Odd jobs and how they made me... me

You don’t ever realize how much you learn from working in obscure jobs while in school. You don’t realize how much fun you are having while working in these capacities until you turn around and are all of a sudden thrust into the normal career oriented work force. I got into a debate last night with an old friend of mine (Bart), about tax codes and how billionaires are hoarding all of the money and dragging down the economy. I couldn’t help but find it funny how the two of us were able to have such a debate when 12 years ago we were working in a carpet warehouse in Ohio.


The Carpet Warehouse:

12 years ago, Bart and I were working together in a carpeting warehouse, cutting pieces of carpet for a bunch of asshole carpet installers who did nothing but complain and give us shit while doing so. They called me a hippy because I had long hair at the time. I tried to fight several of them on more than one occasion. To this day, every time I see a carpet installer on the road, I give them the finger. They are all cut from the same douche-bag cloth. I will always have hard wood floors throughout any house I own.

Although I do look back at that particular job and recognize it as the job that taught me about hard work. I think Bart would look at it in a similar light. Our boss at the time, Al, was the walking personification of a crotchety, racist, chain-smoking, hard working, ball busting, American old white man. I am convinced that Al didn’t even know what my name was as he always referred to me as “Lazy Cock”. Bart and the other help were also given their own names by Al.

We had a fork lift, with a massive metal boom on the front of it that everyone, including Al, referred to as “The Dick”. On more than one occasion, I managed to ram “The Dick” through the drywall that separated our carpet warehouse with the Paint warehouse next door. I am pretty sure we were supposed to have some sort of a license to operate that thing but it didn’t ever seem to come up.

Then of course were the circumstances where the entire dick would just fall off of the fork lift and smash into the ground. Mind you, this thing weighs 300+ pounds. And the only person who could properly reattach the Dick, were Al and some butch lesbian lady who would come out of the warehouse office like a professional wrestler walking into the ring whenever she would hear the dick smash into the pavement. This lady was not messing around. We were all absolutely terrified of her.

We were very young, so we often showed up to work, hung over or still drunk, often late. Bart would often show up for work, climb on top of the carpet padding and fall asleep, sometimes for hours. Horrific cuts on your hands were a daily occurrence. You wouldn’t believe how sharp a razor has to be in order to slice a straight line through a roll of carpeting. So that blade would need changing often and even the most minor slip while doing so, could lead to massive blood loss.

Al was always telling us to go buy him packs of cigarettes but we weren’t even old enough to buy them. So we were forced to drive around town until we could locate a gas station that would sell cigarettes to minors on behalf of our 72 year old boss.

Al, also never had any concept of what was available for order at any sort of a fast food restaurant. Once a day, one of us would go and get lunch for everyone in the warehouse. Everyone besides Al knew what they wanted from Burger King or McDonald’s or wherever. When it came time for Al to make his selection, he would always say something like, “Gimme one of those big sandwiches ya lazy cock!” And that was as specific as it got, just go get Al some sort of a “Big Sandwich”. And no matter what sort of crap you brought back, Al would eat the shit out if. He used to walk around the warehouse, while he ate his big sandwich and just stare at the rolls of carpeting on the racks as though he was at the louver looking at ancient works of art.

I remember the day that I had to leave the carpet warehouse in order to go back to college, I thanked Al for the opportunity he gave me and he walked me out to my truck and just before I left, he looked me straight in the eye and told me, “I got 10 to 1 odds you flunk out of that school you dumb fuck”. I never heard from Al again. He was and possibly still is, a great man.

Landscaping:

My best friend owned a landscaping company and still does. When you watch him do this job, it quickly becomes apparent that he was put on this Earth to landscape. What he manages to do with a few cubic yards of dirt and some trees can only be described as an art form. Me on the other hand, not so much.

It was fun and all working for my best friend over the summer while I was still in High School so we got to spend a lot of time together but the work was extraordinarily hard which lead to mistakes on my part.

There was one yard, in Newbury Ohio, which we referred to as “The Beast” where quite a few mishaps occurred. My friend Matt was always the one who would mow the lawns while I weed whacked. Earlier in the year, the muffler had broken off of our weed whacker, so this thing sounded like a  747 on takeoff. After a while using the thing, it would become so loud that it would begin to skew ones sense of reality and decision making.

At one point, Matt was on the mower and I was weed whacking as usual and I look up to see Matt in a full wind sprint towards me, he is yelling something and waving his arms in the air, but I could not hear anything. I then noticed that his mower was still running, about 30 yards behind him, but still I had no clue why he was running away from it. Finally, in a veritable panic at this point, I managed to locate the choke on the whacker and shut it down. Immediately, I heard Matt yelling, “BEES!!!! BEEES!!! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!!!”

I dropped the weed whacker and began running alongside of Matt through this person’s back yard. Apparently there was a hornets’ nest that Matt had run over and destroyed. You could see a formidable cloud of bees chasing us. This person basically lived on an undeveloped golf course so it was a good 200 yard sprint back to the safety of the truck. By the time we got into the truck, Matt had been stung at least 10 times; I managed to escape with none. We had to sit there for an hour before either of us became brave enough to go back out and get the equipment and finish the job.

We often mowed The Beast first, often around 7:30 am and I am not a morning person. On a separate morning from the bee incident, we arrived bright and early and got to work. I always grabbed my weed whacker and did the front yard and ditch first. I was completely out of it on this particular morning and was just kind of in a zone, not really paying attention.

I noticed for some reason that the lady who owned the place kept staring at me out her front window as I was trimming the weeds directly in front of the window. She had kind of a shocked and humored look on her face. I just smiled back at her as I remember thinking to myself, “See something you like lady?” Just as I was thinking this, I noticed that the air from the exhaust of the weed whacker seemed especially hot this morning below the waist. I looked down, thinking that there was something wrong with the weed whacker only to find out that my penis was hanging completely out of my shorts taking the full brunt of the exhaust as it was exposed to the world.

I immediately zipped up as the lady in the house gave me the thumbs up and began laughing her ass off. I remember wondering how long it had been like that. I had gone to the gas station that morning and bought iced tea and a Honey Bun, was I exposed that entire time? When we got back into the truck to leave, Matt informed me that the lady had included a 100 dollar tip, 50 for each of us. So that was nice of her.
One particularly sweltering morning, we arrived in University Heights to put in a new front lawn at a mansion. We both had F150 pickup trucks and in order to properly replace a lawn, you first have to remove the old one. So we began taking turns, loading the trucks and one would drive the load to the dump and we would rotate. While the other one was gone, at the dump, the other would stay back and grade out new top soil on top of where we had previously removed the old lawn.

When my time came to stay back while Matt drove a load to the dump, it was around 2 pm and about 92 degrees. And for some insane reason, all I had to drink were five cans of Coors Beer. I tried to avoid it, but I was so thirsty that I swear my tongue was stuck to the top of my mouth. So I drank one beer, then two, then 3. Eventually, I had pounded all five beers in these rich peoples driveway of their mansion. I went back to grading top soil. I got tired quickly and decided to sit up against a tree in the front yard and take a breather. Well I ended up passing out. For an hour, drunk in this person’s front yard, up against a tree. Finally Matt came back from the dump and I had heard his truck pull up. So I sprang to my feet and acted like I had been grading top soil the entire time. But there was no hiding it. I smelled like beer, I had left five empty beer cans on the drive way, no work had been done since he had left, and at that point, I was just kind of stumbling around the front yard with a rake, trying to remember what the hell I was supposed to be doing.

