The weirdest piercing I’ve seen all day (which is pretty easy to do, considering I’ve only been in my apartment and office today, so I’ve only seen ears pierced so far…):
Archive for December, 2007
When I was growing up, my hometown paper printed letters to Santa that kids had sent in. I loved reading the atrocious spelling and bad grammar of these letters, so imagine my delight when the Dallas Morning News recently featured a smattering of letters to Santa. Most were asking for Wiis or Webkins (I have no fucking idea what these are) or American Girl dolls (ugh). One letter, however, caught my eye, and I scanned it to share with everyone:
I found this pic on the online version of my hometown’s newspaper, the Tyler Morning Telegraph:
These women seem awfully happy to work at the obituary desk; as if they revel in the deaths of others.
So OrneryGirl over at So Fucking What? mentioned me in a post on her website, acknowledging the shout out that I gave her last week, which led me to read a post in which she lamented the fact that she lives in an apartment complex with a courtyard, which has led me to re-acknowledge her and share my experiences on the subject.
Back in the day (which wasn’t, despite Dane Cook’s insistence, a Wednesday, but was rather a really shitty Monday), when I first started this website, I lived in a stylish, exclusive loft in Plano. This particular loft faced the building’s courtyard, along with probably 50-60 other units and the building itself was four stories tall, so every little sound echoed and reverbrated throughout the courtyard. The first thing I noticed, not too soon after moving in, was the the waterfall that flowed into the pool was annoyingly noisy. It was constantly dribbling into the pool, sounding like an old man taking a piss. It never fucking stopped. After a couple of weeks, however, I grew to ignore it. And I was content. Sure, I was paying like $1000 for a 600 square foot place to live, but it was on the rail line, with a station on site and everything.
Then the weather turned a bit more hospitable, and people started opening their bedroom windows at night. I followed suit…why pay for A/C when nature provides it, even when, in Texas, it only provides it for about a month? Then I started hearing noises. Fucking noises.
Every night, I could hear couples going at it. Moans. Groans. Heaving breathing. Grunts. Orgasmic squeals. I’m pretty sure I even heard the bottom half of one of the gay couples say “yeah, that’s right, fuck me in my ‘man-pussy’”. And no one, save for me, seemed to care. Surely others could hear these same things, right? But did they close their windows? No. I, of course, when having a lady friend over for some lovin’, would always make sure the windows were closed. But no one else seemed to.
Did it bother me?
Yeah it did.
Did I close my windows so I wouldn’t have to hear it?
Oh hell no. My voyeuristic side had an outlet. I found myself taking a weird comfort in hearing people going at it. I didn’t get off on it, if that’s what you’re thinking…I just found it to be interesting. The “thrust-speed” variations. The different orgasmic vocalizations. The relative MSQs (Mattress Squeakiness Quotients) of the different bedroom sets.
This went on for about six weeks, before it got too cold to keep the windows open. But then Spring rolled around and people were back at it, sharing their fuck noises with the world.
And once again, I was intrigued.
At least, to our friends in the Commonwealth. Here in the States, it’s just December 26th, the day when we take back all the crap that we got for Christmas that we didn’t want in the first place. Like those embroidered socks. Or that personal grooming kit (really, mom…I don’t ever want to associate a gift that you gave me with my “manscaping”.
Boxing Day. I can’t get that phrase out of my head. I think it’s because it has such a cool-sounding name. Growing up, when I first heard it mentioned on some BBC import on PBS, I got visions of people taking a day off to fight each other in a ring. Imagine my chagrin when I found out that that’s not what Boxing Day is about. Though I imagine that Don King would find a boxing-related holiday to be simple scrumdiferious in its magnidifness. Or something like that.
So, I went to my mother’s place in the east Texas “City” of Tyler, where, despite being what the great Neal Pollock once called “A World Capital of Barbeque”, I’ve never actually had that great of barbeque-related meal, for Christmas. Despite her pleas to come over Friday after work or early Saturday morning, I was able to hold off going until Sunday…thank you Volkswagen. And why am I thanking VW? Well, if they hadn’t built me such a problem-plagued car, I might have never had the check engine light come on Saturday, then spent the day wandering around the Lemmon Avenue/Inwood Road area (or “scarea”, as this part of Dallas is odd in that there is a VW dealership, a Maserati/Bentley/Rolls Royce dealership and an Aston Martin dealership all right next to each other surrounded by a barrio of pawn shops, questionable bars and rundown low-income apartments) while my car was fixed at Park Cities VW. The weird part about that whole experience was that the mechanic that worked on my car was a fairly-attractive Indian (the dot-head kind, not the “highly-susceptible to the diseases of the pale-face kind”) girl. (By “fairly-attactiven Indian girl”, I mean it didn’t seem like she had too much body hair). After four hours, she got my car fixed, which I appreciate, because the alternative, as she described to me, was “you could be going down the freeway and the engine could just shut off”. Not something I wanted to deal with. Of course, if that had happened, and my GTI were wrecked, I probably could blame VW and get a new Touareg out of it.
