Give it a few seconds to get going.

I’m going to try and find a way to use the term “piss-midget” today…

So, I walked over to the bank on my lunch and hit the ATM for this weekend’s allotment of cash. No big deal, I do it all the time, right? But this time as I retrieved my debit card from the slot on the cash machine, my fingertips detected a sharp point along the edge of the card. Odd, I thought… never felt anything sharp on the card before. A brief examination revealed that my card is developing a longitudinal crack that runs right along the bottom edge of the magnetic stripe. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my debit card is coming apart.

I’m thinking maybe I need to reconsider just how often I use the damn thing if I’m literally wearing it out. Strange to think that just 10 or 15 years ago, I was extremely uncomfortable with the very idea of a debit card. Because they can track you with every purchase you make, you know.

Apparently, I got over that fear at some point. Probably when I realized that if some mysterious them really is tracking my purchases, they’re getting the worse end of the deal. It must make for incredibly tedious reading. “Good lord,” they must be thinking, “doesn’t this guy ever go to a different coffee shop? Always the same damn places…”

An exchange between myself and The Girlfriend at my house Saturday night:

Me: Want something to drink?

The GF: What’ve you got?

Me: The usual… Coke Zero, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, Sprite, water, milk…

(beat)

Me: I don’t know if the milk is still good, though. It’s been in there for a while. The cat seems okay with it.

The GF: The cat licks his own balls.

You can’t argue with logic like that. Anne had a Caffeine-free Diet Coke.

Not to get all whiny on you fine folks, but I’ve had a rough month. Circumstances in the New Proofreaders’ Cave lately have left my work/life balance extremely lopsided, and even though I haven’t had to put in any late nights this week, I haven’t managed to catch up on my sleep deprivation either. I’ve been shuffling along about three seconds behind the rest of the world, feeling like whatever wit or cleverness I may once have possessed caught a Greyhound for Miami round about last Tuesday. It doesn’t help that this is my favorite time of the year, and an entire month of glorious, mellow afternoons have slipped through my fingers while I’ve sat steadfastly at my desk in a dimly lighted corporate cubicle without even a decent window view.

All of which is my way of explaining why the latest dispatch from Tony Long, a.k.a. Wired.com’s resident Luddite, resonated so strongly with me:

I was meant to be drifting through the back streets of Istanbul, clad in a white linen suit, flitting from one café to the next, sipping tea on a Bosphorus steamer, wooing an olive-skinned beauty at the bar of the Hotel Bebek. … It would be nice if my worthy employer would change my job description to “boulevardier” and pay me a princely salary to explore various exotic locales — for the sake of appearances, I suppose I’d deign to dash off an occasional dispatch to the home office — but that’s probably not going to happen. We romantics tend to romanticize, not monetize, and therefore have little value in this hard-hearted, for-profit world.

 

Whatever. I want to be Bogie in Casablanca… Alas, I’m not Bogie in Casablanca. I’m Tony in California and it’s 2007 and it’s not about running a saloon, it’s about “core competency” and “entrepreneurialism” and the “global economy.” It’s about making the bottom line, being there 24/7, upping those page views, closing that deal. It’s about making someone else rich off the sweat of your labor. It’s about living with constant stress that we, as humans, shouldn’t really have to live with.

Sigh. I’ve got a vacation coming up in four weeks, if I can just stave off my pending crack-up until then… but it would be easier if I had a white linen suit. Or at least a cure for insomnia.

During a conversation here in the New Proofreaders’ Cave, deep in the bowels of one of the glorious metropolitan skyscrapers in fabulous downtown Salt Lake City:

“I feel so guilty about taking my dog’s Valium…”

Hey, whatever gets you through the day, right?

I still haven’t made much progress on that entry I mentioned the other day, the one about the events of last weekend. (Sorry to be so oblique here — it really isn’t any big secret or anything. I went to my 20-year high school reunion and want to give it a good write-up. But I haven’t had time for good, hence all the lameness that carried us through last week.) In its place, here’s a compendium of random net crap that’s caught my eyes recently:

Continue Reading…

Hey, remember a while back when I expounded on my experience of wearing a beard? No? Well, that’s okay, because I’ll just remind you of the salient bit, which is the little poem by George Carlin that I ended the entry with:

Here’s my beard.
Ain’t it wierd?
Don’t be sceered,
It’s just a beard.

Andrew Sullivan, a fellow bearded man, posted another poem today that makes essentially the same point, but a little more elegantly:

Abundant hair hangs over my fierce face
and shoulders, shading me, just like a grove;
but don’t think me unsightly just because
I am completely covered in dense bristles:
unsightly is the tree that has no leaves,
the horse without a mane; birds have their plumage
and sheep are most attractive in their wool,
so facial hair and a full body beard
are really most becoming in a man.

 

–Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XIII (trans. Charles Martin)

Go, Ovid!

Doesn’t it just figure that about the same time I’m feeling the urge to write some good, long blog entries (as opposed to the short, lame ones which have predominated lately), work has heated up to the point where I’m not only finding it difficult to squeeze in some decent bloggage, I’m failing even to keep up on the mundane daily crap that I laughingly refer to as “my life.” Like washing those dirty dishes from the yummy breakfast fry-up I had two weeks ago. They mock me with their crusted-on egg residue.

I know, I know… you’re out there making the little fiddling motion with your fingers that signifies the World’s Tiniest Violin moaning out a sarcastic dirge for my pathetic whining, and you’re probably thinking that I don’t have much room to complain because lots of people put in brutally long hours and otherwise bust their humps to make their way in this cold, hard, lonely world. Well, bully for them. Doesn’t change the fact that I stumbled home after 10 PM the other night, and my corporate overlords inform me this will likely happen with distressing frequency throughout September and October, and these two facts combined have me feeling a mite twitchy.