The Lumber Yard:

I worked in a lumber yard while in college in the winter time. Basically, contractors would show up, order the lumber they needed for whatever they were supposed to build, I would get a form from my boss with the order, then I had to drive around on a fork truck and put the load together, band it and eventually put it on a truck. This is fine in the summer but is a pain in the ass in the winter.

Believe it or not, most builders prefer to work in the winter to avoid heat so we were still busy as hell. And the store I worked at had just hired a new manager "Ernie" who would only let us come into the store to get our forms. Ernie was a huge asshole. But he needed us, just as much as the store needed him. Without us, he would have been forced to take all the orders and put all the loads together and load/unload all the trucks. So we got creative.

Whenever Ernie would answer the phone in his office, he would grab it hastily and jam it into his ear as though he was expecting a call from the President. So we, on more than one occasion would take black caulk which matched the color of his black phone and spray it onto his ear piece. We would then call him with our cell phones. He would then pick up the call and jam a glob of black caulk into his own ear. If you have any experience with caulk or caulking, you know how difficult it is to get that crap off of your skin.  So dumbass Ernie, would have to walk around the rest of the day, talking to customers and working the register, with the caulk all over his ear and head. 

He also backed his truck into every spot that he parked in all day. So at least once a day we would take an one of our Lumber Store Bumper Stickers that we were supposed to include in our loads and stick it to the back of his truck. It got to a point where he had about 28 of the same Lumber Store bumper stickers on the back of his truck. And he would have to drive all the way home to Eerie PA looking like an absolute moron.

One time we found a dead cat in the yard and placed it under his windshield wiper. Amazingly, Ernie had no problem with us starting fires out in the lumber yard in order to keep ourselves warm. That is basically how much he didn’t want us inside of the store. As my friend and fellow yard worker were standing around one of our fires out in the yard one afternoon, I noticed that he had his can of spray paint tucked into the front of his pants as we often did. Unfortunately, it was whistling, which is an abnormal thing for a can of spray paint to be doing. It was going to explode as it was too close to the heat. So he panics and pulls it out of his pants and drops it on the ground, directly into the fire. We had no time to get out of the way of the fireball that ensued. The explosion that a full can of spray paint creates when thrown into a fire is incredible. I dove out from behind the building like Howie Long in Firestorm with an absolute wall of flames curling up my back. My Carhart caught on fire, and my knit hat was smoldering, my jeans were hot to the touch. And just as this fiasco was taking place, we had our first drive in customer of the day; some guy looking for tomato stakes. “What the hell is going on here?!!” he yelled. I told him something like, “don’t worry, this happens all the time sir, nothing to worry about”. Unfortunately we didn’t sell tomato stakes. So we had to turn him away.  Shockingly our store eventually closed.

From a Clevelander to a Bostonian: What could Cleveland learn?

I left a lot of really great friends when I left Ohio. I had no idea who I would meet in Boston and if I would make new friends. To be honest, New England doesn’t exactly have a reputation for producing the friendliest of people. Most of my perception of New England was based off of watching Indian’s/Red Sox and Cavaliers/Celtics playoff series’ on television while growing up. After moving to the area I realized that I was stupid for judging an entire region based off of its sports fans. If everyone else took my approach the civil war would be an ongoing, ever-evolving conflict.
I have a trip planned in August that will finally pair one of my good Boston area friends with my best Ohio friend for a weekend of golf and booze. I am extremely interested in seeing how they interact. Knowing the two of them, it should be profoundly hilarious. On one hand, my Bostonian friend is an ex-marine, wise-ass; on the other hand my Ohio friend is arguably the most self confident human being since Howard Hughes and has the absolute worst impression of the Boston accent imaginable.

One bad rap that Boston get’s a lot is with regards to its roads and traffic and highway system. Whatever sort of horror stories you have heard on this topic are absolutely true, if not worse than whatever you’ve heard. There is no possible way to know round about when you will arrive anywhere in the region via automobile. Fifteen minute trips can and often do turn into hour long trips. If FDR could have seen what has become of his Interstate Highway System idea in New England, I think he would have just pulled the plug on the whole thing.

But most things that make up a “reputation” couldn’t be further from reality. People are certainly different here but just as friendly, if not friendlier then where I come from. And the people would probably be even more friendly with better roads. People are just as passionate here about their sports teams as in Cleveland with the exception of the Red Sox. People here, love the Boston Red Sox like Clevelanders love the Browns. I have always seen Cleveland as a city where somewhat of a subculture of folks love the Indians but here everyone loves the Sox as part of their birthright, much like Clevelanders with the Browns. This passion for sports has played a key role in my ability to fit in with people here.

People here are, I think by nature, somewhat wise-ass, which helps me. I come from a very long line of wise-assed culture where it would have been impossible to survive without such a skill.

Here, people have a history of having played hockey and baseball whereas in Ohio Football is the religion. And to be honest I always considered hockey to be sort of weird and silly until I went to a Boston Bruins game and realized how closely the atmosphere in that place resembled that of the Dog Pound at a Browns game. If Cleveland ever has the opportunity to get an NHL Franchise, they should do everything they can to do so. It is hands down the most exciting professional sport outside of the NFL.

I do miss my family. Since I moved here, my sister has had a baby boy and now has a baby girl on the way. My inability to be a part of their lives weighs heavily on me but I do what I can for their birthdays and holiday’s. Some days, I feel like I abandoned my parents. But I talk to them often enough and they have never given me the impression that I did anything of the sort.

I also owe a lot to my girlfriend. Generally when a girlfriend introduces you to her friends, it becomes more of an obligatory errand, however, in my current case, nearly every single friend of hers that I have met, with the exception of one guy I pushed across a bar on Halloween, has been awesome. She has surrounded herself and subsequently me, with some of the most down to Earth, funny, intelligent people I have ever met. When left to my own instincts, I generally tend to surround myself with the, let’s get as drunk as humanly possible and fight someone crowd but these folks are much classier and I love her for introducing me to them.

Nobody from where I come from wants to hear it, but Cleveland could learn a thing or two from Boston. Unfortunately I think most Clevelanders are like me prior to me arriving in New England. The first thing that pops into a Clevelanders head when they think of Boston is C.C. Sabathia getting shelled in the ALCS, at Fenway, with the entire crowd chanting “over-rated”, basically allowing a snapshot of 30 thousand people mold their impression of this enormous population center.

Clevelanders also, and I was certainly guilty of this prior to moving here, think that everyone in New England sounds like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting when they talk. Well they don’t, there are areas where these accents are more noticeable but for the most part everyone speaks normally. I have noticed that the really thick accents are generally reserved for the over 40 crowd in New England. The younger the people get, the less the accent seems to come out.

