Boy, I sure don’t like the government. I simply go about my business, I don’t harm anyone, and suddenly the man penalizes me with 40 hours of community service. On top of that the man made me pay a $700 fine and sign up for a $450 class. Well you know what, I hate the man. Just keep it up Uncle Sam, see what happens.

This isn’t the first time I’ve run into this. In 2007 I encountered the same stroke of bad luck, which is all it really is, and I had to put in 50 hours at McInnis Park. There I mostly spent my time weeding and listening to a park ranger, I’ll just call him Gus, talk about his crumbling marriage. Gus was a nice man, but he was very depressed. And I don’t blame him, his job consisted mainly of telling 14 year olds to wear a goddamn helmet, clearing away dead animals from the park roads and changing out the large duffle bags of dog shit from waste bins all over Hamilton and Marinwood.

I realized there how some people just fall into a routine of pure, unadulterated pain. When you have to juggle a shitty job and a bad marriage, things get pretty hairy. They get pretty sticky. You no longer have much optimism about the next day. If one day you try to lift out that giant and heavy duffle bag and the bottom splits open, spilling dog shit all over the place, that’s just the way it goes, and you have to just sweep it up and try to soldier on.

This time I was given a long list of organizations I could work at, but just about every position had been filled. Eventually I came across McInnis Park, who told me I could come by anytime. So I’m back there. I haven’t seen Gus though. I hope he’s OK.

So now I spend a lot of my free time picking up garbage. I walk around that park with a bucket and trash grabber scanning for anything that isn’t natural; much like the Terminator would if he were picking up trash. This is challenging in many ways. Some things look un-natural, but are in fact natural. These things include, but are not limited to, dead snail shells and tiny white twigs. Cigarette butts are the most common item I pick up, but I also find a lot of plastic straws, as well as gum wrappers, bottle caps, receipts and soda-can tabs. Sometimes I’ll find a giant mess of trash somewhere, and that’s pretty exciting. The picnic benches are a gold mine. Once in a while I’ll see a shattered beer bottle and get a little overwhelmed by the chaos of it. I once found a half full bag of Ritz crackers, and when I tried to pick it up all of the crackers fell out. I had to walk away from that mess. It was just too much chaos to handle.

I try my best to avoid work while I’m there. I look for spots to sit down that are out of view and sometimes I’ll hide out in the bathrooms so I can surf the web in peace, but I can’t stay long because it smells like shit in there. I traced the source of that smell to one particular stall. The chaos was simply unbelievable.

I think a lot about the long life cycle of trash. How that thin slice of plastic originally came into existence and ended up the way it did, to be eventually picked up by my trash grabber and dropped into that awful bucket. Where will it go from there? The world is very complicated.

On Thursdays they have soccer games at the park, and the next day there’s trash all over the field. I can’t help but wonder how this happens. I mean, the trash is everywhere, man. Do they kick their penalty shots using giant open bags of Doritos? Do they use Skittles wrappers instead of red cards and then discard them in the air, again and again, and then spin around in circles like Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music? Or maybe they all snort amphetamines and turn over huge barrels of garbage, spreading the trash everywhere before having one giant, drugged up three hour long orgy right in the middle of the field. 

As I pick up the trash and ponder these questions I often catch myself zoning out, staring at the happy families playing Frisbee together. The parents give me dirty looks, but I don’t care what they think. None of it matters much in the grand scheme of things. We’re all just insignificant specs of dust floating in a vast and incomprehensible abyss of chaos, plus society and culture are slowly beginning to crumble.

These past few days I’ve been listening to Warren G’s 1994 album, Regulators: G Funk Era. It’s good.

There are so many people everywhere. They just don’t quit. They’re constantly forming lines and taking all the good stuff. I tried to order chicken at Safeway yesterday, but I couldn’t. There were too many people ordering chicken, and by the time it got to me they were all out of chicken. These days it feels like if you want fried chicken at Safeway you have to just send in a request and wait a few days.

I’m trying to quit smoking again. It’s very hard. Last week while driving to work I decided to throw my pack out the window. But two hours later I drove up and down Main Gate Road at five miles an hour looking for the pack, and I finally found it, and it was exciting and beautiful. Some people might call this addiction, but I call it passion. There are certain aspects of life that you simply have to play by ear, and a lot of people just don’t understand this. The other day Ben Russo asked me “Ryan, why did you start smoking again if you were just going to quit again later? I don’t understand.” 

