Just a thought ...

My 2006 will end with a hellish series of double-shifts that will likely lead me to pursue adventures in which I almost certainly will drink heavily during the three days off I'll enjoy ringing in 2007. Ah, I do love New Year's.

I usually hate resolutions because they're almost certainly annually redundant and doomed to fail. I'm pretty sure I've listed quitting smoking at least half a dozen December 31sts—and I think this year was officially my mere decade anniversary of making people at Camel very rich.

I swore off making resolutions quite some time ago, but ... boy-oh-fucking-boy didn't they just start springing to mind this recent holiday season. Man, when you start a rare afternoon off by dedicating your afternoon to getting all of the water off the flooded basement floor before Dad gets home—and then Dad gets home after you dumped twenty or so buckets into the drain as evidence of your efforts only to watch Dad walk over to the drier south wall area, jiggle a plug, and then inform you that it appears the "suck pump" (Whatever the fucking hell that thing is ...) wasn't completely in the socket.

Oh ... well, fine then.

You feel stupid for spending three hours that could have been fixed in say, uh, fifteen minutes. Maybe ten.

Then you really feel stupid for looking at all the crap you've been leaving on the floor—again. "Didn't I swear to leave the sketchbook on the dresser from now on, you know, the last time this happened?"

I'd elaborate more if 2006 allowed it, but I've got shirts to iron. I now see why the second question of that interview—at this breakfast place nearly two years ago where my current boss nonchalantly asked, "Have you ever worked for Greeks?"—still strikes me with a certain "We warned you" sense of I having should known better.

So I'm compiling my list and wondering if there's more guilt in not fulfilling pointlessly declared resolutions than there is in just simply setting an enormous amount of basic achievements instead.

"I'll eat better."

"I'll get out more."

"I won't let a girl convince me to shave my chest again unless she's really going to make it worth the emotionally painful sense of self-embarrassment."

2006, I won't forget you. But 2007, I can hardly wait to get knowing you.

"It's cold outside."

Another great moment in ones soon to be ignored by Second Amendment-thumpers.

The Tie That Binds

One of the waitresses at work approached me with a smile on Friday, saying she had something for me. She has expressed a fondness for shopping at thrift stores in the past.

"It's an ugly boy's tie," she told me. (Ugly, of course, meaning the tie and not the boy, just to be clear.) It was adorned with black & white soccer balls and a gray background. At the bottom of the tie, one ball seems to be tearing through the netting of a goal, but it appears as though the ball has been shot through an electrical fence. I said my thank yous and promised to wear it the sometime soon.

Sure enough, on Saturday I decided to sport the tie since my own selection has been severely limited by timeliness (bats would be appropriate if this were still, say, October) or simply being lost (blue-checkered design that was a gift from an ex-girlfriend is mysteriously absent).

My boss' mother—as she typically does—comes up to me to review my uniform. Seeing as my apron is clean and my shirt is pressed, she has little to complain about. "I like your tie," she says. Ordinarily, this is the equivalent of a bad review.

Later in the day, a couple at a booth with another friend asks me "what I do." Not quite certain how to answer that question, I respond with something to the effect of "you're looking at it." For one reason or another, they state that I come across as somebody who works in banking, or "executive"-type work. Why they've drawn this conclusion is lost to me, but I catch a glimpse of my tie just above the top of my apron as I accept a business card they've handed me. No customer at the waffle house has ever given me a business card.

After running into another server from a different restaurant at the bar later, we're discussing the differences and similarities between our two establishments when he suddenly starts urging me to come in and apply where he works. I could do well there, he says. "I can see you come off very professionally," he tells me.

Again, I look down at my tie. I'm no longer wearing an apron, but usually I'd have lost the tie by that point too.

Fast-forward to Sunday when I opt for my sentimental favorite, a tie entitled "Busy, Busy Cars" that was drawn by a nine-year-old girl (I'm guessing on the age, but you get the idea ...). It's my Sunday tie, I suppose, and the day goes on with no comment about my wardrobe—except from the same waitress who'd supplied me with the soccer ball art adorned around my neck. She sarcastically gives me some shit about not wearing her tie again, and I promise I'll wear it in the hear future.

I'm in a hurry on Monday when I exit the shower, run downstairs, grab the neatest-looking shirt from the rack and the only tie I can find: soccer balls. We are exceptionally slow—so much so that the waitress in question and I have time to begin, but not finish successfully, two crossword puzzles. Later that evening, I trek downtown to meet with a former editor still working at the paper when he points out that I'm looking "sharp." Again, I can only assume it's because I haven't removed the tie. Sure enough, a barback standing near us tells me, "Nice tie."

