Anyone who's been reading this blog for the last several months may remember me bitching about this horrible temporary job I've taken as a transcriptionist. Well, the job has become less horrible and (apparently) less temporary, as I head back to school. The worst part is still working for the gorgon, but aside from that I've grown comfortable here and most everyone else I work with is pleasant enough. Which is not to say that I've come to *like* the job, it just doesn't suck the shit out of the devil's ass anymore. So it's got that going for it.
I transcribe police reports, as dictated by the officers themselves. About six years prior to working here, I had some unpleasant dealings with the police. In addition, I also had to deal with lawyers, judges, and the various other whorebags in our backward-ass, farce of a legal system. If that last sentence wasn't clue enough, the entire experience left me with a pretty low opinion of our system of justice (And, yes, I do realize it's the best in the world. If I took a dump in the exact shape of Michelangelo's Statue of David, it would still just be nasty poo.), and an unfriendly attitude toward the police. Someday enough time will have passed and I'll want to write about it in detail.
Working here has turned out to be a really good thing in that it's helped me deal with a lot of my problems with cops. I still think a lot of them are assholes, but I've come to realize that, if I were a cop, I'd be one of the biggest assholes on the force and, in light of that, I can no longer allow myself to judge them too harshly. Hell, if I were given a badge and a gun, I'd probably turn into the Murder-Tron 5000*
Also, in the four months that I've been working here, I've learned (or maybe just come to believe) a few things that I feel the need to share:
Criminals are fucking stupid. Seriously, they're really, really fucking stupid. I've had smarter pets.
All drugs should be legal. Every last one. I don't care if you want to lick a fucking toad or inject mercury into your retarded fucking eyeball, you should be allowed to do it.
If not all drugs, then certainly marijuana should be legalized. And we should actively encourage people to smoke marijuana instead of drinking alcohol. Keep in mind, I hate the pot subculture and I fucking despise hippies, but if we're simply talking about which of the two, pot or alcohol, is responsible for more societal ills...its alcohol. Aside from the occasional stoner who likes to get high and collide trains into one another, the only real societal ill you can blame on marijuana is The Grateful Dead and they haven't been a problem for a good long while now.
Seriously, I've written a ton of police reports now and when some asshole beats the shit out of his wife, he's been drinking. When a couple are having a domestic dispute so loud it wakes up the neighbors, one or both of them have been drinking. When there's a random stabbing at a party, the tards involved have been drinking. When there's a traffic collision with a fatality, the responsible driver has been drinking.
Stoners, on the other hand, tend to just giggle a lot and eat Snacky S'mores.
Only shit people benefit from marijuana and other drugs being illegal. Cartels, pushers, smugglers, crooked cops, and a ton of others are all making a killing on the retarded and arbitrary decision to outlaw certain substances over others. If we were smart, we'd legalize marijuana, tax the shit out of it the way we do cigarettes, and double the sentence for any crime committed as a result of ingesting it (which we should also do for alcohol).
There was a time, starting about eight years ago, when I was a lot more active than I am now. For the first time in my adult life I started exercising on a regular basis. In fact, the day that school stopped having recess (7th grade, I think), I stopped being active on a regular basis, so it's probably safe to say that back in December of 1998, I started exercising regularly for the first time in my entire life. I'd get up every morning before dawn and go for a walk and watch the sun come up, which I love doing.
I'm not a morning person, but there's something wonderful about being outside and experiencing the last half hour of night and the first half hour of day. Watching the world slowly wake up is something I genuinely love doing and is one of those things in life that I believe to be good for the soul. Sadly, the end result is that everyone is now awake and they start leaving their houses and all of a sudden the streets are filling back up with assholes you're not alone anymore and it's really, really, time to get back home.
And so I'd go home and go back to sleep for a few hours. Every night I'd go for my "real" walk, which was just under five miles, half of it uphill. That was during the last hour and a half of daylight and the first half hour of night. Not quite as wonderful as dawn but frequently peaceful, which is certainly nice. And if I didn't have time for that, then I'd at least go for a couple miles before going to bed. I was at a point where I wasn't able to sleep as well if I didn't get in some sort of exercise.
Then I took an office job. Office jobs can pay really well and there are certainly a lot of good reasons to have them, but they are unnatural and humans weren't built for and aren't meant to be sitting at desks all day long. I stopped exercising. Not altogether, not at first. But slowly, I got more and more out of the habit. And then I started hating my job - which at that point, I'd let take over way too much of my life - and the more I hated my job, the more unhappy I was, the less I exercised.
Some people exercise to blow off stress. Some people can tell when they're stuck in a bad situation and will make an effort to change it. I used to think of myself as one of those people. But instead of either of those things, I entered a really stupid 3+ year period of playing video games and ignoring reality. And I stopped exercising entirely. And I got fatter. I just recently broke myself of the video game habit and thank god, too.
A couple weeks ago, I tried on a pair of pants that used to be big on me and the button was about four or five inches away from the button hole. Worse, larger pants that were a little loose on me six months to a year ago, are now a little tight. And the pants that were a little tight I can't even fucking get into.
Goddammit.
So here I am, no longer able to ignore the reality of how much weight I've put back on, or how unhappy I am because of it. Boffo.
