The Gentle News

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Lay your weary head to rest

July 25th, 2010 · Potpourri, Video

On July 24, 2010, three mostly-unrelated things occurred:

1) I borrowed a friend’s video camera to capture some footage from our band’s recent tour to California.
2) Our orange boy cat, Mandy, who’d had a year-long fight with chronic renal failure, was having a good enough day that we decided to give him his final rest.
3) I discovered the sneaky “Life In A Day” marketing campaign to sucker people into providing a bunch of footage for an upcoming documentary produced by one of my favorite filmmakers.

I spent my weekend gorging on junk food, choking back tears, and putting together what ended up being this video/slideshow. Most of it probably isn’t usable in the documentary, though all of the live-action parts were indeed shot on July 24, 2010.

This video contains numerous sufficient answers to each of the questions posed by the Life in A Day project.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter to me whether I get a request for the footage to be used. Nor does it matter to me if people think my wife and I care about our animals too much or take them too seriously. Of all the losses I’ve had to endure in my life, this one is no less important to me.

I also cheated and used “This Year” by the Mountain Goats as the music, since I had no time or energy to come up with my own audio, and the song fit my mood perfectly.

Rest in peace, Colonel Mandarin Mango Spock Cecil Harley Best Orange Kitty.

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This Holiday Inn used to be a Radisson

July 13th, 2010 · Potpourri, Stories

This hotel is in the final stages of renovation after being purchased from Radisson. The marquee on the side of the building just below the roof looks as if it has been there for years, but I know based on the SSID of the Wireless LAN (and the gregarious installer who warned me that he would be shutting it down for 24 hours on Thursday to finish the transition and whatever technology upgrades the new management squeezed their couch-cushions to pay for) that only a few weeks ago it read “Radisson” instead of “Holiday Inn.”

Which hotel is better? The Radisson, or the Holiday Inn?

Which one has better filters on its building-wide plumbing? Better filters on the plumbing for its ice machines? Is any of the water in this building filtered at all? If so, what exactly is filtered out, and when did they last replace the charcoal through which the water is filtered?

Why and how the hell is charcoal, that nasty black shit you burn to cook your pounds and pounds of dubiously-packaged meat products at your family reunion, used to filter out other nasty black shit from water intended for ingestion by intelligent human beings?

How old is whatever plumbing that lies between whatever filters may or may not exist here and the faucet in the bathroom (where you defecate) that is the only place I can currently acquire the most important substance on this planet without either paying an ATM fee to get 20 dollars I’ll need to break at the front desk in order to use the vending machine or getting in my car and driving to a convenience store to buy a bottle of stuff from the same local supply as said faucet?

Would it be safer to just fill my ice bucket from the machine and let it melt, or forget the ice and just choke down the room-temperature tap?

The bottom line is that I’m not a pansy and I drink tap water. But I like it cold. And the ice that came out of that ice maker on the third floor of the Midtown Austin Holiday Inn (Please pardon our mess, we’re making our hotel even more awesome so that you’ll press “9″ when you get that automated telephone survey call asking you how awesome was your stay at the Midtown Austin Radisson, er, Holiday Inn.) has pepper flakes all up in every 4th cube.

At least I’m telling myself they are pepper flakes. If I weren’t still on antibiotics for a recent strep throat infection, I might be less inclined to buy into that assumption.

I’m tired, I’m thirsty, and I’m about to use the wall-mounted hair-dryer to fix myself a nice, delicious glass of life-enabling beverage.

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The thermally activated philosophy mug

June 8th, 2010 · Potpourri, Stories

The cute text on the coffee mug was designed to change from “Half-full” to “Half-empty” when the coffee fell below the median line in the ceramic (or when the coffee cooled to an undrinkable temperature). Unfortunately, the misanthropic manufacturing manager did not see eye to eye with the designer from marketing. He reversed the order of things. The marketing hotshot resigned, feeling the spirit of his message had been tarnished by pointless nihilism. The product was a huge success. The company made a fortune in revenue from his idea thanks to their intellectual property agreement, and the manufacturing manager lost his job when the board moved production to an off-shore contract facility.

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A quick one, before we break

May 28th, 2010 · Potpourri

I fix machines that were not broken,

And say cute things best left unspoken.

I cannot heal the weak or sick,

I much prefer to help them kick.

I teach the rules that have no class

From the text we all keep in our ass.

There’s no degree, in school or verity,

To grant myself austere authority.

So keep your skyward faith and virtue –

I can’t and wouldn’t take them from you.

I seek no truth but constant learning,

For no one fact can quench our yearning.

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Without My Pain

April 25th, 2010 · Potpourri

If you google “without my pain I am nothing” you get a lot of results. If you google “without my pain I am happy” you get only suggestions.

Some years ago, Trent Reznor said or wrote “without my pain I am nothing.” I found that humorous, and responded (to myself and whoever else was listening) with the other one.

My tenth grade English teacher, a large person, sat on my futon in the summer of 2000 and broke it. A few years prior to that, she lectured students adamantly on how certain she was that she would one day die at the hands of an avoidable condition she had no earthly right discussing with teenagers in a public school.

A few days ago she accidentally drove her SUV through the facade of a salon in my hometown. I never hated her, even when a lot of my good friends implied that they thought she was evil incarnate. I still don’t hate her, but I’m a little bit resentful of her sitting on my futon and telling me that one of my friends was on illegal drugs in tenth grade. She knew nothing about him, except that she did not like him. He might have been on drugs, but he probably didn’t take them as often as the doctors and parents told him he should.

The futon wasn’t even really mine, but she did break it.

I am on the back porch right now, shivering in the nonexistent, Texas spring cold. I am not in pain, and I know full well that it’s closer to my preferred temperature inside the house. Yet I sit here, trying to convey how happy I am. I hope some day to have better reasons to sit happily on my back porch at 2:40AM.

I am half way through the first season of House. I don’t know why the show is sometimes called House MD but usually just called House. I do know that I need to read a lot of Sherlock Holmes.

I went to a bar tonight. Last night. Whatever. I went because I knew friends would be there. I was surprised to find more friends than I expected there.

I was too chickenshit to try harder to get B to come with me when we reached that moment where she admitted that she did not actually want to go to the bar.

The only pain I really have to endure right now is that caused by the fissure(s) in my anus. I could start eating right and fix that in a couple of years. Or I could have surgery. Or I could allow a physician to inject botulinum toxin into my anus.

This is as honest as it gets, whatever it is. I don’t need to define “is.” Nobody does, and that’s the beauty of the verb.

The coolest thing about House, MD is that nobody gets him. But I do. You probably do, too, but the coolest thing is that nobody gets him but me.

Fiction, baby. This ain’t it, but I know I could make a lot of it.

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