“It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

Posted on 10/18/2010 by ericmcclanahan

It seems these days all I can do is think.  And that’s not too far from the truth since I’m broke as shit.  I should say “It seems these days all I can afford to do is think.”  Regardless, I cannot turn my brain off lately.  And it’s not just one topic, either, but all and at all times.  I’ve been reading about particle physics, how scientists have ventured to determine the irreducible building blocks of everything, and each particle uncovered is made up of a multitude of others.  It begs that question of “How?” 

We are made up of cells which are made up of molecules which are made up of atoms which are made up of protons which are made up of Higgs-bosons and so on and so forth…. Down, down, down to infinity.  Everything that exists must be comprised of something, and therefore the possibility of irreducibility is neglible.  Because the human brain cannot grasp the concept of nothing.  In the same sense that infinite space cannot be envisioned, nor can irreducibility.  It seems the further down the rabbit hole we go, the longer it becomes.

Definition is constantly receding from us.  If the universe is not definite and could be conceptualized as a painting on a wall, what is the wall?  If the tiniest parts of all matter are indeed Quarks and Leptons and Bosons, what are they made of?  If a “chip” is defined as a smaller portion of the whole, what is a chip of a chip?

Infinite information in a undoubtedly definite world, if I may be so egocentric.  Because once I die, what do I care for questions such as these?  That is the cruelty of existence: that in a definite world we are given an infinite supply of questions and answers. 

But my irrefutable propensity towards thought is not limited to the scientific realm.  I’ve been searching my soul lately, asking myself what my purpose is?  On days that I don’t absolutely have to get out of bed I am extremely reticent to do so.  The unkown nature of what to do with myself and my time is immobilizing.  My lack of motivation is self-perpetuating. 

I need a hobby, other than thinking.

I’ve thought about going to school for philosophy, so that I could ostensibly get paid to think, but that costs money that I don’t have and can’t make lying in bed waiting to work.  They’ve been running a commercial on television lately for the new Volkswagen Jetta and they make is seem so easy to pick up an additional $15,995.00 in your spare time but I know full well that is bullshit. 

But I also know that number could be reduced into smaller numbers that are far more easily attainable and could be combined over time to create the whole, much as protons and neutrons can create atoms and then molecules and eventually even something like me, so it again boils down to motivation.  Build, destroy, observe, build, repeat.

But I’ve grown tired of destroying myself.  It’s not that I’m not good at it; rather far too good.  It’s not that I’m not a good thinker, either.  I excel at it, but that’s not a good thing.  It is this tripping through thought processes and falling down Rabbit Holes that keeps me immobile.  How can I get out of bed and face a world that I don’t fully understand?  I’ve been plagued for years with dreams of a similar ilk; dreams that heap questions upon questions and tasks upon tasks that literally keep me from waking while racing towards an unattainable goal.  It is only through outside influence that I escape these small comas.

All that said, I am not an intellectual.  I am relatively stupid, as should be evident upon meeting me even once.  I needn’t even speak to illustrate my shortcomings.  You could look at a photo of me and know that I’m not the Greatest Thinker of Our Time.  All this hypothetical hoopla I’m spouting now is a diversion, a self-indulgent ploy to distract me from my lack of development, to defer blame to something outside of my control, i.e. – the interminable mindfuck of my day-to-day existence.

But the fact of the matter is I need to reach in and flip the switch.  Or, even better, multi-task.  Unexceptional people do it every day.  Why can’t I?

Sometimes I think I’m afraid of success, fearful of peace, petrified of comfort.  Okay, more than sometimes.  I’m getting married in April and between now and then I am focusing on self-improvement in a provable, financial aspect.  I am changing things about myself that are visible to others in attempt to simulate maturity and to prepare my life to be shared with another.  I am trying to live a life of legitimacy, which would alleviate a great deal of the fear that I’ve felt in the past.  To that extent, it seems my brain has launched a counter-offense to drive my internal maladies further against me.  In growing up and becoming a responsible citizen on paper, I am instigating the war within myself.

Or maybeI just think too much.

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Please Do Not Pet the Tornadoes

Posted on 10/17/2010 by ericmcclanahan

I can’t hold it in any longer.  It makes no sense and it bothers me on a subcutaneous level, therefore it must be expunged.

