April 1st, 2008 by erisian

i have a happy note and a bad note to discuss today.

Lando Calrissian is my Bus Driver. that is the good portion.

I finished reading Penn Jillette’s book “Sock”.. not the good part.

—

Lando. I noticed him a few days ago. Coming to work, he would pick me up at the bus stop and i would show him my bus pass. Mr Billy Dee Willams would wave me aboard and i would either stand or find a place to park my ass. Obviously this depended on the morning.

Every day i would see him and think “who is this guy and why is he so familiar to me?” The answer was always “he is one of your bus drivers and you see him nearly daily.”

Today he spoke to me when i got on the bus. It was at this moment that i realized (at least on a personal level of self delusion) that my bus driver was Billy Dee.

Lando said to me, “did you know your bus pass is out of date?” This is not what i heard though.. The exchange went more like this:

Lando: “(did you know your bus pass is out of date?) That was never a condition of our agreement, nor was giving Han to this bounty hunter!”

Me: “(yeah, i forgot to pick it up but i have a new one) Perhaps you think you’re being treated unfairly?”

Lando: “(that is okay, just make sure to get it soon or someone will get on your case) …No.”

Me: “(no problem, thanks for the ride…) Good. It would be unfortunate if I had to leave a garrison here.”

Billy Dee Lando.. Lando Dee Williams…Billy Lando Williams… What a cool guy you are.

Tomorrow i think i will bring a magic marker with me so you can put your John Hancock on my manboob (moob). Sure you may look a little bit older, you have seen the weather of the world, not just this one, but many others. you have smelled the air high above the planet Bespin. You left behind the repulsorlifts and fought in combat to defeat the empire. you knew the truth about universal health care at the cost of a dominating clone based stifling of basic universal rights.. personally i like health care.. but there must be a happy medium out there that we can all agree on.. Until then, your old ass is one of my heroes and i am glad that you are part of my daily life even if you have a job that is definitely beneath you.

——————————————-

Penn Jillette.. The louder half of Penn and Teller.

Penn wrote a book back in 2004. When i saw it in the book store, i said to myself, that looks awesome! The story is narrated by the sock monkey of a NYC Police Diver. Said diver runs across the body of an ex-girlfriend and spends the rest of the book determined to locate the killer and take him down. Did i mention it was narrated by a sock monkey?

The book (aptly named “Sock”) was one of the lousiest reads i have ever mucked through. The story was interesting. the characters kept me interested as the story progressed, i was surprised by the ending. the problem was the damn sock monkey. as far as narrators go, he was the most annoying, hard to follow story teller i have ever run across. i slogged through the book determined to find out who the killer was, but everytime someone asked me about the book i would tell them i hated it. it was annoying and painful to read.

I was not lying.

The monkey is overly descriptive, worse than Anne Rice, and we all know that she can describe a room for 50 pages with no difficulty. The monkey was full of itself and held itself up as if it were the worst thing ever created. it would tell stories and jokes. It would say dirty things and then put itself down for being dirty… and we are really talking 7th grade humor here.. so far from being truly dirty that it was once again annoying.

The monkey spent a fair amount of time in the past listening to the radio by itself. The damn monkey was written so that it would end nearly every paragraph with the lyrics of a song. You may think i am exaggerating, and i am, but not much. You would find odd paragraphs with no song reference, but most paragraphs… LYRICS. Just when you think you can get past the asinine phrases and buggy bits of the narrator character, he tosses out lyrics to a song. You compulsively stop what you are reading, make a mental check mark as to if you know where the lyrics come from , then continue. The continuation is painful. You FEEL the interruption.

The lyrics were occasionally witty in their placement, but more often than not they appear to have been part of a list Penn was trying to get through. A prefabricated list that if he didnt find a way to use completely, he would have felt as if his “Magic Trick” had failed. In this case, the magic trick being that Penn actually got people to finish this poorly written novel of junk phrases and decent ideas.

To be honest, though i finished it and enjoyed the core story, it took until page 112 out of 228 for it to begin to become passable. HALF the book… It became passable when the monkey got cut out a bit and we started reading text written by the killer. THOSE were fantastic passages. Kill the monkey narration by the killer. This would have been incredible.

Up until page 112, there was only one memorable paragraph.. I marked it in my book.

My honest opinion, post rant… DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. If you do, ask me for the good paragraph and then pick up on page 112. If the text gets sloppy, skip it. The pain is not worth it. I rarely hate books, but the damn sock monkey ruined this one for me. I finished it for story alone and hated the experience.

