The Gentle News

Reminder: Soul Glow, the best damn disco band in Dallas, will be at the Men’s Club on Friday, May 23rd from 4ish to 8ish. Bring it.

Also, we’re hatching a big party at our house on June 7. Be there or you will miss… um… it.

I have been ordered by some very influential people to throw another party. It’s been more than a quarter since my last one, which means my house is probably a little bit too clean and organized for its own good. No date yet, so help me out with that part.

I had been considering a trip to Beaumont this weekend, but because of some work stuff and other-work stuff, that may not be a very good idea. Of the next several Fridays and Saturdays, which ones are you most available for?

I’m not making fun of anybody. Except maybe Mr. Left there.

We got our new mattress yesterday. With our already-tall bed frame, our noses are touching the ceiling. I like really high beds, and I’m not sure why. Maybe because it feels like I’m on a top bunk with no bottom bunk below me?

Last night I had what I think is the longest and most elaborate dream of my life. It’s already slipping away from me, but I remember some specifics. My brother Taylor, Lance L., a bunch of my friends from high school, and I all somehow ended up at a house owned by Mr. P (the CEO of the company I work for). We were hanging out, playing games, and having a great time. After several days of chillaxin’ with Mr. P, things slowly started to change. We had to do strange exercises, and people actually started living there.

I spent one night there, and when I woke up everyone was lined up on the front lawn doing their exercises. When I went out to see what was going on, I heard a noise over a loudspeaker say “Tardiness”, and then a weird contraption in front of everyone that looked like a solar panel on a portable projector screen stand turned toward me and I fell to my knees in pain. I screamed something like “What the fuck!?! This is bullshit!”

Someone whispered, without turning to look at me, “Please, don’t use that language! He’ll make us all responsible!”

When the pain subsided, I fell in line and feigned obedience. After exercises, I approached Mr. P and told him this was unacceptable, and that I was taking my brother home. He grinned and said, “By all means.” I turned to Taylor and he told me he was staying. I fought him on it for a while, but he really wanted to stay.

I paced around the “compound” for a while trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I had a long conversation with Lance, and we took a walk to some restaurant. There he told me that P was some kind of weird 7th Day Adventist, trying to start a congregation through some methods he had read in a book written by some Koresh-type asshole. Lance was working undercover and had gained access to Mr. P’s records, including his bank accounts.

Lance and I hatched a plan to blow up the compound and free the sheep. But, aside from my brother, we weren’t really concerned with saving the poor schmucks who were following P. Our goal was to siphon off his money.

The plan was brilliant… I just HACKED into BankOfAmerica.com. This is exactly how it went:

farris$ ssh root@boahost

boahost:/home# cd $FARRIS_ACCT_NO

boahost:/home/382193783827# ln -s /home/$MR_P_ACCT_NO checking

boahost:/home/382193783827# ls -la checking

total $125,392,204

…

-rw——- 1 misterp root $9546 Feb 29 03:30 check459
-rw——- 1 misterp root $9546 Mar 15 03:30 check460
-rw——- 1 misterp root $9546 Mar 31 03:30 check461

boahost:/home/382193783827# chgrp -R farris checking

boahost:/home/382193783827# chmod -R g+rwx checking

boahost:/home/382193783827# logout

Then, after setting the bombs, Lance and I went to an ATM and moved $125 million from “checking” into my savings account.

And that’s about when my alarm woke me up this morning. There was a lot more going on in the dream, but those are the specifics I still have within reach. There were a few more encounters with the pain-ray, and a bunch of conversations with Taylor at the compound. I’m pretty sure there were some very heated bible study sessions as well.

I’ll attempt to participate in this thingy I saw Josh do. 10 weird things about me.

First off, I’m of the opinion that others are far more qualified to point out weird things about you than yourself. But these are some things I can more or less deduce are odd or not quite ordinary about me:

1. I can’t/don’t burp. If I were still keeping count, I would probably find that for the entirety of my remembered existence, you could count the number of real belches I’ve issued on all four limbs. The few times I’ve ever attempted to do it, whether for comedic effect or relief of discomfort, I’ve vomited.
2. This might belong up there with #1, but I have what some would call an irrational fear of (or anxiety over) vomiting and vomit. I shan’t elaborate further.
3. I’m an atheist who really doesn’t like Richard Dawkins. Maybe this isn’t weird, since I recently discovered that Trey Parker & Matt Stone feel more or less the same way. Not that T&M are normal or ordinary, but what few passionate socio-political opinions can be gleaned from South Park are usually fairly popular ones.
4. Despite the first clause in #3 (or perhaps in light of the entirety of #3), one of my closest and most trusted friends is an ordained Orthodox Christian priest.
5. If you were to review the surveillance video of my life, you’d probably find that, aside from my wife, the beings to whom I speak the most are the four-legs-yellow-eyes-whiskers-and-shit variety.
6. Dwight: Who wrote this, this hysterical one … anal fissures.
   Kevin: That’s a real thing.
   Dwight: Yeah, but no one here has it.
   Kevin: Someone has it.
7. When possible or practical, I sit down to pee.
8. I loved mayo on french fries long before Pulp Fiction. I actually don’t think this one is weird. I got it from my Dad, which is not to say my Dad isn’t weird. It’s just food. And they taste good together.
9. I don’t like Led Zeppelin.
10. If I weren’t a Cylon, and I were somehow tipped off that Tigh, Tyrol, Anders and Tory were cylons, I would kill them. Without hesitation. This is why I don’t like the show and cannot enjoy it. Every character who has ever hesitated to destroy a man-made, faulty, genocidal machine because of any bullshit morals or sense of humanity is fucking retarded and not believable.