Wednesday, May 31, 2006

The New State Mottos

Inspired by Jedi Master Carlin's old routine about some of the goofy license plate mottos we have in this country, I have taken it upon myself to come up with new ones. How much better this country would be if only we had more accurate state mottos on our plates. So here are my suggestions:

  • Alabama - "Most of the people who look at this plate can't read it anyway."
  • Alaska - "If you are reading this, you are probably cold."
  • Arizona - "We don't have to change our clocks twice a year, so there."
  • Arkansas - "You're in Arkansas. Our condolences..."
  • California - "Welcome to California. Try not to die in a violent earthquake."
  • Colorado - "Home of the mile-high club. And John Elway is a pimp."
  • Connecticut - "We're bigger than Rhode Island."
  • Delaware - "Our citizens are nice people. Both of them."
  • Florida - "Our nation's pecker. Mother nature likes to blow us."
  • Georgia - "We can eat peaches for hours."
  • Hawaii - "We have our own language. We rule."
  • Idaho - "Enjoy beautiful Idaho. Have some tater tots. Hump a goat or two."
  • Illinois - "Home of Chicago... and some other stuff too."
  • Indiana - "Watch out for race cars."
  • Iowa - "We are corny. And so is our state motto."
  • Kansas - "Visit your friends in Kansas. Tornados welcome."
  • Kentucky - "We fry chickens and ride horses. Then we beat them with baseball bats."
  • Louisiana - "Be careful a huge freaky misquito don't kill your ass."
  • Maine - "Lobsters are neat. That Martha Stewart is kind of a bitch though."
  • Maryland - "This license plate was made by one of our criminals."
  • Massachusetts - "We love the Sox and chowda. (Yankees, eat a dong.)"
  • Michigan - "Our sports teams usually suck. But we make lots of cars."
  • Minnesota - "We have lakes. Lots of them."
  • Mississippi - "Welcome to Mississippi. If you're not white though, go away."
  • Missouri - "Our river is bigger than yours. So is our arch."
  • Montana - "Our sky is big, but not as big as our appetite for sheep fucking."
  • Nebraska - "We're just plain flatter than a ten-year-old boy."
  • Nevada - "Bring your money, we have hookers."
  • New Hampshire - "We don't know where the old Hampshire is, so don't ask."
  • New Jersey - "We like to pretend we're New York."
  • New Mexico - "Come to New Mexico. Burn your anus off. Make it raw."
  • New York - "We're the center of the universe. Everyone else sucks."
  • North Carolina - "We're on James Taylor's mind. That counts for something."
  • North Dakota - "We're hoping to get electricity soon."
  • Ohio - "We like to fuck over the rest of the country during elections."
  • Oklahoma - "We're north of Texas."
  • Oregon - "If you're still reading this plate, you're lucky. Our drivers will kill you."
  • Pennsylvania - "Our football team is named accurately. We 'steal' victories."
  • Rhode Island - "More like a village than a state."
  • South Carolina - "Even we don't care about our state."
  • South Dakota - "Mount Rushmore is neat. Watch out for crazy bikers."
  • Tennessee - "Elvis was here. Marc Cohn also walked here before he got shot in the face."
  • Texas - "We're the greatest country in the nation."
  • Utah - "The best place to find a wife... or six."
  • Vermont - "We're basically New Hampshire Pt II."
  • Virginia - "At least we're not West Virginia."
  • Washington - "Our teams suck harder than Michigan's. Try not to get killed by a volcano."
  • West Virginia - "We don't know why Virginia hates us so much."
  • Wisconsin - "Laverne & Shirley did it. Now you can too!"
  • Wyoming - "Or more simply, just why?... "

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Friday 19

Friday:

I went out to a couple new bars in West Seattle with a good friend (and his friends). I believe my final stats for the night were:

3 Jack & Cokes
1 Yukon Jack shot
2 Jager-bombs
2 Glasses of water
1 Basket of fries
0 Cases of flaming syphilis

(...I'm really happy about that last statistic.)

Anyway, we all had a lot of fun. Sang some karaoke later in the night. I joined them for a couple tunes up there... "Daydream Believer" (The Monkees) and "Animal" (Def Leppard). We tore those up! I think by the time we were done with 'Animal', we even had a groupie or two. But I didn't want to find out because I'm not generally attracted to piss-drunk 55 year old ladies.

I also found $21 bucks on the floor! I put the $1 on the counter for the bartender and took the $20 next door to buy another round. It was sweeeeeet.

No, that's all. I'm done now.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

More Random Thoughts

Don't you hate it when you say that you "can't speel anything right tonight"? ... And isn't that pretty ironic? It's like whenever I tell someone, "I can't typ at all tonight". Then I feel like an even bigger dumbshit.