February 26th, 2008 by erisian

this is a book review.. seriously…

this is a topic i never thought i would write about. i have never been one for reading on the toilet. i am an in and out man. run in, drop a deuce, flush, wash hands, run away before the smell melts your face off. there is a reason that people i am friends with have always referred to trips to the gas chamber as “fighting a brown demon” or a “holy war”. who ever comes out alive, is obviously in the good graces of their creator and not yet ready for the after life.

unfortunately, i have been sick for a couple days. i spent my whole weekend coughing, fighting off headaches, nausea, dizziness, cold sweats, hot sweats, acid stomach, sniffles, congestion, and poor judgment on movies to watch while ill… well, with the weekend gone and my work being direly short on people, i went into the office today, sick or not, i had to be there. loaded up on tylenol cold and sinus, my numb fingers and cloudy brain plowed through the day. nothing made much sense but i was a warm body where a warm body was needed. tylenol is my friend.. i know it is likely cancerous or will cause me to grow a third testicle on my forehead but hey, it did the trick when i needed it to.

fast forward to getting home after work.

it is now after 10pm. i have not been coughing for a while and i feel phenomenally better… GURGLE… what the hell was that… GURGLE….. ooooh, shit.. literally. tylenol is not my friend.. i think it is the cause of my adverse butt reaction. i hate you tylenol

into the bathroom i go.. i have no idea how long i am going to be in there. every time i think i will be able to escape the horror of it i find that i must stay. as i sat there preparing to cry and give up all hope on a life with a sense of smell, i realize that someone has left a book on the back of the toilet. i noticed it a couple days ago and it caught me off guard. i know people with stacks of magazines, books, even book shelves, let alone those little “bathroom readers”. never has something like this been in MY bathroom to stave off crying, i reached back and picked it up.

Laurie Notaro’s I Love Everybody (and other atrocious lies), True tales of a loud mouthed girl. henceforth to be referred to as ILE.

Laurie, she saved me from wallowing in the fear of my face twisting and dripping into a raiders of the lost ark “i am defying god and paying for it” panic attack. i opened her book and started picking through the pages. i have read it before, about a month and a half ago. i even meant to post something up here about it as it was truly hilarious and made me laugh out loud on the bus a couple times (to the dismay of all those around me).

ILE was a great read. no wonder it caught my attention again in times of great need. Laurie has written many other books, but this one was handed to me and saved me from having to buy it. of course, having loved it, not buying her books is out of the question.. that was a double not positive.

ILE is a collection of stories starting with her getting back into the work force after writing nothing but painfully dry descriptions of kitchen appliances. it details her trials she goes through when she decides to pay the homeless drunk guy to rip out trees from her yard and her inability to get rid of him. you get to learn about babies. you get to learn about crappy emails her sister sends her all the time, bosses who pull guns on you, kidney stones, addiction to pain meds, and blowing snot bubbles out of her nose

my favorite favorite favorite part of the book was the chapter about when she began to play”The Sims” on her computer. she is warned by a sales person to never ever play the game. when she buys it anyway, she is warned never ever to make a digital spouse to go with herself in the game. whew, she straight up ignores the advice and the 11 pages that follow detail all the glory of destroying a husbands self image, wasting hours of her life, fires, pee, fire, pee, job loss, fire, hatred, rotting food, crying, scolding, and death. all in a digital realm and not likely in that order.

so i put down the book when my bowels subsided from their desire to leave my liver and lungs in the toilet bowl, and i ran from the bathroom (hand washing would wait for the kitchen sink tonight). lightning did not pass through my eye sockets and other organs.. all in all my organs are safe.

cool huh?

Check out Laurie Notaro on Myspace
i am sure she will have links to her books for purchase, and if not, there is always amazon.

did i mention she lives in Eugene Oregon and i might have to stalk her?

February 7th, 2008 by erisian

after dragging my sorry ass into work today, all i wanted was a cup of coffee and a blowjob under the desk. i settled for coffee and no blowjob. I have a hell of a lot of work piled up for the day already, Outlook was being a little bitch and failed to open, and calls were waiting to be answered. took a couple calls. they sucked.

Outlook finally stops being a memory whore and opens. turns out, i was being a memory whore as well. inside my inbox i have a network message advising me that my mailbox is too full. well.. i suppose that isnt helping with keeping outlook working smoothly.. crap.. now i have to add personal maintenance to the list of things to do today.

deciding to get it done early i opened my work inbox. holy shit.. i keep everything..

I never delete anything at work. it is easier to use a search function and locate info that will be useful later than it is to delete things and determine how useful they will be in the future based on current knowledge. this has saved time and headache numerous times. little bits of data coming in useful when no one would have bothered saving it. i am a digital packrat. apparently, in the process, i have saved a whole lot of stuff that i would never need (assistance requests, paycheck notifications, etc) and due to laziness, today i found myself accosted by a daunting task.. filtering out all the crap and saving only the useful.

it has been 2 hours now and i have officially made it all the way through years 2004, 2005, 2006 and deleted over 23,000 emails. through a combination of generic word filters i have already deleted the bulk of the garbage, but i still have 4500+ emails to go through from 2007/2008.. luckily, over the recent months, i did start cleaning up the garbage on a weekly basis, so it should be easier.