C'est Non Un Blog

I thought I was blessed. Yesterday I finally completely my Buffy collection, all 7 seasons.

Today, however, I went to Walmart to pick up Goldeneye: Rogue Agent and they had the X-Box version, and they had the Gamecube version, but alas, for some reason the Playstation 2 version never came in.

I put in A View to a Kill to cope.

Best line:

Grace Jones: What a view!

Christopher Walken: [after a second, as if he just realized what she said] …to a kill!

What? That didn’t even make sense. Well, no less than the Duran Duran theme song anyway. “We’ll dance, into the FIRE!”

It’s kind of funny all of this controversy the film Kinsky has created. I mean this movie is about a man who did sex research in the 50’s and came up with some shocking discoveries, like the fact that most people do masturbate (and don’t go blind), gay people aren’t crazy, and that most people don’t stick with just the missionary position. Absolutely shocking, I know. What’s probably more shocking is the fact that before he put out his research if you were to read the leading book on sex at the time and then actually try to complete the act, if you succeeded you probably read it wrong. I mean, what’s wrong with America today?

People are worried about this movie, but turn on the TV. Just about any show on television right now that doesn’t have the words “Seasame Street” in the title has sex in it somewhere. I mean, that’s the whole WB lineup right now. What about this whole Desperate Housewives fiasco? I missed the part where you could actually see something other than her bare back. Ooooo. It wasn’t exactly a repeat of the whole Janet Jackson thing. And I’m sorry, when was sex NOT a part of football? Show me a year when there wasn’t a sexy commercial during the Super Bowl and I’ll show you a year before football.

Oh, and then there is the whole Saving Private Ryan thing. This is where the whole religious conservative thing really gets me. In everything I’ve read, I haven’t heard one person complain about, oh, that scene where the guy’s arm gets blown off. No one objects to the blood, the violence. I mean this is one of the most powerful movies I’ve ever seen and where is the objection? In the fact that the work FUCK is said eight times? Pardon my French, but what the FUCK? FUBAR indeed.

At one point it was ruled that if fuck was used with a non-sexual meaning it was OK to say it on the air. Hence, when Bono said that Scorcese was “fucking brilliant” on the Golden Globes last year, it was OK. Fucking meant “really” or “very”, but come on, “really” and “very” are really very boring words. Fucking sounds so much better. Then Janet’s tits fell out and everything changed. Suddenly you can’t say Fuck again, because it just has too much of a connection with sex. I’m sorry, but if I’m being shot at I’m going to say fuck a lot, and I don’t imagine any of those times I’m really [or fucking, whichever you prefer] going to be thinking about sex. I’d like to think that Ryan was saved so that I could use the word fuck without being fined thousands of dollars.

You hear that the FCC now wants to control what’s on cable? Hell, fuckin’ no!

It’s all just crazy. All of this was just lead-up to my main topic, though, which is what I did this weekend. Since I’ve started working at Bose I’ve only had one weekend off, which was a sweet-ass weekend. First I went down to Bardtown to see Sara. We got lost trying to find the theater showing Shawn of the Dead, which turned out to be something extremely easy to find, we were just given extremely bad directions. We did catch the zombie goodness though, and had a great time wondering the mall like the consumer zombies we are. After heading back we went to Sara’s sisters art gallery opening set in some abandoned factory in Hudson. Totally not how I expect to be spending my evening, but it was a pretty awesome time.

The next day I picked up Clancy from the train station in Albany and we proceeded to (again) get lost trying to find a mall. Fun was had catching up and finding out about all of the stuff I never thankfully got to say I told you so to. I do miss talking to him, and it was really awesome to catch up, have a pint, eat a really great Angus burger, see a messed up Swedish film.

Anyway, again I’m off the point. So here’s the sweet part for all of you who actually read this far without your eyes glazing over and rolling into the back of your head. This weekend I actually had off, the second one since I started working at Bose. I was a little bummed that I had nothing planned and there is nothing worse than a wasted weekend. Thankfully good ol’ Harry and his birthday saved the day for me having a dull weekend.

So I went to my first strip club! That’s what Harry wanted to do, so God help us a whole bunch of us went. I think he was the only one really into the whole thing, although I teetered back and forth between being disgusted by the concept and actually really wanting to check it out. I mean the whole thing is just so surreal. First of all, this place we went to in Latham was no Bada Bing. There were no Playboy models walking around this joint. Instead, you remember that skinny skank from your high school? Yeah, she’s the type of girl that works at a strip club.

