danconley.net

A year ago, I talked about how Coheed and Cambria (and you’ll notice that since then I’ve said screw the authority file) were pretty self-involved and juvenile. Then I saw them in concert. Since then, well, um, I’ve kind of gotten really into them. With Dave’s help, of course, but I now consider them ‘my favorite band where everyone is still alive’ (RIP Joe Strummer, Keith Moon and John Entwistle). As always, Dave allows me to get enthusiastic about something in ways that are otherwise impossible, leading me to think of the great idea (and timewaster at his fiancé’s wedding shower) to compare all the track ones, track twos, etc and make a ‘Numerical Best of.’ (Let me tell you, In Keeping Secrets vs No World For Tomorrow was but one of the hard choices that had to be made).

When we got the date for the bachelorette party he looked, idly, at Coheed’s tour schedule. The day before they’re playing in Sayreville, NJ, which is kind of close, but — oh, it’s 6.5 hours away? And sold out? Oh, okay. But it’s also at the Starland Ballroom, where they’ve recorded a live album. We could do this. We could take a road trip.

Which, thanks to eBay, we shall.

It’s spontaneous and slightly crazy in all the ways that my life generally isn’t, and it means that I’ll get to hear Gravemakers and Gunslingers for the first time since I found out it was totally awesome. A year ago I was ashamed by my fanaticism. Now I embrace the hell out of it. I know I’m a dork, but you know what the best part about being a dork is? You don’t care.

(yet another five minute writing exercise, not at all a real letter)

Dear sir or madam:

I occurs to me that perhaps your store is in desperate need of a reorganization.

Not a shuffling about of employees; no, instead I think you seriously need to consider exactly why your items are where they are, and whether they couldn’t perhaps be put somewhere else. Perhaps somewhere that makes sense.

I suppose that may be a radical concept. Perhaps there’s some secret law of product placement, known only to the upper echelon of supermarket managerial staff, that can somehow maximize product sales by placing them in the exact opposite place a patron would expect. One might think that, being dairy products, it would follow that when milk and cheese are next to each other, that yogurt would also be next in line. And then eggs, perhaps. Not so, you say! I’ll give you that they are all in the same general quadrant of the store, taken quite broadly, in that they are all in the very back of the store, but I suspect that this is more for economical reasons, as it would require multiple refrigeration sections to store the eggs in the optimal area, likely between bread, avocados and children’s cereals with ‘O’ in the title.

Instead, you must be content with having the dairy items scattered willy nilly along the refrigerated section. I have put much thought — much more than I should have, I know — into trying to discern exactly what the overarching philosophical design is. Are your meats organized by animal, or by cut? Are eggs next to poultry because they both come from chickens? If that is the case, why is cheese so far from the ground beef, next to pork chops? Is it because the source of cheese can be any number of animals, and so you consider it a grab bag of sorts? I admit to visiting your store as infrequently as possible (my doctor has informed me that a cardiac condition makes it inadvisable to try to navigate your labyrinthian aisles), but do you perhaps change the location of your cheeses weekly in order to maximize the randomness of it all? Or is it instead some sort of astrological imperative, handed down by superintelligent beings as an experiment, your security cameras transformed into scientific observation points? Will, one day, a human skull made out of crystal appear in the middle of your snack cake display?

It should be noted that the grievances described above are but the tip of the iceberg as it relates to your establishment, but as previously noted I have a health condition that prevents me from thinking about such matters for more than a handful of minutes, lest my heart burst from my chest and throttle my brain in a futile attempt to make it all stop.

Yours, sincerely,

DRQ Conley III

I find it nearly impossible to talk at a normal volume on the phone, at least if others are around. While most people seem to take the absence of another person physically and translate it into a need to shout, as though more decibels will ensure that their message gets through the phone lines safely, I feel more self conscious. There’s nowhere there to talk to; what am I doing carrying on a conversation with myself for?