I miss Wal-Mart.

Phew!  I can’t believe how hard that was to say.  If you don’t know me, a little background:

I HATE Wal-Mart.  They are evil.  Everytime I watch a James Bond film or parody of similar ilk and discover that the villain is the head of an evil corporation, I think of Wal-Mart.  Along with several shady petroleum and pharmaceutical companies, it’s the closest we’ll get to cinematic-quality evil.  Save Money, Live Better, Crush the Weak.  Wal-Mart is powered by Unicorn Tears, Baby’s Blood, and Black Diamonds.

Growing up in a small town in Texas, the only thing that there ever was to do was go to Wal-Mart.  I remember one night I went in at 3am with my girlfriend at the time.  We spent three hours there and left having purchased only duct tape and promise rings.  The height of fun and excitement, ye Olde Wal-Mart was.

I even worked at Wal-Mart, many many moons ago.  I was sixteen.  It actually wasn’t bad. The pay was shit, the hours were shit, but we got breaks and our direct management was serene and fair.  We banded together as employees and tried our best to create a family beneath harsh flourescent lighting.  Aside from missing out on six-months’ worth of the “best years of my life”, it wasn’t bad.  I left the company relatively unscathed, with the exception of a girl I met working there who ransacked my life and siphoned my energy away for about three years, but that’s another story.

It wasn’t until a few years later that the company turned to the dark side, as it were, and really started the descent into unabashed evil.  I heard a few whispers here and there about locations springing up in smaller markets at an alarming rate and choking out local businesses, and I shrugged it off as capitalism.  We have anti-monopoly laws in this country but aside from that, get out there and get that money, motherfucker!!!!!

But then I heard more specific stories that delved further beneath the veneer of their trademark happy face.

Aww, ain't he cute? Too bad he's EVIL!!!!

There was the trampling death a few years ago on Black Friday.  Need more?  There was the worker there who was hit by the semi and lost her short-term memory who had to be reminded each day that her son had died in the service of his country whom Wal-Mart was suing for $500,000 in retribution fees for their healthcare provider.  Don’t believe me?  There are several documentaries you can watch that further examine their atrocities and give light to their underhanded strategies to keep costs and prices down so that they can choke out local businesses and take over the fucking world.

So, yeah, evil.  I haven’t shopped there in almost four years.

But lately I’ve started to miss it.  It’s high-ceilings, colorful electronics department, wide aisles (check out this website for an example of why the aisles are so wide), 24-hour mutant watch, vast selection of toys (I am a child, of course), and that brutal lighting that I mentioned earlier.  It’s a trainwreck of classic American design, like New Jersey.  Something in me in the past few days really misses the place, and it’s the source of tremendous self-loathing.

I think I’ll go next week and just not buy anything.  Just wander around and look at mutants.  I’ll go on a Tuesday, which coincidentally is free-Museum day in San Diego, so I can just convince myself that it’s part of my artistic appreciation efforts. 

I really can’t figure it out, but I had to share it with someone before it completely consumed me.

Oh yeah, and I’ve been watching “Stormchasers“, hence the title.

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Crackers? Really?

Posted on 09/28/2010 by ericmcclanahan

The other day I was tidying up, putting things away and rearranging the space in our very tiny kitchen.  It seriously is the smallest excuse for a kitchen I think I’ve ever seen.  There is very little counter space, so I’m constantly repositioning the microwave, toaster, clorox wipes dispenser, dish soap, or fake Foreman grill.  In any case, I’m shuffling things around and I see three packs of crackers on top of the microwave.  They’re to-go packages, each containing two Saltine-style crackers, and they’d come with a shrimp cocktail cold soup that Meredith had brought home a few nights previous.  She’d left them on top of the microwave on the off-chance that she might eat them at some point.  I, knowing we’d never get around to eating those cheap lousy crackers, took them off the microwave and threw them in the trashcan.

Immediately, the moment between them leaving my fingers and striking the trashbag, I felt extremely sad.  I remembered eating crackers as a little boy with my family at… some restaurant we would go to frequently.  They served Club crackers with certain meals and I loved them.  Buttery and slightly sweet.  I would grab a handful of the to-go packets before we left and shove them in my pockets, eating them on the car ride home and perhaps even further off, putting them in brown paper lunch bag to enjoy at school.  I really loved those crackers.

