Taking a few days off to work on a few lingering projects. (Not fit for mentioning here!)
Let me leave you with something fun:
My son wanted to dress up as the BLUE Color monster for school…. Armed with the book, a crappy screen grab, some KT board and a utility blade I was able to do THIS.
How did I do?
…what if Bob Dylan was your friend.
… what if he had your telephone number and called you all hours of the day and night to try to help him understand the mundane aspects of life that you NEVER expect Bob Dylan to be connected to???
God – I’m shameless.
I’m a huge fan of something I call “Cultural Smash and Grab”. Just like breaking into a jewelry store (I’ve never done that!) I like to think that I’m smart enough to throw a brick through the window of some standing structure, reach in with my one good arm and grab something of value (to me).
My wish, if I were entitled to anymore wishes would be to make THREE movies (one wish???) … THREE MOVIES!
1) would be my 60 second love story movie. That’s the one I keep showing people and they keep telling me that it is the worst idea that they have ever seen in their entire lives. Harsh!
2) would be “Also Ran” – I shared that in a post a few months ago.
https://tothespannerborn.home.blog/2021/03/08/also-ran/
And 3
3) would be to remake “Tommy Boy”, the movie starring Chris Farley as a clumsy and unwitting hero character… but I’d want to remake it IN CHINA – with an all Chinese cast and pretty much the exact same plot line and script.
For now I’ll be content with my smaller ideas – lack of respect and humility and all.
As I have mentioned and you may have taken note of, I’m making some subtle stylistic changes. Don’t worry! Don’t worry: there are more crude and unusual jokes (I have about 50 of them that I am pretty much terrified of!).
This one takes a rough look at what it would be like to recast the ‘strong leading man’ type of role with a ‘vapist’. (Or are they vapers?)
That’s why you never hire a giant squid as your Chief Revenue Officer!
(Short post for Dragon Boat Festival.). Is that “The Mr Young” or “Them R Young”?
(And I get accused of poor branding!!!)
Sorry – I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. I’ve been busy doing stuff for other people (like what?) [Like – you don’t want to know!]
I HAVE been making new stuff but I’m not going to lie, I’m not just shaking them out of my sleeve at the moment.
So – submitted for your (dis)approval: an and stuck to the side of a rollercoaster. What would that be like for the ant?
… I do actually think about stuff like that.
Sorry – I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. I’ve been busy doing stuff for other people (like what?) [Like – you don’t want to know!]
I HAVE been making new stuff but I’m not going to lie, I’m not just shaking them out of my sleeve at the moment.
So – submitted for your (dis)approval: an and stuck to the side of a rollercoaster. What would that be like for the ant?
… I do actually think about stuff like that.
Behold – the cheap stock imagery. The vaguely altered purloined images… Mario is at it AGAIN!
Would Elvis ever wrestle Andre the Giant? IDK – how would we get Christopher Walken to referee?????
I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but probably the most terrifying words I read with any consistency are “UNRECOGNIZED PASSWORD”.
…all those apps and OS features designed to make keeping passwords safe and secure have one MAJOR flaw: they are merely idiot proof.
I am much, much more than an idiot.
The things that make me laugh are varied but all linked by the connective tissues of irony and/or plausibility/implausibility.
Could this happen?
If it can happen – how humiliating would it be for everyone I know to see it happen to me?
If it isn’t likely to happen is the pay-off (the humiliation factor) so great that it is worth pushing the envelop of statistical probability to try to reach the point where it IS likely to happen?
Is it ironic?
If it happened in front of people would they instinctively think that I deserve this kind of humiliation?
If it didn’t happen in front of people, would the think it so humiliating that they would either be willing to believe it happened because it would please them or at least pitch it up against my track record of humiliating myself publicly to think “…yeah – he really did do that…”?
I guess what I’m saying is that the thing that makes me laugh is humiliating myself. That explains a lot about the past 40 years.
The fundamental reason I’m not really happy as a person (as though I might ever be happy as a coffee table!) is that I’ve never been what I wanted to be.
I always saw myself as an artist. When I made friends who were artists they would point me in the other direction and tell me that I was more ‘suit’able for business. When I was in the corporate world people would recoil every time I said anything because I was too free spirited and unpredictable “you know… like an artist…” so that wasn’t ever destined to work out.
About 20 years ago I was really struggling. I couldn’t keep down a job. I was able to find jobs and get them – but some of them only worked out for a week or so… one only lasted for 2 days. I needed help! I went back to my old school to speak to a career counselor. There I took a test to see what my personality was like and to match me up with other people that I was most like and then to find out what careers they were most happy in.