So, finally on Sunday I made it to Tyler. I was kind of peckish when I arrived, so I talked my mother into getting some lunch before taking her for some last-minute shopping. Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, I always get bad service when I go out, and this was no exception. We went to a small deli called Sam’s Deli, where I immediately sense something was amiss when we asked for a non-smoking table and the hostess said “I’m too busy to clean off a non-smoking table, so you’ll just have to sit in the smoking section”. WTF? Don’t you have bus boys? Or bus girls? Not wanting to venture out elsewhere, we settled on sitting in the smoking section. Then, as soon as we were shown to our table (remember, we haven’t even sat down or perused the menu yet), the waitress appeared and asked us if we knew what we wanted to eat. My mother and I were both incredulous as we replied “umm…no”. So this apparently angered the waitress, who then didn’t come back for ages, giving us more than enough time to read the menu. I settled on an “1/2 Overstuffed Turkey Sandwich with a Salad”. When the waitress finally came back to take our orders, she didn’t actually know how to take the orders. When I said I wanted mayo on my sandwich and my mother said she wanted mustard, the waitress said “they just make them dry…I’ll get your condiment orders after I bring your food”. What the shit? Is it that hard to write down what we want? Also, I shouldn’t be served food that’s no ready to eat–I shouldn’t have to wait further after receiving my food to get other stuff to make it suitable to my palate.
Like I said, I get bad service when I eat out (there’s an oral sex joke in there somewhere). It’s my albatross. My lot in life. My own private hell. Also, Sam’s Deli’s concept of “Overstuffed” is not the same as mine…the only person who might consider that sandwich I had to be “overstuffed” would’ve been one of those African kids with the distended belly and swarm of flies hovering about that Eighties music and movie stars were so concerned with helping so that they’d feel better about themselves and their coke habits.
So, there was the first part of my weekend. Lame, I know. I’d try to write about the rest of it, but it didn’t really get that much more fabulous, so here it is in a nutshell: drinks with Holly, last-minute shopping, gift exchange, nasty pomegranate martinis, playing with my nephew and his overly-obnoxious noise-making toys, driving back to Dallas.
Which brings us back to Boxing Day. I’m at work. It’s a slow day. So I’m blogging. The circle of lameness is complete.
Jeezy Creezy, I’m a loser. Or at least I feel that way sometimes, especially when it comes to this blog. And my update frequency.
But enough whining. I celebrated another birthday this last weekend. I’m officially old. There’s no way around it. I’ve started getting an occasional grey hair in my goatee, which means it’s time to invest in some Grecian Formula or Just For Men, because I’m not the type of guy that goes grey with distinction. But I am the type of guy that thinks puddin’ is delicious (or maybe that was LL Cool J…I’m getting senile in my old age). Luckily, no need for Viagra yet (of course, I presently don’t have anyone to share this wonderfulness with, but at least I get a reminder every morning).
I took last week off from work and, frankly, most of the world. I had forty glorious hours of vacation saved up, so I spent the week watching TV, drinking beer and buying expensive tires for the RiflemanMobile 3.0. Oh, and I got my Xmas shopping done.
Anyhow, while I may not update this blog very often anymore, I do occasionally update the Moblog and I haven’t missed a day yet over at my photoblog, LeftyRodriguez.Com, so you can check those out. Also, a mystery blogger (I wonder who it is…) has linked to SSW on her blog and has sent a fair amount of traffic this way, so check out her place at So Fucking What?.
People are always asking me “Rifleman, what’s wrong with America?” to which I reply…uh…actually, I’ve never been asked that question. But I have an idea of what type of people are contributing to the social-ills of this country…people like the person that wrote this letter to Dear Abby, which appeared in Wednesday’s paper:
