob. Placing his dirty dishes in a bucket outside of his bedroom, perhaps. And yet, there feels to me as though there may be limited applications here. How do I get him to vacuum up the piles of crumbs and leavings he leaves after eating on the couch in the living room? Do I pull up the carpet and place it, along with the vacuum cleaner, in front of his door? There comes a point where the impracticality of it stands in the path of my curiosity.

And how do I apply this to his other foibles? How do I put "Don't bring around your imbicile of a girlfriend" in front of his door? How do I put "It's your turn to buy the toilet paper, you unhygenic pig" outside of his door? How do I put his-not-falling-asleep-watching-DVDs-in-his-underwear-on-the-couch in front of his door?

Well, alright, I suppose the answer to that last one is fairly obvious, but the notion of my taking it upon myself to carry his slumbering form from the couch and tucking him into bed is as repulsive as any four of his other shortcomings put together.

In the mean time, I do seem to have limited his DVD viewings slightly by keeping any new DVDs I purchase hidden in my living room after a debacle some weeks ago in which I bought a DVD of a comedy I'd wanted to watch and he managed to lose the disc - inside of the DVD player, I might add - before I ever got a chance to watch it, and then lied to me, pretending he had no idea where it went. I realize that to some extent I'm living in a fool's paradise here; I'm never going to keep him from this habit by limiting his available DVDs. If he had a single DVD - even one he dislikes as much as, for example, the Sarah Silverman program (whose depiction of women as being essentially equal to men repulses and enrages him) - he would still watch that one DVD five to ten times a week because he needs that sensory imput to drown out the howling void inside of his skull. All I'm doing here is denying him NEW motives to do so, though the 10-20% decrease in his viewing times is an acceptable pay-off as far as this goes. The fact that this also prevents him from ruining these new things I enjoy the way he's ruined so many others by watching and re-watching them so many times per month that I can no longer stand the sound or sight of them is a significant bonus.

Tales of Vince: Retard-Girl

29th Mar, 2009 at 3:54 PM

I mentioned the other day that my hideous and repellant room-mate, Vince, has a girlfriend. This, I feel, is worth elabourating upon somewhat.

I call her Retard Girl, though I don't know her real name. I've never asked, and never been introduced. I've never called her this to her face, nor indeed spoken it out loud; it's merely the identifier I use when thinking about her within my own internal monolouge. If it seems peculiar that I've had so minimal a contact with a woman who's lately been in my home four or five days a week for the past couple of months, then perhaps I ought to step back a few paces and tell the tale of my first encounter with Retard Girl for the sake of context.

Vince had been living in my place for some months, and while he had failed to impress me, I was nevertheless not completely disgusted with him just yet. He had made plain that where women were concerned he was entirely amoral and without guiding ethics; he would brag about sleeping with his friends' girlfriends behind their backs, he would praise people for acts of infidelity and dishonesty with their own significant others, he would routinely become involved with women he felt nothing for on the most temporary of basis, and once made reference to a girlfriend of his by saying "I don't have a girlfriend, but I have a girl who would be pretty upset to hear me say that." In short, his attitudes and approach to women was so comprehensively repugnant that I could not imagine any girl who would voulentarily date him being the sort of person I would want to interact with. Besides which, I could tell - without ever having seen him with a woman - that the personal drama involved would be pretty striking in no time at all, and I had no desire whatsoever to be involved in their relationship in even the most peripheral of senses.

It is with this - among other things - in mind that I informed him of one of my personal rules of conduct: "I don't want to meet her, I don't want to speak with her, I don't want anything to do with her. So far as she's concerned, you have no room-mate, and as far as I'm concerned, you're single. I expect you to adhere to the same treatment if and when you should ever see me with a woman." He was a bit confused, and so I clarified somewhat that I just wanted to avoid any potential home-life-destroying drama, and this would be the easiest way to do so in this regard. Privately, of course, this was also a sort of insurance policy I wanted to establish to keep him from deciding he wanted to take a shot at any future girlfriend of mine, which he was even then plainly stupid and selfish enough to do. If he never spoke to them, I reasoned, he couldn't make a pass at them. He agreed at the time, and I was content with this.

Some hours pass, and I'm in the kitchen, cooking at the stove when I hear the front door opening. Out of my peripheral vision, I see it's Vince and he has someone short standing behind him with one of those feminine voices which rises at the end of each sentence as though she were asking a question, regardless of the nature of the sentence in question. One of the most repellently unintelligent-seeming affectations I've ever heard. I immediately realize that this is Vince's lady friend, and, true to my word, I ignore their arrival entirely, keeping my eyes rooted to the dishes in front of me, neither greeting them nor acknowledging their presence in any way. I looked forwards to them returning this absence-of-treatment and pass on to the living room or Vince's bedroom without interacting with me. Sadly, it seems my fool of a room-mate had failed to mention to her the arrangement we had agreed to some hours previously, and before long, she was standing next to me.