I think Clevelanders take things more personally then just about any populous of any city on Earth with the exception of maybe Kabul Afghanistan. The city has been the subject of plenty of abuse. Basically since the Cuyahoga River lit on fire like 300 years ago. Since, it has been a non-stop turn-style of media organizations badgering Cleveland for all they are worth.

But it’s not like Cleveland is the only city where bad/embarrassing things happen. They happen everywhere. Boston is the city where the 9/11 terrorists managed to board airplanes and where the “Big Dig” happened. New York is the city that nearly managed to collapse our entire financial system three years ago. Chicago and Detroit nearly burnt themselves down on multiple occasions. Los Angeles, has managed to become flat broke while being the residence of the richest populous in the country. Finding someone who knows how to read in Miami is like trying to find a Democratic Atheist in Texas. Texas gave us George Herbert Walker Bush. Philly fans booed Santa Claus. Cleveland is the city that accidently managed to light a river on fire like 70 years ago and that Lebron James embarrassed on ESPN. Oh, let’s all just kill ourselves now.

So what’s the difference? Cleveland vehemently, to the point of a fault, defends itself in the face of opposition. All that this accomplishes is more attention for a sore topic. Nobody is ever going to stop talking about “The Decision” as long every time they do, they receive 3 million hits to their news story or a record breaking television broadcast. While they might be assholes, media moguls are not stupid people. Controversy sells and they are in the business of making money. Whether you agree with, disagree with, are hurt or offended by something does not matter, it will still make them money. So if you have a large population center of overly defensive people who are more than willing to pay attention to negative press, of course people will take advantage of that. And they will keep doing so until the gravy train stops. There is no better, clearer cut example of this then Forbes magazine rating Cleveland America’s most miserable city in 2009. Obviously there is no such method of properly indexing misery of millions of people. Anyone who made it through the fourth grade realizes this. But they publish these sorts of “ratings” once a year, with the statistics purposely manipulated in order to best piss off the most sensitive crowds. And sorry Cleveland, you are by far the most sensitive crowd so it makes sense for the shitheads at Forbes to do these things.

In my opinion, other cities do a better job of owning their “issues”. If you tell a Clevelander that their town is full of corn fields, they will bark back at you about how “there are no farms in Greater Cleveland.” It will generally spur a heated retort from them. Meanwhile, if you call someone from Boston a “Chowder Head”, they will generally tell you something about the industry and what it has accomplished for the region and the rich history behind it. And how much money it is still making and how many people have jobs because of it. They own it. They realize that these are the things that made Boston, Boston and they aren’t anything to be ashamed about.

So what made Cleveland, Cleveland? It’s convenient location as a gateway between the Midwestern and Eastern population centers as well as the steel and the manufacturing industry all the while, producing the media and ideas behind this country’s Rock & Roll Industry. More recently, it has built itself into the leading city for Biomedical, Health and related research in the entire United States of America. Not far outside of the city lies the single greatest amusement park on Earth (and that is not just my opinion) that nobody has ever heard of in Cedar Point, which is surrounded by a chain of what seem like borderline tropical, party islands that are only a 30 minute ferry ride away in Put in Bay. And don’t even get me started on the dining and food industry downtown anchored by the absolute standard in farmers markets “The West Side Market”. But they don’t own it.

People outside of Cleveland wouldn’t ever know about things like the Cleveland Clinic managing to transplant faces of attack victims successfully or their finding proven methods of creating new spinal cords for paralyzed people using stem cells or any number of the royalty and celebrities that refuse treatment at any other hospital system outside of the Cleveland Clinic. No, if you ask anyone what they think is going on in Cleveland, they will tell you that it is the city that Lebron James left or a city that has lousy weather in the winter.

Just about everyone who I meet after I tell them that I grew up in the Cleveland area asks me “So did you grow up on a farm”. These aren’t dumb people. One of the guys who asked me this is one of the industry leaders in the sports medicine field along the Eastern Seaboard. They’re not trying to be rude, they just honestly don’t know so the natural inclination is to generalize.

However, if you ask someone from around here, what they think is going on in Chicago, they will say something like “Oh, I love Chicago, such a fun city; I would love to get back there.” So what’s the difference? Chicago has just as bad, if not worse weather in the winter, is smack dab in the middle of this countries grain belt with nearly three times as many farms in its home state of Illinois, but nobody identifies Chicago that way, why?

To me, the answer is branding. More people were murdered last year in “Chicago land” then any other region in this country but that story comes and goes and the positive aspects of Chicago again overshadow the negatives. Before you know it people are again talking about the airline industries resurgence and their merchandising prowess of Chicago and how proud everyone is of Obama. This is the way their town is branded. They realize their identity and they own it.

Imagine for a minute if Cleveland held that statistic: we would hear about Cleveland being the murder capital of America, every day of our lives for years to come. This is because, the local population enables the story to live on and on with their own stubbornness and protesting. They don’t let things die. Thanks to this reputation alone, every media company in the country would continuously pound home the point via the internet and television and late night talk show hosts all because they know they are going to get a major reaction out of the city. And that reaction draws attention, which boost ratings and in turn fills their pockets. Because Cleveland is a town who’s brand is in a constant state of flux based off of whatever the flavor of the week is. And that is often a lousy flavor. One year it will be Lebron leaving for Miami, the year before will be all the crime around town, the year before that will be how bad the Browns are, the year before that will be how the infrastructure is old and ugly and too expensive to fix. So the circle never completes. You never get back to the positive aspects when every time you open up a paper the first three pages are dedicated to everything bad around town. The image never revolves back to great healthcare, or how a Cleveland Ship Builder just won a multi-billion dollar deal to develop Naval Destroyer’s. By the amount of time it takes for one bad thing to finally die, something else will inevitably have gone wrong.

My advice, find your identity as a city, once and for all and to hell with what anyone else thinks about it. There is far too much that is great about the city that I grew up in and fell in love with to take such a half glass empty approach about.

And Boston, build some better friggin roads for the love of all that is holy.

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The Anti-Social Network

Try to visualize the world as it is in the Social Network as though it were a real world and ask yourself, if that is a place you would like to be. It would be a world, where you were constantly surrounded by people who you sort of know but not really, often dislike, who never seem to shut the fuck up about the most random, annoying, crap imaginable. Every now and again some person you don’t know will come out of nowhere and “poke” you. People will constantly be asking you to be their friend or telling you they don’t want to be friends with you anymore like a bunch of five year olds. Everyone would be older and less attractive then how you vaguely remembered them. There would constantly be some bogus survey gauging which 80’s metal band best suits your personality being shoved in your face. Everyone would be constantly, annoyingly, attached to their significant others at all times. Everyone would have an endless supply of boring pictures that they were dying for you to look at and give your opinion on. Everyone in the world would be able to instantly give you their opinion about every single thing you did. And this entire fiasco would take place in a town called Farmville which has been gripped for years by a Mafia War of which millions of people are involved.


In the social networking world, the term “friend” is used much more loosely then in the real world. In order to be friends with someone, you just have to have spent time in the same building as them at some point in your life. You don’t have to have ever spoken with them, liked them or hung out with them. People make friends in this world just because they went to the same school or have worked in the same place, in some cases not even at the same time but they are friends because they share that vague common interest with one another. I have about 300 Facebook”friends”, here is a breakdown.

