Adventures In Dining, Saturday Edition

Had me a gynormous steak burrito at Esmereldas. It was so large that my wife implored me to acquire photographic evidence.

My Neighbor Is Dead

Not my BFF Myra, but the man who lived in the ‘mother-in-law’ house behind her.

I had noticed the dual squads parked outside as I pulled in to my house. My wife met me at the garage. “Unsere nachbar ist tot.”

We speak pidgin German when we want to keep secrets from the kids and my daughter was there.

It wasn’t a surprise – one of the first things my neighbor had told me during one of our infrequent conversations was that he had prostate cancer and didn’t expect to live much longer. He had an imperfection between his front teeth that looked like nothing but the mutation caused by many years of sucking Marlboro smoke through them.

So he’s dead. I wonder how things work now. I hear he has a daughter. I suppose she’ll be or has been notified and will come by to clean up her father’s house – a task I don’t envy. He was living in his house when I first moved here eight years ago and was always bringing stuff he found home (there are still a couple of wheelchairs and an immobile lawnmower in his front yard that I can’t remember ever NOT being there). Will there be a memorial service? Will we be invited? I didn’t know him very well, but there’s a weird empty feeling I have when I see pass by his now-empty house as I walk to my garage and nobody deserves to meet their ultimate and inevitable end alone.

ITunes is making me happy this morning

I Had To Tell You – 13th Floor Elevators
Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down – George Jones
Life In A Glass House – Radiohead
Side 2 – 11 – Star Trek (Third Season Cast and Crew)
Try It Again – Bobby Byrd
National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine (PSA) – Tony Bennett
I Couldn’t Do It Without You – Coca-Cola
Randolph’s Going Home – Shayne Carter & Peter Jefferies
Spanish Flea – The Jack Lander Trio at the Fifty Fourth
Words We Live By – The Ken Nordine Group
Farewell, Marimba bimbo – Pneumershonic (Paul Bourre)
On The Rise – Meat Puppets

Just thought you should know…

Time to mourn later. Survive.

The War Journals of Hillary Clinton, Vol. 1

As bullets clawed the air around us and screams echoed down the rubble-strewn tarmac, I felt almost peaceful.

It was a simple mission, they had told me – get in, shake a few hands and mouth a few platitudes, get out. Simple. Yeah.

Things had started going wrong while we were still in the air and only gotten worse from there. So here we were, pinned down, choking on the acrid tang of cordite and the heady scent of human blood. The mission was even simpler now: survive. Whatever the cost, survive.

There was a grunt and a clatter of equipment as Sinbad threw himself down at my side. Sweat glistened on his bare arms, and I could see tendons contracting and relaxing as he squeezed off bursts from his M14. The motion was hypnotic, like a snake about to strike. Perhaps, when all this was over-

No. Concentrate. Focus on the mission. Survive.

(From noted hate site DailyKos)

A realization.

After I emailed this link to three friends in as many days, I said “Hey! Why not share it with my expansive audience?”
Here, then:
Media Narrative and Hard Financial Facts Turning Against Clinton

This saved me today.

Well, that and the news that my gone-missing suicidal pal who was far away and very alone had at last resurfaced and called his mom.

Is that all you got?!

(Click image to enlarge.)

Let the record show that today, only a few hours after the calendar start of Spring, only a few days before baseball’s opening day, Milwaukee has received more than a FOOT of snow.

I drove my neighbor into her job this morning, entirely missing some gigantic landmarks I usually navigate by (huge municipal buildings, usually almost an eyesore but today obscured in the thickest snow I’ve seen in a long while).

Finally, after skidding/sliding to a stop for a traffic light, I shook my fist and shouted directly to  the heavens, “Is this all you got, God? Is this all you got? ‘Cause I’m not down yet, you son-of-a-bitch! You never knocked me down!’

God has been unavailable for comment.

Which is probably a good thing, since I’m guessing he could still muster up some sort of a NEW Horseman of the Apocalypse, probably something involving network TV.

Or maybe he already has.

Still raining, still broken…

At least the comments anyway. I’m NOT trying to shut you up, I swear!

Yes, I know it’s broke.

Rule #1:
Never do upgrades late on Sunday evening.

Jeremy vs. The Basement, Pt. 3566

Attentive readers may recall that I’ve been doing battle with all of the detritus in my basement for quite a while.

I spent a while down there again yesterday, trying to throw shit away in the brief time I had before I got all weepy and sentimental and starting putting away stupid meaningless pieces of ephemera to ‘look at again a little later’ and make a final decision about later. When I make more than three piles, I try to make it a rule to stop and come back after my resolve is hardened to be a more efficient, cutthroat and heartless archivist. Petty emotions must not stand in the way of a less-cluttered basement!

At some point, standing surrounded by teetering boxes of crap, I had a satori of sorts.

These memories that I’m hoarding in the basement, I need to let them go. The strongest ones are already in me – they’re what make me me. The others – well, I try to keep this in my mind as I’m sifting through the offal of my years. If my basement was struck by a tornado and I lost everything in it, would I miss those things?

Well, no. Maybe it’s all of this zen crap I’ve been reading, but I feel like at least one precept has started to sink in: nothing lasts forever. Our unhappiness really is caused by allowing ourselves to become stupidly attached to things. This is actually a pretty basic part of Buddhism – the first of the Four Noble Truths.

So I suppose there’s a weird sort of parental pride in my (then three-year old) son’s reaction to seeing his mom fight back tears as she explained why our cat wouldn’t ever be coming back from the vet. Ever.

“It’s okay, mom”, he said, giving her a hug, “Everything dies.”

Wow.

Probably this seems simple and obvious and even pedantic to you. It’s a big deal to me.