Yet Another Reason Writing is a Stupid Idea

"Well, I certainly seem to have gotten myself into a pickle, here."

I actually said those words out loud this morning. In previous blog entries, I've mentioned that I'm a fat guy. In addition, I have a minor muscle disease - the specifics are irrelevant, but my muscles are about half as strong as those of a normal male of my age group. This is something that is, in general, not overly limiting, and I've learned to deal with it. But sometimes I just don't think ahead, and today, it bit me on the ass.

Being a fat guy, I have a fat guy office chair. I can use a standard office chair, but the fat guy chair is big and comfortable, with an extra wide seat, movable arm rests, and a tilting back that lets one assume a semi-reclining position. Semi-reclining. We're not talking La-Z-Boy here, this is just an office chair, not a place for lounging around. Of course, I routinely lean as far back as possible, just to think or to stretch out. No worries, though - it's a well-balanced chair, and is almost impossible to tip over.

So this morning, I was working on my book, having a little writer's block, unsurprisingly. I was having trouble figuring out how my Hero was supposed to retrieve the stolen documents from inside the zebra without killing it or its unborn calf, and I was at a complete impasse. I leaned back to ponder, and as I reached the usual reclining limit of the chair, I heard a loud "SNAP," tipped back about an additional foot, and stopped. I didn't go to the ground, but I was leaned way back, with my back almost perpendicular to the ground, legs at about head level.

This situation may not sound so bad, but considering my muscle strength, I knew I was fuuuuuuucked. I felt exactly like the proverbial turtle on its back. I was simply not strong enough in my legs or abdominals to right the chair. You know how you can start a swing in motion by moving your lower legs? No use in my case, there just wasn't enough space to generate any momentum. Mac was already on the way to work, so no help there. The cats were, of course, utterly indifferent.

"Well, I certainly seem to have gotten myself into a pickle, here." The thought crossed my mind that I might possibly be stuck for the day, until Mrs. A. came home. The only conceivable exit seemed to be rolling off the side of the chair onto the ground, but I was about three feet off the solid wood floor, and just knew I'd break every bone in my body if I tried. I couldn't see any option, though.

Slowly, slowly, I rolled to the side, and was able to maneuver my right hand into position to prop myself up a bit. So when I did fall off the chair, it wasn't a complete disaster - my arm protected my head, I banged my knee a little, had the wind knocked out of me. Nothing major, though. I'm just really fucking happy that I've been losing some of this fat - a hundred pounds ago, I don't know what I'd have done.

The last time I felt so helpless, I was about eight. I was climbing a tree with a V-shaped branching in the trunk, slipped, and wedged my knee into the V. I was alone and utterly terrified. I remember just wailing and wailing until my Mom heard. She had to call the Fire Department to get me out. Even they couldn't dislodge me. I almost passed out when I saw the chainsaw - I was 100% certain that they were going to cut off my leg, and I begged my Mom to not let it happen. I was 8, gimme a break, man.

Point is, I have an office chair for sale, cheap!

I Really, Really Hate Bugs

Sand fleas. We've got sand fleas. Or at least the cats do. I feel like I talk about the cats too much. But if every time I turn around, there's a hairball on the floor or an unwelcome anus in the face, there's only so much I can do. You have to write what you know, and right now, I know fleas.

There's only one possible place they could have come from - the beach a few blocks away. Y'see, I am an avowed sun-avoider. I love the light, and I love a nice Spring day, but I am white. Not quite Edgar Winter-level, but decidedly pale. I have burned on a cloudy day. But goddammit, it was Mackenzie's turn to pick the afternoon's activity, and she wanted to go to the beach. Not sure of her reasoning, as it's been colder than day-old piss around here, but at least it wasn't crowded. Much fun was had, and the day was soon forgotten.

Fast-forward about a month. The cats were miserable. As soon as I got paid, I took Trudy to the vet. Sand fleas was the verdict, and she even specifically asked if I had been to the beach lately. Grr...