People from High School:

When you really look at it, Facebook is really just reunion.com on steroids for me. Because just about all of my friends are people that I went to High School with. In reality, I have managed to keep in contact, via phone or email or in person with the old High School Friends that I want to have as part of my life. And then Facebook came along and forged a brand new bullshit means of connectivity to a whole ton of other ones that I don’t care about and in many cases have no intention of ever speaking with again.

I can’t imagine a situation where I would ever need to converse with Joe from 11th grade shop class about anything. Or any of the girls who used to be hot and now have like 14 kids and look like sunburned sea lions slowly dying on a rocky beach someplace, in all of their photos. Or how about I strike up a chat with one of the couples, from High School, who have been married and having kids together since 1996, before we graduated, and who I am sure have never re-evaluated that decision since. The fact that I have to be reminded that these people exist is not cool. These are mental lashings that didn’t exist 8 years ago. I suppose we all need to be reminded of where we come from, even if where we come from is not memorable.

Married women who use their maiden name and then their new last name (pretty much all married women):

Everyone has dozens of these “friends”. I don’t really have a problem with this practice but it really does hammer my point home about not really being friends with people on Facebook. If you need to include whatever your last time used to be when people knew you, in order for them to recognize who you are, you are not really friends with those people. I like to think that I can recognize my true friends by sight alone without needing them to state their full names, including their given surname as though we are at the BMV or filling out foreign immigration forms on an airplane.

This is another situation that is completely indigenous to the Facebook world. In no other capacity on Earth could a single guy be friends with so many married women without getting the shit kicked out of him every 20 minutes.

People you don’t like, who keep talking to you:

It’s not so bad having friends who you don’t like sitting buried in your “friends” list. At least most of them probably don’t like you back and won’t talk to you. But at least once a month, some person, who you dislike, will leave some kind of dumbass message on your “wall”, usually asking something stupid like, “When you coming to my town again Matt?” or “We really miss you over here bud.” As though I am going to make an expensive trip halfway across the country to visit a bunch of people I hate. That’s like paying someone to hit you in the nuts with a rolling pin. And do you really miss me, really? Is that what you did today, you sat around missing people from High School who you haven’t seen or talked to in going on 20 years? Because, if you did, then that’s fucking crazy and you should probably get on some kind of serious meds.

Old work “friends”:

This is another large group of people you are friends with on Facebook. People who used to work in the same place as you did. Now I have made some great friendships through work in my life but I have not made friends with the 124 people I used to work with whom are now friends with me on Facebook. This is the group of friends who makes up the vast majority of the “I don’t even know who the fuck these people are” category. This situation is made worse in the event you left that place of work on bad terms. Now every time you scroll through your friends list, you are forced to be reminded of how you had to work someplace that you hated, in most cases for years of your life. This is another mental blow that you must endure, which did not exist prior to the magic of Social Networking.

Ex Girlfriends/Ex Boyfriends:

Breaking up with someone used to mean, you get your clothes and DVD’s back from them, you get one or two last harsh words in, you delete their number from your phone, you throw the stuff they left at your place in a river and that was pretty much it. Now, thanks to the wonderful world of social networking, this process is a lot more involved. Now, on top of everything else there are relationship status’s that must be changed, mutual friends who must be deleted before you meet someone else so they don’t act as some kind of spy for your ex, old couples photo’s that must be deleted or in more sociopathic cases, cropped so as to no longer include your ex, security settings that must be updated so that they can’t see any future photo’s or relationship status’. And if you forget a single one of these items, then god help you my friend because you are entering a world of pain. But computers are here to make our lives simpler.

People who consistently write bummer comments:

I don’t mind if every once in a while, one of my friends is bummed out and writes something on Facebook about it. Fine, you know whatever makes you feel better, I guess. But I’ve got some friends, who must feel like it is their personal calling in life, to publish every stupid little thing that goes wrong in their life to the entire world on Facebook. I don’t want to come off as completely insensitive, but I don’t need to be made aware of your ingrown toenail or a missing cat or how you feel about gas prices or the new light bulbs. Just quit bitching. Your toenail will heal, gas prices will go down, you will get used to the new light bulbs and your cat is probably dead.

People who won’t stop writing comments about political crap:

We’ve all got them. Friends, usually republican friends, who have never visited FoxNews.com, without posting a link to some article they read on their Facebook Page. Usually, accompanying their link is some kind of biased, opinionated, racist comment from them about the contents of the link. Out of my 286 friends, I currently know of one who works in any sort of political capacity. If he were to, and never does, post something political on his page, I would take it seriously. Otherwise, I don’t give a shit how my Facebook Friend Steve, who works as a night supervisor at a Valero, feels about our foreign policy in regards to South Africa as reported by Fox News.

Your guy friends who seem to have made friends with every whore on Facebook:

There are a lot of guys who seem to use Facebook as a channel to become “friends” with slutty women. It is easy to find these guys. All you have to do is look at their friends list and every other photo is of some women in a bikini or in her underwear or in a sexually suggestive position of some kind. I could understand this practice if they were ONLY friends with these sort of women and nobody else. But waters often become muddied when these men mix these sorts with their family members or their non-whore friends, or their girlfriends etc. These men usually find out the hard way, that you have no control over what anyone posts on your wall that everyone can read. And when you surround yourself with a bunch of whores, you are going to eventually get some shit posted up there that you don’t want anyone else to see. I liken it to a guy going to a strip club with his mom and his girlfriend and then knowing every single stripper in the club.

In conclusion, social networking has improved our lives in some capacities, it provides entertainment value, it does add another avenue with which we can stay in contact with each other, it, in my opinion unfortunately, gives people an outlet for their frustrations, but I am sure a lot of people think that this is a good thing. And like everything else, you take the good with the bad even if the bad far outweighs the good. There have been other advancements in communication and convenience that I can’t imagine how we ever lived without, email, cell phones etc. But I have never once asked myself, what did I ever do before Facebook?

Booze III (3)

This is the third and likely not the final installment in the Booze series.  Based off of the popularity of these posts, I may just stop writing anything else and reflect on my drunken past on a bi-weekly basis. 

Who wants blackened chicken and where the hell is my car? 

These are not two questions that are asked under normal circumstances but if you read on, you will find that the situation I found myself in was anything but ordinary. 

I had been living on the near West Side of Cleveland near the Lakewood border with my good friend Chris.   On a boring Saturday night, we drove downtown in my car and parked at a local garage and went drinking.  We closed down some techno-club which was not in any sort of bar district of the city.  All I remember is that we had to walk down some stairs next to a Thai restaurant to get into the place. 

By the time we left, around 4 am, I had completely forgotten that I had driven the two of us downtown.  Chris was of no help either.  There was nowhere to get food in this neighborhood because it was basically the middle of no-man’s-land.  We got into a taxi and went home, forgetting that my car was in some sketchy parking garage in the middle of nowhere downtown Cleveland.

We get home and are drunk and starving.  Chris goes and begins to run his head under the faucet in the tub like he often tends to do when he is shitfaced.  I am not exactly sure how this helps, but you know what, whatever. 

