Irrelevant Cheetah

At the risk of sounding like an ad for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, many things are good when mixed together. I like peanut butter and jelly. I like vodka and orange juice. Mashed potatoes and gravy, chocolate and peanut butter – they’re all excellent.

But my current addiction is trail mix – the kind with peanuts, cashews, raisins, almonds and M&Ms, and I want to know: When I reach into the bag for a handful, why is it so hard to get an evenly mixed group of items?

The perfect handful would be, obviously, one peanut, one cashew, one raisin, etc. I know that’s asking a lot, however, so I’d be happy with a relatively random grouping. I can even live with not getting an M&M in every handful, since the M&M is obviously a poorly represented demographic in the trail mix.

However, here’s what happens. I’ll reach in and pull out a fairly random handful, which makes me happy. But then, even as I chew, sighing contentedly, I reach for another handful, to be greeted with four cashews. Or a peanut and three raisins. Or – I kid you not – eight M&Ms and a lonely little almond. Then I am no longer happy, and I am forced to replace some of the items and search for others.

There are reasons for this, you know. First of all, I don’t want to reach the bottom of the bag and be left with nothing but cashews. I want to make sure there’s an even sampling all the way to the bottom of the package. Getting too many raisins early on virtually guarantees a dearth of raisins later – not a pleasant thing to look forward to.

But most of all, I do it because I want a sampling, dammit. That, after all, is the reason for trail mix in the first place, is it not? If I wanted a handful of raisins, I would go buy a box of raisins. I want to feel the flavors and textures mingle and socialize as I chew, as if they had been chosen by a master chef. So I’m left throwing almonds back into the bag while I decide if I want another peanut or perhaps a cashew with this handful, and I can’t help thinking that snacking should not be this much mental work.

Perhaps it’s time to switch to something less OCD-conducive, like Doritos.

I am ashamed to say that, despite having lived here in Alaska for nigh on fifteen years, I had never been to Fairbanks. This was a situation my wife was determined to change, and this past weekend, she finally succeeded.

In the closest thing either of us has had to a vacation in more than two years, we made the six-hour drive up to Fairbanks to see an old friend of hers. On the way we passed Denali - Mt. McKinley to you all from the lower 48 – another sight that I am ashamed that I had never seen.

The rankings? There were several. Her friends were awesome and generous and I would visit them again. Four stars. Fairbanks is a nice, small town. I even got to see what they laughably call “downtown”: two four-story buildings. Three stars. The mini-vacation was much-needed and left me feeling less likely to hose down the office with a fire extinguisher while laughing and cursing in Klingon. Four stars.

On the way to Fairbanks, Denali was completely shrouded in clouds and mists, such that we didn’t even know which way to look for it, much less be able to be awed by its presence. On the way back it was slightly better, but only by a tad, and any pictures I would have taken of it would have left you wondering why I had taken snapshots of a particularly large hill. And after we left Denali, it emerged majestically from the clouds when we were about fifty miles away – not close enough for any spectacular photos. One star.

What good is it to live within hours of the highest mountain on the continent when you can’t even see it?

On another note: I hope you all accept this excuse for me not responding to comments, posting, commenting, etc. I had 103 unread posts to read this morning and I had to go back to work. I’ll get back to reading/commenting/procrastinating soon – I promise.

We recently bought a philodendron.

As I was repotting it, I pulled out the plastic tag sticking out of the dirt that tells you what sort of plant it is, how much water to give it, and how much light it likes. Seemed typical, until I saw the last thing printed on the plastic, invisible until the tag was removed from the dirt:

Asexual Propagation Prohibited.

Excuse me?

The first thing that came to mind is that the plant sellers were attempting to tell me that I could not make cuttings of my plant, even after I bought it. The fact that I now owned the plant was irrelevant; plant-sharing is a sinister practice, and though the RIAA is not involved, many honest plant companies suffer from people spreading plant cuttings willy-nilly with no regard for copyright issues or seed purchases.

But after ruminating over the ramifications of plant piracy, I thought of something else. Perhaps, I thought, the plant sellers are involved in something much more insidious. They are attempting to prohibit the act of asexual propagation completely.

Why do they care? If I want to split off a piece of myself, like an arm or a big toe, and use it to grow another Wolf, isn’t that my prerogative? Who are they to tell me that I must create offspring the old-fashioned way?

