Insomnia et futilitia! es cafe, cafe, el simplifico!

As I type these words it is a quarter to six in the morning and I haven't been to bed yet. Well, I've been to bed but I didn't sleep. I don't have insomnia, per se, I have futile sleeplessness. It's involuntary sleep deprivation based solely on the fact that I had a nagging feeling I'd forgotten something.

All night.

I tried to go to sleep. I dutifully got under the covers, I turned out the lamp, ad I laid there. Part of the problem is that a woman's work is never done. I spent the day cleaning and washing and feeding and running errands ad I discovered, around 4 am, that there is a routine, a proclivity, a jones that underscores my day: caffeine.

It starts off immediately upon being terrified out of bed by my egregiously explosive alarm clock which employs a frequency that can double as a sonic rust remover for aircraft carriers. It can move planets out of their orbit. I leap out of bed, race downstairs, and start the joe.

The recommended level is one lumpy tabledspoon of ground coffee per 6 oz. of water. I exceed this recommendation by an order of magnitude, using the recommended grounds ground for a crowd on the grounds that touching the ground slows me down, I'd rather bound around---See that? The shameless and blunt repetition and rhyming? Signs of a hallucinatory state.

I drop the kid off at the Church then head over to the dry cleaners which is located next to the Starbucks they built inside our neighborhood Starbucks. A doppio and a quick run through the Sun Times then race back home to take the medicine I take for a wee lil' problemo I developed, medicine that is essentially Doctor prescribed speed, make a new pot of coffee, and get crackin on the rigorous and erudite refutation of the latest swiftoboatian screes against Obama or Hilary stuffed into my email box overnight by rage-crazed GOP black-op clerks--SEE THAT!? That's unfounded paranoia [no it isn't--Agent K], the 'they're out to get us-ism [seriously, we're not--Agent K] symptomatic of a mind unhinged by stress or S L E E P D E P R I V A T I O N.

But tonight I don't think it was the industrial levels of caffeine or the medicine, tonight it was something at the back of my mind, one of those furtive, irritating hmmmms, like 'hmmmm--did I leave the stove on?' or 'hmmmmm--just how DO you load a self-firing bazooka?' or 'hmmmm--I wonder what THIS does?'

I clean, I prep for school, I have an early breakfast of diet yogurt and what looks like dried contact lenses. Anther cup of coffee. . .just brush the masticated contact lens off my t-shirt and--THAT'S IT: LAUNDRY! I left the kid's uniform in the wash.

But I can't find it. It's not in the washer like I thought. I remember at the last second that I was following a load of bleached whites with a load of NOT EVEN ON THE SAME CONTINENT AS BLEACH black business clothes for my Attorney, dove into the washing machine, and heaved them out over the side. I race down the stairs into the basement and land on--and sink into--an ice cold mound of wet clothes.

There's plenty of time to get them washed and dried. But now that I've discovered what it was that keeping me up, I can barely type. I can barely even sk'cj[s[n ]z. ............ ...... ...............

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.

Thursday's 13 Things: to Think About from The Internet

1. Library of Congress, Print & Photography Flickr Gallery!
2. Original Brochure for Walt Disney World, the Epic Cornerstone of my Youth
3. Mad City Chickens
4. Typography Online gets better and better
5. How to stop believing the news and laugh yourself sick at the same time.
6. See Jesus
7. Bacon-pyrotech-genius.
8. What you DON'T want to see as you go under for a spleen transplant.
9. Why your DSL goes out.
10. Sit your ass on grass.
11. Important: Rambo Death Chart
12. Uh . . .
13. Very, very, very cool glasses.

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.

The Scout Vote

It was a close call, but apparently I'm still in. After a shouting match, an impromptu "Stayin'Alive" pose off, and sining the signature phrase from "Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting," the new Scouts chose the patrol name of FUNKY NINJAS and their cheer is a stylized Karate yell.

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.

Manday is Post Webelos Blues Day

Mini me crossed over into Scouting yesterday eve and thus ends a long and fruitless era in community service for your humble scribe.

I was hoping the boys, seven highly intelligent sons of detectives, a banker, a goldsmith, a stone fabricator, and yours truly, would erupt in emotion, would crowd around me and sing my praises and give me the keys to a brand new car. But that's not how it went down.

After the whole ordeal was over and the carefully crafted Chippewa Indian arrows were delivered into the hands of the cub scouts who'd earned them under my semi-neglectful tutelage, after the bags of awards had been hauled into their parents trophy wagons, and after the debris from Italian beef sandwiches and zitti had been scraped up off the auditorium floor, the Scoutmaster gathered his new protoges around him and welcomed them into his troop. He explained that they'd be having a lot of fun, that they would become a patrol and would need to make up a name for themselves (ie: blazing bluejays, pirates, dinosaurs). Naturally they were excited about this and started shouting ideas. But the scoutmaster interrupted them and gave them the god news that I would be following them over as their patrol leader.