More than that, I think, it’s that I don’t think it’s anybody business what the hell I’m talking about. This generally goes for all conversations, but at least when I’m face to face with a person they get the whole picture. Maybe. it’s hard to describe, but the end result is that you should never call me on the phone, ever, especially if you’re my wife and insist on using speakerphone in the car even though that further obscures what I’m saying.

(This is another five minute writing exercise, though I modified it a bit to meet my whims)

The olive polo shirt I’m wearing is a thatched weave, almost. Were I to know more about sewing and fabrics then I could be more specific, but instead I will have to allow it to suffice in that it is certainly not smooth. Down the front of it the texture remains the same but darkens, as three — no, sorry, four — dots of varying sizes mar the fabric. These are from wearings past, which inexplicably outwitted the washing machine. The collar buttons up, all the way today even though I’ve been told that it looks better open just because it felt too free, almost like not wearing a shirt at all. Now I can feel the comforting closeness of it, the mystery texture, around my neck.

Today’s pants are corduroys, which I admit to giving a lazy attempt at spelling before right clicking and allowing OS X to correct for me. There is a famous story about corduroys, though I cannot remember now exactly what it is, and so each time I wear them I am reminded vaguely of my childhood. Alternating ravines and mountains, perfectly straight, run down the legs, creating a whooshing sound — though not as obvious of one as I had been led to believe — which makes me call them, if only to myself, my Ninja Pants.

Black socks (they never get dirty; the longer you wear them, the blacker they get: another childhood reference for some reason) wrap around my ankles, digging in. I’ve said in the past that the greatest joy that comes from wearing socks pulled up your legs is the feeling when you take them off. Thinking about them now has driven the itchiness into a frenzy of sorts: I long to lift up my pant leg and scratch, bringing blessed relief. These are the second kind of black socks I have (three total, including the fancier, thinner, oddly patterned ones), and have much thinner, sleeker ribbing. They seem to be legitimate dress attire instead of tube socks that happened to fall into a vat of dye. Which sock I wear on any given day is random, of course, though I do take care not to combine the varieties except in cases of extreme sartorial distress.

My shoes, also black, are smooth, and would be shiny were they not scuffed with dust placed there by the opposite foot resting on top in a tic I can’t quite explain (do I feel compelled to turn my lower body into a diamond shape?) Around the laces the smoothness of the material bunches up, drawn together in grooves by overly tightened laces. Perhaps this means I buy my shoes too large for my feet. The laces hang, haphazardly, to one side or another, double knotted in a ritual dating back to my grammar school days to ensure they wouldn’t come untied (as all my shoes did, which is why I was always grateful for a new pair that was velcro). It honestly had not occurred to me, nearly 25 years old, until this moment that I can probably safely tie them only once.

The bottom of the shoes is different from my previous pairs, despite the outward appearance of being identical (dress shoes and my wife appear to be the only facets of my life I am disinterested in changing repeatedly). Rather than multiple groups of four circles connected in a square, almost clover-like, these are a myriad of diamonds with perpendicular lines in the middle forming crosses. They litter the bottom of the shoes, in theory providing traction but in practice giving just enough room in between each other to pick up small bits of paper and rocks that may be unwittingly tread upon. They cover the entire bottom, with the exception of the arch, where it narrows for no reason that I can see besides giving the illusion of thinness, mirroring my foot stretching slightly into the air. What sort of person looks at the bottom of their shoe enough to make such aesthetic changes necessary?

This took far longer than five minutes. I hope that’s not against the rules.

A personality test of sorts:

How do you eat your food? Assuming you have multiple foods in a meal — say, a burrito, rice and beans — do you eat all of one before moving on to the next, or eat them all equally?

I’ve never been a Sequential Eater. My philosophy is that I want to enjoy everything for as long as possible, so I’ll take a few bites of one before moving on to the other. At this point, it’s automatic: look at the results of a fish fry when I was 75% done:

I had never given this habit a name, until I realized that my coworker/friend Brie did the same thing. She had dubbed it Sandwich Pickle Chips, since that’s her standard lunch (Brie’s philosophy of A Good Lunch could be a post in itself). Now, though, the battle lines have been drawn. Our foes have been named, and they are many. Which side are you on? Are you one of us, or one of them?