The man doesn’t have a clue, and his blog is of very poor quality. It is like steamed asparagus garnished with a giant pile of crap.

For the last few weeks I’ve been watching a string of terrible Buddy Cop movies. I have no interest in traveling abroad, yet I can’t imagine living my whole life without understanding what Dragnet is all about. I downloaded the Lethal Weapon Quadrilogy and watched them all. They’re all bad, but the second one is the best. Out of all the films in the series, Lethal Weapon 2 provides the most unique insights on the human condition. The change in style from the first film to the second represents a major shift in the underhanded values expressed in most action movies from the mid-80s to the early 90s. You know what I’m talking about.

I always try to place some degree of reality on movies like these. I try to think about how the character’s lives might play out years after the film takes place. In Lethal Weapon, for example, Roger and his daughter must be in a lot of debt to Riggs after Riggs broke into that drug den and rescued them both like that. Riggs will definitely go on having the upper hand in that relationship. He could repeatedly show up at their door, foaming at the mouth and demanding drug money, and all he would have to do is remind them about the time Roger’s daughter was kidnapped by drug lords and he single handedly took down 25 henchmen, finally wrestling the mob leader one on one, half naked in the rain and that family would really have no choice but to apologize and pay up.

I downloaded Bad Boys but have yet to finish it because I thought it was especially terrible. I watched Beverly Hills Cop, another terrible movie, but my god, what a theme song.

I’ve been drinking a ton of coffee lately. It makes you nervous, I know, but I need it. Things are dull without coffee, and I hate that. Oh no. The thoughts pour in and one thought leads to another, then suddenly it all cuts off like a clogged vein and that’s when I have to drink more coffee.

I got a little surprise in my mail recently from the Oakland Police Department. It looks like I didn’t make a full and complete stop before turning right on October 13th at 7:17AM. The fine is about $500. They’re trying to take me down, that much is obvious. But the jokes on them, I still have my health. They can’t take that away.

Lately I’ve found myself fantasizing about various situations in which I find about 900 dollars in public places such as underneath a park bench or behind a dumpster. It would be great if tomorrow while walking home I ran into a billionaire who handed me a check for two thousand dollars, telling me to have fun and keep up the good work, or if I crossed paths with a woman pushing a baby carriage, and then suddenly the baby carriage fell over sideways and instead of there being a baby inside a bunch of hundred dollar bills fell out and then the woman just ran away. I guess I can’t count on that type of thing happening, but it’s possible.

My microwave is getting weaker. It’s been a slow progression but I’m sure it’s happening. I can tell because I often eat the same brand of burrito, El Monterey Red Hot Beef & Bean. Seriously, that burrito used to heat up in one minute, sometimes one minute and fifteen seconds, but now it takes three. Can you believe that? I did my research, don’t get me wrong. I searched a few online tech forums and found that, sure enough, other people have been in this situation, but there was only one suggested solution which read “You’re SOL, dude. Just give up on the dream and accept that your microwave is losing power.” 

But you know what? That’s OK. It’s not the end of the world, though it definitely is the end of an era. I remember buying that microwave right after I moved onto that boat.

“You lived on a boat? Tell me more.”

OK. In 2009 I was offered a broken down sailboat docked in San Rafael. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. The rent was only $275 a month and the harbor had free electricity, can’t beat that. The catch was that it was an uncomfortable, rundown sailboat. I mean talk about a bad lifestyle, now I know how homeless people in Nigeria feel. The boat was small and hard to keep clean, the bathrooms were far away, and doing laundry was a flat out nightmare. Yuki, the middle aged Japanese woman in the neighboring boat, was very nice but she often pinned me in long conversations where I understood only about half of what she was saying, She filled me in on all the harbor politics, which I didn’t care about, and whenever there was a stabbing she explained to me exactly how and why it happened.

