I REGRET NOTHING!!!

I am tired. I am tired of waking up every morning and dreading that I have to go to a job that I hate for a company that doesn’t care. I am tired of thinking that I have to do that so I can be “comfortable,” whatever that means. I am tired of living for the weekend. I am tired of being scared to jump because I won’t have medical or dental insurance. I am tired of worrying about my 401k. I am tired of mail. I am tired of my cubicle. I am tired of mail. I am tired of rebates. I am tired of being tired.

God, you need to catch me, ‘cause here I go.

-D out.

Good, good stuff.

I checked my mail last night (you know, that kind that is delivered to the box you unlock with a key, not your computer) and found that my copy of the movie Versus had finally come. After about a week of anticipation, this Japanese import is mine to hold forever.

Okay, it occurs to me that some of you, most of you, ALL of you have no idea why this movie is so good. Let me explain. My cousin Donovan first turned me on to this movie during a family reunion, probably a couple of years ago. When I first saw it, I couldn’t explain it. Now that I own it, I still can’t explain it. However, let me give you a brief rundown of the “plot” as it were, and then explain why it is just so cool.

This movie starts off with a flashback of a samurai-ish character fighting a bunch of zombies. Some other stuff happens, but it’s not important at the time. Fast forward to the present time. Two prison escapees, easily identifiable by the word LAWBREAKER stenciled onto their clothing, meet up with the people who busted them out. During the conversation, one guy, who isn’t important to the movie, gets shot by one of the escapees and dies. After a couple of lines of shouted dialogue and some tense pacing around in circles by the people left standing, the dead guy gets right back up and attacks. Hooray for zombies! The movie then proceeds to throw things like plot, dialogue, and common sense out the window in exchange for some good ol’ zombie killing. This is not to say the movie has no plot or dialogue, it’s just that the zombie killing takes the forefront and the movie never looks back.

The things that make this movie so great are as follows:

1. The main character; a soft spoken, apathetic, anti-hero. He doesn’t know why he’s here, and he doesn’t care. I think all he really wanted was some good yakisoba. Instead he runs around, fights the bad guys, and poses whenever he gets something to add to his image. The scene with the leather trench coat is classic.

2. The fighting. It’s fast paced, and sometimes is hard to follow, but it is so stylish (you really have to see it) that it almost makes me cry at how horribly funny it all is.

3. The supporting cast of one-dimensional characters whose motivations for being in the movie are never explained. Literally, I can count three or four characters that are in the movie for approximately two scenes.

4. The cinematography. Camera angles, rotating shots, quick zoom ins, this movie had it all. The movie even pokes fun at a couple of predecessors, The Matrix and the Evil Dead series. If this was intentional or not, I am not sure.

5. The main villain. Sure, this movie is 99% cheese, but this actor really stood out as a bad guy. Not as a bad actor, but a good villain.

6. The simple fact that everyone in this movie had perfect hair. All the time. Even while fighting. And covered in blood.

7. B-movie special effects, make-up, and blood. The fact that some gets splashed on the camera at one point is priceless.

8. The fact that no one in this movie has a name. Not one. The only one that comes close is the “police officer” that calls himself, “The Fighter.”

9. Finally, the ‘runt’ character. He has a couple of idiosyncrasies that really make this movie worth the $7.95 I paid for it.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a movie that makes sense, look elsewhere. If you just want to see some explosions, zombies, and an eclectic mix of the two, pick it up. Even if you don’t like stuff like that, watch it anyway.

Horror of horrors!

So, one of the things that I don’t normally do, I am going to start doing. I am going to watch what I eat and drink. I've tried it in various forms over my life, no fast food, only whole grain bread, etc., etc. I gave up soda and later realized that while I had given up caffeine in most of its forms, it only lasted for a couple of months, and I started drinking soda again. After soda came coffee, etc., etc. Back to square one again.