Talking to me.

Retard Girl: "Whatcha doooooing?"
Me: "I am cooking."
Retard Girl: "What're you cooooooking?"
Me: "The Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand, a dish of my own concoction, and thus named after the Serbian Monarch whose assasination led to what we would come to know as World War 1."
Retard Girl: "Whaaaat's thaaaat?"
Me: "Which? The War or the meal?"
Retard Girl: "Eeeeeiiitheeeer?"
Me: "... World War One was a wide-scale military conflict taking place in Europe in the second decade of the Twentieth Century. Primarily involving the countries of..."

And here Vince stepped in to interrupt me, perhaps not wanting to have to sit through a lesson on the history of WW1 during the first date which had led to his girlfriend being within a few feet of his bedroom. I was content to leave it at that. Sadly, Retard Girl had other ideas (if indeed the products of the peanut rattling around in her otherwise empty skull could indeed be called "ideas" in any meaningful sense).

Retard Girl: "Can I have a huuuuuug?"
Me: "You may not."
Retard Girl: "Why nooooooot?"
Me: "Because I do not wish to give you one", I said, privately disgusted both by her naked attempt at drama whoring and at the thought of the number of guys who must surely exist out there who would fall prey to a ploy like this with all the subtlety of presenting her upraised hindquarters to them.
Retard Girl: "Is it because I'm tooooo uuuuglyyyy?" she asked in a pouty, little-girl 'comfort, console and indulge-me' voice.
Me: "I wouldn't know", I replied entirely honestly, "I haven't looked at you yet."

At this, she flew into a rage, screaming curses and insults at me. I replied mildly "If it pleases you to speak these words, then by all means speak them. It is of no significance to me." before Vince dragged her off to the bedroom.

She made another abortive attempt to speak to me some ten minutes or so later, once again asking me what I was cooking, evidently having forgotten our previous conversation. I was already tired of this situation, and asked Vince if he could explain to her why it was I was not engaging her in conversation. As he did so, I retreated to my bedroom, my thankfully-now-complete meal on a plate in my hands.

In the many months since then, it seems she's gotten the message; she's never again spoken to me, nor I to her, nor indeed have I ever looked directly at her. Every so often, though, I'll have the misfortune of hearing them in the living room as I'm in the kitchen. Perhaps they'll be watching Venture Bros, I cartoon series we have on the DVD shelf, and she'll be asking him to explain the plotline to her every ten seconds or so because it's too complicated for her to follow. Or on another occasion, she'll be watching Wildboyz with Vince as he watches it for the thirtieth or perhaps fortieth time, and he'll need to explain to her that a great white shark is a dangerous animal that has been known to eat people, and that's why the guys on the TV screen are afraid of it. With each passing instance of my having to hear her speak, my heart falls a little bit further, burdened down by the weight of the knowledge that the modern world could give rise to such a woman, and that Vince's personal standards are so low that she's the sort of gal he will voulentarily interact with her month after month. He talks about killing himself a lot while she's around, and I suppose I can't blame him for reacting this way to her, but that doesn't keep him from needing to speak on the phone with her some 80% of the time that she's not directly in his presence, essentially narrating his every thought and action to her over the phone because she requires this sort of constant attention and maintenance, presumably to continuously distract her from the vague but nagging impression that there's something amiss with the howling, empty void in her skull where any normal person houses their brain. It's just a shame that all she has to fill that void of thought is a retarded man-child like Vince.

They really do deserve each other. I just wonder if the world really deserves the horde of mentally retarded children they'll doubtless someday spawn together.

A one month... monthiversary, I suppose.

18th Mar, 2009 at 6:58 AM

I've spoken a time or three on the topic of my dear room-mate Vince, and since it's a topic people seem fascinated by in a sort of horrified way, I see no reason why I ought to deprive you goodly folks of more tales of my amazing cohabitation with him that you, my gentle readers, can marvel at and in some small way appreciate further your good fortune in living with anybody else, or perhaps more fortunately yet, nobody at all.

This past month, I've been running a series of experiments. It began one month ago today, when I noticed that Vince had - as is his wont - left some dirty dishes in the sink. While as a matter of habit I have habitually cleaned up any such messes in the kitchen as a reaction to what I consider an ordinary adult aversion to seeing post-meal filth cluttering up the home, I decided this time I might like to try something a little bit different. This time I would leave it to Vince to handle on his own and see how long it would take him. He had, after all, demonstrated a truly epic level of sloth, self-indulgence and irresponsibility in so many other fields of late, I felt it was a valid field of inquiry, and one which the scholar in me felt a burning need to learn the answer to.