When I go to the grocery store, and I approach the automatic sliding doors, sometimes I gently wave my right hand as if I'm opening them with The Force. Somehow, that makes me feel really special. And when I'm driving behind some car that's pissing me off, I like to wave my hand at that as well to make it change lanes or take the next turn. Those moments when it actually does.... priceless. I'm like, "Okay, I'm ready for my lightsaber now." I know I'm not the only one who does shit like this...

So I was thinking yesterday about my independant tendancies, and I think I made some sense of it. As you probably know by now, I am an only child. No sister. No brother. Just me. And my parents have both worked as long as I can remember. When I was little, they dropped me off at a daycare place during weekdays. This might explain why I was never really that close to them growing up... Also, I was always pretty shy. I remember keeping to myself for the most part at that daycare place (which was called 'Jack And Jill Daycare'). I would interact with the others only when the "teachers" made me get involved. I mostly remember watching Sesame Street and The Smurfs a lot...

Not growing up with a sister, and being so shy, pretty much carved out my eventual outlook of girls as being completely alien to me. And that's exactly what they've been over the years. This, obviously, explains my troubles with understanding women and trying to decipher their 'we-say-we-want-a-nice-guy-but-really-we-don't-because-if-you're-nice-we'll-just-walk-all-over-you-and-find-someone-better' mentality. Fortunately, I've been learning a lot about the female gender lately...


NOTE TO SELF:

Learn to be an unreliable jerk so more women will dig you. ........ Oh, and flash around money.

Tuesday, May 9, 2006

Welcome To My Head

You know when you get in an elevator, and you go to press the button and it lights up? Well, I always feel like I just passed through a magic portal and somehow ended up in the 'Billie Jean' video. And everytime the elevator doors close and I'm all alone in there, I get the sudden urge to thrust-kick the air in front of me and grab my shit. Is that just me? Because I'd totally moonwalk all over too, but c'mon... it's a frickin' elevator. There's just no room for that.

Why do really old people smell like Fruit Loops? Has anyone else noticed this? I like to think that if I even made it to that age, I'd at least smell like Cinnamon Toast Crunch or something. I used to love that shit. But I never really cared for those three cartoon chef goons in the commercials. I thought they were jerkoffs... Besides, do chefs really make cereal anyway? Shit, how hard can it be?! Buy a box of the shit at the store, grab a spoon and bowl and a pour some milk in the fucker. That's some culinary magic right there.

And speaking of imaginary chefs... does anyone else think that the Keebler elves are kinda creepy? I mean they seem nice, sure... but how do we really know what they're putting in our cookies? Should we be trusting a bunch of overly chirpy midgets who live together in a tree? Think about that for awhile...

I was telling a friend one time about the band ZZ Top. I grew up watching their videos on MTV. They are famous for having really long beards. And I had brought up the point that the one guy who never had a beard in those videos was the drummer. His name is Frank Beard...

I still think that's fucking funny.

Sunday, May 7, 2006

Aftermath

******Disclaimer******

The following rant is lengthy, somewhat random, deep and simply unimportant in the larger picture of your own lives. However, I have thoughts that need to somehow mold into words. If you are the slightest bit interested in the events of my life, then by all means feel free to read it. If you don't care to waste your time, I understand that too (hence the reason for this disclaimer). Either way, I can't honestly say I really give a shit which you decide to do. I don't have the energy to bullshit you.

Writing makes me feel better, so this one is for me...

**************************************************


I just got back from Idaho a couple hours ago. The weekend was surreal. And I am not the same anymore.

Since the Wednesday before last, when I heard the news about Liz, I have spent only two nights sober. I realize it's not helping anything to go into self-medication mode, but it's all I've really wanted to do lately. So I've done exactly that.

The thing yesterday for Liz did not turn out to be so much of a funeral. Instead, it was a get-together at her family's house with the people who cared about her most. We had food and shared stories about her. We watched a slideshow tape of many photos of Liz and Wayne (her brother) growing up. It was really nice actually. And I found it fascinating. It made me smile.

I am still haunted by an image I keep of her in my mind. We went out for drinks and conversation barely two weeks before she killed herself. In this image, she is smiling at me like only she could. (You had to have known her to understand.) And I can't stop thinking about it; about her. I was the last one to talk with her. I don't mean "hi how are you?"-s, I mean actual conversation. I was the also the last to hug her, which I did twice. It's possible I may have also been the last to talk to her on the phone... but I believe she may have spoken to her parents just after she talked to me.

I called her a few days after I got back from that first trip. The first thing I gave her over the phone then was an apology. I told her I felt bad because I didn't really get to say goodbye (referring to that night we got to spend together). I don't remember her really even replying to that statement. If only I knew how ironic that would be in the days to come...