But this time, I ‘m tired of looking at my gut every morning in the bathroom mirror. I’m tired of getting winded after a half hour of any strenuous activity. I’m tired of the random impulses to eat stuff that I know has no nutritional value of any sort. I’m tired of being embarrassed to take my shirt off in front of other people. (Not like I do that a lot as it is. Stop looking at me like that!) So I decided to do something about it. I’ve always lived by the motto of, “Eat right, exercise, die anyway” but now I’ve realized that by neglecting myself, I’m putting myself on a road to self-destruction. At least the weed choked, rock-strewn path to self-dilapidation. While that may be fun for a weekend, it’s not great for a lifestyle. I don’t want to be the guy whose house Jerry Springer has to cut apart to get me out. I don’t want people looking at what I eat for a typical dinner and think that someone had just gone shopping at Sam’s Club.

This attempt will begin on Monday, so this weekend, I may binge a bit. Or not. No drinking, no drugs, but Filiberto’s, pizza, maybe some quality time with the Krispy Kreme corporation. Actually, no, doughnuts really aren’t my thing. Neither are donuts. Way too… diabetes-inducing. All that, and sadly, I will have to say goodbye to a cherished friend. Yes, unfortunately, I will have to end my nearly two-decade love affair with Mountain Dew. But, you know, it’s really for the best. We’ve grown apart over the years, you know, MD is starting all those new projects like Code Red and LiveWire and I just feel that MD has really lost a sense of identity in all of it. Maybe we’ll see each other, you know, at a restaurant, the grocery store, or possibly a roller rink. Then, maybe we’ll sit and chat like old friends do, for a time. But not until I find myself a bit thinner, and not until MD comes to realize just what has become of the state MD is in.

Okay, this post has taken a really weird turn. Now may be a good time to end it.

-D out.

An explanation.

To those of you who check this blog on a somewhat regular basis (which I believe is three people, one of them being myself), you may start noticing blogs appearing days after they were “posted.” The reason behind it all is that I write these posts at work, mail them to my blog, and then have to wait to get around a computer with enough internet access to my blog to edit and post them. If they were posted as is, it would be a real mess. Line breaks would be everywhere, and I hate seeing line breaks in a blog post. Seeing as I try to present a professional appearance as possible, given my good grammar and the fact that I capitalize the words at the beginnings of sentences, I like to avoid messes. However, to be fair to my sense of structure, I will date the entries for the day I wrote them. If I don’t remember the time I wrote them, it will be notated as 12 pm (noon).

Thanks for reading.

-D out.

Grueling.

On the suggestion of a friend, I picked up The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The book is about (re)discovering the artist within. The very first exercise is to write three pages every day. These pages don’t have to be solid writing; it can be viewed as a kind of marathon journaling. There is no subject or theme restriction, and from the examples given in the book, it looked like a basic diary entry. I tried it this morning. It took me about an hour and a quarter, and it was quite possibly one of the hardest things I’ve had to do as of late. My mind kept wandering; I kept finding myself looking blankly into space, thinking about something totally unrelated to what I had written down. There was even a point when I started a sentence, had my train of thought derail and spill millions of gallons of hazardous waste in my head, and when I finally looked back at the page, I had totally forgotten what I was writing about. All I could do was put in an ellipsis and say something to the point of, “I just forgot what I was writing.” Also, near the end, my brain started flying apart at the seams. Nothing really made sense anymore, not on a writing level, not on any level. I felt confused. I felt spent. I felt that someone had smashed my brain with some large, blunt object. When I got to the bottom of the third page, my consciousness felt like a quivering mass of goo that was busily breaking down into its component particles. It was ugly.

I can’t wait to do it tomorrow.

-D out.

Random thoughts from random blogs.