Days went by, and then weeks. The stench began to grow steadily stronger and stronger in the sink. A few dishes came and went, but there were a few "old regulars" like his blue-lidded Tupperware containers with noodle remnants and his glass full of some increasingly-scummy-milky substance (see picture, below). All the while, I kept on placing my own dishes and such in the dishwasher immediately next to the sink, keeping them carefully separate from those in the sink so as to keep the results of the experiment pure and pristine.

In the mean time, I set up a number of other experiments in series. "If the kitchen garbage bag is full to over-flowing, will Vince eventually take it out on his own, or will he leave it like that forever?", "If we run out of toilet paper, and I refuse to buy the new bag for the eighth time in a row, but rather keep a private horde in my bedroom for my own personal use, will Vince eventually clue in and buy some toilet paper without needing my prompting to do so?", "Will Vince ever take out the recycling when it's his turn, or will it just pile up over and around the recycling box forever?", "Will Vince run the dishwasher if I don't, or will he leave it full of dirty dishes forever", and "Will Vince wipe up that smear of blood on the bathroom counter that he or his girlfriend left, or will I need to do that for him". All were all topics of significant interest on my part.

Each of these, in their turn, ended with predictably disappointing results. He turned to using paper towels from the kitchen rather than purchasing toilet paper (paper towels which I had bought), he let the kitchen garbage bag overflow onto the floor, the blood on the counter ended up getting wiped clean incidentally when I was doing my routine cleaning of the counter in a moment of piquant disgust, the dishwasher went unused except for when I felt the need to run it to satisfy my own sanitary distress, and so on. He DID take out the recycling after just three weeks of it overflowing, and I took that opportunity to praise him for it, hoping that - like a dog - some positive re-enforcement might motivate him to further acts of hygiene. Sadly, this was not to be the case.

Today, one month in, the kitchen sink is largely full of his filth, many of the items having been there since day one and still there to this day, like old veterans still hanging around to tell these johnny-come-latelies that there WAS a day when the sink is clean, and NO our old minds aren't playing tricks on me, I was there damn it!

Vince can see this, day in, day out for a solid month without feeling any urge to clean it. He is more of a man than you'll ever be.

I have no particular desire to be his daddy, holding his hand and walking him through these rudimentary tasks, but I begin to feel that he lacks the necessary brain power to contribute anything but filth in the absence of something closely resembling parental guidance. Somehow, that critical part of the upbringing of a child where they learn that the household tasks that their parents teach them to do as kids are not merely for the parents' benefit but in order to inculcate them in the child just never happens with him, and as a consequence, he's incapable of functioning as an adult in this sense. When I tell him to do his chores, he seldom does them either, which tells me that he's not capable of functioning at the level of a child, either. A dog or a cat would know not to leave their filth in the area where they live and eat, and so he's incapable even of functioning at what I would consider a basic mammalian level. I would characterize his level of hygiene, thus, as somewhat akin to a worm or a maggot, who is content and comfortable living amidst their own filth.

This poses a bit of a conundrum for me: An adult, you can talk to about these things. A child, you can teach. An animal, you can train. A worm will never be anything other than a worm, though, and will never do anything but what a worm will do. Even a maggot will never be anything better than a fly, and I don't care for either, to be quite honest, and I begin to sense than in Vince, this is exactly what I'm forced to live with.

Perhaps in a short while I'll tell you folks about his truly magical girlfriend. The sort of woman who decides she wants Vince as her special guy is someone worthy of a tale or two herself, I can assure you.

Rate my sideburns!

6th Mar, 2009 at 6:28 AM

Looking at some old photographs of myself, basking in the glory and radiant beauty of my own youthful visage, I came to a startling conclusion: Though the years have been in large part kind and my appearance has changed for the most part as little as you would hope perfection might, there is one trait which has - quite without my intention or notice! - changed appreciably.

My sideburns, it seems, have crept ever downwards and outwards, coming to dominate an ever-greater portion of my face. Now, while I neither begrudge nor bemoan this, as I rather like the look either way, I aknowledge a certain bias in this regard. And so I have decided to consult those people whose intellect and taste I trust the most: The people who like me and my work.

To wit: Sideburns: be they better whilst short or long? The results of this survey may have some small consequence vis a vis my personal grooming practices.

Update: After two days, by my count, the vote stands at five votes for longer, five for shorter, and thus we stand at a stalemate. I find it somewhat vindicating that opinions on this topic are broadly as divided as my own personal ruminations have themselves been. I believe I'm going to let this one stand for a while yet before make any decisions.

Domestic disturbances

9th Feb, 2009 at 7:35 AM

I swear I'm going to get back to doing entertainment-oriented posts in the immediate future, but for the moment, I feel that people may be entertained and horrified by the ongoing-and-seemingly-accelerating ridiculousness of my room-mate situation.