Maybe I’m just not the type of guy that gets turned on by this sort of thing. Well, I’m definitely not the type of guy who gets turned on by this sort of thing. There wasn’t a single point in the evening that I was actually “turned on.” It was fun though. I don’t know, there was just something inherently wrong in it that made it enjoyable after you got over the fact that you were putting your hard earned money in a g-string of a girl who was doing something anywhere but in a strip club you would call her a whore for. None of these girls had a very big rack, and the lighting was so low half the time you didn’t notice when a girl lost her underwear. That’s probably a good thing though. Some of them definitely benefited from that lack of light.

I was more interested in the whole thing on a more sociological level. I was just as interested in the kinds of people who went to a strip club. Like the lonely (aka creepy) old man. The flamboyant loser throwing his money around. At one point this guy came in with three girls, one normal looking and three hideously obese. They didn’t stay long. The whole thing was kind of weird. When a stripper came over and asked me if I wanted a lap dance what I really wanted was to ask how she got there. Bad home life? Poor self esteem? Lack of money? Really poor guidance counselor? I mean as a writer this stuff is golden. Instead I let the poor girl grind her ass in my lap, because heaven forbid you refuse enough, they throw you out. The whole thing is comical. A girl you never met before walks up to you and asks you if you want a lap dance. It doesn’t matter what you look like or how much money you make or how funny your jokes are. She’s asked everyone. So you say yes, because what else can you say? Some do a decent job, some can’t hide their lack of interest, some are so into it that their tactics can be considered brutal. I got a good laugh watching a friend coming back from some private couch time, looking like a cowboy after a long haul.

What was really funny though was that after we decided to leave and walked out into the parking lot, we noticed the strip club was stationed right next to the Latham Meat Market. I can only imagine the poor sap that would get confused and enter the wrong building….

I had this little scare the last couple days where I thought I was going blind. Ugh. Let me explain: I’m driving home a couple nights ago and I’m having some real problems focusing on the road. I figure I’m just blinking a lot because my heater doesn’t pump out hot air, just the driest air ever experienced by man. And it all goes to your eyes. Don’t ask me why. My car is a piece of shit. I threaten my cassette deck on a near daily basis.

But back to my eyes. OK, the next day I’m at work and my right eye is really bothering me. I’m blinking a lot. Something is obscuring my vision. I figure, well, I’m not really the best about cleaning my glasses, maybe they’re dirty? I clean them, that doesn’t help. The drive home that night is really bad. I can barely see the road. Everything’s blurry. I count myself lucky I got home alive.

The next day I feel like I got wasted the night before and I’m still hung over, just without, you know, the hung over or partying part. My right eye feels spotty, like there is something in my eye, but I can’t find it. There’s a pressure on the top of my eye and at times I feel like I’m going cross-eyed, because my lack of focusing seems to be coming from the fact that my right eye feels like it keeps wanting to move inward.

I’ll tell you folks, the power of denial is a powerful thing. Instead of say, oh, scheduling an appointment at the eye doctor ASAP I decide to ride it out, because you know, it’s not that bad. Probably my biggest fear in the world is probably going blind, by the way. I don’t want to know that anything is wrong with me. At all.

It seems that luck might be with me, though. Today my eye wasn’t that bad. It’s felt kind of sticky or gluey, like there’s not enough moisture in there. And I think that’s the problem. Either I’m dehydrated or I have some sort of eye infection or something. Whatever it is, it looks like it’s going away. And I’m glad.

—–

I can be a smart-ass sometimes. I admit it. I think our new guy at work really enjoys how I work with customers though. He tends to really enjoy that tone I get when I know I’m working with some dumbasses. Take for instance the crackpot we got in today. Woman comes in the door asking if we have the CD radio in black rebuilt. We actually did get the Wave CD/radio in black Factory Renewed on the truck today, so I point her in that direction. “OK, I want to hear the black one.” John is standing right next to the white Wave CD on display, so I direct her towards him. “He’ll play something for you.”

“I want to hear the black one.”

This is where my personality really shines. “I don’t think color really changes how something sounds.” You should have just heard how I said it. The clear implication for everyone involved was that the word “DUMBASS” should have ended that sentence. It was pretty funny though. I won’t bore you with the rest of the story, but let’s just say that God knows what this woman was looking for–it certainly wasn’t the Wave CD.

What kills me is how people don’t listen. They just don’t think. You tell someone something in the clearest language you can muster, and five seconds later they are asking you a question you just freakin’ answered. I had this guy who came in yesterday who I know I talked to before. He bought these little shit box speakers for his bar because they were small and he could hide them out of the way, and surprise, surprise, they don’t sound very full. Well, no shit. You want a bigger sound you’re going to have to buy something BIGGER. People just want the impossible, it’s amazing. We make the smallest speakers on the market, and people want to know why they aren’t smaller. It kills me. What really got me about this guy though was that since I know I worked with him I KNOW I didn’t recommend he got the shit box speakers. Because I HATE them. I try to push people away from them like cops do onlookers at a crime scene. Nothing to see here folks. I so wanted to scream out I TOLD YOU SO! Can’t really gloat in front of the customer though. Bad, bad, bad.