Throwing the crackers from the other night so flippantly into the trash reminded me how much reverence I held for those other crackers in my childhood.  And I felt so sad.  It occured to me that thinking about my childhood makes me sad, and this is not new.  I had a good childhood for the most part, but it had its share of tribulations.  All of ours do.  Everyone can say they had a shitty childhood and they’re probably right, but I choose to remember the good memories of my youth.  And maybe that is where the sadness came from.

Whoever I was as a child is gone.  The family that I spent my childhood with is gone.  The home is occupied by strangers.  That restaurant, whatever it was, is most likely gone.  (Wait, I remember now; it was a cafeteria; a buffet.  I don’t remember the name, but yes, it is gone.)  I am in California, fighting my damnedest to be an adult and build a life I can die happily in, my parents are divorced, my brother is dead, and all the happy memories I can recall only remind me how sad I am that none of it exists anymore.

I am a ghost of myself.

I think often of my parents and the injustice done to them by the dissolution of their marriage and family.  I think often of my brother and the wrongdoing he endured by dying before he had a chance to prove the world wrong about him.  I think of the house we lived in, the one that my father built with his own hands, and how there is now another family living in it; one I do not know and more than likely never will.  I think about the home built upon the site where my brother’s body lay, where I found him in a cornea of his own blood sixteen years ago, and I know that the people who live there do not know of this.  I think often of the mistreatment of this family unit and it makes me very sad.  But I don’t feel any injustice for myself.  I had a good childhood, a happy childhood, in spite of all those things.  I smiled, I laughed, I was loved, and I loved in return.  My family was relatively poor for a long time but I rarely went without.  Even when we all lived in a one-room shack and heated water from an outside pump in a five-gallon casserole cooker and added it to cold water to fill a free-standing tub and take turns bathing, I was happy.  I had a family that loved me and each other enough to find a way to keep us clean and healthy.  I turn on the news and see reports of mothers murdering their children because they can’t or won’t care for them and I realize that my parents were fucking saints and I’ll defend with my blood their legacy in such terms.  We were given nothing, we were afforded nothing, and we built everything ourselves; literally.  We didn’t have much, but we found happiness where we could.  So to the point that something as trivial as Club crackers was enough to make me happy.

And as I threw Meredith’s leftover crackers away the other night, a sadness hit me that took me this long to trace back to its origin.  That after all the happiness and all the subsequent destruction, I can still find a sliver of hope in the flavor of a good cracker.  And maybe that in itself is sad, but that’s not why I felt sad that night.  I felt a reverence for my family’s triumph and all it could remind me of is how much we failed.  How we rose from nothing, loved so fiercely, then burned away completely.

My mother has a new family now.  My father has a wife and a terrifically small life that suits him perfectly.  And I have a universe that I’ve spent years building, populated with all the things I feel I need to make me happy.  We speak, but not often, and rarely about anything of substance.  Our “family” is an elephant in the room, as though we had a Deliverance-style hunting trip that went horribly awry and now we never speak of it.  I feel a profound sadness because of this but I can’t imagine what I could do.  I’m not a little boy anymore and my parents don’t love each other.  Things can never be the same and maybe they’re not supposed to.  Maybe this is what growing up is.

Maybe this is why I have such a hard time with growing up.

