Testicle Bedpost

Testicle Bedpost

Went searching for a link I'd put up, once upon a time. Ended up making myself laugh...it was a day that my water went out....

And it reminded me to try and find some more cashew butter. That stuff was the shit...

Someday, we'll all laugh. But right now, I'm gonna hurt somebody...

Tonight, I sit here, trying to figure out whether I believe in Karma, or not.

I won't lie to you, my hordes of Big Stupid Tommyniacs, it's been a rough few days. Grocery Inventory; No sleep; Everybody in the world calling in; Cubs losing the playoffs, again; seeing a person who still makes my heart jump into my throat though we haven't spoken in months; a two-day case of the runs; having to own up to a Georgia bet (I gave points, even...lots of points); et cetera, et cetera.

This morning, I wake up, and there's no water.

None.

I turn on the faucet, and it makes a sound kinda like the tripods in the Tom Cruise vs. the Martians flick (which I kinda like, in spite of myself).

So, your old pal Tommy calls to find out what the heck is up, can't get anybody on the phone, and proceeds to wash his face, armpits and private areas with bottles of Dannon Spring Water, cussing anything he can think of, all the while, asking himself but one question:

WHY CAN'T I LEAVE JUST A FEW BOTTLES OF WATER ON THE COUNTER, SO THAT THE WATER MIGHT BE AT ROOM TEMPERATURE?

Damn. It's bad enough that I gotta wash 16.9 refreshing ounces at a time, but I also gotta spend 10 minutes before I put the shirt and tie on to get my testicles to pop back out of my torso (for the record, falling gut-first on a bed post seems to do the trick).

So.

I'm thinking this might all come from having done a post on the Cubs.

I mean, they're no longer around to jinx, so the jinx has to fall back on me.

It's the only logical thing I can find, as for why all these little, piddly, irritating things keep happing.

The only logical reason.

In truth, I deal better with the big stuff. Though I'm knocking like hell on wood that cancer or a car wreck don't pop into my life having just said that.

Jeez, I'm a superstitious sumbitch when left to my own devices.

Truth be told, in spite of all the little irritations, it's been an otherwise good day. Work went easily enough, I actually wrote something, for the first time in forever and a day. And I found Cashew Butter here in town!

Cashew Butter!

Like Peanut Butter, only with Cashews!

And Quince Jelly.

I don't know what that tastes like. I've heard of Quince, and Quince Jelly. But I've never had it.

Today, I will.

Soon, we will found out if Quince Jelly can overcome a Day Without Water....

(The water is fixed. Thankfully. Though just in case, before I left work, I bought a gallon container....)

I'm a workin' sumbitch...

I'm a workin' sumbitch...

I think I have worked more today than I do during a non-vacation day.

First, I spent an hour tidying up Casa de Big Stupid Tommy, which was apparently fell victim to some manner of paranormal activity concerning a demon who had issues with Chili Cheese Fritos. (Parenthetically, I like the idea of watching a camera set up of myself, walking into my living room in a sleep-walk trance, and simply scattering a bag of Chili Cheese Fritos willy nilly around my living room.

In truth, I simply dropped three or four Fritos when I was snacking on them while finishing up the World Series last night, and inadvertantly crunched them into the carpet. A device that men call "vacuum cleaner," that I refer to simply as "the vacuum" corrected this particular malady.

There was also the chore of "picking up the laundry," which seems to be vexsome for yours, truly. I own more hampers, at this point, than I have cars in my life. Yet somehow, everything I wear or use gets tossed onto the floor, as if my subconscious is sure there's a laundry fairy out there who will come pick up my clothes.

Trust me, after living on my own this long, I'm pretty sure they're not coming. And, as an aside, it's a pain in the ass not to have somebody else there to blame this shit on. It's always my dumb ass who's left the laundry on the floor, not done the dishes or drank the last ever-loving Guinness. That last one almost earned me an ass-whupping night before last.

But I digress.