I get the idea that I want chicken.  And luckily, I had purchased a package of frozen chicken earlier in the week.  Now, I know how to cook chicken, but when I am drunk, I make poor decisions. 

I heated up a frying pan to somewhere near four thousand degrees centigrade, opened the frozen chicken package and blindly inserted the contents into my nuclear hot frying pan.  I then began attempting to prepare some tater tots to go along with my chicken.  I don’t care what anyone says, it would have been delightful.

Somewhere in the middle of this spectacle, I put my head down on the counter next to the frying pan.  It turns out, completely frozen blocks of chicken don’t cook well in a frying pan, they basically just light on fire.  After some unspecified amount of time, I become completely past out with my head in a pile of frozen tater-tots with two pieces of chicken literally in flames, not a foot away from my head. 

I wake up to find Chris, soaking wet screaming at me and throwing baking soda on the stovetop.  He was still soaking wet and topless from having run his upper torso under the faucet for a half hour.  He is about as mad as I had ever seen anyone at me in my life.  For some reason in the midst of this fray, I come to realize that I had left my car downtown and began to ramble about this in some sort of drunk, confused, concerned, I just woke up into an emergency situation, type of babble.  This only added to Chris frustration because I was much more concerned about my car then the fact that I nearly burnt down our apartment building via frozen chicken. 

Luckily, I was able to go get my car the next day after paying a hefty parking fee, the chicken was unable to be salvaged.  Chris and I were able to patch things up, the tater tots were still edible 

Blue Goo and dishes do not go together:

At this time, I was around 21 and living in the middle of absolute nowhere Ohio, while working and in college.  My roommates and I had not done dishes for quite an unacceptable amount of time.  And it was time to do the god damned dishes.  My good buddy Matt and his girlfriend at the time agreed to go to the grocery store, while my other good buddy Ben and I stayed back and took care of the dishes. 

Both Ben and I have active gag reflexes and are unable to stomach disgusting things well.  And make no mistake about it, this dish situation was horrendous.  So I get the idea to mix up a batch of Blue Goo before we did them, you know, to take the edge off the disgustingness.

For those of you who did not grow up in rural Ohio, Blue Goo, is Vodka (a lot of it), poured into an empty Milk jug, and with Blue Kool-Aid and sugar mixed into it.  If cold, it is probably one of the easiest ways to get absolutely rip-shit in no time whatsoever. 

So Matt and his girlfriend leave to go grocery shopping, and Ben and I sit on the couch and begin passing the Blue Goo back and forth until it is completely gone,  time to do the dishes. 

We stumble into the kitchen absolutely blitzed around 11 am.  We decide that Ben will throw and I will catch.  At first, the system was working, we managed to get nearly half of the load clean and then the full brunt of the Blue Goo kicked in.  I began to get warmer and warmer until I was eventually pouring sweat like Jack from Lost.   I took my shirt off and Ben followed my lead.    Just then, Ben begins laughing his ass off but his laughter turned to pain when he realized that he had sliced his hand open on a dirty knife in the sink.  I began laughing at the overall situation just as I realized that I had done the same thing.  So now we’re both bleeding.

Throughout this process, our jeans had become soaked with dish water as did most of the kitchen.  You would be amazed at how difficult it can be to contain dish water after basically drinking half a bottle of vodka while the guy next to you drank the other half. 

I took my pants off because they had become gravely uncomfortable.  At the time, I did not wear underwear so I was basically nude, standing in a puddle of dirty dish water, with my hand bleeding, laughing my ass off and drying dishes. 

Then Ben took his pants off.  To my surprise, he had smacks on, AKA tightie-whities.  Now for whatever reason, Ben did not want to take off his boots so he attempted to take off his jeans over his boots without taking them off first.  This is a feat that is tough for someone who is not fighting a half liter of 80 proof vodka.   So Ben falls down, hard onto the linoleum, right in the middle of the most disgusting puddle of dirty dish water I had ever seen.  He begins laughing and I begin laughing at him. 

Just then, Matt and his girlfriend return from the grocery store.  Mind you, they only left about an hour before.  And when they left we were completely sober.  But what they returned to was something that nobody could have possibly predicted.  Two men, both absolutely hammered, soaking wet, one in his underwear on the floor laughing his ass off and myself, drying dishes in nothing but my birthday suit. It was like some sort of crazy, southern, gay swing party.  We all shared a nice, long laugh.   

We were able to get the dishes done and mend our various wounds, I then past out on the floor of my bedroom for about six to eight hours as did Ben. 

It is all fun and games until you accidently knock your friend out and get questioned by the cops:

When I lived in Cleveland Heights my friend Ben and I used to frequent a wine bar down the road from us.  We were there often, as we could walk to and from our apartment.  Now this is sort of embarrassing but in order to make the walks more entertaining, and due to the fact that we had both been making fun of the immensely popular at the time “X-Games” recently, we came up with a game we called “Extreme Walking”. 

“Extreme walking”, was basically just normal walking, except you have to be drunk and do stupid jumps and tricks while doing so.   For instance, if there was a curb in your way, and you jumped over it, while doing a 360 was considered, to us an extreme version of walking. All the while, the other person would commentate the exercise like one of those, ubber-hip, skater boy, douche bag, X-Game announcers.  It was fucking funny to us. If you don’t think it is, try it once; I guarantee you laugh your ass off.

After about a year, both of us had become formidable extreme walk men.  We had gotten to a point where we began to try to distract each other’s maneuvers by pushing each other in mid-air in some cases. 

Most of the time, this practice was harmless but unfortunately, on this evening, I did not account for black-ice.  Ben leaped off of a landscaping planter onto the sidewalk next to me.  In an attempt to prevent him from sticking the landing, I pushed him.  He slid about 10 feet to his right and fell down and slammed his head into a glass window.   Normally there wouldn’t be anything funny about this.  But in this case, the window was for this brand new, underground, ultra-trendy nightclub which was absolutely packed inside.  So when Ben’s head smashed into the window, the laughter from inside was fairly audible to everyone outside.  So I naturally began laughing with them.

Everything began to happen fairly quickly at that point.  I realized that Ben did not get up in a reasonable timeframe.  And just as I began to get concerned a cop came out of nowhere and pushed me onto the ground and began screaming at me.  I remember he called me “tough guy” about 5 times, rapid fire.  It is really weird to have someone calling you “tough guy” when you had no intentions of in any way trying to be tough.   It occurred to me, that he thought we were fighting and that I had done this on purpose. 

Then I realized how ridiculous the whole thing was.  Like, what am I fucking Batman?  Like in the middle of a fight, I would have the foresight to realize that my opponent was about to land on some black ice, and I would then use that to my advantage to make him slide 10 feet into a glass window.   

Finally Ben woke up with nothing but a lump on his head and we explained the whole situation to the cop.  This wasn’t easy; try explaining something like “extreme walking” gone wrong to a police officer!  He then reminded us that he had every right to arrest us for public intox and/or disturbing the peace, but this time he would let us go with a warning.  Thank you Mr. Officer, I don’t know how I would have ever explained how I got arrested to my cellmates for this one.  What are you in for Tyrone? “Murder”, what are you in for Jack? “Murder”, what are you in for Matt? “an extreme walking incident”.  