Not that I have any issues with the old-fashioned way, mind you. No, I’m quite fond of the usual ways to create offspring.

But it’s none of their business, is it? Are they against cloning? How about artificial insemination? What if I want to plant my toenail clippings and see what sprouts? All of those are “asexual,” and thus prohibited, according to my plant’s plastic tag.

I never would have pegged the potted plant companies to be among those bent on world domination. And to think that all this time I had my eye on BP, Chevron and Microsoft.

A recent post of mine and its related comments brought to light the fact that almost all of us are unwilling and/or unable to throw away our socks.

Any rational human being would have to agree that there is only one explanation for this unusual aversion: evolution.

Yes, somewhere written in our genetic code is a piece of instruction that tells us not to throw away our socks. Somehow, back in the mists of time, our very survival must have depended on us keeping our socks at all costs.

I have a good idea when that time was. Somewhere between Piltdown Man and Cro-Magnon man, sandwiched in the Paleolithic era, was Homo Pedicurus, or Argyle Man.

Argyle Man was unique in our lineage. Not quite as adept at tool-making as his successor, Cro-Magnon, he was nevertheless quite skilled at making warm foot covers from whatever materials he had at hand, be they reeds or saber-toothed tiger furs. However, the construction of these foot covers was time- and labor-intensive, and because they contributed to a good night’s sleep and helped prevent injury from stepping on pointy things, it was imperative that these foot covers be kept at all costs, regardless of their condition. The sock-maker of the clan was revered as a shaman, and if you damaged or lost your socks, it was just as likely that you would be fed to a hungry cave-bear as it was that he would make you a new pair.

Thus, our sock-stocking (that is, the hoarding of socks) behavior originated and was bred into our very DNA. I know that for a time the art of sock-making was lost, but the genetic instructions remained, waiting to be reactivated at the first sign of a stocking or even a relatively soft slipper.

But we are better than our genetic instructions. Just as we no longer flee when we hear a twig snap in the distance, so we should no longer hoard our socks. Join me! Rise above your roots! Trash your socks!

I just got back from a “business meeting,” which is short for “excuse to eat on the company expense account while we discuss fishing and maybe ten minutes’ worth of business-related activities.”

Food? Pretty good, actually. Company? Nice enough people.

Me? Not so nice.

It seems that as I go through life and the longer I live (and don’t get me wrong - I’m not going off on one of these “I’m getting so old” tangents) the less I understand the subtleties of human social interaction, and the less time I want to invest in it.  

Since I’m not a huge fan of the human race in general, I suppose it only makes sense that I don’t have a whole lot of interest in making nicey-nice with people that I don’t know, will probably never see again, and only work with tangentially (i.e., I deliver files to them electronically, and they email me to say that they got them.)

Is that so wrong? I wasn’t rude or anything – just quiet. I didn’t feel like I had a lot to offer the conversation, so I kept my mouth shut. I realize that it is necessary to rub shoulders/other body parts in order to advance in the corporate world, and we all know how I feel about that.

I guess this means that I am well on my way to becoming the crotchety old bastard that yells at the kids to stay off his lawn and then totters off for a nap.

Some of you may not know this, but I have a lot of contacts in the movie industry. They know of my expertise in screenwriting, and are often asking me all sorts of questions and offering me advice, including “Would you like butter on that?” and “Sir, please put that thing away. This is a family movie.”

But I digress. Recently I went to see one of my industry insider buddies, and after sneaking past the security guards, I sat down and grilled him on the future of cinema. Well, first I grilled him for his PIN and his smoked salmon recipe, and then I grilled him about cinema.

As an informed consumer and movie-goer, like me, you may have noticed the current trend of turning video games into feature films – games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Steel Magnolias. Well, my contact assured me that this trend will continue. As (name withheld) put it, “What? Write something new, with a fresh storyline? I don’t have time for that! I’ve got to reach level 5 gazillion on Grand Theft Auto IV. Now get out! Go watch Alvin & the Chipmunks again!” (It shows how important somebody is if they can actually speak in roman numerals. And pronouncing the ampersand is also tremendously difficult.)

Because he was so rude, I feel compelled to share with you the industry secrets he involuntarily passed along to me while he was raiding the candy machine down the hall. Mark your calendars: The following blockbusters are coming soon to a theatre near you.

That last one looks like a blockbuster to me.

(This is cross-posted over at Burt’s Mustache.)

I told myself I wouldn’t post about it.