When last we checked in with Vince, he was pretending to be asleep while I was steam cleaning the apartment, including, most notably, the sections which he himself had said he considered it fair that he be tasked with cleaning. I say "pretending" because the notion that he could have slept through my working it back and forth immediately outside his bedroom for at least one of the five hours I spent doing his work for him, only to have woken up mere MOMENTS after I put the last of the furniture back in place, affecting surprise at the fact that I got the machine to work in the first place, since - and this was the new explanation, not proffered as of 6:30 AM when he went to bed - he was never able to get it to work, and THAT'S why he hadn't done any cleaning.

The past week, I've tried my best not to speak with him for more than a couple of seconds at a time, so as to avoid a screaming match and thus maintain the fragile, surface-deep illusion of domestic peace which I value so much. This morning, though, it seemed as though doing so was less valuable than asking him the following when I found him passed out on the couch in his underwear with the menu for a DVD of "TNA Wrestling" on the TV:

"What series of events, exactly, led to your hat being on my bed at some point in the night? I would like to know the nature of the interaction between you and my bed which brought about this situation, and why you thought it was a good idea that this interaction should take place."

His reaction was to stare blankly at me for a solid twenty seconds or so, the gears in his head audibly grinding against one another, before mumbling that he had no idea how it had happened, nor indeed how he came to be passed out on the couch watching old wrestling videos, and conceded that the situation was "Pretty fucked-up."

In light of the absence of empty beer bottles strewn about the apartment, I am forced to begin to consider the possibility that he may actually just be losing his mind. I seem to recall a time - and this was a time which was not too long ago - when my disgust with him was occasionally leavened with moments of tolerance and even contentment.

Bedbugs: A dark and obnoxious legacy

2nd Feb, 2009 at 10:13 AM

Astute readers this past month may have noticed that there's been very little in this blog to astutely read. They are to be praised for this attention to detail, and it is in light of this that I offer any such interested parties a theoretical coupon for a virtual high five, to be redeemed at a time of their choosing. There have been reasons for this. Good reasons. And while these reasons have not changed, they have of late reached, shall we say, a magnitude where a certain critical mass has been reached, wherein their atomic properties have been in some fundamental way altered, thus resulting in their effects upon me (IE, a lack of posts) to transmute as well (IE, into a post). Thus does science work its grim and mysterious magic.

( Contained herein is a bit of tl;dr, but I have a tale to weave and a powerful need to vent )
I'm feeling a little frustrated with this entire situation.

Colin Macdonald: Father of one.

29th Dec, 2008 at 7:06 AM

Perhaps a dozen or so of the readers of this blog do or have known Colin Macdonald personally, and a similar number of readers will know him as one of the chief actors in my old comic, Dave & Vyacheslav. For the rest of you, he's one of my oldest and dearest friends. This weekend, I received the following e-mail from Colin and his wife Layla in Italy:

Linora Carolina Macdonald was born on the 23rd of December at 12:20 in the afternoon, almost two weeks late, lazy girl. Lela had to be induced, but unfortunately it wasn't working as needed so Linora was born by emergency cesarean after two days of labour. She's is happy and healthy, and as you can see by the pictures, she is in fact the cutest baby ever. At birth she weighted a reasonable 3.54 kilos, 52cm long with a 35cm head. She drinks like a sailor and has made numerous Pollocks in her diapers. We're now home a ready to celebrate a late Christmas, even though we already got the best present.

We hope you are all enjoying your holidays.

( A number of additional baby pictures under the cut )

My own response to this missive:

Congratulations on slapping nature in the dick and telling it you don't give a shit who it thinks ought and ought not to be born. Nature is such a jerk. It's got no idea what babies are worth having around and what aren't. I think you've demonstrated much better judgment than nature this way, in that this is plainly a fine offspring you've produced. Belated congratulations on getting your DNA to intertwine successfully, incidentally.

This, incidentally, is really bizarre to me. Colin, in my mind, has to some extent never stopped being the clever, snarky, nerdy, creative, abrasive and funny teenager who attached himself to my social circle some eleven years ago, and now he is quite undeniably an adult, in a way that even his years-long proprietorship of Vancouver's #1 Satan-themed cafe and bake shop, La Cucina del Diavolo, didn't concretely make him in my mind. The heavy footfalls of inexorable march of time begin to sound louder and louder in my mind with each passing day...
Anyways, anyone who cares to leave their well-wishes, congratulations and such, leave them here and I shall make certain that Colin is alerted to them.

Are You a Hardcore Atheist?

27th Dec, 2008 at 4:45 AM

Apparently there's this "Are you a hardcore atheist" meme going around, which I found by means of the excellent Evolved and Rat/i/onal blog. While I only occasionally post memes and surveys of this sort, I felt this one was smart and on-the-nose enough to be worth my time and attention.

Quoting from the original post....

***

How serious do you take your atheism?

Let’s find out.

Copy and paste the list below on your own site, boldfacing the things you’ve done. (Feel free to add your own elaboration and commentary to each item!)

Participated in the Blasphemy Challenge.
Met at least one of the “Four Horsemen” (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris) in person.
Created an atheist blog.
Used the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a religious debate with someone.
Gotten offended when someone called you an agnostic.
Been unable to watch Growing Pains reruns because of Kirk Cameron.
Own more Bibles than most Christians you know.
Have at least one Bible with your personal annotations regarding contradictions, disturbing parts, etc.
Have come out as an atheist to your family.
Attended a campus or off-campus atheist gathering.
Are a member of an organized atheist/Humanist/etc. organization.
Had a Humanist wedding ceremony.
Donated money to an atheist organization.
Have a bookshelf dedicated solely to Richard Dawkins.
Lost the friendship of someone you know because of your non-theism.
Tried to argue or have a discussion with someone who stopped you on the street to proselytize.
Had to hide your atheist beliefs on a first date because you didn’t want to scare him/her away. (I actually feel that the fact that I have refused to hide my beliefs even when on a date with a christian girl and gradually and gently introduced her to what proveed to be some fairly persuasive arguments sould count in my favour...)
Own a stockpile of atheist paraphernalia (bumper stickers, buttons, shirts, etc).
Attended a protest that involved religion.
Attended an atheist conference.
Subscribe to Pat Condell’s YouTube channel.
Started an atheist group in your area or school.
Successfully “de-converted” someone to atheism.
Have already made plans to donate your body to science after you die.
Told someone you’re an atheist only because you wanted to see the person’s reaction.
Had to think twice before screaming “Oh God!” during sex. Or you said something else in its place.
Lost a job because of your atheism.
Formed a bond with someone specifically because of your mutual atheism (meeting this person at a local gathering or conference doesn’t count).
Have crossed “In God We Trust” off of — or put a pro-church-state-separation stamp on — dollar bills.
Refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. (Canadian equivalent: refused to stand for the national anthem because of the "god keep our land lyric)
Said “Gesundheit!” (or nothing at all) after someone sneezed because you didn’t want to say “Bless you!”
Have ever chosen not to clasp your hands together out of fear someone might think you’re praying. (I'm almost embarassed about this one)
Have turned on Christian TV because you needed something entertaining to watch.
Are a 2^nd or 3^rd (or more) generation atheist.
Have “atheism” listed on your Facebook or dating profile — and not a euphemistic variant.
Attended an atheist’s funeral (i.e. a non-religious service).
Subscribe to an freethought magazine (e.g. Free Inquiry, Skeptic) (I buy them both regularly, but I'm not going to claim this one)
Have been interviewed by a reporter because of your atheism.
Written a letter-to-the-editor about an issue related to your non-belief in God.
Gave a friend or acquaintance a New Atheist book as a gift.
Wear pro-atheist clothing in public.
Have invited Mormons/Jehovah’s Witnesses into your house specifically because you wanted to argue with them.
Have been physically threatened (or beaten up) because you didn’t believe in God.
Receive Google Alerts on “atheism” (or variants).
Received fewer Christmas presents than expected because people assumed you didn’t celebrate it. (in fairness, they are correct)
Visited The Creation Museum or saw Ben Stein’s Expelled just so you could keep tabs on the “enemy.”
Refuse to tell anyone what your “sign” is… because it doesn’t matter at all. (I've really annoyed people by claiming that I was born on a far-away world where the stars appear in different arrangements than they do on Earth, and thus the constellations as they appear on Earth have no bearing upon me)
Are on a mailing list for a Christian organization just so you can see what they’re up to…
Have kept your eyes open while you watched others around you pray.
Avoid even Unitarian churches because they’re too close to religion for you.

THirty-one out of fifty. Not bad, not bad. If you're interested, by all means post your own. Even with the recent influx of readers, I suspect the atheist community is still well-represented within my circle of LJ friends.

Charity work in Vancouver - any fellow atheists interested?

16th Dec, 2008 at 11:29 AM

Hey, all. Or, more particularly, all in and around Vancouver (of which I know there are a few).

A few years ago, I got roped into voulenteering at a homeless shelter up in Vancouver; a program called "Out of the Cold." It was run out of the Grandview Calvary Baptist Church, and this was, for certain (and I think obvious) reasons a little uncomfortable in that sense. Still, I had friends I was voulenteering with, and this made the experience survivable at first. Not only did I have people I was comfortable with, but I feel like there was a certain "Safety in numbers" deal going on, which kept the christians from proselytizing to me.

As time went on, and weeks turned into months, the christians there, I think, came to accept me and warmed up to me. I was a hard worker, I was polite, and I was doing good work. And you know, it was a good experience for me. Really good. I felt like I was living up to my moral standards in a very tangible way.

I always say, "We all have this one life, this one chance, this one world, and afterwards, nothing. It's up to us, and only us, to make sure it's as good experience for all of us as we can. We're all in this thing together." Having the chance to really put that philosophy to action was an enormously satisfying experience.