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Developmentally Challenged

Posted on 09/23/2010 by ericmcclanahan

I’ve been saying for a while that I don’t feel I deserve my management position at work. Not that I’m unqualified or feel that I’m doing a bad job; I know this business pretty well and I’ve been at it for a long time. It’s just that when I get to work or sometimes even when I’m going to work I’ll think to myself, “Really? I’m a manager? I still feel like a waiter playing manager.”
It’s been a pervasive thought for a while now and I think I finally found the root of the problem, the reason that I feel this way. Because I am not an adult. It’s strange, frustrating, and debilitating. I am 32 years old but I am not an adult. I am still a boy. A very, very hairy boy.
I feel more kinship with my friends’ teenage children than I do with my friends. I saw an older married couple walking down the street from my bus window and I couldn’t feel any connection to them, even though they’re probably not that much older than me. It’s in everything I do: the music I listen to, the clothes I wear, the shows I watch, the food I eat, the way I flippantly spend money on crap that doesn’t matter. I drink heavily and party all night and watch cartoons and scoff at authority and live as though I will never die.
But I will.
I don’t do anything. I rarely plan for the future. I mean, yeah, I have plans next month, even stuff to do next year, but as far as my future goes, I can’t see anything. I would be content to keep working the job that I’m working now, keep drinking and staying up all night, keep the same stupid goatee facial hair pattern and sleep, eat, drink, work, and die.
That’s not an adult life. I am doing things to try to trick myself into growing up, i.e. – getting this management position, clearing up my legal record, marrying the woman of my dreams, trying to establish a line of credit, getting my passport, etc. All the things that an adult already has down, things that they don’t even think about; they just do them instinctually. I have a screw loose or something, because I’m not wired that way.
Maybe it’s arrested development. My brother committed suicide when I was 16 years old and I suppose when a person of that age has to come to terms with something like that, they handle it in one of two ways: either they grow up very quickly so as to be mature enough to accept the tragedy, or they stop growing up and remain that age indeterminately. I think I did the latter.
Sure, I’ve got a fifty cent vocabulary and I’ve read a few books, but that doesn’t make me a man. I’ve walked this earth as long without him as I did with him, but I still can’t escape the damage his departure inflicted upon me. I’ve seen many things and I’ve wrapped my mind around the finer insinuations of human nature, but it doesn’t mean I’ve grown any more. I have age and a modicum of wisdom, but whatever self-awareness an adult has, I don’t have it. I just don’t see myself as an adult.

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Geriatric Pork Rinds

Posted on 08/29/2010 by ericmcclanahan

If I could speak in a language you could understand, I would tell you how much I loved you.  I would tell you that you were loved, despite what you might have believed in your hate-filled heart.  If only you’d used your mind you could’ve seen.  But you didn’t.  Didn’t want to or didn’t know how.  I’m not sure.

I’m cold, shivering almost, as I write.  My veins are half-full, my stomach empty, my head light.  There are things I should be doing, puzzles I should be piecing together, but I can only sit here and love you.  It’s all I can do.

I am an artist of rage.  I create by feeling.  I take a bucket of my emotions and spill them on stage or page and leave it up to the beholder to find the beauty.  As it is, I can see none in any of it.  It is all raw and unfiltered.  My hands are clumsy tools, my mouth an open sore.  I stumble through this world a vessel of unwanted memories; an island of misfit misfortunes unto myself.

Everything hurts.  You can attest.  You were there.  You remember.  Or do you?  Is remembering something you can do where you are?  Or are you nothing at all?  Do you exist only because we remember you?  And when we begin to forget, will you cease to be?  Will it be as though you never were?

Are we all the fabrication of some dreaming demigod?  Is it pleasant to Him or a nightmare?  And when He wakes, what will become of us?  Is the world tailored to His flights of fancy?  Is that why I sometimes see it scrambling to retain its shape between the darkness of a blink and the focus of opened eyes?

Will I be like you one day?  Of our world but not in it?  A memory, a patch of grass, a name in stone, an open-ended love?  Will I be a waste of thought, an emotional vampire, a highway where the loves of others will extend unending to die unrequited? And when those who remembered me fade, will I disappear entirely from the fabric of existence?  The demigod will roll over, His brain dislodging and righting itself, and all of a sudden a new world exists, one without me or you or anything we can recognize.

Nietzsche said “In all love there is some madness, but in all madness there is some reason.”  I do not believe this to mean that love is reasonable.  We all know better; it isn’t.  It’s highly irrational, volatile, loud, fiery, and utterly bewildering.  That’s what makes it so amazing, so intoxicating.  It can’t be controlled, and we can’t be controlled when it takes hold of us.  It can’t be killed, no matter what so many jilted lovers choose to believe.  It never goes away, even when it seems to have abandoned us entirely at one end or another.  It always exists in some form, lying dormant until the song on the radio or the smell of the breeze or the way the skyline catches the light stirs it into weaving its baffling magic into our limbs.  It scares us, excites us, smashes us and builds us.  It is a rollercoaster, a plump recliner, a car crash, a hammock, a feather, a sledgehammer, a bandage and a gunshot wound.  It looms over us, sometimes threatening, sometimes inviting.  It lies in wait, it pounces without provocation.  It disentigrates, it regenerates.  It kills, it revives.  It is terrifying and beautiful.  We are nothing without it.