I told myself it was petty.

I told myself that suffering in silence is manly.

But I can be silent no longer.

The elastic on my right sock is totally shot, and the feeling of a loose sock flopping around my ankle is driving me f***ing INSANE. I keep reaching down to pull it up, and that wrecks the elastic further, and thus the vicious cycle continues. I may soon be able to pull my sock over my head like a blanket and hide from the world.

Okay, I posted it.

No, I still don’t feel better.

Damn sock.

Even here in the Great Frozen North, summer is coming. Nay, for all practical purposes, it is here, since we don’t celebrate Spring much here. We have winter and summer.

I say this because, with the advent of summer comes home improvement season, and thus long walks through the aisles of the local Home Depot.

Now, I could regale you with tales of house construction, of eighteen different types of hammers, of discovering that HOLY CRAP sheets of T-111 are expensive. Rather, however, I shall spin a yarn of sawdust.

This sawdust was happy, and lived happily ‘twixt two sheets of plywood. Until, that is, an innocent passerby happened to raise the top sheet of plywood and then release it, thus expelling two pieces into the air, and thus directly into the eyeball-apparatus of said passerby.

This passerby (me, if you’re having trouble keeping up) then rubbed and rubbed, trying to get the sawdust out, with some luck. However, there was an unintentional side effect.

Keep in mind that each of these two pieces of sawdust was roughly the size of a Volkswagen. Rubbing your eyes when a Volkswagen-sized piece of dirt is in there is never a good idea. The result? A corneal abrasion.

Yeah, it’s fancy talk for “I scratched my eyeball.”

If you’ve done it before, you feel for me. It hurts, and entails a trip to the emergency room, where I was poked and prodded and half-drowned as they washed out the eye and proceeded to put all sorts of drops and chemicals and what-have-you into the eye, such that it seemed like a good idea to just keep the original sawdust in there instead.

Still, I let them have their fun, and I walked out of there with a tube of antibiotic cream to go in my eye for five days and a worthless Vicodin prescription (worthless because not only does Vicodin do nothing for me, but these were for 5 mg pills. I don’t think a large termite could get pain relief from 5 milligrams of Vicodin.)

I have had to put “Vicodin” into M$ Word’s dictionary. I feel dirty, somehow.

I wonder if Hunter S. Thompson ever had to do that.

Just in case you were starting to feel good about yourself and what you’ve accomplished in your life so far, check this out:

Teen graduates high school, graduates college a week later

If you suck up your dignity long enough to read that, you’ll see that not only is he graduating college a week after he graduates high school, but that he’s graduating with two degrees. Summa cum laude. And, to top it all off, he was a preemie.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go dunk my head in a bucket of water and blow bubbles. I like bubbles.

Dear Mr. Spammer-person:

First of all, congratulations. You have single-handedly increased my spam comments on this blog to twenty or thirty a day, compared to the measly five or ten a week I was getting up until about two weeks ago. I’m almost starting to feel popular.

But secondly, why are you here?

And I don’t mean that in a metaphysical sense. Rather, why are you bothering me?

I realize you have a small penis, and I feel for you, I really do. But – and I’m asking you to trust me on this – spamming random blogs just isn’t going to fix anything. If you had bothered to email me first and ask some questions, I could have done some research, pointed you towards a few helpful support group websites, and so on. But you appear convinced that leaving random comments about ringtones is going to solve your little problem (pun intended.)

What about this blog, in particular, made you decide to market ringtones here? I just did a search, and in two years of posting I have never mentioned the word “ringtones.” Not once. Yet every single one of your spam comments is attempting to sell them to somebody, and linking to a webpage that doesn’t even exist. Which confuses me even further. I thought the point of spam in general was to sell something, but when your link is broken, seems like it’s a waste of your time and mine. If your link was working, at least one of us would be getting something out of this parasitic relationship you seem to have fostered.

Well, I have done the necessary research, and I’ve reported your spamming ass to your hosting company. If the world was a just place, you would be strung up by your undersized testicles and forced to listen to Michael Bolton singing tenderly about losing a hangnail, for hours and hours and hours.

 Of course, since the world is not a just place, you will probably receive a firm letter, asking you to cease and desist. And I can only hope that you will take that in the spirit in which it is intended: with all the power of a white-hot ball of rage and sorrow, along with a case of herpes. Rabid, HIV-infected herpes.

Sincerely,

wolf