Occasionally I’d get back to my boat and find empty beer cans inside that weren’t mine, though nobody ever stole anything. Yuki warned that I should put a lock on the cabin door, but that would have cost valuable money, so I decided against it. I learned a few general life lessons while living on that boat, like why it’s not a good idea to move onto a tiny, poorly insulated sailboat. And why I shouldn’t break down a bearing wall inside a boat’s cabin, releasing the support cable on one side of the mast and causing the boat to lean fifteen degrees to the right. Yuki didn’t like the fact that the boat was leaning. She warned me that if I ever took the boat sailing it would most likely tip over, but I told her that wouldn’t be a problem. Yuki also didn’t like the giant pile of garbage on my deck. 

I think Heaven enjoyed the concept of her father living on a boat, but the reality of the situation was, I’m sure, far different than what she envisioned. She would sometimes ask me when I’d bring her back to her mom’s if I was heading back to my “boat house” and I could hear the wonder and amazement in her tone. Though she had no idea it was essentially just a giant floating bathtub with a ceiling, totally immobile and filled with garbage. Eventually I’d had enough of the harbor life so I had to GTFO. Now I live in Oakland, and that’s my story.

I just finished watching Ferris Bueler’s Day Off. In my opinion it is a wonderful movie, though I have seen better.

I often have battles with my daughter in the car over what music to play. She used to like my music; she used to have good taste, but now she prefers her mother’s radio stations such as 94.9 The Beat of the Bay. I explained to her that those songs are garbage; that they all sound the same and get cranked out like Play Dough spaghetti by massive recording companies, but she doesn’t care. She insists that we compromise by switching stations song by song. I said “Who are you, Henry Clay?” She really likes “Last Friday Night,” by Katy Perry, so the other day I showed her the Youtube video. As I listened to the lyrics I was appalled. I turned the video off after the first verse, which upset Heaven deeply. I told her “Heaven, this woman needs help.”

Here are some of the lyrics. I mean… here, just read them:

There’s a stranger in my bed,
There’s a pounding in my head
Glitter all over the room
Pink flamingos in the pool
I smell like a minibar
DJ’s passed out in the yard
Barbie’s on the barbeque
This a hickey or a bruise

Last Friday night
Yeah we danced on tabletops
And we took too many shots
Think we kissed but I forgot
Last Friday night
Yeah we maxed our credit cards
And got kicked out of the bar
So we hit the boulevard
Last Friday night

We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a menage a twois
Last Friday night
Yeah I think we broke the law
Always say we’re gonna stop Whoa
But this Friday night
Do it all again
This Friday night
Do it all again

Do it all again, sure. Keep it up Katy. It sounds to me like Katy is about two Friday nights away from some serious, life altering shit. Maybe her next album’s hit single will be called Last Friday Night Part II (I really like crack now). I mean correct me if I’m wrong, but here we have a popular song that is clearly targeted towards twelve year olds, yet the lyrics are about a girl who is on some sort of blacked out, self-destructive sex binge showing absolutely no self-control. I know I sound like an old man by saying this, but it really seems like we’re devolving into some sort of jungle like society.

I mean whatever. That’s fine. Maybe society will just slowly revert back to how it was in the cave man rape days, only with the convenience of modern weapons and machinery. Maybe there will be a long dark period of chaos and then we’ll rebuild and start anew. I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers.

I’m trying to quit drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and it’s pretty tough. I guess it’s liberating in a way, but I’ll tell you, it’s no Sunday stroll at the park with the dogs. I have a massive, pounding, boiling headache right now. It’s like I’m losing my two best friends, watching them die of TB together on the kitchen floor. “Save us, Ryan,” they say. But I mustn’t. Tuberculosis would be a bad way to go. It would be slow, it would be painful. I’ve been thinking about mortality quite a bit now that I’ve stopped smoking cigarettes. I read the Wikipedia pages for the three waves of the Bubonic plague and the 1918 Spanish Influenza outbreak. Boy, it would suck to have been around during that. The flu killed over 50 million in a little over two years. Just take a look at these figures.

I’m planning on suing a night club in San Diego, but I can’t talk about the details.

I watched a documentary last night about Genie, a girl who was locked in her bedroom for the first thirteen years of her life. Although it was fairly interesting, I’d have to say it was somewhat of a downer. Nay, I’ll say it was a major downer. I had to take a short nap after watching this. I mean, let’s be honest here, she didn’t have the greatest parents in the world. Sure, we all know that old saying, “there’s no such thing as being too strict with your children,” but I don’t agree with that. The film dealt with the question “is there a cutoff period for language development?” It turns out that indeed there is, because Genie never learned how to talk. Also the father shot himself. 