My top three matches:
1) airline test pilot
2) a person who arranges displays of food
3) a musician or actor who performs on stage.
I can tell you that I do NOT like turbulence (I’ve been through some SHOCKING moments!)
I actually DO like presenting food and have taken part in designing and producing about a dozen parties that hosted multiple hundreds of people… that was cool… but I was paying for the parties and after a while THAT kind of sucked.
Not gonna lie – I’d love to be a musician. But there are only TWO things that keep me from it: lack of talent and lack of practice!
… so now I do THIS instead!
And this has happened to me.
But WHO CARES? It’s Friday!!! The week’s half over!
I’m old enough to remember people turning their nose up at Japanese cars… I’m also old enough to remember how the first few early adopters that I knew laughing at everyone else because they kept their cars for decades and hundreds of thousands of miles!
I’m worldly enough to have driven in Chinese made cars. People Stateside are probably very dismissive of Chinese cars. Chinese cars 15 years ago – yeah – dismiss them. They were junk. Chinese cars today??? Mmmmm I don’t know. Some of them are pretty nice. Point of fact – no one is going to bother to design a car with obsolete features and functions! If you’re making a car today, you make TODAY’S car.
I’m also very very lucky to know a bunch of people who design cars (as a kid the one thing I always talked about was designing cars! My much younger self would have been well chuffed to know that his older self would know folks who make cars!). These guys are very slick and very sophisticated.
….what does any of this have to do with long-term relationships?
I
D
K
I get messages from the beyond. It is always the same sort of thing: I ask “Am I doing the right thing?” And all I ever hear back is laughter.
Sometimes it feels like all my kitchen can produce with any consistency is STRESS! Stress sandwiches for lunch and dinner. Stress cakes for breakfast. Bacon and Stress on weekends. For a midnight snack I can sneak into the larder to spread a bit of stress on a pita bread.
I need to lay off all the stress.
I think I’m going to switch back to chocolate!
This has been one of my favorite jokes for the past 15 years. Of course – it doesn’t translate into text – it’s a spoken word jam at best.
I’d tell people “you remind me of the riddle of the ass!” …’ you mean “and the two bales of hay”…’ to which I would quickly and deftly reply. “NO – two halves and a hole (whole)!”
… look – I KNOW! I KNOW! I never said I was Noam Chomsky!
(Maybe ONCE I said I was ‘like’ Noam Chomsky…)
I was on the phone with a friend. He’s not a big believer in what I’m doing (that’s a scary proposition because HE is the dreamer and I am usually the practical one!)
This came to me while we were on the phone. He doesn’t know that this is out (not a lot of my friends (none really) ever look at these.)
…he couldn’t understand why a porpoise would be a peristalsis poster animal. I suggested that a penguin would be worse for hygiene reasons. Apparently he didn’t understand why peristalsis needed a spokesperson. That’s a valid point. I’ll get back to you on that later.
Sorry to go for the low hanging fruit, but HEY! I’m human and by that I mean lazy.
… and I’m certain that this sort of thing HAS happened before. (Ewwwwwwwwww!)
Relationships and how we see ourselves in relationships are another of science’s great mysteries. In an ideal setting both parties sense the gravity of the situation they are in and respond with parallel or at least symmetrical(ish) actions.
Sometimes however, things go south FAST!
You see a situation and try to find the easiest possible solution; your mate may decide to take a different tact.
For instance – the coffee pot is BROKEN (OH NO!).
Your solution is: go online and order a new pot… spring for overnight shipping.
Your partner may decide that the easiest solution is to move out and keep your record collection.
Oh well.
I don’t know about you (how could I?) but I’m constantly stuck in a paradox:
On one hand I try to exist HERE and NOW… in the moment.
On the other hand I have kids and I don’t always feel comfortable asking them to live in the Zen of life – so I plan things out.
To the best of my knowledge and my abilities I don’t feel comfortable making plans that go out beyond the shelf-life of green bananas. Oh well – I suppose to keep both sides of the ledger happy I’ll just let the $h!t hit the fan and then act ‘in the moment’ to see what I can do!
Wish me luck!
What if the soliloquy from “On The Waterfront” took place in 2020/2021 – via ZOOM?
Friday is spent ferrying between doctors; part of my neurotic drive for immortality (“you’ve got ‘Fatalistic Yoga‘ as a legacy! What more could you want???”)
I do in fact want more…
Now we are in the realms of the holistic and the natural -I’ll let you know how it goes in 12 years!