And so while I'm mulling over searching out thrift stores for more conversation-starting neckwear, today I followed up on that fellow server's advice and applied at his restaurant. Because, hey, if you can't find one real job, you might as well take on two decent ones to compensate.

The application was about as basic and vague as they come, and the interview might as well have been:

1) "What's your name?"

and

2) "When can you start?"

The answer to that second question is tomorrow evening. And with the annual Christmas Walk coming through town this weekend, I'm guessing I just booked myself a rather hectic little week. Or couple of weeks. Or couple of months. But let's stop there.

"And what should I wear?" I asked the front-of-the-house manager interviewing me.

As is common among fine dining, it's a long-sleeve white dress shirt and black dress pants.

"No tie?" I asked.

Nope; open collar. Perhaps now I can test to see if my naked Adam's Apple reaps the same attention one shortly-debuted tie earned within a single weekend, but I've got my doubts.

Emphasis On The "P" In The Acronym "R.I.P."

There's nothing quite like Thanksgiving to end a pretty ugly week of racial tensions in the media. Besides the post below regarding numbskull Mark Fuhrman's comments adding to the latest sad attempt by "The Juice" to profit off his ex-wife's death, we also got treated to Kramer going slightly postal at a comedy club and then making us further uncomfortable by trying to explain how he's somehow not a racist on Letterman. Oh, and in a slower media week, maybe somebody might have been a little more upset about what the typically asinine Michael Irvin had to say about the ancestry of a certain white athlete in Dallas.

I was thinking how we might need Rodney King to come out and ask for us to all get along again, the way a motion picture director would when dealing with a cast of out-of-line celebrities.

And that's when I woke up this morning, picked up the paper, and saw that the man who built a reputation getting the best of his large ensemble casts had died.

Anybody who watched this past year's Academy Awards telecast would likely remember that one of the night's bigger surprises (besides the show being trumped up as a celebration of how "courageous" Hollywood is every year right before naming a faux controversial piece of cinematic swill like "Crash" Best Picture) was Robert Altman accepting an honorary award and revealing that he had undergone a heart transplant years earlier.

It was sometime around the mid-90s (1996, I believe) when I discovered that video cassettes of older pictures were available for free rental at the public library. And I went through most of the classics quite quickly before becoming so consumed with taking in all of the older fare I'd heard so often but had never actually viewed. On one occasion, I watched all three of the "Godfather" films in a single day.

I don't really tend to lean toward any particular director as a "favorite," partly because there's too many good ones to choose from and partly because nobody can have that kind of remarkable consistency—the greatest directors can let us down on occasion, not with a particularly bad film, just a disappointment.

But going over the obits for Mr. Altman today, I was struck by just how many very enjoyable films he had made. Ask me my list of favorite directors yesterday, and I might've likely forgotten to include him. But from "M.A.S.H." to "Nashville" to "Short Cuts," his work always stood out in the singular way that you imagine any great artist's would: Only he could have pulled that off.

Of course, 1992's "The Player" remains my favorite of his. But just to make sure I've seen the entire scope of his beautiful career, I did the only thing I could think to do today and went out to rent his final film, "A Prairie Home Companion." I'm not especially fond of Garrison Kiellor, but with Altman at the helm, I'll trust that perhaps one last movie of his might make me believe that we can all still get along.

UPDATE: Okay, career gone for Michael Richards.

Mark Fuhrman: "These people will kill someone and go have chicken at KFC"

I can still recall the day of the infamous O.J. Simpson Ford Bronco chase during the Knicks-Rockets game of the NBA Finals. We all assumed that he had done it at that point. It was just a matter of catching him.

And as his trial dragged on for month after month after relentless month, I remember slowly listening to his defense and realizing how they weren't so much proving his innocence as they were creating a reasonable doubt. An episode of "Seinfeld" spoofed the decision to have the defendant try on the glove, but many would admit that perhaps one of the most explosive bits of testimony to come out of that trial was that of Mr. Mark Fuhrman.

I'm not terribly proud to admit that when we were ushered into the high school library to witness the verdict being read that day at the conclusion of the trial, I was one of those people who cheered when O.J. was found innocent. I could make excuses for it now if I sincerely felt O.J. was actually innocent, but instead, I'll just refer to this recent clip from FOX News' "Hannity & Colmes":



There's a number of discouraging things to be found in this video clip:
1) Alan Colmes shows unprecedented backbone.
2) Mark Fuhrman continues to treat his racist views as though they are beyond question.
3) Sean Hannity—as he always has—supports his good friend Fuhrman through and through.