I’ve been listening to Ice Cube’s early work these past few days. Man I could go for a cigarette.

I got my driver’s license back, which is a good thing. This came right on time, because I don’t know how much longer I could’ve taken that bus without snapping buck wild all over town. Commuting on that bus for several hours a day was a downright travesty. You can see the slow evolution of the public commuter very clearly at any bus stop or transit center. The younger people seem normal enough, but the older ones look crazy and withered, compared to those their own age. There may be a sociological explanation for this phenomenon, but my theory is that the bus itself has some sort of melting effect on the human body.

And that BART is beginning to fall like Rome. Protests every week, cell phone use has been banned, police with batons standing at the doors. The train itself drives more and more turbulent each day. It will crash soon, mark my words. It shut down for two hours a few weeks ago when I was on it. The paper said it was due to a router communication failure, but that was a lie.

So it’s nice to legally drive a car again. It’s a lot like the feeling of smoking that first cigarette after a few days of no nicotine whatsoever. Not even a little bit.     

I’ve been watching a lot of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s a pretty good show, though I don’t think it’s quite as good as Seinfeld. 

Lately, since giving up caffeine and nicotine, I’ve felt a little overwhelmed at the seemingly endless amount of choices in day to day life. Choices like what clothes to wear, what brand of toothpaste to buy. It’s like, where does one even begin? I also think about how much time people waste each day on trivial things like walking to their car too slowly, saying hello to each other, and emptying the garbage.

I was trying to park my car yesterday at Rite Aid and the lot was completely full. Immensely frustrating as this was, I discovered I was in luck when I noticed an old man heading to his car. After this man got in his car, I waited for him to back up for what seemed like an eternity. Finally I gave up and parked on the street about a half mile away. When I walked back to the store I noticed that not only was this old man still in his car, he was eating a banana. A few minutes later I saw him back in the store. Holy shit, I thought. Did the man go to his car just to eat a banana? Did he not notice that I was waiting behind him for five minutes? 

I bought a new hat last Saturday. I worked a lot that week so I decided I would give myself a little reward. I started out by reading reviews of Bay Area hat stores. I was in the market for a quality plain black baseball cap, and it soon became clear that the Berkeley Hat Company was the place for me. It had plenty of five star reviews on Yelp written by everyday Joes like myself; reviews that included phrases like “Your one stop hat shop” and “Look no further” and “I’m just a regular consumer who has no affiliation with the Berkeley Hat Company’s marketing department.” I got directions and headed out, not forgetting to bring my new electronic vapor cigarettes, which I will definitely tell you more about later on in the blog (they are wonderful).

The store was located on Telegraph Avenue, just a short walk from the Berkeley BART station. Telegraph Avenue is a terrible place and I hope that someday soon it will be burned to ground. But I journeyed through the crowd of scenesters, hippies and crack heads to purchase the hat. And what a great hat it is. It is quite possibly the best hat that I have ever owned. It is the type of hat that makes you take it off your head every once in a while and stare at it for long periods of time thinking, “God damn, that’s a really great hat.”

I have been taking the BART and the bus to work the past few days to avoid the po-po, but it’s no day at the park, I’ll tell you what. Using public transportation in the Bay Area is a lot like being raped by a zoo-animal in an alley behind a Carl’s JR. There’s no single factor that makes the commute horrible, it’s just a huge mess of crap that melds together and shatters your spirit. Such as the fact that every other time you get off the BART you barely miss your bus and have to wait thirty minutes for the next one. Then maybe some mobility scooter Nazi nearly crashes into you while you’re sitting down, and later the bus driver has to load this asshole onto the bus, which takes a very, very long time. I’ll tell you, people like this who needlessly waste everyone’s time should be flown to a remote island and beaten to death with a sack of door knobs. Sometimes when you’re in line to get on the bus the guy right in front of you forgets that he has to pay, so everyone has to wait for him to dig through his bag. This is usually the same person that slowly pays the entire fare with nickels and dimes. This person should be shot in the neck. Usually the bus driver gives you attitude when you ask him for a transfer. He asks you where you’re going, takes a minute to decide if the transfer is justified, then eventually gives it to you, but reluctantly. I’ll see you in hell buddy. Enjoy that little bit of power you have while you’re on the bus, because once you step off you’re nothing but a stupid, fat, smelly loser. The whole bus experience is like one big depressing time vortex where it feels like the outside world and all characters in your life are on stand by and you just have to sit and think about the circumstances that led you to this mind-numbing routine. The passengers are all hopeless, 7am-7pm workers, each one stuck in the same miserable rip tide. I guess the bottom line is that I wouldn’t recommend the bus to anyone. 

