one lonely success

the only thing i hate more than hearing people talk about how “hard” the Mac is to use is helping those same people do something on the mac…over the phone.

so i know that burt reynolds is a crazy plastic-surgery-freak, but those miller lite “man law” commercials are fuck funny.

if you’re a vegetarian/vegan, then new studies indicate that you’re 5x more likely to have twins–if you’re a woman of course. this is the first compelling reason i’ve ever heard to start downing meat…by the truckload.

next week at this time, i’ll be in miami beach staying at this rock-star hotel. can you believe they’re paying me to go?

these pages are thicker than most. but he can wait them out.

he can fill the air with blue smoke and lie still so that the night does not find him here.

alone.

it was the only way he could write.

listening to the melody that led him to her.

but to say that he sought her out would be unfair.

he didnt believe in destiny. but she was the antithesis.

it’s warmer now in his winter jacket. the one she picked out. the one he promised would take them on the trip she had longed to take.

but he still found excuses. still found ways of making their world a carbon copy of what he had grown up with, with what he had known.

i am so sorry for that.

the haze carries itself effortlessly in the late night draft, unaware of any greater purpose.

just
like
the
rest
of
us.

in the morning, she would giggle while lying in bed.

not too loudly.

just enough to wake him before the sun could pull him from sleep. it was her way of starting their day. her way of never wasting a minute that they would soon share.

they would watch as their little one ran into their bedroom, jumping up into the bed and insisting on attention.

without saying a word they both knew that this was their life.

theirs to live.

theirs to love.

theirs to lose.

“…the way i used to laugh with you was loud and hard.“

something has got to give with customer service.

as you may or may not know, i hate pseudo-corporate-sponsered-kindness. that is, when i walk into a store, i don’t care if i get greeted with an all too phoney “hello sir, how are you today?”

now, i’m all for please, thank you and other pleasantries, but i abhor scripted interest. i’ve got friends. i dont come here for friendship, i come here because you sell coffee for $6.

the second thing that has to change is the number of questions i get asked whenever i buy something at a retail store. for example, today i bought some of this stuff at the local mini mart. i was asked the following questions in the 30seconds i spent at the counter:

1. hello sir, how are you today?
2. did you find everything OK?
3. can i get you anything else?
4. do you have a frequent shopper card?
5. is that debit or credit?
6. is this total OK?
7. would you like cash back?
8. would you like a copy of your receipt?
9. would you like a bag?

ok, so i get that some of these questions are unavoidable but son of a bitch i’m just buying some tea! i dont need my hand held when i’m making a purchase. i’ve done this a million times before and i get how it’s supposed to work.

i remember when i was a kid my grandma always bitching about how cashier’s quit counting back her change the old-fashioned way. she would be so annoyed that they relied on the register and “trusted” the computer to do the math for her.

perhaps this customer service non-sense is my generation’s “counting back the change”.

god am i becoming a cranky old man or does this shit drive you nuts too?

I swear, newspaper subscriptions are the biggest scam.

so it goes like this:

i decide i’m too snotty for the local paper or for that rag the LA Times. this is remedied by subscribing to the New York Times (the nation’s premiere newspaper) and through the wonders of modern technology they deliver the nyt to my socal doorstep each morning.

this priviledge is afforded to me for the low cost of $25 per month. so when i sign-up they give me the super promo price for a month or so and then start charging me the regular $1 per day rate.

a few months go by and gas prices soar and i’m feeling the financial crunch. so i call the nice lady at the times to drop my subscription and she tells me how valuable i am to the times and offers me the same service for $10 per month…for like 6 months. this gets me all happy and i hang up feeling the pride that a nyt subscriber always feels.

then i realize…i’ve been paying the “sucker rate” for like 3 months when i could have had the damn thing for like half? wtf.
moral of this long drawn out story is that subscriptions are for suckers. if you’re paying more than fifty cents for that newspaper you’re getting fucked.

you’ve been warned…now if you’ll excuse me i have to go read my newspaper.

in case you haven’t laughed yet today, that crazy bastard Tom Cruise decided he would look cool if he went on BET…and danced like a white guy…a crazy whacked out scientology white guy, but a white guy nonetheless.

It seems these days that my life revolves around watching my favorite artists on NBC-variety-shows.

If you missed Pearl Jam on SNL, here’s video of their performance of “World-Wide Suicide”. If you can put up with Lindsey Lohan introducing the band, the rest kicks ass.