The judicial branch of America ain't perfect; but watching ass-hats like Hannity and Fuhrman continue to try and deny how much of a role Fuhrman ultimately played in O.J.'s subsequent acquittal makes me appreciate a fair, but flawed justice system even when the jury's decision is not indicative of the conclusions the rest of us in the public had drawn.

Ghetto Fabulous

I am 28 years old and am supposed to be dressing up for Halloween ... twice. This makes me uncomfortable.

It is not as though I haven't had to do this before so much as it is the reality that I'm doing it again. I promised myself this year that I would treat myself by not forcing myself to endure a mask while waiting tables, nor would I spend any needless time or money on a costume. Everybody wins.

Plans to purchase a costume with some co-workers also forced to play dress-up this weekend didn't go off without its own little hitch. A seemingly easy pitch of going to Goodwill after a shift for some cheap but creative hand-me-downs quickly became a fiasco requiring the involvement of their boyfriend's companionship or hair needing to be done.

In the end, I stopped in the Goodwill a few days later and purchased a wig and a predominantly red flannel, like the type you'd imagine Paul Bunyan wore. The cashier looked at the prebagged wig with a picture of a man with a large, wide smile modeling the wig. It looked as though he might be retarded.

"You'd look good in a mullet," she told me. I wasn't quite sure how to respond to a comment like that.

The last time I dressed up for Halloween at work was while employed at the country club. There was a costume store on the other side of the river, and I once again purchased a prebagged item with the label "Shiek." When I drove to work on Halloween morning, the front page of the New York Times had a full-color image of Osama bin Laden from a recent video release and I spent the rest of the day having the strictly Spanish-speaking employees constantly giggling to themselves while repeating the "Osama" line aloud.

And it had been hard to take orders with my ZZ Top fake beard covering my mouth. It caused my the lenses of my rainbow-tinted hippie sunglasses to fog quite quickly. Not this year, though. Seeing as I had to abide by the dress-up code for this morning and Tuesday's day of recognizing a children's holiday, I simply donned a decade-old profession wrestling T-shirt, some tattered blue jeans, the flannel, wig, and a "Jim Beam Racing" ballcap. Voila: White Trash.

It wasn't the most imaginitive costume, to be sure. Nor the most extravagant. My boss opted to purchase an all-white jumpsuit a la Elvis Presley. He also had glasses with fake lamb chop sideburns attached when he wasn't busy loading up trays with food and shouting random employee names.

There were a few strange looks from customers of mine, but perhaps none more so than a curious lad in a highchair who leaned back and looked straight up at me in some upside-down perspective while I scribbled down his parents' breakfast order.

"Denver skillet ... scrambled ... cheddar ..."

While jotting down that his father did not in fact want onions in his selection, out of the corner of my eye I saw the child raise its hand in the air and proceed with the beginning stages of an innocent, playful slap at my genitals. I took a step backward and avoided any contact while the parents apologized for their son's curious manner. But I just waved it off, knowing that to a child being sat down in a restaurant, a Halloween costume and the daily uniform aren't all that different. Both are forms of costumes to kids, which kind of makes me wonder when I go back to the white dress shirt for a day tomorrow if I'll get sick of wearing that costume too.

It smells like syrup. Everything smells like syrup. And I don't even like syrup.

Men Of The World: Unite!

Have you seen them? Or, even worse, are you one of them?

You know the couples I'm talking about; those ones who are just so completely in love with one another that they couldn't fathom the thought of sharing an entire meal while seated on opposite sides of the booth. Yeah, sure, sharing a seat next to your significant other was pretty sweet in, say, the high school cafeteria. But the general public without the company of your three or four ugly chess club friends is quite another thing. Stop proclaiming your love of being in love in the public square ... please.

I say this knowing full well that women, for the most part, get the free pass here. Very rarely does it ever appear that it's the female who takes her seat and genuinely asks her boyfriend to take the open space beside her. Sure, it can happen; and if you're a dude who follows through with her shameless call for attention, well, you're a giant tool. Congratulations.

Not that any of that excuse makes you any better than the douchebags I all too frequently see performing what I'll refer to as the "insecurity trap." It becomes nauseating.

Nine times out of 10, some hostess at any given restaurant shows a young couple to their booth, the lady sits first, and then the male—as though he were a predator on some wildlife documentary—dives in to sit right beside her ... leaving the other side of the table empty.

This is an empty gesture in many ways, but a telling one about the male in the relationship.