The next winter, though, when the program started up again, I was working thursday nights. And the next. And the next. And so on. I kept wanting to get back to it, but I never quite found the time.

These last few days, as I'm sure it's escaped nobody's notice, have been terribly, bitterly cold. It put me in mind of that program, and I realized "Hey, I have thursday nights free". I did some checking, and it seems the program is still going. Even better, the guy who was running it at the time I was there - a fellow named Karl - is still around. Karl, more than anyone there, I remember fondly. As the winter program was coming to an end that year, I remember him giving me a card (and I wish I could find it now! I'm sure I didn't throw it away!), telling me about how I had changed his mind about atheists, and showed him it's possible to be moral for entirely altruistic reasons, without any desire or need to get into heaven. It touched me rather deeply.

So, I'm going back there. This thursday, most likely, and I expect on subsequent thursdays as well. This having been said... I find that I would prefer to go there along with a kindred spirit or two, for the same reasons as I enumerated above. I don't know if any of you folks have thursday late afternoon/early evening free, but if you do, I would be glad of the company. Besides which, it's a worthy cause and the feeling of genuine satisfaction which springs from that is one which you would do well not to deny yourselves.

One way or the other, I'll be there. Perhaps I'll have a story or two to share when I get back.

No Jury Duty for me.

10th Sep, 2008 at 7:25 AM

Yesterday, I went down to the Superior Court, answering a summons for Jury Duty. It was an interesting experience, but one which was somewhat futile and frustrating in that I spent about eight hours there and didn't actually get selected for any of the three trials they had me attend the Jury panels for.

This is kind of disappointing; I had actually gotten kind of excited about it. It seemed like an exciting change of pace from my actual job (and would pay slightly better, once the trial hit the 50 day mark). Especially disappointing (and potentially interesting0 was the third one.

This third one started very strangely. The Jury Panel I was with (about 100 people who had also been summoned on the same day) were all brought into a large, strange courtroom with all this super-high-tech equipment (I would later learn there's more than 3 kilometers of electronic cables in that one room), bullet-proof barricades, and about a half-dozen desks within the court.

We were then asked if any of us felt like taking part in a nine-month trial. If not, we were free to leave immediately. All but twelve of us did, and I was one of the few to hang around. I thought to myself, "Hey, it'll be a great story to tell once the trial is over, it'll be meaningful work, and I get to call my bosses and tell them 'Hey, guess what? I need nine or ten months off. Yeah, no. You're legally required to give it to me and keep my job available to me for when I get back".

We're all then taken aside again and told that all but one space on the jury has already been taken up, and they need just one more, of which one of the twelve of us is going to be chosen. We were led, shortly later, back into the courtroom, where we listened to a lengthy, lengthy list of charges. Twenty-three counts, involving extortion, death threats, conspiracy, possession of massive, massive piles of grenades, pistols, automatic rifles and the like. The defendants?

Four members of the Hells Angels.

We were taken out of the courtroom again, and told we would be led into the courtroom in a random order, and questioned by the judge to see how qualified we might be for this position. I got picked second. My heart was racing. Though I realized that there was an element of personal risk involved in a trial involving a heavily-armed organized crime ring such as this, I also realized that, rationally speaking, very few jurors in such cases ever actually face personal harm as a consequence of their roll. I was all for it. This was going to be an adventure.

The judge asked me about my personal biases and such, and I was able to truthfully answer that while I was of course aware of the Hell's Angels, I was never interested in them enough to read enough to personally bias me. Finally, the various lawyers involved, one after another, said "No objections", "We find this one acceptable", etc. , until finally we came to the one accused who had bizarrely decided to represent himself. "Challenge, your honour", he said. This is essentially court-speak for "I don't want this guy on my jury". It was the final hurdle for me to overcome, and unfortunately, I did not clear it. I was on my way home.

In perfect honesty, I can't say I resent the outing too much. It certainly was an interesting and enlightening experience, and I had never actually been inside of the courthouse before, which was a grand sight to behold. All the same, I do wish I hadn't walked away disappointed. I was all for it. Ah. well.

A childhood memory vindicated!

9th Sep, 2008 at 7:16 AM

When you're a wee tot, your memory is often faulty and unreliable. I remember all sorts of business from my very early childhood which I know must have been either dreams or childhood fancies which don't accurately reflect any actual event. This having been said, there is one memory which I have retained for some twenty-five years or so which I have repeatedly wondered about, just because it was so specifically bizarre that it seemed unlikely my five-year-old mind would have had the ability to conjure such images.