So how can you understand what I say when I say “I loved you”, past-tense, like it’s not real anymore?  It is; it’s you who is not real anymore.  A ghost, a memory, a lightly-held gathering of mist on the wind.  And I loved you.

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Last Night I Fell in Love with Laura Linney

Posted on 08/23/2010 by ericmcclanahan

Eh, what can I say?  Maybe it wasn’t her, at all, but a mish-mash of the characters she’s played, but it was strong last night and hit me full on.  Maybe it’s just a deep admiration, but after watching an episode of “The Big C” and then the movie The Savages, I felt a great swell of emotion toward her.  Her smile is sweet, her tears contagious, her face in repose is breathtaking and she can summon a fiery intensity that can stop a bullet.

This is nothing new.  It’s called “The Witching Hour”, and in Texas it occurred around four a.m.  Each night when I found myself awake at that time (which was just about every night from age 19 to 24) I would inexplicably fall in love with whomever I laid eyes upon or conjured an image of in my brain.  Here on West Coast time, that makes it about two a.m., which is right around the time I saw Laura Linney staring out at me from the television with that steely intensity of hers, her brunette hair cascading in subtle waves around her face.

I’m a hopeless romantic. We know this.

Despite that, The Savages wasn’t really all that good.  I was unimpressed.  It did however help me come to the realization that I need to write my screenplay, and soon.  So I took Syd Field’s Screenplay off the bookshelf and placed it on the queue (my coffee table) to be read next, after I finish Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor. 

I’ve had this idea stuck in my brain for almost a full year, now, and I’m itching to get it out.  The fact remains, I’ve never written a screenplay before and don’t entirely know how; hence the book.  I want to do it right, once, the first time.  I want to sit down, summon my will and energy, and write a kickass screenplay right out the box on the first try that sells for a cool one million (I’m not greedy) and then rest on my laurels for a while and drink coffee and whiskey and hang out with my wife.  Is that too much to ask?

The premise: A nihilistic worker drone without ambition or purpose finds himself hurtling towards his mid-30s.  Desperate and mad from directionless relationships and dead-end jobs, he plans a trip back to his hometown to see his old high school chums.  He discovers once there that they have not changed but the world around them has aged drastically.  In a last-ditch effort to feel young again and/or put a cap on their carefree days, the protagonist convinces his buddies to aid him breaking into their alma mater and stealing the mascot, a full-sized stuffed tiger.  Hijinks ensue, people learn about themselves, fart jokes abound.

In other news, I just turned 32.  It happened with little fanfare, but I did get my FaceBook blown up by messages all day long.  My gifts were practical, my weekend little more than a dinner and a movie.  Interestingly, I’m not upset about this.  I’m a career-man, focused and driven to the point of exhaustion.  The quieter my private life, the better. 

I have to assemble addresses so I can send out the save-the-dates for my wedding.  Then I can get to work on the screenplay, maybe publish my “Making of Action Squad Episode 3″ to the internet, collate the works of Macy over a few CDs for my friend in Oregon to catalogue, then perhaps get some sleep.  These are my plans over the next week or so.  It truly is an honor being me.

So…. yeah.  That’s it.  I guess I don’t really have much to say, do I?

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Everyone I know goes away in the end

Posted on 08/03/2010 by ericmcclanahan

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

Defeatist thoughts, yay!  I am at work, still, very late.  We have been cleaning the kitchen thoroughly.  I have been doing my part, which is rare.  I don’t like being in the kitchen.  I don’t feel I belong there; just some gringo in the way of people who know what they’re doing.

When I got off the bus today through the back door, I saw a passenger about the board at the front door.  He was blind, tapping his telltale stick against the sides of the opening to determine its width and then at the bottom step to gague how high he’d have to step up to enter the vehicle.  The bus driver said, “15?”

“Excuse me?”

“This is the 15 headed to Union and Broadway.”