Now, I’m no slacker, and I understand and accept that the industry I’m in demands the occasional late night. But I’m also fiercely protective of my leisure time. I think it’s important, and that Americans in general undervalue it, and that we suffer, both as individuals and as a society, because we undervalue it. All of which means that when I see my work/life balance tipping too far toward the “work” side — and I’d say being warned that the next six weeks are likely to include a lot of late nights is a pretty good sign of the scale dropping in a particular direction — I feel justified in getting grumpy about it.

Not that anyone cares about my grumbling, not when there are product briefs that need to be proofread by EOD.

What I’m getting at here, other than simply venting my frustration over the abrupt shift from a lazy summertime pace to balls-to-the-wall, caffeine-fueled all-nighters, is that blogging in these parts is liable to be sporadic, possibly incoherent, and likely somewhat whiny for the next little while. I’m hoping to find the gumption to do those longer entries, but it’ll depend a lot on how late I’m getting home and how much creative juice I’ve got left after the caffeine buzz fades.

In the meantime, here’s something interesting for you to chew on: it’s a compendium of the military slang that’s emerging from the Iraq War. I’ve always been interested in slang, and in military lingo in particular. Slang from the Vietnam War, for instance, is extremely familiar because of all the movies we’ve seen about that conflict. So far, however, it seems that Iraq War terminology has failed to penetrate into the public consciousness in the same way. (I suspect that’s because the war itself hasn’t really sunk into the general public’s collective mind either. If you’re not part of a military family, it’s really just an intellectual abstraction, isn’t it? It’s not like we’re all planting Victory gardens and buying war bonds, or even protesting and burning draft cards. It may as well be just another reality show on the Fox Network. But I digress…)

Much of the list consists of inelegant acronyms, the linguistic currency of our technology-driven age, but there are some colorful terms that stood out in my mind. “Dirt sailor,” for instance, refers to a member of the Navy who is performing a role in landlocked Iraq. (My old high-school friend Tim, who has been sailing on nuclear submarines for much of the past 20 years, pulled a tour in Iraq; seeing photos of him in body armor and tan fatigues instead of the usual blue submariner’s uniform was… disconcerting. For the record, he made it home just fine.)

I also liked “fobbit,” a person who never goes outside the wire around the forward operating base (FOB); “frankenstein,” a truck that’s covered with unsightly weld-seams where armor has been added; “haji mart,” a decidedly un-PC term for “any small store operated by Iraqis to sell small items to Americans”; and “sandbox,” referring to Iraq itself.

And then there’s my favorite: “death blossom,” described as “the tendency of Iraqi security forces, in response to receiving a little fire from the enemy, to… fire indisciminately in all directions.” And why do I like this term so much? Because, as this article notes, it comes from the 1984 movie The Last Starfighter, a nifty little flick that, along with Tron, was a major milestone in the development of computer-generated visual effects. The Iraq War usage fits: the “death blossom” in the movie was a last-ditch maneuver in which a single fighter-ship expends its entire arsenal at once in hopes of taking out an entire enemy fleet. I’m frankly amazed that anyone in the military even remembers this movie; as I recall, it wasn’t a major hit, and it has been 23 years since its release. Although perhaps I shouldn’t be, considering that its central premise — an alien videogame serves as an assessment and recruiting tool — obviously inspired someone at the Pentagon…

Over the past several weeks, several people I care about have experienced problems that have the potential to change their lives. I won’t embarrass anyone by naming names, and I won’t elaborate on their situations other than to say that they range the gamut of all the scary grown-up shit we never stopped to consider when we were teenagers aching to become adults: medical, psychological, marital.

I want very badly to help these people, to say something useful, but what do you say to a friend who is scared and hurting and feeling like they’ve just realized their entire life is constructed on a pile of sand that is beginning to shift out from under them?
Once, a long time ago, I fancied myself a great philosopher who had it all figured out; in truth, I was just a glib SOB who had a knack for reciting applicable lines of movie dialog. But as I grow older, I’m gradually learning that the dialog doesn’t always fit. Sometimes there’s just not anything to say. And sometimes maybe you don’t have to say anything. Even when you desperately want to.

Sometimes you just have to listen, and let your friends know you’re there. They may not ask for anything, they may not know what to ask for. But that’s okay. It’s the being-there part that matters.

Think about that as you enjoy the long holiday weekend. I know I will.

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that one of the descriptors I assign myself up there at the top of this page is “pack rat.” As long as I can remember, I’ve had an almost existential dread of throwing away anything that might later prove to have some sentimental or historical value. That’s why I still have a comic book my dad bought for me when I was six years old.

In addition to this natural tendency toward hoarding, I also picked up a collecting hobby in college. Tracking down, acquiring, and owning all manner of pop-culture memorabilia has proven to be immensely gratifying, for a number of reasons. But there’s a big downside to being a collector, and that’s the difficulty of storing and protecting all your possessions. This point was driven home rather forcefully a little over a year ago, when I experienced an event I like to think of as The Great Water-Filter Containment Failure and Basement Flood of 2006. Briefly, if you don’t recall and/or don’t want to follow the link, my water filter developed a major leak in the middle of the night, and by the time I woke up and noticed it, I had several inches of water throughout the entire basement. This would’ve been disastrous enough if the only possessions down there were my own, but I was also storing a lot of stuff my parents left behind when they built their new house. And most of that was sitting in stacks and heaps right there on the floor, right in the water.

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