Then the cop told us to “be more careful next time” and that “Ben got lucky by not being more seriously injured”.   But it isn’t like Ben had even been examined for any sort of a concussion or anything, so I felt like it was a little too early to make that sort of an assumption. So unless this cop moonlights as the best neurosurgeon in the world I find this statement to have been a dubious claim.   Finally he let us just walk away.  We went right back to extreme walking.

I wish....

People would stop blaming the President for not having jobs: 

When did it become Barack Obama’s responsibility to get everyone a job?   He is the President of the United States, not the President of the KForce Staffing Agency.   I wish that we could just have one “The President tells it like it is, day, once per year”.  On this one day, the president can say whatever he really wanted to say and be guaranteed no repercussions.  Because I would love to see Obama get in front of a microphone and tell everyone, “I’m terribly sorry that I can’t find a job for those of you who dropped out of school after the fourth grade and short of cooking up meth, have absolutely no vocational skills whatsoever, but I was too busy killing the guy who wants to fly airplanes into our buildings, thank you, god bless you, and god bless the United States of America”. 

That old people were not allowed to drive:

Old people should have to take another driving test when they turn 70.  And this test should be extremely difficult.   It should be borderline impassable.  It should be so hard that the old people don’t even attempt it and they just surrender their driver’s licenses to the state on their 70^th birthdays.  The test should involve things like swimming and pull-ups and using Twitter and staying in a handstand for 10 minutes; all things that are nearly impossible for old people to do.

These people are a menace on the roadways, which is a fact.  Not a year goes by in my life where I am not nearly killed by several old people who are still trying to drive cars.    It’s not good for them either.  I’m sure they don’t enjoy getting yelled at and flipped off all the time.  They drive slowly because they are scared of going any faster.  Their old hollow bones could not possibly withstand any sort of a fender bender and they know this.  So they don’t take any chances. 

The only compromise I would be willing to make here is to make it illegal for old people to drive during peak traffic hours.  Relegate the old people to driving between 11 am and 4 pm and then again between 7 pm and 5 am.  If the old people needed any exceptions to these windows, they could apply for a one day pass that grants their exception.   But this could turn into a double edged sword as you would likely have a shit load of old people all trying to drive around during these windows which could become a catastrophe.  Also, most old people can’t see at night for various reasons so the 7 pm to 5 am window would likely become a Hindenburg scale disaster of epic proportions.

That golf courses didn’t let just anyone play golf:

Every public golf course, right now, across the entire United States of America, is packed with hacks that have absolutely no fucking idea how to play golf.  This is a problem that I have personally witnessed grow to near biblical proportions over the past couple of years.  On a daily basis, 90% of the people who decide to go golfing are so bad at golf that it is hard to imagine how they ever managed to become toilet trained.   For people like me, who actually know how to golf and take it somewhat seriously, this is a major annoyance as I find myself constantly dodging errant tee-shots, waiting behind some idiot to line up and subsequently miss a three foot putt for five minutes, some guy who can’t golf trying to teach his kids how to not golf well, old men, who move so slowly that they would have a hard time getting out of the way of steam roller, women who think it’s just hilarious to be out trying to play golf, absolutely shit-faced thirty something’s and kids smoking pot in the woods.   And not to mention, the worst of the worst, the business men who golf because it is just something that they are supposed to do as business men.  These men generally have thousands of dollars worth of the best golf equipment, none of which they have any idea how to go about using, they play like they are tour players, measuring every putt, and every approach shot like their lives depend on it, just to slap their next shot 120 yards into the woods in front of the thirty people who are stuck behind them, because no business man, has ever let anyone play through.   

Golf is the only sport like this.  It is the only sport where someone else’s ineptness directly affects everyone else's experience.  I propose a skills challenge that must be met on the driving range, under the supervision of a golf course employee, prior to being granted access to the golf course.  If you are unable to hit a drive more than 150 yards, you’re gone, if you can’t make a putt from 30 feet in less than four strokes, you’re gone, if you think 15 minutes is an acceptable amount of time to spend on a par 3, you’re gone.   And just for good measure, they should be physically kicked in the ass throughout their entire walk back to their cars by golf course employees and fruit should be thrown at their cars as they exit the parking lot.

These are skills that anyone who has half of an idea of how golf works, could easily pass but at the same time would weed out the typical golfing riff-raff that we decent golfers are forced to put up with every weekend.   

People would stop taking about “Our Founding Fathers” as though they were so great:

I am sick and tired of hearing folks talking about what the “Founding Fathers” meant for America.   Whatever they wanted no longer applies to the reality that we have created for ourselves.  The wonderful group of men, known as your Founding Fathers, that you love so much also loved things like slavery and not letting women have rights and hanging people who they thought were witches.  If you had your way, and the country actually turned into what the “Founding Fathers” had envisioned for it, we would have no cars, next to no technology for that matter, we would all have to learn how to farm, or make shoes, or shape molten metal with hammers, there would be no diversity, women would have no say in anything, people would still be dying from strep throat and scurvy and we would constantly be at war with the British, slugs and cocaine would still be considered acceptible types of medication.  So thank god you are wrong, because that sounds terrible.

 Someone would revisit the 40 hour a week idea:

Who the hell decided that it would be a good idea for everyone to work for forty hours every week of their lives and that’s the way it’s just going to be forever, and if you don’t, you get no health coverage, end of discussion?    Shouldn’t this at least be up for debate, ever?   I think people should only have to work for as long as it takes for them to complete whatever their job is on a weekly basis.  If that’s five hours, then that’s how much you work.  Conversely, if it takes them 60 hours, then too bad, that’s how long those slow ass people have to work.   I do believe that there are a lot of people out there who grossly underestimate how long of a period of time forty hours is.  You could build a small airport in less time than that.  Forty hours is a long, long time.

I am probably spoiled as I work in the IT field and over the years have come to the realization that the most talented IT people are the least busy ones because they have found ways to automate everything. Yet, those people are still forced to drive to a building 5 times a week and sit around and act busy in order to remain qualified to receive health care benefits.  How much electric bill money and fossil fuels could be conserved by not making people drive to a building every weekday?

That we were allowed to select exactly which Television Channels that we wanted:

Why can’t we do this yet?  Is there a reason why I get the 8 channels that I watch and another 1000 channels that I don’t?  It is not like I am going to wake up someday and all of sudden want to watch CSPAN or OWN or the Hunting Channel? 

The ability to select only the channels you watch would give the consumers the power to band together and deactivate channels that broadcast content that they dislike.  If all of a sudden, on a near overnight basis, 8 million people discontinued Fox News, I am pretty sure they would tone down their rhetoric.  Instead, since we all have to get these channels regardless of how we feel about them, they can pretty much just keep doing whatever they want because they have the control. 

It would also severely limit the cable companies from being able to justify the hundreds of dollars they charge for cable.  If I am only getting 8 channels, then you have to stop charging me for a thousand. 