I suppose no one really gives it much thought, but then most people wouldn’t notice they had six peanut M&Ms left, two of each color, and then eat them in an even amount. (please note that I have never considered myself to have OCD; I just like symmetry).

They were Brie’s M&Ms, by the way.

There may not be any hoverboards, but I am typing this out on my shiny — if fingerprint riddled — iPhone.

(I had originally intended this to immediately follow The Last Piece of Pie, but then we kinda drove to DC and have been being social and whatnot.)

I had said on Twitter that I need to write more. I really enjoy it (I do so love the sound of my own voice), and it’s very easy to say ‘I’ll do that tomorrow.’ So it stood when I read Felicia Day’s blog (side note: Elizabeth and I are fairly obsessed with Dr Horrible now, and have gotten very much into The Guild as well), where she gave advice on how she started writing. One of the links was for five minute writing exercises: I can do five minutes! …at least occasionally.

I’ll hopefully be doing more in the future, but picking and choosing what seems interesting, I think. Hey, I cheat, what can I say? Also I won’t, at least at first, be able to do them daily, so it should even out.

I don’t really expect anyone to read or enjoy them: there’s another blog I read occasionally that posts snippets of fiction and I always skip over them, so no hard feelings if you don’t want to read my stupid crap. Now that anyone reads this besides Dave and tiny anyway.

(More on what this is later. Bear with me, or ignore)

She would not give him the last piece of pie.

She had given him the last piece of pie as long as she could remember. Not just pie, either: cake, too. Non-baked goods were also on the list of things she had given him over the years. Bigger pieces of lasagna, for instance. When a piece of garlic bread was burned, she took it. He got the most beautiful of everything they shared.

But no more. Years and years and fucking years of putting other people first, and she was done. There was one piece of pie left. Where did the uneven number come from? Had he eaten it while she was elsewhere, or had a guest eaten one under the guise of going to the bathroom? It was, good pie after all.

Or maybe, god knows how, the pie had been cut into seven pieces. What kind of person cuts something into an odd number of pieces? You cut a line down the center of the pie. You rotate it by 45 degrees and you cut again. Rotate, cut. Rotate, cut. That’s how you cut a goddamn pie.

Which is why she was taking this. This piece of pie was hers.

‘Is there any pie left?’ She heard him as she opened the silverware drawer.

She plopped the slice onto a small plate. The disposable pan was tossed into thr garbage; well, placed, really, but ‘tossed’ has a better ring. She placed her fork on the plate and walked towards the living room.

‘Nope.’

Recently, I got ‘tagged’ in a ‘note’ on Facebook, whatever the hell that means. I only found out about it because Facebook emailed me to that effect, and the tagger was an honest-to-god person who I have seen at some point in the past six months, not a high school acquaintance who I probably said a total of 75 words to throughout the course of four years but who still made me feel enough of a mix of guilt and nostalgia to add them when they friended me.

The note was ‘25 Things You May Not Know About Me.’ I was one of 25 tagged friends (thanks, Jill: I thought I was special) who now are supposed to compile their own lists and tag 25 more people. Apparently it’s only a pyramid scheme if money is involved. But I haven’t done one of these in a while, and I am remarkably self involved, so here we go. Feel no compulsion to make your own list, unless of course you want to.

1. I used to be nigh-obsessed with this type of meme in high school. I’d fill out as many as people sent, even if all the recipients already knew my status on Coke v. Pepsi.

2. It’s Pepsi, by the way, not that I drink much pop anymore.

3. It is pronounced pop, you know. I’ll call anyone who says otherwise a Communist or race traitor or whatever other inflammatory non-sequitur insult I can think of at the time.