I'm not really that mad. The medicine (Advantage II) prescribed was like some kind of Ebola for fleas - they appear to be gone, only a few days after treatment. And over the decade or so we've had them, the cats have cost us almost nothing other than food and litter. It's worth the companionship. Sometimes I'm stupid though, and I start to imagine that they think like I do.

About eight or so years ago, we lived in a house with lots of windows looking out on grass and trees and whatnot. The cats (we only had two of them at the time, I think, as I look back on it) loved sitting at the windows and talking to the birds. So I got the bright idea of taking them outside! I went out and bought them a couple of hot-pink mini harnesses and leashes. Nothing restrictive of the neck, of course. I had grand visions of walking them like dogs. Yes, this is the point in the story where the reader points and laughs at the moron. For me to have even considered such an idea seems impossible, in hindsight. You can see where this is going, I'm sure.

When the doctor finally took the stitches out, it was the happiest day of my life.

Just One More Log on the Heart Attack Fire

You people probably think I complain an awful lot. I assure you, you have no idea. In real life, at least in the last couple of weeks, I've been nothing less than a whiny little snot, and it's starting to get annoying. To me, I mean - I'm sure that Mrs. Arone is long since past that stage.

When I'm watching TV, and an advertisement comes on, and the narrator blabs on about how his product is "the ultimate [whatever]," I inevitably say, "Uh-oh! It's the very last [whatever]!"

"Every time, Cheech? Every single time?", Mac asks me. "Yes. Every time." It's like a compulsion. At this point in the evolution of the English language, most people probably wouldn't even understand why this usage of "ultimate" bugs me. Hell, man, I barely even understand why - it's an utterly insignificant issue, by any measure of the word. Yet here I am, bitch bitch bitch.

Or the stop sign at the intersection. Our apartment overlooks a medium-busy residential intersection, controlled by four-way stop signs. I love looking out the window, just watching people go by. But I just can't help but monitor the traffic and comment incessantly about how nobody ever fricking stops at the stop signs, in any direction. In general, of course, it's a safe intersection. There are no line-of-sight impediments, so pedestrians and vehicles all have clear views, and I never see any near-misses. And 99.9% of the time, the cars come to an almost-stop, then continue through the intersection. And I'm about the farthest thing there is from a cop. But all I can do is bitch and moan, and have long, completely imaginary conversations with the drivers about what they think "STOP" means.

Or the bicyclers. Oh, those wacky bicyclers. It's great that they're doing what they're doing to keep themselves healthy, but I want to fucking stab them, all of them, right in the face. I don't mind sharing the road, and I don't have a problem keeping their presence in mind. But the number of bicyclers who seem to give not the tiniest little corn-kernel-sized shit about traffic laws must approach 95%. And I'm not even talking just about the bicyclers in my neighborhood, I mean everywhere. This is something I've observed since I first started driving, 22 years ago and 3000 miles away. Dammit, if I, as a 16-year-old taking Driver's Ed, had to learn how to make and recognize bikers' hand turn signals, why haven't I seen a bicycler make one, even ONE, since about 2008? Fuckers. To their credit, however, I must admit this : most of the time, they DON'T simply blast through the intersection at full speed, while not even bothering to acknowledge the other wheeled conveyances in the road. That only happens like seven out of 10 times.

Maniacs. They're all maniacs.

The Juventus guy is at it again. I call him that because his secondary vehicle is a white 1970s-vintage Econoline-style van upon which he's emblazoned about two dozen different decals and adornments boosting Juventus F.C., his favorite soccer team. An entire story in its own right, but that's just background info right now.

Today, he seems to have gone for a drive in his main vehicle, a late-70s Mercedes-Benz. It's nice. A perfectly fine vehicle. But he's kinda nuts about it. This morning, I've been watching him for about the last 9 minutes. He caught my eye as he pulled into the curb spot that's right outside my window, and right next to my computer screen. It appeared to be a normal park-job, perhaps not centered between the driveway entrances sunken into the curb on either end of the car, but reasonably close.

He got out, stepped back from the car six or seven feet, eyeballed it up, got back in, pulled forward six inches or so, and got out again. He was still not centered, but a few inches in the other direction. Mind you, he was still comfortably in the legal spot, just not centered.

