Harbinger of the Apocalypse perhaps?

Lately a lot of strangers have told me that I look familiar. They ask me if I know them. They ask me two or three times. People I've never seen in my entire life.

The last occurrence was just yesterday. A young man walked slowly past me, the entire time staring me in the face. He didn't even blink.

It happens a lot.

Sometimes when I'm out at a bar, it'll happen a couple of times a night. It happens more in the city, a city I don't live in.

I guess I just have one of those faces. That's my response every time, only to cover up the fact that I don't know what to say.

I can't help but shake the feeling that there is another me out there somewhere meeting all these people and having all this fun. My more fun, more charming doppleganger. Me in the bizzarro universe. Maybe I'm really my shadow, stretching and deforming over the landscape behind me as I walk perfectly into the sunset.

That's ridiculous though. It sounds like something someone who majored in philosophy would say. Their failing grasp to use a very expensive and worthless degree.

When I was little I used to think my life was being broadcast on TV, on some channel I never saw or wasn't allowed to see. This is long before The Truman Show or even the Twilight Zone episode The Truman Show ripped off. Anyways, I'd always think I was being watched and I'd never want to slip up or look stupid because then everyone would know. I felt like weird things would only happen because they were supposed to. Maybe this was just a very uneducated belief in God.

I think most kids who grew up in the TV generation think like this. It's a false sense of notoriety. It makes you feel like you matter. Like you're not just living and nobody cares.

It's all scripted, this is supposed to happen. This is just the episode where Dad takes me to a bar and I sit and watch him drink all day. This is the episode where I do math homework and feel stupid and not good enough.

It's not really happening if it's not happening to you.

Maybe the reason people think they know me is just this residual faux-fame from back then, when I thought I was on TV. The once child star, now has-been of my subconscious.

Maybe it's the internet. Maybe these strangers have seen me on myspace or stumbled onto my website. Maybe that's it. Honestly though, the numbers just don't add up. Nobody goes to those pages.

But these people, they never tell me where they think they met me and I never ask. They simply feel I should know them. As if my face is familiar to them and they can't explain why.

Searching my memory banks for anything only brings up cobwebs in forgotten corners. Sorry people -- it's not that I don't know you -- it's that I never knew you.

You've been drinking and you have me mixed up with someone else.

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but it's all better now...

Know why?
Cause the framing is done.

Be jealous!

>:)


Signed and errythang.
Big ups to Shaz/x for hookin' it up on the real. He's a fine chap.

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@#$%&*@%#$*&!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FUCK!! Now I'm staying late to edit fucking EXCEL FILES????
I'm surrounded by fucking retards!!!!


AARRRGHHHHH!!!!

ANYONE ELSE IN THIS WHOLE FUCKING BUILDING SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THIS!!!!

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Nothing at all.

So I called out of work on Friday and during the entire course of my weekend I only left the apartment maybe twice. I say twice because the third time I left the apartment was only to walk down to another apartment and supervise my roommate help a friend move in.

So, for three days, I did next to nothing. I didn't see anyone, I didn't call anyone and nobody called me. Well, Kevin called and I called him back, plus my mom called, so I guess there was that. Still though, it was pretty quiet all weekend.

It started when I woke up Friday morning, I felt as if someone had been hammering nails into my jaw all night. This resulted in a mild headache that I could feel becoming worse if I pressed it. I was going to call out anyways and now I had my excuse.

Later a phone call to Kelly turned up that I had probably been grinding my teeth in my sleep. She said during school she used to do the same thing, that it was stress. This was over the phone, I maybe saw her in person for a grand total of six hours all weekend.

Friday we all went out to dinner, Kelly, Dennis and I, then we grabbed some beer from the local liquor store and went home. We decided to watch The Jerk with Steve Martin. Kelly and Dennis had never seen it. It was a good night even if the new phonebooks were not here.

All and all Kelly and I have been seeing less of each other over the course of the last month or two. I think this is a study to find out who each other is without one another. To get reacquainted with ourselves. She wants to go back to school, get into a good regiment at the gym, and is starting to find her own again. We do spend a lot of time together and maybe it's time we relax and figure out direction.

I thought it best to do nothing for a while. I had been exerting myself worrying about things that I had no control over and I could use three days underground. And during the daylight hours, for three days, that's exactly what I did.

I decided to read. I drew the blinds closed. The weather all weekend was nice but that didn't concern me, I was inside, buried in a book and my thoughts. A funny thing about this book I'm reading, I think it's making me crazy. Things all around me have been out of whack as of late. I'm worrying about things I wouldn't normally pay any mind to. I'm conscious of things that I'd normally not think about. Everything has taken this kind of surreal semi-gloss coating. This is how I spent all day Saturday and at 10:00pm I decided I should get out.

Dennis and I decided to forego plans of going to Baltimore. It was a long drive that neither of us felt up to that late in the game. We ended up at a pub in Annapolis. The pub we always go to in Annapolis. Nothing unusual ever happens there.