4. Re: #1 When my wife was just the girl I had started dating, and I didn’t know all of the rules like ‘only hard fruit, not softened and ripened,’ I needed a gift for her. Not knowing what kind of jewelry she liked, I forwarded her one of those surveys and added ‘Gold or silver?’ I’m still probably too proud of that maneuver.

5. I think the number five is more even than two, four, six or eight.

6. That’s unrelated to the Law of Fives, but I’m a believer in that too. Exactly how much is belief and how much is tongue-in-cheek is a mystery to everyone, including me.

7. Without the game Halo I wouldn’t have my job now, though the explanation is more than I’d care to type now.

8. There is a depressing fact involving a man from Glasgow and the number three, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.

9. I love snow more than anyone else I know. They think I’m crazy and I return the favor.

10. When we got a big snowfall this past Christmas, the fact that I’m 24 and a reputable citizen and all that went out the window as I seriously considered jumping off my roof like I did when I was 16.

11. Re: #5 I still remember the day that Gary Hoffmann (with two fucking n’s) handed me a copy of Illuminatus! that he had found at a used book store.

12. I like school, learning things and being forced to learn things. I had a bachelors by the time I was 22, a masters by 23 and am seriously considering going back in the fall for another. Whenever anyone tells me what course they’re taking, unless it’s law, medical or accounting based I generally wish I were taking it too.

13. I always wished I had skipped a grade, just because it would have proven how smart I was. Despite this, nearly all my friends growing up were a year younger.

14. On that note, I’d say I’ve made three friends since high school.

15. I was firmly in my 20s before I had seen a Sylvester Stallone movie. Now, of course, I’ve seen plenty.

16. I just coughed loudly. I don’t really think that’s interesting, but there you go.

17. I spent a few months using British spelling and grammar because I was convinced that, upon graduation, I’d be moving overseas, or at least to Canada. I’ve given up on that, but still use single quotes because I think they look nicer.

18. I’d listen to a person with an English accent read me the phone book.

19. The farthest east I’ve been is Aberdeen, but the farthest west I’ve been is… Chicago.

20. I know that 60652 is a zip code for Chicago, thanks to Scruff McGruff.

21. I don’t consider something to be lost until I’ve searched everywhere I think it might be. If I haven’t looked upstairs, and I may have taken it there at some point, it’s not lost. I just don’t know where it is.

22. I liked Wesley Crusher and don’t see why everyone hates him. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen TNG, so maybe I was missing something.

23. The Next Generation, by the way, is the best Star Trek series.

24. For some reason, I just realized that I’ve always mentally associated Jonathan Frakes with Frank Reich. I don’t know why that is. Number two, I guess.

25. In first grade I remember giving numbers personalities. Two was a young boy, three was a young girl, four was a teenage boy, five was a young man in love with six the young woman. Seven was slightly older than five and competed for six’s affection. He was a jerk. I also visualized math problems that way, ie to get to 12 seven and five had to work together to climb over a wall.

Well that was an interesting bit of introspection.

But I fear that too many people, across the nation and world, have projected their deepest hopes onto Obama. People see in him what they want to see, think that he believes in all the same things they do, and think that his agenda for the nation mirrors their own. And while I’d love to believe that Barack Obama will do all sorts of wonderful, positive things, I can’t help but remember the similar excitement, hope and belief in “change” that came with the inauguration of Bill Clinton. The Bill Clinton who bombed Iraq, Somalia, and Kosovo, cut welfare, instituted Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, signed the Defense of Marriage Act, maintained the harsh sanctions against Iraq that may have killed half a million Iraqi children, and championed NAFTA and the WTO. One can’t help but notice that Barack Obama has stocked his cabinet with many of the same faces we saw during the Clinton administration, and I can’t help but be fairly cynical.

Please do more podcasts and writing, Jake.

When you mess up, then spend four years saying OH MY GOD WE MESSED UP, then do it again because people managed to convince you that your homophobia was more important than common sense, and then you finally, almost miraculously, manage to get it right, or at least as right as you could under the circumstances, you have not earned the right to pat yourself on the back and throw yourself a party. Even if John Hodgman says you can.