I mean it’s not all bad I suppose. In some ways the bus is kind of relaxing. Most of the time during the commute I either sleep or tune out on my Blackberry. I’ll usually remote into my home computer to browse the internet, because I use a company issued phone. Not that I browse NSFW websites on my phone, but you never know what the internet will bring. For example, the other day I was thinking about Super Soakers. I owned one when I was about 10 years old, but I couldn’t recall if it was the Super Soaker 100 or 500. So I plugged the words “super soaker 500” into Google Images. On the third row down there was a picture of a man standing outside shooting a Super Soaker who was completely naked and had an erect penis.

Well that’s just great, I thought. Maybe I’ll be getting an email about that one soon. Honestly, why do I have to see this smut when I’m trying to reminisce about my childhood? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging. Whatever you feel like doing to get your rocks off, that’s fine by me, so long as it’s behind closed doors or at least on a desolate field somewhere like this guy. I’d just assume you could make some sort of effort to keep it from being tied in with the general Super Soaker images.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Pink Floyd recently. Nothing satisfies the soul like good music, except maybe a good blog. I used to see Pink Floyd as a band that you had to be at least really high to enjoy, but lately I feel that they’ve been wrongfully portrayed that way. The more I listen to Dark Side of the Moon, the more I see it as truly one of the great masterpieces of the 20^th century.

Though maybe that’s just the nicotine talking. I bought a starter pack of electronic cigarettes recently online, along with about 6 months’ worth of nicotine cartridges. They took a good week to ship, and I was juiced like OJ when they finally arrived. They are much less harsh on your lungs than regular cigarettes, and I appreciate that. Who knows, maybe they cause some sort of super-cancer that makes you vomit bile and blood for three weeks before your lungs explode, but I’m taking a leap of faith with these. I smoke them quite often, quite often indeed. They come in a variety of flavors. The flavor cartridges are what contain the nicotine. These look just like the filter on a cigarette, and all you do is screw it onto the battery and suck in the vapor and then you’re in flavor country. I keep wondering what would happen if you were to break open the flavor cartridge and drink the liquid nicotine, but I don’t think I’ll ever do that.

So I guess the next step is to eventually quit these things.

I also took Heaven to the Legion of Honor last weekend. She enjoyed it.

So my schedule has been tight lately leaving me with little wiggle room for letting out another massive blog. I’ve been having what bloggers often refer to as a blog backup, where the unreleased blog becomes impacted, making it harder and harder to get the blog out. Now I know some people are probably wondering, “What could you possibly be doing that’s more important than writing this wonderful blog?” Well OK, I may not be going to Spain or Paraguay like Ben Russo, and sure, I may be currently confined to a strict policy of driving directly home after work to avoid the police, but that doesn’t mean I’m not able to fit in lots of exciting, adventurous activities. Last week, for example, I added a wireless access point to my home network, giving me Wi-Fi access practically anywhere on my whole block.

I titled the SSID “The Joy Fuck Club,” which I thought was pretty funny. You see, I never sprung for an actual router. I thought, why go out spend a bunch of money when I have all the makings of a perfectly capable gigabit router right here at home? So I threw a couple of gigabit NICs into a PC and set up a basic server using Windows 7 and ICS. Now I know a lot of people might say “Look Ryan, this isn’t Mexico, you should really just bite the bullet and set up an actual DHCP server with either Linux or Server 2008. Well screw that. I’m not running a space station here asshole!