Watch him put his arm around his girl. Watch the girl occasionally squirm and look around in a fascinating state of panic. Watch as the female is then trapped in a date situation in which she can:

A) no longer escape

or

B) welcomes the gesture as a sure sign of commitment

Option B is popular among uglier couples. That's who love to flaunt it the most, after all. "Hey ... We're fucking ... And you're not."

They need to tell themselves that. It's always a saving grace that no other employeee in the restaurant is envious at this point.

Option A is particularly saddening, however, because I tend to shake my head and try to think of the best subtle way to remind the poor fellow how uncomfortable he may have made his date feel. Suddenly, there's a spotlight cast upon her that the rest of the patronage sees, but only he does not.

Treating your date, your girlfriend, your "we-should-get-back-together" as a caged animal is a heartless, shallow manuever that I'm sure guarantees you more failure in the long run than you think it ensures in the here and now. But, you're oviously smarter than me, Mr. Pimple Face seated with Mrs. Double-Chin. Best of luck to the both of you.

For the rest of us that are smart enough to realize there are times when allowing some physical space isn't just necessary, but also productive, please pity these poor souls.

And then please tell that couple to get a fucking room if they really think we're into watching them be more in love with pretending to be in love than they are with actually being in love with one another. You can put it off for another couple of weeks, and we'll forget about it in about twenty minutes. Everybody wins ... Kind of.

One more viewing of behavior like this for me is enough to make me vomit, and hence, leave one unfortunate female who didn't realize how cornered she was, trapped in an entire room where she might not be able to stomach the smell of what I puke up.

Relationships succeed by knowing your boundaries; exploiting them to remind others that you're in a relationship ensures nothing but failure. It's too bad freckly-face will have to learn that the hard way.

We all know the rest of the world is having sex, but feeling the need to remind us that unattractive or overly sheltered goonies get to have it to doesn't impress anybody. To be honest, it's downright frightening.

(Another Edition of:) Adventures In Housesitting

I have just as much cash in my wallet as I recall leaving with before the previous night began, one cigarette left from that moment's fresh pack purchased following work, and now ... now I'm staring at the same sheet of itinerary I saw the last time I was at this place.

The instructions are the same, but I'm only now separating which directions the most attention be paid from those of lesser importantce. This is difficult in that the two pages are prited entirely in capitalized letters.

Early lessons in "nettiquette" taught me that the effect of writing a simple, innocent statement like—:

"HEY! HELLO! HOW ARE YOU?!"

—when entirely capitalized is the equivalent of shouting out every word that comes out of your mouth. If somebody came up to you on the street and trying to shake your hand, you'd turn and run as though they were a lunatic who'd mistaken you for a different N.R.A. buddy of theirs. That or a locally campaigning Republican. Same difference.

Point here is that these following days will not be as fruitfully rewarding as the times of the past.

Why?

Well, let's look at one warning about fucking Cosmo's seemingly constant battle with constipation:

"AUNTIE FROM SAINT CHARLES WRITES: 'SIGNS HE'S PLUGGED UP—HIDING UNDER THE BED, SQUATTING AND TRYING TO POOP OUTSIDE THE KITTY LITTER. IF NO POOP FOR 3 DAYS, CALL THE VET—'..."

The bastard child I'd rescued as a young, still-believing-Jesus-mighta-happened teenager has come back to haunt me. Not only is he crapping (all over the house, actually), but he's also HIDING UNDER THE BED, and SQUATTING AND TRYING TO POOP OUTSIDE THE KITTY LITTER.

So, there's reasonable belief for conern. But there's also reason for hope. Call uncle or vet first?

Phone lines NOW OPEN . . . (I'm screaming it, by the way, if it isn't already evdient.)

The Truth Lies Somewhere In Between ...

Blogs leaning to the left mostly conclude that releasing the recent National Intelligence Estimate should be one of—if not the—most urgent issues Democrats have on their plate, while those on the right predominantly reiterate it's a classified manner and the liberal media is (once again) running amok.

So it was refreshing, once again, to have Jim Lehrer sit down former CIA official Paul Pillar and shoot the shit tonight about what the real story is. And while Pillar said that what, basically, amounts to the most sensational of newsworthiness is what gets reported and helps "give a distorted impression," that final bit of dialogue exchange really tells me just how deep of an impression has been left that the Iraq War's done more harm than good:

JIM LEHRER: Back to the substance, at least as far as we know it at this point, and what Iraqi President Talabani told Ray Suarez in an interview we're going to see in a moment, he said that he doesn't agree with the finding that it increases the terrorist threat on the United States because the terrorists are on all now focused on Iraq. Does that make sense to you?