The second time I could finally get ahold of her, sometime that next week, she was replying to my message I had left regarding something I wanted to talk to her about. (By that point, she wasn't accepting many calls or even checking her phone much as far as I know). She asked what it was that I wanted to talk to her about, but I didn't really know what to say. My real reason for calling was just to check up on her; to see if she's alright; to hear her voice and know that she's still here. I had been so worried by then. So I proceeded to ask her if everything was alright. After a slight pause, she calmly replied, "It will be soon." She sounded so emotionless that day. Still, I went on trying to get her talking about our plans for August and all that, hoping it might spark some excitement and remind her she has stuff to look forward to. She mentioned that we had "already talked about all that." And it was obvious she wasn't in the mood to talk with me anymore. I understood, thinking that she could use some rest or something like that. I told her to call her brother because he really wanted to talk to her. Then I told her the usual "take care of yourself" stuff and let her go. Before we hung up, she told me word for word, "Tell my brother I love him and I sent him something in the mail." I promised that I would do exactly that, and also told her that she and I would talk soon. But we never would again...

I immediately called Wayne after hanging up with her and told him what she said and everything. I let him know how worried I was about her. He couldn't get through to her after that as far as I know.


For those of you who don't know yet, here's what happened in detail (from what investigators could best put together):

Liz left her house on Saturday morning (April 22nd). She packed up her most personal items and took all of her clothes from the closet. She also cleaned her room as if she had never lived there. She went through her notebooks and tore out many pages. Then left a note for her parents apparantly saying something about going into Moscow to stay with a friend...

Police think that Monday night (04/24) was when she killed herself.

Liz checked into a Motel 6 in Spokane Saturday evening. Apparantly, she had been stockpiling pain killers that were being prescribed to her for a certain medical issue. She wrote some things in her diary. Pages, actually. Then she put a sign on the door that said "Caution: Dead Body", hoping to keep the maid from having to deal with the shock of finding a body in the room... Liz then took all of those painkillers she had, and proceeded to take an overdose of over-the-counter sleeping pills. And as a fail-safe, she filled the bathtub with water so that when she passed out, she would drown.

They found her the next morning and called to inform her parents. Her parents then of course called up Wayne to let him know, and he left me a message the next day while I was at work saying that he got some "bad news". Of course as soon as I heard the message, I knew what he meant.

So the police are still holding some of her personal items, as well as her diary... pending lab results confirming it was in fact, a suicide. Her clothes were not in the room when they found her. Nor were the missing notebook pages. Nobody knows what she did with them. Perhaps she gave them away... threw them all in a dumpster.... burned them.... perhaps she even just threw them out the window somewhere along the highway. We don't know.

The autopsy showed signs of "light drowning", just as she had planned. She was cremated late last week. Police did release a photocopy of part of her diary that they found. They gave them to her parents. I got to read that for myself... It was incredibly raw and honest. Some very personal things in there, some random phrases and notes, some inside jokes only meant for certain people to understand...etc. On one of the pages that affected me the most, she wrote this along the top:

"Hey - I just don't belong here.
Don't be sad/mad.
I am happy now."

Actually, she started out the very first page by writing something like "Ryan told me that writing really helped him, so here goes...". And I couldn't help but wonder... would she have written those suicide notes at all if I hadn't tried to convince her how much writing can help?

She was my girl. Not in a romantic sense, but in a close friend sense. Since I had the chance to spend that night with her, I've considered her the closest thing I've ever had to a sister. And I miss her.

She left a mix CD for Wayne, a goofy picture she took of him years ago with a sincere apologetic message on the back, and a note asking him to take care of her CD's. Because of this, Wayne insisted that I should take her CD collection, for three reasons...
  • He knows I would never lose them or get rid of them.
  • Her and I both had very similar taste and love for music. In fact, her collection eerily seems to compliment mine quite nicely...
  • He also claims she said that because it was an inside joke they shared. Years ago, he had let me borrow some of her CD's when she was living somewhere else at the time. I don't know why, but somehow I never got around to returning them to her and kind of forgot about it all. (I still have many of them.) I guess she never really minded that much when she found out and never bothered to remind me about them. Apparantly, she thought it was even kind of funny. So Wayne insisted that I had to take them all. She would have wanted me to. So I did, and I'm honored to take them...

...So here I am, with a new box full of great music I haven't heard yet... from a recently lost friend with musical taste rivaling my own. She also has many mix CDs with random stuff on it. I promise to listen to everything. Everything. It gives me a new project. A way to connect with her again, even if it's only through our music.