Read more
After yesterday’s rant about golf, I know it is possible for people to think I’m a ‘negative’ person. In actuality, I’m not. I’m actually a pretty cheerful person – yes – crappy things happen, but I usually find a way to find the humor in them or find creative solutions.
And I’m fully aware that crappy things happen to other people too. I don’t go around seeking pity.
So, today’s post is a good faith showing that I can be a ‘positive person’ from the outset.
Golf and people who play golf, or worse are GOOD golfers are not to be trusted: they have some deal with the devil that allows them to bask in the glory of the sport while their personal lives seem to cruise control from one success to another. (Hint: that’s how they have time to play the game!)
Their model of achievement in the universe can not be applied to people who are bogged down with changing diapers or building businesses.
(‘But people do business on golf courses!’)
People also do business at Starbucks! And I trust deals that are made over coffee (a fundamental building block of human life) over deals made obsessing about having “skill” as it pertains to knocking something that fits in the palm of your hand into a predetermined hole a mile away!
YOLO
FOMO
Acronyms that are supposed to describe how we feel/act towards things. Maybe it really is as simple as fear and greed? Throw in a dash of ignorance in the fear camp and a splash of arrogance in the greed crew.
What was the computer’s sage advice in that ancient movie with the kid who played games with a government computer : “the only way not to lose is to never play the game”
…how boring! And who likes hyper-moralistic computers anyway???
In case you couldn’t already tell, my weight is a constant source of interest for me. I keep a few different paper journals of my food intake and my moods and my weight (please note – I don’t take it very seriously because I don’t COMBINE THE THREE!)
One very telling post from the other day read: “I guess chocolate cake is NOT my secret weapon in the war against obesity!”
(Those are kilograms – not pounds! 😦
… and that’s why these glum, portly characters beset my thoughts.
In fairness to myself – I’m not actually that dumb.
(I’m DUBMER!)
More tests and more blood. I think I’ll ask if I’ll be able to play the violin after the blood draw!
So, here’s how this works.
I get home from taking my kids to school and having breakfast with my wife… I stare blankly at the walls.
Something funny comes into my mind. Normally I’d just giggle and go back to staring at the walls. Now, thanks to Fatalistic Yoga, I try to visualize that funny notion and make one of these crappy cartoons.
I use Canva – mostly because it is very, very easy. That’s a good thing because I’m not actually too smart – so the easier the better. I create “Volumes” every week and try to produce anywhere from 5 to 10 of these little ditties.
After I stare at these (as opposed to the wall) for a long enough period of time I export them and stick them in a folder.
Every few weeks I go through all of my published posts (like this that you’re looking at now) and all of the scheduled posts and try to create (if you can but believe it) a cohesive flow of images and words…
But I don’t just publish them all at once – no. I schedule them days and even weeks into the future. Monday through Friday at 5:55AM UTC they hit the world!
(what the hell is this madman talking about and WHY is he talking about it?)
What I’m trying to say is, as sad as this is going to sound, there was a moment in my life when the idea of a person with gastrointestinal problems talking to a Scottish doctor (with haggis on his mind) was extremely funny to me.
Now, months later, as I look at this I have to question my own standards.
FYI – if you have the need for a surgeon – go Scottish. It’s a long story… someday I’ll write about it. That will be one of my “The WORST day of the rest of your life” stories.
Sorry, no. Lowest Common Denominator.
Sometimes that’s the limit of my capabilities.
“I wish that I could really tell you all the things that happen to me, and all that I have seen.”
Realistically – the person who’s story I should tell is my wife’s. About how she met the man of her dreams and how he swept her off her feet with his charm and his romance and wit… how they fell in love and became inseparable (so far I haven’t actually lied yet!)
Then the $h!t hit the fan and she decided to get a job in a highly competitive and almost 99% exclusively male dominated industry and work to the point where she was acclaimed far and wide (still no lies)
But she doesn’t want her story told (in fairness, she’s still sketching out new chapters on a daily basis!) so you’re all stuck with MY lame-ass stories instead.
Fundamentally I would LOVE to be on YouTube… but what I would LOVE MORE is for someone else to do it for me. I’d script it out and block the scenes and do all that stuff… but I don’t actually want people to see me… or hear my voice.. or know who I am.
I need to find better hobbies.
“One day I’ll be famous. I’ll be proper and picky; go to St Richard so often that I’ll call it St. Ricky!”????
It doesn’t have the same lyrical appeal.
“They say I got brains – but they ain’t doin me no good (I wish they would)… I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.” Brian Wilson
It just seems tougher and tougher to get to ‘that place’ where everything works. So many things are in flux. Time is in flux. Chemicals in flux. Money in flux. Motivation is in flux. Aptitude is in flux. Enjoyment and dread are in flux.