Two days ago, I finally found proof that what I was recalling did indeed take place, and was every bit as bizarre as I remember it having been:

This is Mummenschanz. Apparently it's a group of surrealist performace artists who were pretty big in the 1970s. My recollection had me at a live performance by these oddities by my mother and father - one of my very, very few memories of anything I did with both of my parents as a child - and just viewing this performance as the single most exciting and fascinating thing I had ever seen in all of my four or five years of life. It's things like this make me wish my parents had stayed together beyond my sixth year of life; if they were taking me to see awesome stuff like this as a wee kid (and assuredly my mother did not, after my dad was gone), then I can't help but think I would have had a far more pleasant and interesting childhood entertainment life if they'd remained together.

(though there were excellent and compelling reasons for them to split up which had nothing to do with tastes in entertainment and which I don't begrudge my mother at all, as far as that goes)

Anyways, I felt like I ought to share this joy with you, the readers, since it seems to stand to reason to me that if I have gone 25 or 26 years without any exposure to them, many of you will have never seen anything of them at all.

In one specific regard, it seems my memory did fail me, though: I had falsely believed the act to have involved black lights, which I can't now find evidence that it did. I believe that - like the image up top there - they were simply wearing black leotards (as they apparently tended to) and performed against a black backdrop with brightly-coloured act-specific costume pieces which were highlighted with regular lights.

(there is more of their material on Youtube here: http://ca.youtube.com/results?search_query=Mummenschanz+&search_type=&aq=-1&oq= , and their personal webpage is to be found here: http://www.mummenschanz.com/ )

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Cohabitating with Insects

8th Sep, 2008 at 6:36 AM

For as long as I've lived in my current place, there have been silverfish here. This has never been a large concern to me; they're unobtrusive, they live off of garbage, they breed at around the same rate at which I can smoosh them anyways, so it's never been able to get out of control. Besides which, my neighbors report that they have these little vermin as well, so even if I were to take the trouble to destroy their population, their friends and relatives next door could just come scurrying on over to fill the ecological niche in no time at all anyways.

That battle is lost.

However, of late, there has been a new addition to my home which is significantly less welcome, and which I am much less apt to cede victory to. I speak of that blight which is bedbugs.

For those fortunate enough to be blisfully ignorant of the habits of these creatures, I offer the following primer: They are around the size and shape of a period on a printed page when born, and about five times that size as adults. They lurk in and around your bed during the day, and during the night, they scurry out, crawl about your body and drink your blood. And ONLY your blood. That is the entirety of their diet. Human blood. This is conceptually horrifying to me for reasons I will discuss below. When well-fed, they breed quickly; they can lay about five eggs per day, and eggs take around seven days to hatch.

Astute readers will have realized by now that I have a significant advantage in this struggle: I work at night and sleep during the day. As such, they are habitually malnourished and thus they breed nowhere near as prolifically as they otherwise do. This has the ancilary benefit of meaning I get bitten very seldom; no small thing, this, as their bites itch such as you cannot imagine. However, there will be those few of them who are brave, adventurous, and/or ravenous enough for my blood to come out during the day.

As is my wont, I have perhaps devoted too much thought to the nature of the parasitic relationship these things enjoy with me. This having been said, here's the way I view it: They feed exclusively on my blood, and this means any bedbug in my home after the second generation is made entirely OF my blood. These are literally bits of my body now running around independant of my will and acting against my interests. This is somewhat like a Frankenstein-style monster coming to assault me during the night, stealing my hand, and then sewing it onto the wrist of a second creature. This second creature comes the next night, holding me down with my own hand so that my arm can be cut off. This arm is added to a third creature, which then comes and elbows me in the face the next night so that my other hand can be stolen...

Another concept suggests itself, which is somewhat more upsetting still: A tumour is a lump of your own cells which have gone "wrong" in one way or another, multiplying at its own rate without regard for the well-being of the rest of your body. Bedbugs are made of the cells of your body, and do the same thing. They are like an externalized tumour which hides from you during the day.

I have spent the last month and more struggling with these creatures, and have spent hundreds of dollars in this fight. I have come to enjoy, in a perverse way, the act of hunting them down to their lair during the day and destroying them. Especially when they're bloated with my blood, I adore the act of smooshing them and seeing their - MY - blood gush and geyser out of them. It is satisfying in a way which is somewhere between the way that popping a zit is satisfying and the way that delivering the final blow in a fistfight is satisfying. Nevertheless, I have long since come to the point where my skills as an amateur bedbug extermination enthusiast have yielded as many results as they can; though I can kill them as fast as they can breed, their eggs remain difficult to destroy before they can hatch. Every time I go three or four days without a bite and without a sighting, I allow myself a momentary delusion that perhaps I've got all of them. And then I see a new hatchling, kill it, and allow myself a momentary delusion that perhaps it was the last one, and I killed it before it could breed. But I know this is absurd.

I've already had exterminator over once, and the difference is quite noteworthy, but the battle does not seem to definitevely have been won just yet. Yet I am loathe to spend an additional $180 for their reccommended second visit, and 90 day guarantee be damned.