I’ve been on edge lately. Around two weeks ago I decided to get back into the hobby of smoking a half a pack of cigarettes a day. I used to be a lot healthier around two weeks ago. I’d run around the lake every other day, sometimes I’d lift weights at work, but ever since I started smoking again I figured “fuck it man, exercise is just too much work and I’m just not going to do that anymore.”

And that has freed up a good amount of time for me, time which can be spent downloading things for free on the internet. I downloaded a bunch of Time Life CD compilations: Superstars of Country, Spirit of the 60s, Malt Shop Memories. I had downloaded their Classic Soul Ballads compilation a while ago and liked that a lot, so I figured I’d download a few more. It turned out to be about 20 gigs worth of music.

And that’s fine, no one will know. A lot of people seem to have a strong moral opposition to downloading music for free on the internet, but they’re all just mindless sheep, drudging out their meaningless lives to the beat of the corporate agenda. I’m not paying Time Life $99 for the Classic Soul Ballads set when probably three bucks of that will be divided up and given to each artist. The artists would probably only get about eleven cents each from my purchase, and most of them are dead anyway. The first track on the set is Sexual Healing, and if I’m not mistaken, Marvin Gaye was shot to death twenty five years ago by his lunatic father. Sounds like he really doesn’t need my eleven cents, and I’ll be damned if his father gets one penny of that, because I don’t approve of his handiwork. I’ll say the same thing about Courtney Love and Yoko Ono. Not one penny! You hear me?

Clearly Big Recording is just butt hurt because the backbone of their billion dollar a year industry is now totally obsolete. Well, sorry. You can lobby for all the laws you want, but you’re done now, thanks. Shows over. Downloading music isn’t copy write infringement because those doing it aren’t claiming to have written the songs nor are they using the songs to make money. It’s not stealing either. All it is is reading and copying information, which should be free and legal in this day and age. I mean, I’m no political economist guy, or whatever you call it, but I’m pretty sure that if we let the government artificially inflate the cost of music, it’s only a matter of time until they’re breaking into our homes and raping our grandchildren.

I also dislike the police, and I’m probably going to go back to the bus for the next two months to avoid them, but I still haven’t made up my mind. I’ll probably decide on that within a month or two. A few times now while driving I’ve seen a police car flash its sirens behind me only to realize that it was pulling over another car. There’s no point in even trying to describe the terror of being in this situation. Instead, I figure I’ll just post this short clip from Jurassic Park. This seems to recreate the experience pretty well.

I played disk golf with some friends at Golden Gate Park last week. I noticed that a lot of people on the course were openly smoking marijuana. And by a lot, I mean every single one of them. I never figured weed and disk golf would be so closely associated with one another, but apparently the two go hand in hand.

I’ve also been keeping up with Ben Russo’s blog, Tree in a Forest, or whatever the bullshit title is. It should really just be called “Oh My God, Look At Me, I’m In Europe Now.” Ben seems to be having another blogging condition, known as bloggorhea, where several runny, incoherent blogs are posted per week. When reading some parts of this blog I can’t help but shake my head in amazement and think, “Man, what is this guy talking about?” Take the following excerpt, for example:

“Our drinks of choice that night were Vodka redbulls (which were much needed) and these chick drinks that Marie loved and would have made Ryan Richards proud.  They tasted like candy but packed a punch.”

What is that supposed to mean?!? I get proud from chick drinks? Is that supposed to mean that I really like drinking chick drinks or something? Clearly the man is suffering from some sort of jetlag related mental retardation. Ben Russo telling me that I can’t drink hard liquor is sort of like Steve Urkel telling Rambo to toughen up and hit the gym. I mean you should see this man drink, he takes three small sips from a vodka tonic and eight seconds later he’s telling everyone about how wasted he is. 

In case you’re still reading this, Ben, you’re out of your element here. You really just don’t know what real drinking is. I mean, if you want to see some serious shit, I can give you the tour, but it ain’t pretty.

Don’t get me wrong, drinking isn’t a good thing. I don’t do it anymore. No sir. I don’t want to end up like those crazy people down the street who shout at the walls and hit me up for money every time I walk back to my apartment. There’s one lady over there who’s pretty clearly had a few too many in her day. I really hope she’s not reading this blog. She asks me for change at least once a week. Each time I say no, and each time she replies with “OK, fine, go back to Humboldt motherfucker!” I mean, alright lady, fair enough. But you should probably realize the next time you ask me for change that I’m definitely not going to give you any. I mean, it doesn’t matter how nice your intro is the next day, I haven’t forgotten about last time when you told me to go back to Humboldt, which I’m pretty sure was an insult.