He put one hand on his hip, and (apparently, as I saw this all from behind his body) the other on his chin. Clearly, this was a challenge. He got back in, backed up a few inches, and cut the engine. Perfectly centered, from my vantage point. He got out, backed away, and reassessed the sitch. Something was not right. He got back in the car and turned on the engine. For a minute or so, maybe only 30 seconds, he sat there, motionless as far as I could tell. There was some little activity, and the brake lights (or, the one that I could see) came on. The car sort of lurched a bit. No actual forward or backward progress, just a jolt.

He got out and walked around to the other side of the car, stepped up on the curb, and set himself up AGAIN in his thinking pose. He paced up and down the sidewalk three or four times, measuring it up. I fully expected to see him pull out a tape measure, but no. He made a circuit around the car and, apparently satisfied, went into his apartment building. Victory!

And what caused me to write this? The activity described above took place in about 8 minutes. Before the next minute ticked on my computer's clock display, he bolted from the building, got in the car, and drove off.

Everything I Own is Trying to Kill Me

As I type this, the room is filled with smoke. I have every window open, and the kitchen and living room fans are on, and it makes no difference. The cats have abandoned their usual raised perches, and have literally gone to ground, where the air is mostly clear.

I think I've figured out the problem. It started a couple of months ago. I started cooking much, much more often than I ever have in my life. I went from using the stove or oven maybe once or twice a month, to being the primary food preparer, using it at least once, and usually twice or more, daily. The second or third time I cooked something in the oven - likely bacon or chicken - there was a ton of smoke, even though the food wasn't burnt. I figured there was some kind of loose food item in the oven, burning up and making the smoke. Found nothing, and it kept happening intermittently. Long story a little shorter, I found that the baking pans I use to cook bacon suck balls, and when the temperature in the oven reaches about 350, they suddenly warp, causing a muffled "clang" sound, and apparently spraying grease all over the oven. So the NEXT time I cook something, I get the Towering Inferno. Good times.

I tend to lose socks. I wear them in the cold mornings, and they gradually work themselves off over the course of the afternoon. This often happens when I'm just lounging around, so they wind up under or behind the bed, or the couch, or whatever. I (or Mrs. Arone) collect them every week, but the number gets smaller, and I'm sure there's a huge sock nest somewhere in the apartment. So I'm short on socks, and Mackenzie brings me home a couple pair of new socks! "Sweet, thanks for thinking about me!" I put 'em on - they fit like a champ, which is actually rare, as I have one fat ankle (Long story. Trust me.) With my warm, comfy feet, I stand up to go into the other room, and immediately go completely ass-over-tits, as the socks fly out from under me as if made of inside-out banana peels. Turns out that the socks are coated with some kind of space-age sweat-repellent which also functions as a floor-repellent. They are nice and toasty, but to this day, when I wear them, I have to repeat the phase "CONSTANT VIGILANCE" in my head every time I try to step from the carpet to the wood floor.

The three cats seem to be in a competition to see which one of them can murder me first. A clear, empty room is still an obstacle course because of cats weaving between my legs as I walk, or plopping down in front of me as I'm about to step down right there, hands full of dishes, or leaving a nearly-invisible puddle of piss right on the edge of the carpet/floor border, so I step in it, go flying, and break a hip.

When I'm found dead in the middle of the room, with no clues as to the cause of my demise, IT WAS THE CATS.  Disregard the suicide note, as I think I saw Trudy practicing her penmanship last week...

Want Some Cheese With That Whine?

As anyone familiar with this blog should already know, I'm usually not big on complaining over the internet. Ahem. But I'm having a hard time thinking of anything to write about. I know that I don't HAVE to write anything - I'm not on a deadline here, and nobody's lining up to pay for this stuff. And I also know that it's a common conceit for a writer to write about writing. But really, there's just nothing in my life worth writing about, so this is what it's come to.