An ex-Clevelanders take on Lebron

Patience is key…

I used to live in Cleveland. I was born and raised in the area.  I love the city, the people, the attractions and pretty much everything about it.  I embrace its negative image that many people who have never been there have created for it.  If nothing else, it keeps those kinds of judgmental shitheads out of my home town.  I don’t like to see horrible things happen to my city.  I don’t think anyone does.  But, on my birthday last year, July 8^th 2010, Lebron James tore the heart out of me and a city that had previously done nothing but worshiped him for his entire life via a 1 hour special on ESPN that he personally named “The Decision”.  If I ever become an actor and have to get myself into a pissed off mood for the camera, I know that I can always think back to that evening.

Patience is key…

Over the past ten plus months, I have been forced to endure the sight of the Miami Heat run through their competition.  Competition like the Celtics and the Bulls and Magic who were previously able to hold Lebron in check.  But now, along side of Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, who really could stop him?  So Lebron James will get a ring.  And it is time for me and some fans to accept a few inconvenient facts….

Patience is key…

Lebron will win multiple titles with the Miami Heat:  This is a very hard pill for a Cleveland sports fan to swallow but it is going to happen.  Any team that has Lebron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh in the starting lineup will win multiple titles.  It is a simple matter of mathematics.  There is simply not enough high powered talent left in the league that could team up and deny them of their multiple titles.  In basketball, if you have three of the best 6 players on one team, they won’t be stopped.  As bad as it may be for the integrity of the NBA product to have the most hated franchise in sports win multiple titles, it is going to happen.  There isn’t an international All-Star team that could be assembled who could get in the way of the abomination that is the Miami Heat. 

Patience is key…

Lebron James is never going to stop taking shots at Cleveland:  Lebron has joined forces with two of the best players in the league.  He no longer needs to be the best player in the world in order to win night in and night out.  One of the three just has to be that guy once every three games and they will be fine.  Therefore, his stock as a great basketball player is on the downswing.  He will likely never win another MVP trophy again.  After all, how could anyone justify a single player being the most valuable player on a team where he has more help than he knows what to do with?   

Lebron also irreversibly tarnished his image on July 8^th.  Anyone who lives outside of the Haitian Slums in Miami realizes how much of a dick move “The Decision” was.  Most people can’t get themselves to understand how a human being could possibly be brain dead enough to think that that would have been a good idea for more than eight seconds.  The spectacle took a level of arrogance that has never been seen before in organized sport.  It introduced pure hatred into professional basketball.   So if you team his regression as a basketball player along with the thermo-nuclear destruction of his public persona you have a recipe for a lot of pissed off sponsors.  There are a lot of people at companies like McDonald’s and Nike and ESPN who need Lebron James to be “liked”.  They literally have invested hundreds of millions of their dollars in people liking him. 

So what do you do when you have an image problem at work?  You pass the buck.  It is the easiest way to get the heat off of you.  People have been doing it for centuries.  If Lebron James blames the Cleveland Cavaliers ownership and his former players and the city of Cleveland for not getting him enough talent, or not trying hard enough in the playoffs or being spoiled by his greatness, enough times then it will eventually stick.  Unfortunately, one complete dickhole of a move usually leads to another.   Eventually Lebron will be able to deflect the pressure on himself back onto Cleveland.   He has all of the resources of Nike and ESPN and ABC and Disney and McDonald’s to help him do so. 

Patience is key…

The Cleveland Cavaliers are not going to win an NBA title before Lebron does:  I am terribly sorry Mr. Dan Gilbert but this was one of the dumbest statements anyone has ever made outside of the nut house.   I do understand how pissed off you were at the time you made this statement and I can appreciate your team spirit.   I think the Cavs can turn it around in about three years and be back in title contention but I think the Heat are going to win the titles for at least two of those three years.  There is just nobody left who can stop those three shitheads in Miami. 

Patience is key…

Why do I keep saying that patience is key:   From a Cleveland fans perspective, the short term is going to suck…. a lot.  We are going to have to sit and watch one of the biggest pieces of shit the world has ever seen win multiple titles with two of the other biggest pieces of shit in the world along side of him.  But it is going to get progressively better as the years go by. 

First off, the new Collective Bargaining Agreement that the NBA is ready to impose is going to lower the salary cap.  It is not going to be lowered enough to prevent Miami form having all three players, but it will be low enough to make sure they can’t ever get any better than they are right now.  Basically, I really hope Miami is completely in love with Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller as role players because they are going to need them for the long haul.  I also hope those two guys never expect to get a raise because Miami has so much invested in their big three that they can’t pay them more then what they get now. 

Secondly, it is going to be harder and harder for Miami to attract decent role players.  Other then the fact that they won’t be able to pay them as much as everyone else, who wants to go play fourth fiddle next to three of the biggest prima donnas that the sporting world has ever seen?  They are going to have to go out and keep getting old men, who have given up trying to win on other teams and want to go to Miami just for the chance at a ring.  So have fun with the Zyndrunas Illgauskas’s and Mike Bibby’s of the world. 

Thirdly, the pressure on that franchise is never going to let up as long as they have all three of those players.  Not a single one of them strikes me as someone who handles pressure particularly well.  One thing my good buddy, Mr. Cavalier Austin Carr will tell you….  “Pressure always burst the pipe”.  Sometimes it takes a while but it will happen.   Lebron no longer being “the man” on a team, relentless media frenzies before and after every game, people booing them in every arena outside of Northern Cuba, people constantly asking Lebron questions like “What would this championship have meant in Cleveland?”  “Wouldn’t this have meant more if you had been able to do it yourself and in your home town?” Lebron not being able to take a piss in a Wendy’s bathroom without people hating him for it, the list goes on and on.  Eventually, this burden will weigh the team down.  Eventually someone will beat them in the playoffs and that loss, teamed with this pressure will tear a whole in that locker room.  You cannot have that many ego’s, with that much pressure, and that much riding on everything, with that much money floating around, and not win. 

Fourthly, Cleveland has Karma and history on its side.  Lebron James is going to play basketball for about another 12 years.   He is going to have some ups and downs and win several titles and make a lot of money.  But while sports history fades away into the background after time, you being a complete asshole remains front and center forever.  So Lebron will never be able to enjoy his empty titles as much as everyone else does.  He is never going to be able to go anywhere without people asking him about that decision.  Whatever he does from here on out in his basketball career will play second fiddle to the errors of his youth.  He is never going to experience what Michael Jordan did when he held the Championship Trophy after killing himself, with limited talent around him, for six years.  Any tears Lebron sheds when he wins that title will be for the camera, not because he played though walking pneumonia in the playoffs like Jordan, or with a broken hand like Kobe or played perfect fundamental basketball like Duncan.  It will be because he manufactured a championship with his friends.  It will be the most meaningless championship in the history of sports. And people will call it this.  And Lebron will hate them for it. 

