Cell Phone Camera

Hell DOES Freeze Over...

After sitting in the can for over a year...

It's done.

The long-awaited Part 4 to the Uncle Freddy Pilot is completed. You can listen to it

here.

I won't bore you with the details of how it got done. I will say this, though: Thank you, computer geeks everywhere, for inventing USB ports and flash drives. And thank the universe they can cross platforms.

Anyhoo, enjoy. Let me know what you think, good or bad. There's only one part left. I'm hoping to get it out before the decade's over.

Novel Progressions

Let's get back to business...

I've been working hard, reading volumes of journals, scouring through pages of utter prepubescent bullcrap, reliving packed-away events and emotions avowed never to be reopened in perpetua, transcribing the creme of the crop of literary genius spewed forth from my brain into pure art and I've come up with

13 poems
14 essays/stories (of which all will not be used)
4 monologues

Put them all together and you got yourself a booklet. Yeah, buddy.

So what I need now is a printer. Not a printer like a computer peripheral but as in a printing house. Sure, I could Kinko's it but I'd like a production level a couple steps above a manga zine. Anybody out there help a brother out?

Sis -- I know you mentioned knowing someone in AMUN who I can talk to. I'll hit you up for info when you're in town this weekend.

Everyone else: If'n you got any advice, now's the time to speak up.

Thanks in advance.

Something Incredible Is Gonna Happen Today

Why, you ask?
Because.

Incredible things happen every day, every single day. Little miracles unfold in front of us all the time. Sometimes they happen to us, sometimes we are meant to witness them. Thing is, we're usually too busy or preoccupied with everyday life that we miss them. All the time. We're too focused on how much our job sucks, or how we haven't had a girlfriend in 10 months, or how we stopped chasing our dreams and left them by the side of the road miles ago. In reality, though, all that doesn't matter. Even the shittiest of days has at least one bright spark of wonder grace us with its presence. In fact, the shittier the day you have, the brighter that spark's gonna be. So be ready. Could be right as you wake up, could be right before you go to bed, or it could be lost somewhere in-between. You gotta be prepared for it. If you head into your day knowing it won't be anything but crap, all you're gonna see is crap. But if you want to see something truly amazing, you increase your chances to experience it exponentially. Lose your inhibitions, drop your expectations, and just know that it will happen.

Don't miss it.

I can see you

New Jersey, why do you keep knocking on my door?
I don't know anyone from Jersey, at least not personally.
At least, I thought so.
But now, you check out this site more than I do.
I'm flattered, really, but c'mon, Mt. Laurel, who are you? Are you a spammer?
I'd like to know.

Same for Jasper, Indiana. Don't know anyone from there, but all of a sudden you're keeping pace with Mt. Laurel there.
Are you a spammer?

Plenty of people from other countries. Canada, of course. Got Vancouver representin'. But Quebec and Nova Scotia? Cool. Alberta I can understand just because I'm a big Fubar fan and have been spreading the Word of Terry and Dean for years. Five other countries been callin' as well. France, Sweden, and Singapore (!) must've made a wrong turn at Alberqueque. I had family in Australia, so that's a gimme (Welcome home, Ms. Aimless). Spain came to call, and came back for more. :)

Arlington Heights, IL and Milwaukee... wazzup! You mah homies. We blood, what? Same goes to Houston, TX and Phoenix, AZ. Got some contact from an old friend by way of Plano, TX. Thanks, I missed you. And a BIG tip of my top hat to Cville, Virginia (Heeeeeeeyyyy!), Seattle, NOLA, and to all the Masons in the DC area.

And then there's this one dude (and I know it's a dude without the -ette 'cause,... well, let's call it a hunch) who's a complete mystery. Motherfucker's orbiting Uranus in a flying saucer or something. Freaky yet curious.


Are you a spammer?