After the cleaning, I spent an hour or so raking leaves up at my folks' house. There are roughly 600 trees on their property, and apparently they've all decided to start dropping their leaves this week. This has happened in years past. I suspect terrorists.

I want to take a second (my blog, fuckers...I'll take a paragraph or three), to address an issue of semantics. There are devices called "leaf-blowers." They are wondrous machines. They create a wind gust that allows you to be able to move leaves without the horror of picking up a rake. Here it is, though, that we run headlong into the semantic issue I brought up. There is nothing on the device that denotes it is expressly for the purpose of moving leaves. I think of the thing simply as a "blower." And as such, the dogs, the cats, a squirrel, an unfortunate chipmunk and my Dad all managed to feel my wrath.

It occurs to me know that there are jokes to be made along the lines of how I blew the dog, the cats and my Dad. These are to be kept silently to yourselves, to be shared perhaps after my funeral. Be warned, my funeral might come after I am executed, for killing you for telling jokes like "Tommy blew the dog."

Anyway, it should suffice to say that I lost the semantic argument, and was relegated to "rake duty."

There were other chores....

My folks are preparing to have major work done on their garage. Call it an exercise in persistent gravity, and result of living on a hill high enough to defend against the masses. But, the hill is doing its damnedest to push their garage down. And, after several years, it finally seems to be doing the trick. There will be some construction work, and it's involved my having to remove ductwork for a furnace made obsolete by prior renovation. This among other tasks, of course. At the end of the day, it's involved multiple trips to the metal salvage yard, here locally. I've made friends with the fine people at Seaton's, and highly recommend them should you have large quantities of metal to dispose of, or if you simply want to drive your truck through the swamp where Mateyo has his horse drown in The Neverending Story.

And? We cut up trees with chainsaws. We've had a damnable amount of stormy weather in 2009. And it's been simply a metric assload of limbs they've piled up for a free afternoon. So, there was chainsawing. We chainsawed the hell out of various trees and limbs. We chainsawed the shit out of this one tree. It was all, like, "Don't you dare chainsaw me, you asshole!" and I was all "Here I come anyway, you dumbass tree. I'm gonna chainsaw your ass!"

That's right. You can guess who won that particular fight.

Don't see any trees from my parents' yard blogging, do you?

Or do you? If so, send me the link. I need to know what I'm competing against.

Then, there was a return to Casa de Big Stupid Tommy, where showering was the order of the day. I spare you the hot, hot details. However, I did find sawdust in one particularly troublesome spot, and simply say that the sleepwalking featured early in this post may not be so much a figment of my overactive imagination, after all.

Anyway. We wrap up the vacation this weekend. There's a trip to Nashville in the works, and a hockey game to be taken in.

Good gravy. What a day....

An oldie....

An oldie...

This one just makes me laugh.

Cheating....

Cheating...

Just a couple quick thoughts.

For a few months now, I've been wandering down to Chattanooga for a night of beer, greasy food and team trivia. We do okay. Very well, in fact. Every place we play, we're in contention to win, owing to that I'm not the only one with 2.3 billion otherwise useless bits of information rattling around in my noggin.

It's a fun game. A question's asked, and a song is played. You must answer your team's answer by the end of the song. Some are fairly simple...others can be bugger-all tough. It's good to have a well rounded team. We win occasionally. Usually it's enough to put a nice dent in whatever bar tab we've accrued. By no stretch of the imagination is it enough to hoot and holler over.

Or cheat in order to get....

Dunno. Watched a group use everything short of morse code and a slide rule tonight to get their answers. Aside from Fat Tire and shrimp (something I've acquired a taste for in the past several months, after a lifetime of taking or leaving it), there was some satisfaction in beating that particular team.

I dunno. I look around the world today, and I wonder at that particular attitude. There's a maudlin part of me that wants to wretch and bitch (and how) at a society of people who doesn't know that it's about the journey, and not the end result. Whether it's a group of idiots who can't enjoy a night out because they're not winning a game, or some douche loading himself up with some manner of growth hormone over the matter of an everyday playing position in a sport.

Don't know why I'm on this line of thought. Just a little pissy with the world, this evening....

Thoughts at 11:53 on Paranormal Activity, and other items

Thoughts at 11:53 on Paranormal Activity, and other items

Blogination was meant to have occurred before now. There were doings that transpired, which need to be reported. I mean, honestly, there was a discussion about Y2K that somehow had me thinking that there was a massive health scare recently related to the nation's much needed supply of KY Jelly. That was the personal highlight of my visit to the Hysterics at Eric's, this past weekend. I got to meet a few more blog people in real life.

Mercy.

Also? I got to see Mickey Dolenz in real life. He wore his sunglasses inside, because he is a star.

I am on vacation. This, in and of itself, is sweet. I go to bed when I want. I wake up when I want.

Well, that last part ain't precisely true. My old friend insomnia showed up somewhere around 3:15 in the morning. This was twofold troubling.

The first level comes just from irritation at not being asleep, though since this is vacation, it isn't a huge issue. I was muchly aware that I'd be able to sleep to whenthefuckever whenever I fell back to sleep. Much of my insomnia, I think, is based on some godforsaken fear that I'm going to oversleep. I am not sure if this is a cause or a symptom of impending madness. I'm thinking it is like the Chicken and Egg debate.

The second level comes from my viewing Monday of the movie Paranormal Activity (which I have mostly positive feelings toward). I don't want to spoil too much of the movie, but there are a number of portions that come from one character's running a camera while our protagonist couple sleeps. The movie documents the paranormal activity that occurs in the house, and the bulk of it happens during these sleeping hours. And there are a fair number of occurrences, unless my memory fails me, that happen within spitting distance of 3:15 AM.

Troublesome for me, because most of my insomniac episodes begin somewhere within spitting distance of 3:15 AM.

I hate to say that a movie is fucking with my fragile little mind. But Paranormal Activity stuck with me.

I made myself get up EARLY this morning. Turned on a few lights (and if there's one BIG complaint I have about the actions of Micah and Katie in Paranormal Activity is that they wander around their haunted house with the lights off entirely too much for my taste or suspension of disbelief).

I started writing this morning. A piece of fiction. Don't know where it's going, but it's kinda biographic in nature.

I wrote 9100 words today.

Holy frigging crap.

My eyes, brain and wrists were sore at the end of it. As was my back, to a lesser degree. I wasn't precisely hunched over writing, but I could feel the ghosts of poor posture as I made myself get up and wander around.

Like I said, I don't know if it's going anywhere. I suppose that's up to me. It's 9100 words, though. I can't think that I've done that much in any five, six or seven days, lately.

So, the insomnia was helpful. Even if it's 9100 words of crap, it's 9100 words I've written....

Anyway. That's all I got for now. We'll see you fine feathered frogs on the flip side.

Tuesday Top 5

Tuesday Top 5

For no particular reason, my top five favorite Joe Lansdale Books

1. The Bottoms
2. The Drive-In
3. A Fine Dark Line
4. Sunset and Sawdust
5. The Leather Maiden

Not intended as a slight for the Hap Collins & Leonard Pine books, which I enjoy very much. I have a hard time separating their individual story lines, which actually, I like inasmuch as Hap & Leonard are Joe at his most pulpy....

Thoughts on a Monday Morning....

Thoughts on a Monday Morning....

Just a few random thoughts as I procrastinate:

• If you ever get the opportunity to do a grocery inventory, I'd skip it. Eh....I'd say most people have something similar in their jobs. Some manner of rigamarole that's a necessary evil for reasons of accounting or bureaucracy. It's just a matter of sucking it up, and accepting that you're gonna spend more than the average amount of time getting things set up. (Now, getting those above store level to understand what's going on with that...that's a whole different ballgame. This one particular fact has been hardest to swallow in 2009: Ours is not to question why, ours is to jump and ask "how high?")
• The inventory went well enough. Positive results. Probably the best results I've ever had. There's nothing worse than putting in a 60 hour week over the course of four days, and then getting a new asshole torn after results are announced.
• So, I have the one asshole. I got that going for me.
• Wandered down to dinner after work one day with the sister and brother-in-law. Ended up with more than a couple hours to kill, and wandered up to the cheap theater to catch Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince. Every review I'd heard expressed some amount of disappointment, and I found myself disappointed at being denied both the climactic battle at the end of the book and the interaction between Harry and Snape. Half-Blood Prince wasn't my favorite of the books, but I enjoyed the Snape/Harry interaction of it in that book more than any other volume. What did Snape have in the movie? Four lines? Ultimately, I'm with a lot of others who've said the same. Probably the wisest thing to have done adapting this book would have been to separate it into two flicks, perhaps ending the first flick with the destruction of the Weasleys' home (which I dug as a way to bring Harry closer to the destruction being wrought by the Death Eaters). At the end of the day, I think another flick should have been added, if only to give a little more character to the Death Eaters as a force.
• I realized, too, that I don't remember having seen Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix.
  
• I'm listening to the Harry Potter books as I get ready for work in the mornings. It's a way to go over the books again, without having to use up too much free time for re-reading something I've already read once. Harry Potter is still a git, by the way. Not as much as the first time, though. Surprisingly.
  
• And that Titans' beatdown yesterday? Embarrassing. This is not a Jeff Fisher football team. I've been saying that since the Jets game. I don't know what's going on, exactly. But for the first time since they made it to Tennessee, it's like Fisher and his staff aren't getting through to the team. Add that to a quarterback situation that's plummeted off the cliff...this already has been a long season, and it might be a long couple of years. I have faith that Fisher can take control of his team, and knock the secondary and special teams into place. That quarterback thing may be an issue it takes a year or two to correct....
• Good news for the next baseball season: The Cubs open their season in Atlanta. It's too close to our next grocery inventory to take the week off, but I think I can find a way to make Opening Day.....
  

Sunday: Highlighting Another Difference Between Me and President Obama

Sunday: Another Difference between Me and President Obama

Tommy: On Sunday, got ink all over three dress shirts when he unknowingly left a pen in one of the pockets when he did laundry. The extent of the damage is not yet known, but this development has effectively halved the number of shirts he has to wear to work, in the short term.

Obama: On any given day, probably has any number of dress shirts available to him, laundered and pressed. If he leaves a pen in his pocket, and it is laundered, the laundry technician who missed the pen is put before a death panel. Also, if he has "B.O." on one of his dress shirts, it is probably a monogram, and not a reason to change shirts/get sent home from work.

Highlighting Yet Another Difference Between Me and President Obama:

Highlighting Yet Another Difference Between Me and President Obama:

On Friday, October 9, 2009, President Barack Obama awoke to the news that he'd won the Nobel Peace Prize.

On Friday, October 9, 2009, Tommy Acuff awoke to a bowlegged, snorting pug's desperate need to go outside to take a whiz.

This has been yet another in a series of Differences Between Me and President Obama.

Rambling, Guinness-y Thoughts on the Cubs

Rambling, Guinness-y Thoughts on the Cubs

Yeah. Gonna ramble. As is my right.

I don't write nearly enough shit on this thing, you know?

The Cubs ended their season today.

Eighty-three wins, huh?

Whaddya gonna do?

So, what's this? Three winning seasons in a row? Good job, Lou. Honestly. Lord knows I've seen my share of 66 win seasons, so that voice in my head isn't completely quiet.