“Oh, I need the –”

But by then I was out of earshot, trucking my way deliberately from one self-indulgent practice to another.  (In this case, from sleep to work, far too busy to witness my fellow man in a sadder state.)  I cursed myself as I put distance between us, narrowly navigating the sidewalks amidst looky-loos, vagrants, tourists, businessmen, and sign twirlers.  I have all five senses in fair working order, all four limbs (well, five; I am a man, after all) functioning properly, neither under- nor overweight, tall enough, not conventionally hideous, smart, friendly, accompanied, loved, employed, sheltered, kept, and creative.

It makes me angry to be sad.  I have lost in the past, will lose again in the future.  But I am alive, and I am winning. 

I have.  There are those that have not.  I don’t remember that enough.

It makes me angry to be sad.  Siddhartha, better known as Buddha, came to similar realizations and gave up his earthly treasures to live life amongst the poor and the suffering, only to find that with no material wealth or position, he could do nothing to help them.  He held no sway over those with the power and provisions to provide aid when he approached them as a vagrant, so he found a nice happy medium wherein he lived with moderate affluence and realized the Four Noble Truths.

I wish I could do that.  Fucking television.  Was there ADHD before television?  I mean, cell phones cause cancer; does TV cause ADHD?  Somebody get the APA on the phone.

It makes me angry to be sad.

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I am a Hummingbird

Posted on 07/30/2010 by ericmcclanahan

I am calm in chaos.  My wings create a storm about me and I sit contentedly inside it, my heart beating faster than anyone.

I am a duck on the water.  I am chaos disguised as calm.  My feathers are uniformly smooth, the water about me still.  Underneath my legs are a fury of work and survival.

I am all of these things.  Today and always.  I am not afraid of death, but rather feel a disappointment at the idea of being dead.  There is so much I could be doing and to not be able to do any of it makes me sad to think about.

Meredith and I registered for our wedding gifts.  We planned on registering at two stores and we’ve already got one in the bag.  The plan is to hit the other one on Sunday.  Registering is fun, but tiring.  I was surprised by this paradox.  We joked and had a lot of fun and took our time finding just the right items.  I’m looking forward to doing it again on Sunday.

That’s it, I suppose.  I’m introspective today and feel that I should be writing, but I really don’t know what to say.

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Burying July with whiskey and a whimper

Posted on 07/25/2010 by ericmcclanahan

The month is coming to a close, and for the first time in a long time I am not looking forward to August.  Strange.  I have several charity functions to attend and my birthday is that month as well, though this year I near it with almost no reverence.  July has been a very exciting and expensive month, and as the year winds into its descent, I feel that time will continue to be more and more expensive and draining, and 2011 will find me as a potato chip in tattered clothing, bereft of the bodily fluid required to cry about my situation.

Daily I assess my career and how little money I’m making and my inherent inability to keep any amount of it from slipping between my fingers.  It’s very annoying, as the date for the wedding closes in and the random aches and pains of being on this side of thirty swell and threaten to send me scurrying to WebMD.  I can’t save money and go see a doctor or even buy a piece of shit car to take me to said doctor.  Because I do love my fiancee and I don’t want to die before the wedding.  The day of, that’s fine.  As long as we can still have the party that we’ve already paid so much for, I’ll die happy.

In other news, ComicCon is here in San Diego and the days have been just packed with awesomeness, color, and light.  I absolutely adore this time of year.  The workplace becomes unbearably busy and loud and congested and crowded and, in a word, righteous.  Everyone dresses up and we all get stressed out and the staff makes a ton of money and I count it.  Everyone has their duty to do and it all gets done and afterwards we all get drunk. 

I just feel like sometimes it would be nice to have more purpose, more determination, and more fucking money!   Goddamn, I hate dwelling on it, but it is kind of important.  Oh well; I’ll keep writing and making music and films and working and someday it’ll all add up to something worthwhile.  And worth something.

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Simple Kind of Man

Posted on 07/13/2010 by ericmcclanahan

To say that is not to quote Lynyrd Skynyrd or even, for those of my generation, Deftones, but to say that I still have drafts of things I’ve written on ruled notebook paper.  If you’re my age you might remember that as the stuff you used to use in high school.  I believe we called it “loose leaf”.   But those days are behind us, aren’t they?  We’re Men, now; and Women.  We’re part of the Workforce.  The productive backbone of America.