PAUL PILLAR: No, it doesn't. Well, it makes sense for the president of Iraq to say it because the president of Iraq has to have Iraqi interests uppermost in mind, and evidently President Talabani have concluded, as have many other Iraqi officials, that keeping the U.S. presence there longer rather than shorter amount of time is in Iraqi interest.

But his point about all the terrorists in the world are being attracted to Iraq -- this is the flypaper theory -- and therefore they're going to stay away from the United States, the flaw in that is we don't have a fixed number of terrorists in the world. I think the more appropriate comeback to that was what Secretary Rumsfeld raised the question in another leaked memo, a year or so ago, as you may recall.

JIM LEHRER: I do.

PAUL PILLAR: And the question was, "Are we breeding more terrorists faster than killing or incarcerating the ones we already have?" That's really the issue that is at stake here with the Iraq war.

JIM LEHRER: And if what's been in the press is correct, this intelligence estimate appears to suggest that we are breeding more than we're catching, is that right?

PAUL PILLAR: It does. And that's my judgment, as well.

Unless Karl Rove's supposed routine of having Bush pull a bunny from the hat next month scores big (sniff, sniff: I smell another bin Laden capture conspiracy theory), the Dems would have their incompetence upgraded to 100 percent if they fail to make up ground in BOTH the Senate and the House.

Period.

Adventures In Housesitting

I wouldn't call myself the most responsible person in the world (many assorted cops and bartenders would attest to this), but every now and then my aunt and uncle deem me to be the person they entrust with watching over their happy home when they leave town.

It's not all that difficult a task, really. There's but a single cat who needs to be fed twice a day. Oh, and the mail needs to be brought in.

So I've been spending the week here with the singular goal being not to let the cat die. And while that sounds simple enough, I should add that poor "Cosmo" has one wee little problem: He occasionally goes through periods of constipation. This was fully relayed to me in horribly graphic detail in a two page printed letter of itinerary for the week.

Until Sunday, I never knew cats could have an "emergency enema." Or that they would spend a span of days following such a procedure by, ahem, "cleaning" themselves in the privacy of the garage.

The house isn't any type of drastic upgrade from the folks' place (no cable television, dial-up internet service, etc.), so I've mostly been trying to finish reading a book and checking the litter box for a turd or two.

I had been told that if there was no fecal matter to be found—either in the litter box or perhaps on the floor somewhere—I would need to phone the vet, because the hell if I'm performing the procedure on a cat myself. When the first two days passed without Cosmo having a number two, I began to worry. I considered picking him up, embracing him, and quite literally squeezing the shit out of him.

And then I thought back to what additional food I could feed him that shoots right through me and basically spray the bowl. That food, as I hope you might not have had the horror of experiencing yourself, is of course jalapeno cheeseburgers from White Castle. There's a reason some people call this restaurant's sanwiches "steamers."

I'll make the regrettable late-night deperation decision about once every two years to go through the White Castle drive-thru for what, at the time, seems like an innocent post-midnight snack. One particularly memorable evening after leaving a party or a bar, I placed my order for what I thought would be a "sack" of five or six. Driving up to the window, I was asked to pay something like 20 bucks. "W.T.F.?"

Turns out I must have mistakenly said "case," which is why I begrudgingly shelled out the dough (I was really that hungry) and was handed a gigantic cardboard box filled with probably about 25 of the burgers. Upon returning home, I tried to choke down as many as possible and probably got through about ten before passing out.

I slept fine, but going to work the next day, my stomach rumbled its displeasure. And drinking the second-most effective laxative, coffee, along the way didn't help matters any. Seeing as I was working at a country club that was an hour drive, the journey was unbearable. It's hard to cross your legs and steer at the same time.

Upon arriving (late, I add), I burst into the facility, clocked in, and ran directly to the member bathroom. It was what an old boss referred to as "pissing outta your ass." And the member entering the bathroom after I emerged had to turn away as though he'd just been punched in the face.

So if White Castle has a proven track record for cleaning out my system, it would certainly work for Cosmo.

But on Tuesday, as I began wondering what time I should wait until to call the vet, sure enough, there it was on one of the small area rugs in the garage: sloppy, wet brown goo. Normally, you'd run to find something to clean up the mess and kick the pet across the fucking room for something like this. But I just stood and smiled, placing the phone back on the set to charge, relieved that this might have to be the only "cleaning" I'd have to deal with.

Hey, shit happens.