Lionizing Each Other

I was pimped out in a blog written by a dear friend of mine from back when I lived in Iowa. Ms. Jen King, proprietor of scrambledaches.com, gave me a sweet little shout-out, and my only recourse is to put her up on a pedestal and fawn a bit.

Ms. Jen has undergone many changes since we first met each other working overnight shifts on the psych ward. She was addicted to "Jane" magazine, Matchbox 20, and deep stimulating conversation. She's a girl who can discuss Fight Club and Roe v. Wade with equal respect and wide-eyed drools. You can see how we got along so famously. While I left Iowa to go heal in Chicago, she stayed behind to keep the patients and await her impending marriage. Since then she's always seemed to be one step ahead of me. She's lived all over the Midwest and even moved to Canada before I did, living in Ontario with her Canadian artist husband. She's also got her book deal squared away eons before I considered self-publishing as a possibility. Since I've met her she has since lived in Ireland (as a scholarship-laden writing student at Trinity College, something I just learned about her), come out, redeclared herself for women's rights, returned to working in a hospital in Iowa, and writes all about her roller-coaster life with impeccable skill and heartbreaking wit.

You like me? You'll love her.


Thanks, Jen.
Scrambledaches.com. Give it a spin.

Everything she writes about me is true.

Locked Out

You have me to blame for the blog being restricted.

So, I came in to work last week Monday (25/June/07) and my boss wasn't in. Got into the office ready to do my morning routine: Make coffee, print up yesterday's numbers, collect faxes,... y'know, the usual. However, nothing gets done until I log on the computer, set up my Radio Stream, and check my e-mail. Priorities, of course. My computer was already on and logged up as it is wont to do from time to time. I shut down my computer every night but because there is no locked door on my "office" it tends to get used and misued, especially on the weekends. One time someone used my computer to register for a Passport. I used to get up at arms about it. Now I really don't care.

So the computer's already up and I'm hitting all my usual sites. Problem is, the web browser is not registering them as it usually does. Internet Explorer has this great function where you start typing an address in the Go box and a pop-down window appears with all the websites this computer has been to which closely match what you're typing. This time my computer was reacting like I was typing Chinese. Checked my blogs, same thing. Then I took the time to realize that the Desktop was completely different. I write a lot of office documents which I have either collected sparsely around the screen or, when I'm feeling guilty and orderly, placed in folders. This time the desktop was considerably less cluttered. A whole lot of head-scratching came into play until I went to the Start Menu to look up another document and saw that it wasn't me who was logged in to this computer. It was my boss. He apparently had been on my computer over the weekend, doing whatever, and didn't shut down at all. All of a sudden my heart went into my throat. I had been doing such a good job of keeping my Blue Man Group escapades out of Saks Fifth Avenue and strictly on my blog that now I felt there was a breach of security. Had he read my blog? Will he read my blog? Now that I just typed in all the frickin' addresses, including to the new one which barely anyone knows about, he's got everything he needs to just peer into my vast secrets. One of the entries on the new blog has me writing about my plans to phase Saks out of my life. He doesn't need to be reading that. So I freaked out. That night at home I tried to figure out a solution. How can I keep my boss from finding out all this stuff? Checked all the settings that this new blog has to offer (and there are quite a lot, believe you me), and found the easiest answer: Allow the blog to only be read by the author. So that's how I've kept it. It's nothing personal. I just wanted to keep my job.

Interesting postscript to that story: That Tuesday my boss ran out the store to catch his train and asked me to shut his computer down. First time that ever happened. I scoured his browser history to try and erase the addresses, but they never came up. Whatever I typed on my computer didn't register completely on his account. So, I don't think he actually read anything. I think it was all really in my head and I overreacted. Thing is, if he (or anyone in the store, for that matter) wanted to look me up online I'm not too hard to find. And he would've slipped something into conversation by now, which he hasn't. I even mentioned my being a Blue Man for Hallowe'en last year and he didn't bat an eyebrow.

And people tell me I think too much...