Other than the fact that I like to talk about myself way too much, I have no idea why I'm making this all public, but I am. And I've decided to write weekly entries talking about diet, exercise, and weight loss. If this is the sort of thing that bores the shit out of you - as well it should be - please feel free to ignore the fat bastard reports as they're posted.
Above is the new Mountain Goats video, give it a look. This is from the new CD which was just released. You can get it at your nearest non-suck music shoppe, or you can buy it from Amazon by clicking here.
There's this crazy homeless guy called Stankovich. Honest to God, that's his name. Can't make shit like that up. He tells three teenagers to give him a cigarette because he knows they have one. They tell him they don't, so he goes bug-fuck and charges them. One of them beats Stankovich in the face with his skateboard and runs away. When the kid tells the cops what happened, they pretty much let him go.
Generally speaking, violence isn't a good thing, and beating on the homeless is just plain fucked up. And yet, I find this really funny. Something else to share with the shrink, I guess.
Just a brief little aside that didn't really belong in the previous post: I watched American Idol once. I had to stop after watching Simon "cock-goblin" Cowell tear into some dude. In a way, he reminds me of this girl I once dated. Everyone used to always talk about how honest she was and how she'd tell it like it is. That was all a load of shit. She was just an ill-mannered bitch who got off on mistreating people out of some warped sense of cosmic revenge. A lot of fun, tho. Anyway, fuck that Simon guy, I hate people who are rude in the name of honesty.
Desperation Squad is perhaps the greatest band ever, certainly in the top five. Never heard of them? Neither has anyone else, which is so typically fucking backwards when it comes to the music the people in this country listen to. And yet, it's also one of the reasons I love them so goddamn much.
This band has seen so many different incarnations and every single one of them has been great. Mr. P and company have been rocking harder, louder, messier, and nakeder (new word!) for over twenty years now and they've made about fifty fucking dollars doing it. Long past the point where other bands call it quits and get jobs to support their families, D-Squad is still out there rocking the bejeezus out of stunned first-timers and old-school fans alike.
One of the best nights of my life, was at the Blackwatch Pub, back in late 2000 or early 2001 when, in the middle of one of their sets, the band kicks the audience in the nuts with THE BEST ASS IN ROCK & ROLL. I hadn't seen the band play in about two years at this point and had forgotten what they were capable of. I remember sitting at the bar, slowly shaking my head back and forth, in jealous disbelief over how fucking cool these guys were. And then, of course, they closed with YOUR GIRLFRIEND'S UGLY.
One of the best nights of my life was at The Old Towne Pub, in late 2003 when Desperation Squad played with the equally kick-ass Third Grade Teacher. It was a weeknight and fucking nobody was there. 3GT opens the show and kicks ass for my table of friends, one other table of people, and a small handful of the scary old trolls that sit at the bar. They do their set and tear down and leave. I'm pretty sure I bought their newest album and got Sabrina to sign a mini-poster for me. After a few minutes, the squad is on stage and rocking out their first song of the night. When the song finishes, the trolls at the bar pay their tab and get up and leave. Mr. P gives them shit for leaving one song into the set and they all mutter something about having to work in the morning. So did everyone at my table but we aren't pussies. Sometime into the second song, or shortly thereafter, the Third Grade Teacher folks take off and the audience is now down to my table of five or six people and another table that winds up going outside to smoke or just leaving entirely by halfway through the set. So now we're at the last half of Desperation Squad's set and they're playing for my friends and I and maybe one or two guys at the bar. Do they puss out like a bunch of little girls? Do they change their set to some lower energy version of the band? Fuck no! My hand to God, these guys rock the fucking house like its packed to capacity with screaming drunks. I'm not usually the sort of person who screams and goes nuts when I see a band play, but that night was different. All of us at the table were giving what meager, pathetic applause we could at the end of each song. We dutifully chanted, "NO! PUSSY! TONIGHT!" when it was called for, and how could we do anything less? These four rock and roll gods were playing their hearts out for eight people. Fucked if I'm not gonna clap my ass off for that shit. They played a great set, and, of course, closed with YOUR GIRLFRIEND'S UGLY.
Holy shit, what a great night that was! And that show is why I love those guys. People talk about the unbridled energy of Green Day. Whatever. I'd like to see those guys do what they do for more than two decades for no fucking money. Desperation Squad is Rock & Roll for its own sake and it's about time they started getting some fucking credit for it.
Which brings me to the reason I started writing all this shit in the first place. There's this show called AMERICA'S GOT TALENT. I wouldn't even know this show existed were it not for the fact that Desperation Squad recently performed on it. So I checked out the web site and the Executive Producer is Simon Cowell, the rude, smirky-faced, cunt from American Idol. Regis Philbin is the show's host and the judges are David Hassellhoff, Piers Morgan, and Brandy. I don't know about you, but these are exactly the people I'd go to if I wanted to find real talent. Oh, and I'd also turn to Fred Phelps for spiritual advice. So anyway, D-Squad got to play on this show and godammit if they didn't give yet another great performance. Which means most of America won't even notice it. As for myself, I'm proud to say I own all their albums.
You can go to YouTube and check out their performance (and other videos) by clicking here, or just click play and watch it below:
Doing some research online, I discovered that sodomy laws in Kentucky were apparently ruled unconstitutional back in 1992. Then I realized that for 200 years prior to that, sodomy was totally illegal in the state whose postal abbreviation is KY. I can't be the only person to find that funny.