Well, all hope died today. A dream of a world where the world doesn’t hate America is gone. I don’t mean to be over dramatic, but what we are seeing right now is history. It’s the beginning of the end. How often do you get to see the beginning of how an Empire falls? It’s not going to fall right now or anytime soon for that matter. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t fall in a day either. But the decay has begun. We are witness to it. We get to see history in the making. Isn’t that cool?

I celebrated our impending doom by putting in the happiest, most optimistic movie I could find: Schindler’s List. Not bad. I don’t feel so depressed anymore. I wanted to breakdown and cry or vomit or something, but that was so much better than where things were going.

Of course after that I put in my O.C. DVDs. Nothing like watching messed up rich kids to make you forget about your problems with messed up rich kids.

I guess we have one thing to look forward to. Traditionally when things get bad, art gets great. Expect lots of great movies and music for the next 4 years!

Sorry I haven’t written in a while. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to write, I just never had the time or energy. I kept mental notes and such, but never typed them out. And I realize people want to see more. For a while there I thought like two people read this thing. Lately it’s been more like, well, everyone. Which is cool. I’ve got to dish out the dirt though to keep you people happy.

Some lessons I’ve learned lately at the movie theater: Do not ever assume that the best time to watch a kids’ movie is at the matinee on a school day. There are a lot of bad parents out there. I was shocked to find that on a Thursday afternoon there were more families in the movie theater than on most weekends. No wonder this country is going down the crapper.

At the movie I saw last night there was a trailer for the new Bridget Jones movie. At the conclusion of the trailer I heard an old guy behind me say, “huh, she’s gotten heavy.” I didn’t know if I wanted to burst out laughing to the confusion of everyone around me, or to turn around and point out what an idiot this guy was.

What’s the etiquette for making out in a movie theater? When I saw Friday Night Lights one of the kids who works at the theater (I recognized him because he took my ticket the night before) was there with his girlfriend and sat on the other side of the aisle in front of me. We were the only people in the theater. These kids couldn’t be more than 17, and it was pretty funny to watch this courting ritual in action. An annoying peck here and there. The thing was, they obviously weren’t here for the movie. Which is cool. If you need a place to make out, a theater is as good a place as any. But dear Lord, I don’t need to watch that when I paid for this (and you probably didn’t). What ever happened to that time when you took a girl to the back of the theater for making out? Luckily they left a half-hour in. I still can’t figure out if that was because they were going to get more serious or if it was game 7 of the playoffs for the Red Sox.

New…updates…coming…soon…

Free…time…so…close….at…….hand……………

We do a surround sound demonstration in our theater at Bose, and before we start the show we usually hand out ballets to win our top of the line system while gathering more people for the show. I’ve had people refuse to fill out a ticket before because they didn’t want to get on the Bose mailing list. I can understand that. Today though I had a weird one. A man refused to fill out the ticket because, “it goes against our beliefs to gamble.”

This baffled me and led me on an interesting train of thought. I mean, is entering a free drawing really playing a game of chance? You aren’t betting anything. There’s nothing to lose. I don’t think anyone has ever gone to gambler’s anonymous for entering too many sweepstakes. So is that gambling? If so, what’s the definition of gambling? Isn’t everything gambling? I mean I wake up every morning and play a game of chance that I won’t get hit by a bus on the way to work today. Life is one big game of chance. Everything is just one coincidence connected by accident. We put those events together and then make sense of them. Because, let’s face it, if we don’t make sense of things, we go mad.

Of course I don’t think this guy takes more my scientific stance on life with him. He probably thinks everything is predetermined by God or something. But then wouldn’t God predetermine if you’ve won a new Lifestyle system or not? I’m so confused. Someone has got to explain the whole gambling is bad thing to me.

Of all the idiot drivers out there in the world (and yes, there are too many to count) the one’s I most want to kill are the “same speed” drivers. Who are they, you say? You know who they are. They’re the ones you’re stuck behind in the 55 going 40. But then you enter one of those 20 mph school zones and these assholes are still going, you guessed it, 40 mph. It’s like their cruise control just got permanently stuck on 40, but they just keep driving anyway.

OK, this is kind of cool. A new survey conducted found that viewers of the Daily Show are actually better informed about the coming presidencial election than watchers of major network news shows and readers of newspapers. Take that Fox News!

Wise words from the Apprentice’s Stacy J.:

“OK, I’m not crazy. Crazy people kill people, they blow up buildings, they don’t pay their taxes. I pay my taxes. I’m not crazy.”

I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but you get the general idea.