Still. I just watched 2008 whiz into 2009...and it seems like just yesterday I was watching the Cubs fumble their way through a playoff series against the Dodgers, after playing the best baseball I'd seen the team play in my life. That was a bitter pill to swallow, if you want to know the truth. I'd not wandered into the "This is the Year" mentality, but I did recognize that it was probably the best Cubs team I'd seen in my life (though I'll say to you that 31 has a hard time comparing a 12-year-old's fascination with that 1989 team.....)

Maybe it's frustration with other things, but starting last October, with that defeat, it's been a bitter-like-ashes year.

Mark and Kerry went to Cleveland. We brought in Kevin Fucking Gregg and Milton Goddam Bradley. The former being irritating, the latter being maybe the most irritating acquisition I've seen this team make.

First, I didn't like the way Kerry was just sent on his way. The statement that "we want Kerry to find the best deal for him" bugged me. Here's a guy who's done whatever's been asked of him. Yeah, I ragged him about being a pansy who's made of glass. But whatever they wanted him to do, he did. Plus, he'd been much the face of the franchise for a decade. Jim Hendry and company wanted him to be able to find a multi-year contract. Because the 2-year contract he got in Cleveland is so much more daunting than the money we threw at Kevin Gregg for the 9 saves he blew in Florida the previous year....

And then? Milton Fucking Bradley? I've argued with a few folks over the course of the year, even getting tarred with a racist label by a fellow twitterer at some point. Honestly. 10 mil for a guy who'd played 120 games all of twice in his career. Who is combative with opponents, umpires and even teammates? Who blames the media and the fans for his troubles when he can't figure out to shorten up his stroke with two strikes?

But hey, he played 124 games. Which is the third highest number of games played in a season in his 10 year career. (The next highest is 101 games....)

Realizing he may not have been the Right Field answer, but Mark DeRosa has played six 100+ game seasons, in that same span, but spent much of his career as a platoon player down in Atlanta....

And Mark DeRosa gets the benefit of the doubt when arguing calls with umpires, because he's not known to be a raving lunatic.

But, I digress....

There were things beyond that that were discouraging. The slow offensive start sucked. The revelation that Marmol's a bit of a flake. Aramis getting hurt. My growing suspicion that somehow Alfonso Soriano is the biggest hoax perpetrated upon baseball in the past dozen years.

I think it was Gooseneck I'd talked about this with, though if it wasn't, I apologize. The contention was the Soriano was as big a waste of time as Milton Bradley. I disagree, but at the same time, I don't think the guy has any kind of clubhouse presence at all, and I feel like having his bat at the top of the order does us no good at all.

Plus: Soriano, to my impression, is the opposite of clutch. I throw that out there, knowing I may be complete wrong. Not a fan, and I don't know if it ever came across in my previous conversations. I'd rather have somebody out there in left who didn't pout when they didn't get to lead off.

Anyway.

Did I have a point?

Eighty three wins?

I dunno. Seems like we folded in big games this year. Any game against a quality opponent. It was almost like the opposite of Cubs teams I grew up with. We fought the first place teams of the world okay, but were perpetually tripped up by cellar dwellers. Maybe the opposite this year...seems like we played Pittsburgh 83 times this year, and only lost three or four to them. But anytime we got up against the Dodgers and Phillies of the world, we were roadkill....

Anyway. Don't know what's up over the offseason. I can't see myself overly enthusiastic about the postseason, though I always manage to find a way to enjoy it. I can get behind the Angels or Red Sox, I reckon. Nobody on the senior circuit does much for me.

I am fear a Cardinals/Yankees World Series. Can I say that? Damn. That's like Cancer Fighting AIDS. Are there truly any winners?

It's like the Cardinals are America, and the Yankees are Soviet Russia, and I'm tiny little Japan, with nobody truly to root for in this battle of megapowers, and I have a giant-firebreathing lizard patrolling right-field to contend with anyway.

Priorities?

No more Milton. Puhleeze.

Other than that? Stop sucking. I have no good ideas about running a baseball team. That's why I manage a grocery store for a living.

Enjoy this post while you can. If it's too rambly, I'll revise in the morning....