Speaking of crazy, homeless addicts, I took Heaven to the Marin County Fair last weekend. I figure they’re probably just shipping those carnies in from San Quenton. They must have been low on staff this year and just told the inmates, “Hey guys, wanna go outside? Put this on.”

Parking was $20. Lesson learned, never park at the fair because it’s just not worth it. It would have made more sense to park in Mogadishu and walk rather than pay $20 for a parking spot and still have to walk a mile to get to the fair. My mother went as well. Admission was fifteen a person. We tried to get Heaven in for under four but that didn’t work. 

Heaven had good time. She went on a few rides, partook in a snow cone, and she really enjoyed watching the fireworks. She talked me into buying her a stuffed Angry Bird and a stuffed green pig. Both were about the size of a soft ball. Thirteen bucks each. On the way out we got trapped in the parking lot for an hour and a half. After forty minutes or so of absolutely no motion whatsoever, people began getting out of their cars and forming small groups, insurgencies if you will, discussing the hopelessness of the situation, what should be done, and who would lead the parking lot revolution. One woman rose up to the occasion and began directing traffic as the security guards all sat back and watched, and that sped things up considerably. Unfortunately Heaven had already peed in the back seat by then. 

This is my first blog. It is mainly a response to Ben Russo’s blog. If Ben thinks he’s it because he can write a blog, well then I’ve got some news for him; you don’t need to travel to Utah to write blog. In fact, you hardly have to leave your house. I mean, aside from work and home, where have I even gone in the past four months? The gas station? Not the one on Park Blvd, that’s for sure. I’m fairly confident at this point that they’re watering down their gas. Let me tell you a story. I put 20 bucks in my tank (not literally of course), and it didn’t even give me enough gas to get to work and back. That is bullshit, man, pure bullshit. Every other gas station’s gas lets me get at least three round trips for 20 bucks. Why, if I cared I would surely make some sort of effort to report them. But one thing is for sure, I will probably never buy gas there again.

The clock on my taskbar says 6:19PM, but as I write this the time is 11:19AM. Something is wrong. I’m not sure offhand how to fix this. I suppose I can look it up, but I figure I’ll just remember the difference and do the adjustment in my head from now on.

Where is the nearest blogging facility? I have to blog.  

I’m debating whether or not to get a second cup of coffee. Just cool it, Ryan. You’re playing with fire.

Last Thursday I got home and watched three episodes of the Daily Show after work. I find it funny that Rep. Anthony Weiner is involved in a scandal over a photo of his penis. Surely some others must see that there is some clear irony there, what with his name and all, Weiner, that is. The third episode had Larry King as a guest. He is a good man, that Larry King, is what I thought after watching that show. I then searched Google for torrents of Larry King Live, hoping to find a best-of pack, but I was unsuccessful. I found a torrent for an episode from 2008 with Barack Obama as a guest. When I opened the torrent file it started downloading rapidly, like a bunny running from a leopard. Good, I thought, I will watch that show later. But I just checked on the download today and saw that it had gotten to 99.6% and stopped completely. The file won’t open. I suppose I’ll give it another day or so, but it most likely won’t finish. Oh well, I guess these things happen. Sometimes certain parts of life just don’t work out in your favor, and you just have to accept those things and move on.

Please wash your hands after blogging to avoid the spread of blog.

Due to circumstances which I would prefer not to say online, my driving will be restricted to going to and from work for the next two months.

This is a major pain in my ass. It has also proven to be somewhat of a damper on my social life. I recently moved to a one bedroom in Oakland, and I work in Novato. I cannot stay in the North Bay past sunset, or I will likely be taken away. But, as the Chinese say, crisis and opportunity are much like twin male lovers, so I have decided to see my current situation as a chance to relax, sober up, take some time off from normal life, and get to know the wonderful world of the internet a little better, maybe even drop the occasional blog.

Why does it smell like blog in here?