At this pub the back area is outside and you can sit down, have something to drink and hear yourself speak. Neither of us had eaten and so we got a couple of menus on top of our beer order. It was the same waitress we always have, her name is Amanda. She's nice and is always good to us.

I couldn't shake the feeling that something was different about the night air. Even though it had been a bright, clear day, the evening sky held no stars. Not one.

As we sat there, out back, under the empty sky, we ate and drank. Later a man would come out of the bar, sit down in our vicinity and take off his shirt. He'd move chairs around in a ritualistic manner, finally sitting down by himself to smoke a cigarette.

Later still, on the other side of the wood fence that backed up to the rear of our chairs a man would pee a foot from where Dennis was sitting. This kind of stuff never happens here.

It was after that when we met a man who could run one-hundred and fifty-five miles an hour. He was not joking. A black man, he wore a yellow hat and pants up past where his waist should be. His eyes were constantly looking upwards and every now and again they'd roll around when he got excited about something. He asked us if we thought he was a fool. We replied that he was nobody's fool.

He talked about his 'condition' and about how he knew his place. His lot in life. How someone on the bus had put hands on him and how he was not a violent person but if he was provoked, then you better watch out.

He was mentally handicapped and later we were told that he was a regular, that he would come in three times a week or so, order some food and just talk to people. He was a nice guy but it all just seemed rather odd for a Saturday night. That surreal semi-gloss coating our little world. After all, it's not every day that you meet a man who can run one-hundred and fifty-five miles an hour.

I woke up on Sunday around 9:00am. Dennis and I cooked waffles -- well actually -- Dennis cooked and I ate. He did a new trick with the waffles though. He sprinkled cinnamon on them. Something he'd never done before. They were excellent, the cinnamon brought the maple taste right up to the surface. He'd truly perfected the artform.

After that he went down the street to help his friend Sean move in to the new apartment. Again, I was alone and with my book I spent almost my entire Sunday reading. Every now and again I'd fall asleep and have a dream that someone was chasing me. I'd wake up every time I turned this one corner down an alley. I don't know what was in the alley.

Later I walked down to Sean's to see how things were going. I stole some pizza and helped put together a television stand, after which I went home again.

That night I stayed in and caught the new episode of Family Guy, Dennis was still down the street. I went to bed somewhere around 11:00pm after I had finished a couple more chapters and couldn't hold my eyes open anymore.

This morning it took everything in my power to drag myself to work. I actually contemplated calling out again but I knew that it just wouldn't be in the cards to take that long of a weekend during the busy season.

It's funny how doing nothing can get into your system so quickly that once it's time to actually do something you don't even remember if you know how.

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I want to play truant tomorrow.

Who's with me? Actually, I want to play truant today, right now. This week has been pretty hard and I feel like I deserve it. Like somehow it's owed to me though I know any angle of that thought is absurd.

Still, though.

All I want to do is go home, work-out for a little bit, throw some weights around, then play Ninja Gaiden until my eyes bleed. Or at least until I've dried my infinite well of profanity.

That game pisses me off, but I love it, but it pisses me off.

We <3 Katamari is also great but sadly it doesn't run in progressive scan and thus looks one notch above dog-shit on my projector. Oh well. I just wish the PS2 had the foresight to include progressive scan and make developers utilize it like the Xbox did.

While I was picking up Katamari I also grabbed another wireless PS2 controller. Mainly because the co-op mode in there is supposed to be real fun and I need more co-op games and thus more controllers.

Buying this controller, holding it, I no longer feel tethered by the shackles of my youth. The many years of having to sit four to six feet from my televison deliquesce away like an ice cube in the amazon. (not Icecube in the amazon, that wasn't an Anaconda reference... Now I've gone and done it. No, NO, there are NOT snakes out deer' dis big. NO.)

But I digress.

I bought my first wireless Xbox controller some many moons ago. I have since wondered how man -- in his highly evolved state -- lived with these 'wires' for so long. I feel as if I've broken free from my strait-jacket and am now running freely through the looney bin ensuing hijinx one could only refer to as mad-cap.

The analogy kinda breaks down there but what I'm trying to say is: If I want to play the console of my choice from the toilet, I can now do so. I don't know why I waited so long to be free.

All the controllers in my possession are now wireless with the exception of those blasted Konga drums and trust me, if they sold wireless ones I'd own them.

Sorry, got a little off topic there.

But really, who wants to call out sick tomorrow? I may just go it alone, play Gaiden all day or something.

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Working late

I'm stuck here late today, and by late I mean 5:00 or 6:00 pm. I would usually be leaving about now, 2:30-3:00ish but the president needs me to do some powerpoint stuff.

Yeah, you just read that correctly. Powerpoint.

I'm a graphic designer.

It appears that I have failed in my many attempts to dethrone myself as the sole person in this company that knows how to unlock the mysteries of Microsoft Powerpoint. I guess I know too many of it's arduous secrets.