Sadly, this cohabitation - which I think I can at least say has never reached the point of "infestation" - has prevented me from having many guests over to my place for long in the past month and more, and this defeat is perhaps the most stinging and most telling for me. Steps must be taken.

A recovered pleasant childhood memory

5th Jun, 2008 at 2:15 AM

( In the event that you should care )

I Need you to Hold on to Something - A comedy in two acts

2nd Jun, 2008 at 8:12 AM

So, about four years ago, my friend Billy and I sat down and wrote a script for a short film. He came up with the core concept, and wrote about the first seven lines of dialogue (one of which I would later re-write), before I came on and it became a great little exersise in back-and-forth. There are a couple of jokes I didn't and don't really care for (see the cephalopod flag as an example), but that's the nature of collaborations; you need to include a certain amount of stuff from the other guy even when you don't like it.

Anyways. Billy and I have drifted apart, in spite of my best efforts. He's a pathological narcissist and requires that he be surrounded by people who see him as a superior being, and I respected and admired him as an equal. His ego could never endure it. It's a shame, but there's no hard feelings. If he were to call me up tomorrow, I'd happily spend four hours shooting the shit with him. This having been said, it seems to me that nothing is ever going to come of this script; no film of this will ever be shot.

Still, it bugs me that nobody can ever enjoy this work. I've been meaning to post this forever, just so people can read it, laugh at it, and imagine the film which - in some parallel universe - could have been.

( Full script below the cut )

His ultimate bullshit

17th Sep, 2007 at 9:01 PM

So, my ne'erdowell room-mate, Aaron Markham, has plopped what would seem to be his ultimate turd sandwich in my lap. After eight years or so of being room-mates, he's decided to go live on a boat, which he will float out in the harbour and thus live without rent. I don't begrudge him this. What I do begrudge him is telling me - this morning - that he's doing so at the beginning of November.

This means, basically, that I have two weeks to line up a new room-mate, since whoever it's going to be will have to get their crap together by the beginning of October, so they can give their land-lord notice and get their arrangements in order. Two motherfucking weeks.

After all the bullshit he's subjected me to, of all the nonsense I've had to put up with, it seems somehow appropriate that this should be how he ends our shared living arrangement. This is a man who, in these eight years, has never once taken out the recycling. This is a man who has forced me to buy the toilet paper for the appartment eight times in a row, since he simply refused to do so in spite of admitting it's his turn. This is a man who will leave bags of garbage festering in the front hall for weeks without taking them down to the dumpster, in spite of - again - admitting it was his turn.

Really, if he were considerate or thoughtfull about the manner in which he ends this arrangement, it would somehow lack poetry. At minimum, it would demonstrate a lack of follow-through which I would find distasteful. No, he's leaving on just the right note: Selfish, self-absorbed and inconsiderate. That's how I want to be able to remember our time together, and he's given me just the right means to ensure that's the case.

The practical upshot of this is that I'm in need of a room-mate. I've got a prospect, but it's shaky. It's a decent place; a block shy of Kingsway. A ten minute walk from Edmonds skytrain station. Thirteenth floor, great view. Fully furnished, with laundry facilities, a dishwasher and a fully-functioning toilet by means of which to rid yourself of unwanted bodily excretions. $450 a month, or thereabouts. Available, apparently, November motherfucking first.

Christian Love Songs

15th Feb, 2007 at 9:01 AM

Okay. I'm feelin' a mite pissed off. I'm not going into detail here. You should be able to infer at least some of it from context.

Really, I'm feeling pretty predisposed to being pissed-off. Hearing even a few stray lyrics of any love song is enough to make me want to put my fist through a fucking wall right now. Really gets the adrenaline going, know what I'm saying?

Now, it's occurred to me: I've been working out about 16 hours a week lately, and I've been experimenting with different types of music to have playing on my MP3 player while doing so. Might a selection of love songs, especially with christian overtones not be effective in motivating myself to push myself that much harder?

I imagine myself listening to a loop of that crap, and developing the absolute fucking certainty that I do not merely want, but NEED the strength necessary to strangle the life out of the world itself with my bare fucking hands. So I'd better work out harder, because that ol' world is clearly mocking me with this banal, mindless bullshit.

Dillemma: I don't know a thing about this genre of music. Don't know where to look. Don't know where to start.

Therefore: Can any of you suggest some good selections to elevate me to the very apex of all possible fury? The most brainless, mainstream, vapid turds-in-the-toilet-bowl-of-human-thought, god-loving, trapped-in-the-bronze-age garbage out there? Those of you living down south of the border in that wacky christian nation of yours ought to have greater insight into this, I should think.

Who have you wronged?

16th Aug, 2006 at 8:49 AM

Spurred on by recent introspection, I felt compelled to write the following. It's personal and in places ugly. Feel free to look, and comment, or not. Just be advised, is all I'm saying.

( Who have I wronged? )

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
June 2009
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

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