Inside, I braced myself for my usual uncontrollable weeping fit whenever something even remotely noble or grandly traditional manages to come my way and I even started working up a little humility speech when one of the kids raised his hand and was recognized by the Scoutmaster.

"Can we vote on that?"




(Little %&$!@#, ingrateful %$^$#@, hyperactive opossum shavers. I hope they get tangled up in a stevedoer's knot. Sugar addicted monkey kissin' . . . freakin . . . dadgum . . . )

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.

Dear Dawn Olsen at Glosslip

Dear Dawn;

You recently posted a comment on my previous post regarding your web site's article regarding Britney Spears' menstrual cycle and your ambitious charting thereof. In that delightful and exceedingly polite email (included), you intimated that you care about Britney Spears and that I am a device for remove small particles from hard to reach places. I assure you, I am not such a device. And I assure you, you don't care about Britney Spears.

GlossLip is a collection of articles about celebrities and near celebrities. The subject of any one of your articles will surely match one of Google's top-ten search phrases, a tactic sorely proven to generate hits and links over time and move your blog, as I'm certain you hope, higher into the Googlespheric strata and closer to right hand of God, the number one result, the first thing people see when they type in Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears--the holy grail of the internet.

Imagine for a minute being Britney Spears, existing on the tip of the tongue for pretty much 70% of the western world, a person more easily identified than Jesus or Angelina Jolie. She doesn't have a life; she exist as an object of pursuit by everyone, even those people closest too her. She can't blink without having it analyzed for frequency and arcane meanings.

Then imagine all the people out there who beg off her name by sprinkling it all over their blog like some kind of memetic censer, people who will not only analyze her eyelashes but take hi-def video of them and post 'em frame by frame. These are people desperate to capitalize on her breadcrumbs, its the paparazzi times ten million. Then find out that one of them has the audacity to chart her cycle and claim that it's because they care.No wonder she wigs out. It's worse than being pope.

I'm certainly not defending her, I think she's a half-retarded monomaniac sloven onanist and should be relieved of her duties. However, I'd take her over people like you any day of the week. She's not riding on anybody else's coattails and last time I accidentally paid attention to her, she was dealing with her own problems, not pretending to care about someone else's--or profiting from them.

Your blog is and all blogs like GlossLip are a blight, a cancer, a cold sore on the pouty lips of the world's attention span and you ought to stop, turn off your laptop, and take a walk outside.

With love;

The device for removing small objects from hard to reach places.

P.S. ( I chart my wife and my daughter's invading orc hordes so they don't run out of supplies because I am the rigorously supportive homemaker for two highly ambitious and successful women, a fact that is generously distributed throughout my blog. Furthermore, my audience--vast and literate--is about 90 percent women, a fact easily gleaned from reading even one string of comments on even one post. As you advised, a little research goes a long way.)
P.P.S. (Dude.)

(letter from Ms. Olsen)

Hey buddy, how about you read our entire body of work on Britney for a better representation of who we are.

A little research goes a long way DUDE.

What, do you think only you are allowed to talk about Britney? You aren't even a woman, WTF do you know about periods and how they affect the mind, let alone the affect of having two children in such a short period of time.

We care about her and want her to get help, so don't be such a presumptuous prick.

Thanks and have a nice day.

Dawn Olsen
www.glosslip.com

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.

This is how the world ends

If the world were ending on, say, Saturday, around 3:21 pm or so, would there be some kind of catastrophic leading indicators? And if so, would we be smart enough to notice? I'm only asking because, as your resident brainiac, I have to tell you, I'm seeing some pretty disturbing stuff out on the rough seas of the internet. In fact, I think I'm starting to see things, anomalies, virtual ghosts, bandwidth banshees. I'm seeing the kind of things you read about after the disaster happens and someones just happens to mention that all the dogs and cats ran away just before the volcano blew or 300 surfers mysteriously showed up the day before the tidal wave struck. Stuff like that.

The clearest leading indicator of our Apocalypse is the proliferation of Brit Lit. No, I don't mean all those Percy Bysh Shelley blogs. I mean literature regarding the imminent decline of Our Lady of Trailer Trash, Britney Spears.

This brief article will be the most attention I've ever given Spears during my adult life. She don't register. My mind is trained to edit my reality with excruciating prejudice. In th course of a day there are countless boneheaded micro-catastrophes it just blithely deletes. I never know they're there. It's like my inner child grew up to be a curmudgeonly aesthete and barely has the time of day for me much less the sheer billions of jaggoffs that walk among us, her calamitousness being one of them, being in fact, their queen. It's a gift from God.