Then of course we have the history factor on our side.  How well does being a complete douche bag usually work out in the long run when it comes to pop culture icons?  Britney Spears is still trying to stop eating hot dogs for breakfast lunch and dinner, Michael Jackson had to spend the last 20 years of his life being shot up with elephant tranquilizers in order to function, Lindsey Lohan is still trying to snort any powder she can find under her sink at the Betty Ford Clinic and Tiger Woods is not even a factor on the PGA tour and watched his entire family move to Sweden as a result.   So we, as Cleveland fans are going to have to learn to sacrifice short term joy for a long, entertaining, downfall of the hated one. 

So history always has the last laugh and it will with Lebron too. And part of me will be sad to see the downfall of a kid who has been called “The Chosen One” and “King James” since he was 15 years old.  Because the intelligent part of me will understand how someone like that never really had a chance to develop a normal logical brain.  I will “get” how compassion and the ability to be humble and a sense of personal responsibility could have never been harbored in the brain of a teenager who was given a Hummer on his 18^th birthday and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated before he graduated from High School. But I will still smile when it happens because I won’t care.   Because he earned every horrible thing that will ever happen to him.

Twister Anyone?

The weather has to be stopped.  Nothing else in the world manages to demonstrate to the human race just how feeble and powerless we really are.  We can invent things like IPad’s and International Space Stations, find planets rotating around distant stars, erect billion dollar structures that are visible from space but as soon as the wind kicks up or the ocean decides to create a bigger wave than normal, we all become ants on the driveway surrounded by kids with magnifying glasses.

I don’t believe that controlling the weather is impossible.  I think it would be hard.  I think we can do a lot of things to better protect ourselves in the meantime. I don’t think it would be a perfect science, but none are.  I liken the people who laugh at people who endorse weather control as morons.  Isn’t it at least worth a shot?  Or are we just supposed to sit around and watch Japan fall over into the Pacific and people in the Midwest float away in funnel clouds and people in the South have their homes flooded over and over and over again, on CNN, for the rest of our lives?   I would rather deal with something after I had exhausted every effort to eliminate it then just blindly deal with it. 

At some point we need to decide if this planet is ours or not and make some tough decisions.  Are the causes that we have our smartest people working on now really all that noble to begin with?   You can’t tell me we can’t pull a few people out of designing the next great phone or figuring out a new kind of pill that gives old dudes bigger hadrons and task them with applying their genius toward something that could save lives.  Currently we are not getting out in front of this problem; we are not doing ourselves any favors.

I also don’t want to hear a lot of noise about how car exhaust and aerosol cans of hair spray are to blame for the recent uptick in severe weather.  Whether it was a contributing factor or not is no longer the point.  The fact is, we needed all those things, we still do, they aren’t going away anytime soon, so we need to figure out how to survive on Earth with the shit we need.  We made this bed, so we minus well make it comfortable.

We already know that we can ionize clouds in order to weaken their strength.   We do it all the time with hurricanes that are scheduled to make landfall.  Why can’t we do this in the Midwest with storms that have a shot of producing tornados?   Now the meteorologists will likely say something like, they pop up too fast to possibly be able to react to them and ionize the clouds.  But this is my point exactly; let’s all just give up then and go back to designing our social networking websites until we all get sucked up into the sky. I will bet if someone offered a 1 billion dollar reward to anyone who figured out an affordable system to ionize cumulous clouds that have the potential to produce tornados in a timely manner, someone would figure it out in 10 years or less. 

This brings me to the issue of tidal waves.  There are presently over 200 laboratories around the world that do nothing all day except simulate tidal waves.  Yet whenever anyone asks them how it’s going over there, all we hear is “We still have a lot to learn about these waves”.   Well what the fuck?   How long is this going to take exactly?   Is there anything else we can do from our end?  You people have made the choice to study waves all day, every day so it’s time to figure it out. I’m no scientist but I am pretty sure a tidal wave is just the result of a metric shit ton of water all rushing ashore at the same time.  I also don’t think we will ever be able to stop the root cause (earthquakes under the sea floor), but how do we protect the coasts?  Is there anything we CAN do?  Or should we all just keep floating around in our cars, screaming for help every time one of these things blows in?  Every coastal city in the world, that has half a head full of sense, has some sort of 1920’s style break wall in place.  So they had to have had an idea back then about how to stop oceanic flooding.   Maybe we build them bigger?  Maybe we build them 20 times bigger?  Wouldn’t spending a couple billion on that pay itself off as soon as it worked once?  Or should we just keep flooding and melting down Nuclear Power Plants and causing trillions in damages for halves of entire countries? 

Hurricanes are an issue I think that we should have people working on stopping around the clock.  We generally get the same answers as we do with tidal waves; “There is still so much we don’t understand”.  Well that is just fine then, you just sit there and study then while we all drown. The damages that we endure from hurricanes could be made minimal by both of the aforementioned techniques.  First you ionize the shit out of the storms in order to weaken them; next you have your new massive break walls in place to eliminate the storm surge.  After all, the storm surge that hurricanes produce is the real killer.  That is what causes the most deaths and property damage. 

Finally, if you live somewhere that is at risk of real windy situations, such as hurricane force winds, tornadoes, down drafts, micro-bursts, dust storms etc… do yourself a favor and live in some sort of a structure that can withstand these things.  Let’s maybe stop putting trailer parks in Tornado Alley.  Let’s perhaps stop building New England style homes in New Orleans.  Let’s get something in place where the roof doesn’t rip off in winds any higher than 80 miles per hour.  Maybe put that thing on some stilts if you live in the French Quarter?

Let’s also build sections of our basements that don’t sit directly below our homes.  Just one room, built into a wall in our basement that is not directly under the house that is likely going to collapse and crush us in a tornado.  Maybe we look into mandating the same type of shatter proof glass that car windshields are made out of, for the houses that are at the highest risk of being hit by a twister? 

Then of course there is the education factor.  This is the favored approach by all sorts of people in law enforcement and meteorology.  The more people know how to react to various weather situations, the better prepared they are to react properly when they occur.  This is all well and good and I don’t want to sound like too much of a prick here but this idea puts entirely too much faith into current US population.  Can we please just face the inconvenient facts here?  Most of this country is thickly populated by a bunch of real dumb folks.  Most of these people cannot be sat down and taught things.  Even if those things could someday save their lives.  You kind of have to devise operational solutions for these sorts of people that will save their lives without them ever having to even put down their moonshine ladles or manage to get their tongues of their bus windows.  Basically you can’t expect most people to be able to do anything to help themselves.  You have to do it behind the scenes, on their behalf.  It is unfortunate, but it is what it is. 

The education approach is also quite flawed.  I remember in grade school where we had our “tornado drills” These drills consisted of all the students, walking out in the hallway and bending over with our hands on our heads.  Thank god a tornado never really happened because we would have probably been better off just trying to run away from it.  Then of course there was the ingenious nuclear bomb drill that consisted of us doing nothing but getting under our desks and closing our eyes.  Thanks teacher, I am sure this quarter inch piece of Formica above my head is all I am going to need to survive the thermo-nuclear explosion outside of the school window. 

Education is overrated. Education relies far too heavily on people ability to learn things and not having complete dipshits deciding what to teach them and how to teach it to them, too many variables.  Technology is a much cleaner solution.  We have a lot of smart people left, but they are going fast.  My suggestion would be to get them on the important jobs before it is too late for us all.