It's funny how I keep expecting her to just show up again. I'm waiting for her to tell us it's all an elaborate joke. I want to see her smile and hear her laugh again. But she's gone. And I was really hit with a sense of finality as soon as I saw the box that now holds her ashes. Suddenly, it's physically impossible to see her again. I feel like I'm seeking closure but now know I will never find it. How do I know she was really cremated? I wasn't there. For all I know she could still be in Spokane, snickering to herself as she reads her own obituary... All I'm left with is a forced trust. I have to accept what people tell me. She died. She's gone. Her body was incinerated. She is right there in that box. I suppose I don't like being forced to accept that.

And she wanted so badly to get out of that area. She seemed excited about coming over to room with me. To start over in a new place. But she was scared. And now, all that's left of her is trapped in a box kept in the very place she was desperate to leave. I find that thought incredibly frustrating.

I still feel numb. Like part of me died with her, and I will never get it back. Before, I had told her about the way my brain works. I have a habit of seeing potential in things. I will play out every possibility, path or situation in my head before they even have a chance to become reality. For instance, I was telling her all the things I could already see us doing. I had it all planned out in my head of all the things I was going to do with her; places I was going to take her; people I wanted her to meet. And now none of it will ever happen. I feel as though we did share those experiences, and now those memories are being taken from me. Pulled. Torn. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

I find part of myself wishing I didn't care about anything as much anymore. Because one thing this world has continuously taught me is that the more you care, the more you will get hurt by the things you care about.

Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Thought Of The Day

If you're smart, you will learn from your mistakes. If you're even smarter, you'll learn from the mistakes of others.

Fuck Me All To Hell

To answer the unasked question.... Yes. It does, in fact, suck being me.

As if losing Liz weren't already too much (and it is), here are a few other great hunks of shit life has thrown at me this week:

  • I went to help Jen move this weekend. Just after I got there, her mother's dick of a fucking boyfriend decides to hit my car with his, leaving some nice scrapes along the front of my car. He says he had the brakes on and it just rolled into my car. I say he's a fucking douche.
  • Later, while still helping Jen move I twisted my ankle, just barely escaping tearing the ligament like I did back in my baseball days. I had stepped on the edge of a concrete piece and would have fallen on my face on the concrete if I didn't grab the truck that happened to be right next to me.
  • In trying to grieve the best way I know how, I've spent a good $300 - $500 in bar tabs since Wednesday. I admit it's my fault, but it still fucking sucks. And I spent most of those hours being extra quiet and keeping to myself. So now all the other locals think I'm a psychotic loser. And they're probably right.
  • My cough still isn't going away. I very well may have to go back in soon to get a chest x-ray or two. More medical bills. Yay.
  • I haven't been getting much sleep at all lately. Too much to think about; too much to do. I've been eating more than usual, and I still don't seem to have enough energy to keep doing my pushups and all that other stretching shit I usually do.
  • Less than twenty minutes ago, I got a message from a girl I've actually been really interested in. We went out a few weeks back and I think it went really well. A promising dating partner; something seemingly rare for me. (Due to scheduling conflicts and medical issues, we've been having difficulty planning a second date) ... So in her message tonight she informs me that she started seeing someone else this last week, but still wants to be friends with me. As I told her, "I find it funny how life likes to shit on you from all different angles at the same time, you know?".

So there's that. Maybe I'll get fired tomorrow for being a whiny bitch or something, who knows. Maybe someone at Arby's will jerk off into my turkey sub. Perhaps a co-worker will try to ass-rape me with a heavy-duty stapler. A head-on collision during my two-block commute? Will I get evicted because the people in the apartment above me don't want to live over a puddle of shit anymore? At this point, I'm not going to rule out any possibility.

Tune in tomorrow to find out what else goes wrong...

Monday, May 1, 2006

Update

Well, things are starting to unfold a bit more. The bigger picture is beginning to uncover piece by piece... I don't know exactly what that really means, but just go with it. It sounded kinda deep.

The service, funeral... or whatever the hell you want to call it... will be on Saturday. So I'm going to take a couple days off and drive over to Idaho on Thursday. Wayne (Liz's brother/my very close friend) will meet me over there sometime between that night and early Friday morning. We plan to spend Friday in deep conversations about Liz. We are the two people who were closest to her, so we have a lot to discuss. I'm somehow hoping to find more comfort in knowing that she's gone. And just for the record, Wayne and I also plan to give her our own personal memorial at a later time. I'm thinking in August when he moves over, we'll do that. (For those of you who don't know yet, Liz was going to be my roommate before all of this.) So when August rolls around, we'll do our best to give her a proper send-off. The best way we know how...

In the meantime, I will be back online beginning tonight (though I'll obviously be gone this weekend). For those of you who sent me messages, comments, thoughts, whatever.... I did get them and I'm extremely appriciative of every single one of them. Thank you all, you guys rock! And I will eventually get back to each and every one of you. You just might have to give me a day or two to get caught up with things.

But I'll be around...