I've been writing pretty much forever, and have never, until the last month or so, even attempted to write fiction. It's always been about my life, or my opinions, or my (puke) feelings. I recently went through a ton of old crap, and found the original copies of the dozen or so issues of the zines I used to hand-publish back in the Nineties. Such a massive volume of stuff, the equivalent of probably a couple hundred pages, and the majority of it is absolute crap, self-centered whining about how put-upon I, a white, middle-class male living with Mom and Dad in the suburbs, felt. I mean, I DID have a less-than-ideal childhood, but who the fuck didn't? Even rich kids suicide every so often, and I certainly wasn't THAT. It's just that 20 years of perspective makes me realize what a little shit I was.

My point was, It's just so hard to come up with a workable idea for a piece of fiction, at least for me. Right now, I've got approximately the first 6,000 words of a much longer, novel-length piece of fiction, and it's quite good, in the author's opinion, but it's really just a highly-fictionalized version of things I've experienced. It's just so much easier that way. I have no problem coming up with words that make sense, and which tell the story in a concise, entertaining manner, but first formulating that story is massively daunting. If I write about my life, well, I already know how the story goes, don't I?  Makes it flow like milk instead of molasses.

I feel like a rip-off artist when I post an update here, and it's an album review or something like that. I don't even fucking like music, man, what the hell am I doing telling people what I think of it? Not that anything else I write has any intrinsic interest to anyone beyond my tiny circle of family and friends, but the music stuff must be on an entirely higher level of I-Don't-Give-A-Fuck for most people.

And even when I write something that is all about me, I still fight the idea block. If I spend an hour writing one of these things, you can bet you ass that 40 minutes of it was just me, staring at the screen, slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, wondering what I've done to deserve such a fate. Then, if I'm lucky, something catches, and I can usually pound into submission fairly quickly.

I always seem to have trouble ending an entry, though. Thank god for YouTube.

I Got Hit By a Car This Morning

I'm very tired of being a complete fat-ass, so I've been going for walks in the morning.  Just walking around the block, or to the park and back, whatever keeps me moving and interested.  I'm actually somewhat proud of my progress - since my first foray out of the realm of the sedentary, I've literally octupled the distance I can walk comfortably.  I'd not go so far as to call it a "long walk," but definitely an accomplishment.

I have found myself rising very early these days anyway, regardless of when I go to sleep, but I particularly choose mornings for my exercise.  I like the weather on the cool side, and a San Francisco morning can be, shall we say, a bit brisk at times.  I like that there are not many people out and about, to see me huffing and puffing down the street, red-faced like some sort of ambulatory tomato.  And I like that there aren't a lot of cars at that time of day.  It's not a major issue, in general - more than half the time, my walk is simply a number of circuits around the block, so I don't even cross paths with cars in the roadway.  But I do sometimes vary the route, to the park, as mentioned, or the 7-11 a few blocks over and down the hill.

This morning, I decided to not walk anywhere in particular, but to widen my "lap" - instead of going around the block four or five times, I'd circle two blocks, twice.  A nice distance, and a view that, in the context of me being on foot, as opposed to driving, was new.

I had completed the first block of the trip.  I was at a four way stop sign, and stopped to look. There was a car coming up behind me, maybe 50 feet down the street.

I started to cross, as I was the only thing actually at the intersection - no other pedestrians or cars.  Luckily, I kept alert.  The car behind me kept coming, and not slowing down, not slowing down.  As I got to almost halfway across the street, I realized that he had ignored the stop sign, and I twisted my body out of the way.  I saw him see me as his front fender just barely got my calf muscle.  I went to the ground, and he immediately stopped and jumped out of the car.

"Where did you come from?  Where did you come from?  Oh my god, where did you come from?" As if I'd simply poofed into existence in his path.  I shook my head a few times and gathered my thoughts.  Did a quick inventory, and found all parts accounted for.  I hefted my ass off the pavement and walked a few paces back and forth, just sort of making sure I was alive. Surprisingly, I had only a few choice words for the driver, nothing too outrageous.  I was fine, and I think I might have been in shock or something.  I mean, now, I can think of all kinds of ways the whole thing could've played out.  At the time, though, I just shooed him away, cursed a little, said "Watch where you're going, asshole!", and went on my way.

Dammit, I should've at least flung some feces or something.