I don’t know why I even referred to “my generation” in the previous paragraph.  I personally am a pariah because I still listen to The Deftones.  I am a resistant hanger-on amongst those in my age group and a reluctant dinosaur amongst those in the next generation or two.  I will be 32 next month and I still haven’t gotten the hang of the concept.  Being old, I mean.  I’m not too keen on the idea of jumping wrists-first into a pile of Peter White smooth jazz tracks just yet.  Yes, the “music” that kids these days listen to is shit, but I can’t hang up my Rage Against the Machine records or put away my Nine Inch Nails CDs.  Or sell them, for fuck’s sake.  I have an iPod.  What’s the hold up?  Why hang on to these Compact Discs, relics of a bygone era?  Heck, I bought a new CD this past Saturday.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, a CD.  I know.  Sue me.

Here I am, a “man” with hardly the knowhow to be such, adding to the choking chemical mass of waste that is sure to conflagrate myself or my children in due time.  And in the shadow of my wife-to-be’s awareness.  We’re to be married this next April and I feel the asinine need to hide all of my superfluous purchases from her until the sacred and expensive date finally reaches us.  As though she doesn’t know.  She’s my wife, for God’s sake!  She knows everything I’m going to do before I’m going to do it.  Everytime I approach her with an idea, she knows full well it’s not a case of “What would you think if I wasted my money on this such-n-such rotten idea?” but rather “Hey, I’m going to waste our money on this such-n-such rotten idea.  Would you like to say I told you so now or later?”

So now I finally signed up for a new blog to rant and rave about our impending nuptials and to give the world the male perspective (’cause face it, Kevin Nealon just gave you his own, and we penis-bearers rarely know where the Hell he’s coming from) and this site confuses the Holy Shit out of me.  I’ve done the blogging thing before, mind you.  In fact, I did it before it was called “blogging”.  Before blogging was the thing to do.  (Not that it is, anymore; now it’s “Twittering”, which is just blogging without all the content, and you can keep that, thank you very much.)  But this site has so many bells and whistles that I just don’t know where to blow.  You all know, of course.  You signed up.  Did it strike you as odd that immediately after you signed up and went to your Dashboard the readout said that you’d already made one post?  And gotten one comment?  And had one category?  And one “about”?  ‘Cause that makes a shit-ton of sense, doesn’t it?  You totally remember pouring your heart out in between verifying your password and clicking “OK”, right?

I’m a simple man.  I still text using the letters allowed to me.  I don’t use T-9, because T-9 has no fucking clue how I talk or what I’ll say.  I’m using a dialect without time, trapped in the ether of who I once was and who I’m supposed to be.  I still send postcards to people I care about.  Sure, I e-mail them to tell them to expect the postcards in the mail, but I send them, nonetheless.  (I’m simple; not unevolved.)  I still ask to speak with the person I’ve called once someone answers the line, knowing full-well that I’ve called a cell phone, because EVERYONE has a cell phone.  I’m a Simple Kind of Man.

Who is getting married, I’ll remind you.  Because that is a theme we will visit time and again.  Because I tell you, I am stoked.  I am very, very excited about this.  In fact, the wife (I’ll call her that; deal with it) and I went to a wedding on Saturday and treated it like a “Coming Attraction” feature.  We viewed each aspect of the event like a sneak peak at a Summer BlockBuster.  Oh, how I can’t wait for the sequel!!

But it won’t stop me from pointing out the weird things she does.  The things that make me love her and stare into the pools of her endless eyes with a questioning “WTF?” beneath circling canaries of love and tiny hearts.  For instance, she told me tonight as I came in at $:@^ in the morning from work “I bought catsup.  We were out of ketchup so I bought catsup.”  Which I thought, “Yes, of course.  That’s terribly important.”  Then I went into the kitchen to make myself some food and saw that she bought the 40oz of catsup, as though between now and the next time we head to the grocery store there may be another World War, and it’s important that we stock up on these peacetime necessities now.  I don’t know about your household, but mine will be diving headlong into the bomb shelter knowing our ketchup needs will be met.  Best of luck to you and yours.

And these are the things that make me love her, that make me cherish her, that make me think to myself, “The rest of my life is going to be awesome, no matter what I decide to do with it.  Though, truth be told, I should really get back into stand-up.”

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