In the past few days I’ve been watching a lot of Norm Macdonald interviews on Youtube and listening to a lot of Aphex Twin. I created a music playlist page on my website about a month ago. Whenever I hear a song that I think is very good I’ll add it to the page. Now some people might think. “Ryan, you really need to widen your taste in music, goddammit, and listen to more underground music like You Will Know Us By The Trail of Rape, The Flaming Basset Hounds, and Hillbilly Johnson’s 1914 spoon sessions.” Well, you may be right. I would like to widen my scope a bit, but more often than not, doing so simply leads to disappointment, plunging me right back to the bottle. Others may think, “These bands are all old. Get with the times, man.” Well you may be right, but I unfortunately cannot listen to most new music, because it makes me violently ill when I think about how badly the recording industry is raping this once wonderful art form. [Stands on soap box] When I see a band like The Black Eyed Peas, I can’t help but think that this band was somehow actually created inside a Coke machine. I know this isn’t the case with all modern bands. Wilco, for example, apparently fought very hard against corporate ass-pounding. And they are a great band, in my opinion. But here’s my beef with Wilco, their lyrics just don’t make any goddamn sense. Take the following, for example:

“Spiders are singing in the salty breeze
Spiders are filling out tax returns
Spinning out webs of deductions and melodies
On a private beach in Michigan”

Now what the hell does that mean? It could be a metaphor, but I’m pretty sure it’s just total nonsense. I mean, spiders filling out tax returns? What are you, nuts, Jeff? He really shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this. And this really reflects a deeper problem with modern art, in all forms. Take a look at the following examples.

This is a work of art

This is an upside down urinal.

This is a work of art

This is a crazy woman getting her clothes cut off.

Do you see the difference?

I guess the problem is that no clear line can be drawn between a great painting by Van Gogh and an upside down toilet, and good art often falls somewhere in the middle. But that leaves the door open for these scam artists who always manage to gather a strong following of jackasses. And when Wilco writes a song about spiders filling out tax returns on a beach, they’re really just feeding the public a spoonful of lies and that makes them no different than Charles Manson in my book.

Now I know a lot of people might say, “It’s all just a matter of opinion. Who are you to say that an upside down urinal isn’t art? A lot of people think it is.” Well to that I’d like to say: This is reality, my friend, and this is planet Earth we live on. If you really think the upside down toilet is art then you need to get back into the Phantom Zone and let it slowly drift you back to Krypton. Under your logic, to make art I can simply open up my fridge, take the lid off a pickle jar, replace the pickle juice with spoiled milk, write “Dock Martins” on the jar with a permanent marker, and now I’m just as much an artist as Leonardo Da Vinci. Is that really how it goes? You really mean to tell me that to be an artist I can just go to my dad’s house, break down the door, shave the words  “I am a prude” onto his dog’s back, replace the food in the dog’s bowl with bicentennial quarters, call up his neighbor and say “Hi Don, this is Alf. I am not just a fictional character from a TV show. I am real,” hang up the phone, and now I’m Rembrandt?

Look, I don’t really care. I’m just trying to compete with Utah over here and I really don’t have much to work with.

I really need to blog.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the world trade center attacks recently.

Today I configured Microsoft Outlook on one of my home computers to have both my work and Gmail accounts. I was surprised at how easy it was to set up the Gmail account. The new version of Outlook configures all the IMAP settings automatically, and that gave me a feeling of warmth and comfort that words cannot fully describe.

So much blog…

I’ve been frequenting the website Reddit.com quite a bit for the past year or so, and I’ve sort of triple-downed on that in recent months, what with my new driving situation and all. I post stupid questions to AskReddit under the names RogerSimon, WarningMANKind, and pleasenojunkthanks.

Most people would consider this a complete waste of time, but oh man, I get such a distinct, almost sexual thrill by aggravating random fourteen year olds on the internet that I honestly cannot control myself.

I also have a daughter who’s five. Her name is Heaven. Her name comes from an old religious word that means “the place good people go after they die.” Here is a picture of her.

My dad got a new scale for his bathroom by the way. I’m surprised I didn’t mention that earlier. It is the kind you stand on. I weighed my daughter on it and it read 54 pounds. I then weighed myself, 168 pounds. I then explained to her that there could be three of her standing on the scale, and I would still weigh more.

That concludes my blog for today.