I wonder if the pendulum ever finally sits still or if some other variable comes along to tilt the plane and put it all in flux again.
Oh flux it!
(EXPLETIVE DELETED)!!! The seal inside the washing machine is mouldy (I don’t even want to think about what the implications are for me underwear.)
The little hatch that releases the detergent packets into the dishwasher doesn’t open during the wash cycle. (Which explains the slow-building gut-wrenching pain that has me sidelined.)
And now the display on the microwave stops for part of the time and flickers for the rest. (I have been using a stop watch to time things that go in for a warm-up.)
Fortunately the gas range top still sparks-up and lights with not much fuss! Good’ole fire ; it hasn’t let us down since the year dot! (What’s the worst thing that can happen?)
🙄
Too many Minions in the house still… have to parse out my time better!
I hate it when I realize that huge chunks of my life have been spent under the sway of wild misapprehensions. But that seems to be the case more and more.
Star Wars was a great example of that forms. (Caveat – I’ve only seen the first movie (1977) two times. Once was in the theater in 1977 and the other was 3 years ago, also in a theater, but with a full orchestra performing the musical component…I’ve never seen any of the others – I don’t want to ruin the memory of the first one.). When I was 4 it was a story about two robots trapped inside someone else’s fight.
When I was a bit older – 10 – it was a sci-fi movie about intergalactic conflict.
Much later in life it morphed into a story about zen masters who were in touch with a way of seeing and understanding things that transcended what ‘regular’ people tap into on a daily basis… “The Force” was like a SAP track that gave an overlay of detail and nuance that enriched the thoughts of Jedi.
(Then later I tried to mix some of Star Wars and some of Carlos Castaneda to form a grand unified theory of introspection … I’ll get back to that at a later date.)
For now what I’ll say is: what if there were a whole additional layer of information / energy that was right in front of our noses that could tell us so much more about they how and why of the when and where of life… maybe it is there. Maybe we haven’t picked up the scent.
(All that from a move I saw 44 years ago !!)
One of the most disappointing things that I have to endure is life is when everything goes exactly the way I anticipate it will… but at the wrong time. It usually comes down to a simple misunderstanding; I wasn’t paying attention, so I didn’t realize now was not the ideal juncture in the conversation to: laugh,cry, scream, jump up out of my chair and hoot and holler.
Eventually I’ll ‘get that faculty together’ – to wait patiently and read the signs before turning off the highway.
This all started innocently enough. After 10-12 years of deep introspection (and complaining) someone told me that the solution to my problem was to just DO something. Do ANYTHING. Go for a walk. Go for a swim. Volunteer some time at a worthwhile cause that needs your help.
None of those things appealed to me so I decided to start converting some of the weird ideas milling around in my notebooks into these terrible comics.
In a way it doesn’t mean too much for me to say that I know, deep down, that they are not good. The ideas aren’t that bad – I get laughs with them IRL, but artwork is crap like you wouldn’t believe.
After I started compiling some of the hundreds of these little ditties it entered my mind that I could perhaps make more of it than just your standard ‘shouting into an empty room’ blogs that I’ve done before. This time it could be serious ‘… it could be a contender. It could BE somebody!’
… but that would require people like you and I don’t know how to find you. So I pay to place ads to attract clicks and readers (sometimes with hilarious effect! Not everyone is content to just ‘change the channel’ or ‘click elsewhere’. Some folks are really quite (ummmm) ANGRY? That I do this and that they see it.
For this – the last post in the month of April I want to make amends by saying “Sorry”.
Oh
BTW – starting in May I’m doubling down on a more coordinated attack through FB and IG to get even MORE people angry with me. Sorry for that too.
For those of you who actually click the “Like” button (there are a few of you!) I want you to know you’ve made a happy man VERY old. Thank you. If I hadn’t taken the ‘Price on Wilson’ I’d do something nice for each and every single one of you… well all three of you.
Drop me a line – this isn’t the product of a nameless/faceless corporation or sophisticated computer simulator. It’s just me, Mario.
One of my ‘Minions’ is home this week, so I haven’t got a ton of time. Let me look in the fridge and see what I can re-heat…
(That’s awful…)
(it even looks like crap…)
Call me weird but I don’t really mind giving blood or blood tests. That wasn’t always the case, and like a lot of other people I’ve found myself in some scenarios where it wasn’t really an option. In those ‘back to the wall’ moments you start to appreciate how (when we succumb to the red flashing “PANIC” signs in our minds) we can make more out of things than they really are.