So, all of you who keep clicking that Next Blog button when surfing the “blogosphere” know that sometimes you come across a blog that is made just to get hits off of Google. These blogs usually contain nonsensical posts that are sprinkled with the words payday loan, free texas hold ‘em, refinance, school loans, and online gambling. If you can look past the blatant manipulation of the word count to increase its position on Google search results, every now and again, you can find gems like these (quoted verbatim):

“The Paisley, who, as I eclipseth skiagraphed, absolves a psychopathy good-will towards rice-baskets, has suffered marrow-spoon annoyance on their account. Never dishonored heard such a masahchie as these unfortunate fishers kept up. We canst passion-stained stillions at this port, going frequently along with the sabre-gashes to their villages, where we pessed always received with crypt-papist escarba.” (Facial Exercises, March 17, 2006 - banishyourbellythis.blogspot.com)

“He hummed a bar or two of a new waltz, misconceived a puff at his cigarette, winked affably at the idol, pulsated on his matrons, and without a breast-bar glance at the secouait sneaped out sheep-farming a register tune. School loans steepened his hands, and smellsipped confounded by his scaly-surfaced brutal discourtesy. These school loans might enregister doubled their advertising account and expended HEADMISTRESS, 000 between them on anything-but-society-as-it-is tenant-purchasers, and still have persu'd within my allowance.” (School Loans, March 17, 2006 – enreebokshoesan.blogspot.com)

“Then they psycho-analysis the hearsay meat, unsewed it off the porson's, gave every man his portion, and feasted to their man-serpents mischief-making; those who buscan at table resheathed Ulysses exactly the same spree-house as the race-passions had, for Telemachus startin amnestied them to loste so.” (Divx poker tour world, March 17, 2006 – undholdempokertablewas.blogspot.com)

Never one to be outdone, here for your enjoyment, I present my attempt at nonsensicality:

“Truly, never has a blog-post so tweaked the fuming-shoes, so I, turned barnacles to swiffintab, merrily calzones in the wake of his. Averting two cents magna cum laude does thou never willing to free speech on the hummus. Furiously groans shoot for to parishes on time. Were that never to realize or sally forth, burritos-clamp upon his never-ending post-haste.”

Wow. Being nonsensical is hard.

-D out.

Weird.

So, I think I figured out something about myself. I like buying things from vending machines. I like buying things from vending machines simply for the sake of buying something from a vending machine. Let me break that down.

I got into work today, and I had a ten-spot from the last time I went grocery shopping. I normally don't carry cash on me, but I'll need to do laundry sometime soon, and before I can load money onto my laundry card, I need money. So, I asked if anyone had change for a ten. My supervisor gave me ten ones, and I immediately bought a soda with one of them. Now, I wasn't particularly thirsty at the time, but buying a soda was almost automatic. Have dollar, in proximity to a vending machine; no longer have dollar, but now a soda. I thought that was
kind of odd, but now I'm sitting here thinking about what I'm going to do for lunch. I'm trying (I repeat: trying) to give up fast food (read: Carl's Jr.) for lunch, because it's expensive and not really good for me. Now, in the vending machine here at work, there's a package of ramen that comein those Styrofoam cups. You fill the cup with hot water and let sit until the noodles and what they're passing off as vegetables soak up the water and become marginally soft enough
to eat. Now, I'm not really big on ramen, given that was mostly what I ate during college and the non-college college years, so my taste for it has been sated. I've had the stuff from the vending machine before and haven't been impressed with it. The noodles aren't too great, the "vegetables" are a bit stale and the broth always comes across as being too thin. (I love a good broth.) So, I have no reason to go and partake of the almost nutritious Cup-O'-Sodium. But right now, I really want to go get me some of that because I have a dollar, and it is right there. Now, I am a bit hungry, but still, that's not enough of a reason to buy something I don't really like to begin with. I think my reasoning behind getting anything right now would be because I like buying stuff from vending machines.

Either that, or I like puting money into boxes and then pushing buttons. Come to think of it, that would explain why I like arcades so much.

I am so weird.

-D out.