But deep in the bowels of Death By Children's secret underground complex, the internet churns and wails and occasionally I have to go down and poke it with a fork and today when I poked it, it said "The end is near--Chart Britney's period."

We all know Spears went crazy when she married Kevin Federline. It's simple math: trailer trash + trailer trash = "Cops". And we're all guilty of paying attention to her mostly because we know she's bound to set herself on fire any day now and we want to be the first person in our Five to make the emergency conference "Dude" call and put the YouTube immolation video on our blog. Same reason we go to NASCAR. It's not the race that's exciting, it's the crash.

The thing is, Britney's crash is so inevitable that I can't see how it's interesting to anyone. In fact, I think her crash is long over but she's milking it. Or worse, it's all orchestrated by her Svengalian manager to drum up sympathy and support for a massive comeback to coincide with a new album and hit song. I don't know if it's better that I'm right about that or wrong. And I don't care that much. I'm just saying that she's one of the leading indicators of impending planetary destruction. She's THE indicator. In a bazillion years, they'll be referring to her and Nostradamus in the same breath.

How do I know? This is how I know. Celebrity gossip hounds have sunken pretty much as far as they can in finding Britnephalia to coat the empty insides of their blogs. It's not enough that she's just %$#@!ing crazy. That's not simple enough. And it's not enough that she's bipolar, or suffering from post-partum depression, or exhausted, or any of the ten thousand other afflictions that might explain the source of her ludicrous behavior (she makes Ludicris look like a Lutheran). NO, for the leading indicator of global deletion, Britney must suffer from something both noble and mundane, both ridiculous and rare, something divine yet disturbing.

She's on the rag.

But when Britney is visited by her leel frin it's she can't just be a little crabby. Her orc horde switches on her bipolarity, her post-partumality, and her panty-less-shopping-ism. Because she isn't human. She's a leading indicator and she dances on the upturned faces of her worshipful bloggists, people who watch her every move and would, could they afford the air fare, gleefully root through her garbage like feral pigs stumbling out of the forest into the grease trap at Arby's. People like this guy, who actually CHART HER PERIOD TO SEE WHEN SHE' GOING TO FREAK OUT NEXT! Gaze, as the planet teeters on the brink of disaster, on the wonder that i the menstrual cycle of Our Lady of Holy Sh--


(Red indicates . . . uh . . . that her "Cousin Red's" in town t help her with her "Grammar" . . . )

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.

Damn, that's a sweet dragon.

I found these posters while looking for some graphic art prompts. Absolutely fantastic. I would go see every one of these guys . . . except the Floyds.

The biggest difference between graphic art of the Victorian era and today is not merely the brilliant advent of photoshop, it's the mistakes. The old stuff had gorgeous mistakes which do not happen in computer controlled artistic rendering. Look at the way the letters are not base aligned and how they're all weighted differently. Not because the artist wanted them to be, but because the artist was eyeballing the whole thing and didn't have an intel processor equipped Mac that could kern ligatures to the nanometer.

And look at that frikking dragon. Damn, that's a sweet dragon.

You can see the rest of the collection here.

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.

Manday is Manning, Charles, Worship Day!

I spent Superbowl Sunday like any sane man in Chicago would--at The Cigar King.

My radio compadre, Dave Haynes, and I strolled in about ten minutes before the game started and the place was SRO, wall-to-wall hardcore stogie tokers.

Dave found a seat right away and abandoned me and my fat ass directly in the main aisle where everyone was lined up to get food. You know how when you go to a club and there's a natural conga line to the bar but there's always that one idiot who stands right in it talking t somebody and just won't frikking move and everybody has to keep tapping him on the shouloder and saying pardon me pardon me pardon me? I was that guy.

Gambling was paramount and the stakes were high. Our bets:

• Who's wife would call more.
• How many "Givvin' it up to the lord" speeches would occur.
• Spit takes, overall.
• The length of the national anthem.
• Would she remember the words to the national anthem.
• MVP
• Who the MVP would thank (Jesus was 5 to 1)

I smoked the following totally righteous cigars (in order of pure deliciousness):

My favorite and highly recommended choice, La Gloria Cubana Serie R Oscuro:My second favorite and quite delicious, Hoya de Monterrey Dark Sumatra:

And my final choice, pretty good in a pinch, JFR, for which I have no picture. A lot of people rave about the JFR but it doesn't work for me. I can't put my finger on it but I just don't enjoy this smoke.

So we screamed out guts out and rooted for the Giants the entire time and were entirely blown away by the heart and spirit the team showed. They were up against an undefeated team headed by a quarterback that apparently inspires "man crushes" from every corner of the guy-o-sphere. It was by far the best superbowl I've ever seen and as soon as I swab my lungs I'm going back to the King for post game fumar.

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.