Marvel at how I am able to make corrections in type! Be amazed at how deftly I can copy and paste! My ability to make a rectangle -- then put text in that rectangle, then add a background color of your choice to that rectangle -- I'm sure it will be revered for generations to come.

And on a day that two games came out! Two games that I've been waiting months for! Ninja Gaiden Black and We <3 Katamari! DAMN!

And just to let you in a little furhter on the ongoing joke that is my bussiness. The people I'm dealing with here? Yeah, some of them think the 'internet' is 'inside' my computer.

Honestly, really. Are these people able to operate light switches? How do they go on breathing?

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A word for today.

If I had to sum up the way I've felt about the last couple of days at work in one word, that word would be: immure.

To enclose within walls, or as if within walls; hence, to shut up; to imprison; to incarcerate.

This isn't the kind of place that brings one great joy, this is the kind of place that breaks one's spirits. Mad and cackling, riding your back into the distance of some desolate landscape. No end in sight.

When you explain to a man that in order to design the page he wants, you need product shots and graphics of the stuff he's selling, and when this man looks at you blankly -- as a child would if you tried to describe to them thermo dynamics -- and expresses to you that it's your job, that you should 'make' them, it takes every ounce of your being not to scream obscenities in his face.

How am I supposed to 'make' a bottle of Martell Cognac? Especially with nothing to go on.

Maybe his childlike wisdom was lost on me. Maybe he was indeed suggesting that I 'make' one. Literally. With hops and barley and age it in oak casks for 12 years until one would describe it as sweet perfection. At which point I could photograph it and drink from it's contents until I was surely dead of alcohol poisoning.

Ah, sweet, sweet poison.

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Driving Blind

Every morning in the early fall there is a strech of road I drive made of pure light. It's there, waiting, just around the corner from my house. Every morning is a test.

For ten seconds my windshield might as well be my tunnel to the afterlife. The sun reflects in such a way and at such an angle that it makes it impossible to see a foot in front of my car. I'm completely blind. Wipers? They only make it worse.

I simply want to get to work.

Every morning in the early fall it's my ten second leap of faith. My silent prayer that today wont be the day that changes the rest of my life. My test.

Today I passed.

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It's official

I've gone full blown nerd. I just crossed that line and jumped out of my casual nerd dolor and right into the throes of full-on-mega-nerd.

I just got in my first argument over anime.

Do I get a fucking medal now? Maybe I transform into a car or some shit.

Please, someone, ANYONE, break this curse!

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PBF in case you didn't know

This is the Perry Bible Fellowship, a comic that I check daily, even though it only gets updated on sundays. I get bored sometimes... Anyway, it's great. It's so twisted. Maybe people dont know about it? Bookmark it, love it:

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Medium me

You could say at any given time during the day at any given time during the week things are going about average. I'm not happy, I'm not sad, I'm just existing. I'm there and not there at the same time. If I was in the DSM-V, I would be categorized as having Dysthymic Disorder.

My Jeopardy dream categories are:

• Future Technology.
• Video games from the 1980s to now.
• Photoshop.
• Ninjas.
• Film techniques.
• The history of art in Mesopotamia.
• The Princess Bride.
• How to organize a music server file system.
• PSP Hacking.
• The Information Super Highway.
  

I'm well versed in things that don't matter. I'm a very medium person.

I lead a pretty medium life. I have a medium car, a medium residence, make a medium salary. I have a medium body type, not skinny, not fat. A medium attitude. Medium taste in just about everything from clothing to food to movies. If I had to turn in a summation of myself in one word or less, that word would be medium.

Nothing about me really stands out. I just fold along the dotted line, down the center of life.

It wasn't always like this. I was the kid who could draw just about anything, I was into photography and making movies. Creativity man, that was my bag.

I have to get out of the medium rut. I need to, for the betterment of my being.

I'm Downloading these language CDs and I'm going to learn Japanese if it kills me. I've always wanted to learn another language and falling back on the excuse that my brain doesn't work that way is getting old. I'm going to start a web comic, I'm around far too many funny people to not. Plus I can draw. I'm looking into taking A+ classes. I need to start learning again. I'm getting back into the gym.

Hopefully I'll have some more categories added to that list very soon.

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It's about time

It only took almost three years of me bitching and complaining, but finally, my job as outfitted me with a new computer. It's GLORIOUS!! For real, bigups to them for hookin' it proper.


This marks the first time I have a better computer at work/school than I have at home. I'm gonna have to deal with that.

For a frame of reference I was working with a Pentium II 800mhz with 512mb of ram, a 40gb Hard Drive and two crappy eye straining 19inch CRT Monitors. Yeah, they thought I could graphic design on that. I'm now on a Pentium IV 3.4Ghz with 2gigs of ram and a 350gb Hard Drive. Not to mention an Nvidia 128 Quatro card and enough bells and whistles to choke a large animal.

My soul is finally at rest.

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