That said – I’ve had a few blood tests that were pretty grizzly. Once a nurse didn’t want to put on a pair of rubber gloves to draw my blood. I indicated that it was NOT NORMAL to do that. She indicated to me that in her country it would be considered rude for her to wear gloves because it would insinuate that the patient was ‘dirty’… I was finally able to get her into a set of gloves and everything went just fine.
Another time I was flanked by a whole team of nurses who had no idea what they were doing. They couldn’t get a drop of blood out of either forearm or inner elbow… the most senior nurse among them came up with a rather ingenious (and by that I mean so utterly bizarre that looking back on it I can’t believe I actually agreed to play along!):
– I had to lay down on a gurney
– then they inserted the needle part into the top of my hand (that hurt!) and got me to
– flop my arm over the side of the gurney WHILE
– one nurse massaged the blood from my shoulder down to my elbow AND
– another nurse massaged the blood from my elbow down to my hand!
I only needed to give seven (7!!!!!) vials of blood that day!
Two weeks ago I needed to give another five vials of blood. The nurse told me to stop looking at the needle. I said “But I’m not scared of the needle!” That’s when she indicated to me that it made HER nervous!
I make it a point to rewatch a collection of Kubrick movies at least once a year. “The Shining”, “2001”, “Dr Strangelove”, (sometimes, but not always) “Barry Lyndon” and “Eyes Wide Shut”,
I don’t always watch them in conventional ways. For the last four or five years I’ve made it a point to sit down and ‘look at them’ with no sound. It allows me to focus on how each scene develops and how each frame of film is (well) framed. I look at all kinds of details and try to figure out if Mr. Kubrick did little things intentionally or benefited from the occasional fluke (like the arrangements of the cans and boxes in the storage room in “The Shining”… did he REALLY arrange all of those? I don’t know if he could/would. They say YES – he was totally committed to the smallest details… did he keep a journal or a record saying he did? If he did, I’d love to read it.)
Anyway – this is an adaptation of a scene from “Eyes Wide Shut”. It isn’t just a filthy movie – it is a visually fascinating movie too! What does it mean? I don’t know. Sometimes I’m close to figuring it out and then it goes. Then again I’m sure there have been moments while on long, long walks when I understood EXACTLY what “Tales From Topographic Oceans” by “YES” was supposed to be about… and that meaning too left my brain as soon as I got to where I was going at the time.
This isn’t funny at all. It isn’t really meant to be funny though. For some reason it popped into my head that if you write an a and an e with the correct font you could make an ambigram out of the term “eds spa”. That interested me.
I’m completely fascinated by palindromes and anagrams. I am constantly forming anagrams out of words I see written down or on signs and I’m always on the lookout for palindromes in car registrations, serial numbers on bank notes or any strings of numbers that I see. I have a spreadsheet that is constantly generating prime-number palindromes out of factors of one of the addresses in “The Untouchables” (I’m not making this up. I don’t have the creative bandwidth to fabricate something so bizarre and so boring.)
I’ll go back to dreaming up the plot to another story…
If your name is “Ed” and you run a spa, consider this for your logo. You can have it for free (just give me credit when people ask where you came up with it.)
So much of the social order has been turned on its head recently. Relationships with family and friends and even the relationship with school – not just the people or the classes but also the institution. To know you’ve taken part in something, that you’ve written your name and your chapter in a longer work…
…yeah – what if your school is using you? What if your school is the one friend that fishes for compliments? What if it was using you for money?
WHAT IF school didn’t really see you as a student and instead saw you as just a ‘friend’?
Just another way that life can twist around on the vine and rot instead of ripen.
Don’t laugh yet.
The last car I had was actually pretty nice. I got it as a consolation from a mechanic who blew-up my other car (that’s a long story and I’ll probably share it soon.)
Anyway – the transmission ‘failed’ one afternoon will getting on the highway. I took it to the guy who sold it to me. He scanned the door with his phone and told me to go to the manufacturer … “they won’t charge you!”
I went to the blue-oval company and they told me that they knew what the problem was. They would fix it in a day.
A day later I went back to collect the car and asked what they did to fix the car. In essence they changed the batteries! Something to do with an overly complicated transmission and a tired battery. Once the battery was changed ($317.00!) my free of charge service was complete.
Next time I’m going to try to reboot the car first.
BTW – for those of you who are interested – I’m also building a footprint on instagram. You can find me at (wait for it!) : Fatalistic_Yoga
Not very imaginative – I know.
To The Spanner Born 