The Ghost Of 9/11’s Past

• by GeekMan • In Geek Life •   5

Sometimes, the worst day of your life turns out to be one of the best stories for you to tell your friends & family later on in life. One of my personal favorite stories to tell revolves around my very first day as a college senior. The day was so bad in fact, that I bought myself a journal and began writing down my thoughts just so that I would remember how miserable I was at the time.

And boy, was I miserable.

Looking back, everything that happened to me that day was probably very funny to those around me. At the time however, I was so distraught I probably wouldn’t have minded if I had accidentally chewed off my own arm and fallen into a huge vat of lemon juice, salt and battery acid. Today, for the sake of learning to look back and laugh at myself, I thought I’d tell the world all about the day I like to call The Day Of Ultimate Suckiness. The following is the complete text from my journal.

I’m living in hell. My life is in ruins and everything I touch is turning around the bite me. Don’t believe me? Well, let me just tell you about my day and maybe you’ll do me the favor of putting me out of my misery.

My girlfriend, who I’ve been going out with for eight months, has just broken my heart. She says she needs ‘space’, but I found out the truth and broke up with her. You see, I found out that during the summer break she was sleeping with my roommate. Isn’t that special?

I am poor. So poor that I can’t afford to buy food and have been boiling basil leaves in water in the hopes that it will make a good soup. So far it’s not working and no, I’m not kidding.

I’m also so poor that I can’t afford to pay for my college classes. If I don’t get a job, and soon, I’m going to get thrown out of college.

I received a letter from college today telling me that I need a measles shot or I am not allowed to attend classes. I hope the shots free or I’m, well… shot.

My car has just died and I don’t have the money to get her fixed, so I might have to junk her. As if that isn’t bad enough, due to that little ‘accident’ last week my license has been suspended.

My one and only credit card is overdrawn. A lot.

I know it didn’t happen today, but yesterday my mother made me go to a family outing where I was put in charge of the nine small children and three dogs. I still have the migraine.

My other roommate, not to cheating bastard, brought a couch to the house today that stinks like mildew. He refuses to get rid of until we find a replacement couch, which we can’t do because we’re all very poor. So, because of this stinking, stupid couch, none of my friends will visit me at all. Stupid bastard.

The answering machine that my brother bought me as a house warming gift doesn’t work.

My plant is dying and nothing I do seems to be helping.

I’m a theater major.

And lastly, as I was walking down the street this evening a little girl pointed out to me that the pants I’ve been wearing all day have a hole in the crotch.

I want to cry. Somebody please kill me. I won’t even struggle.

Coincidentally, the date this all took place was 9/11. Funny, huh?

It’s strange, but even while all of this was going on I still managed to keep my sense of humor. My ability to laugh at myself, and to get other people to laugh at themselves, has served me well throughout the years. It’s gotten me out of fights, into jobs, through hard times and yes, even laid.

I’m especially proud of that last one.

When I tell the story about this day in my life it becomes a comedy, not an odyssey. Looking back, it all seems so trivial that I can’t help but laugh. Nothing that happened on that day changed my life forever or gave me new insight into my inner self. I took no journey, I learned no lesson.

I just took notes and moved on.

I really enjoy telling this story and most of the time my audience enjoys hearing it. It makes me feel good that I can look back on what at the time felt like the worst day of my life and laugh along with my audience as I relive it.

I’m positive that everyone out there has at least one of these stories to tell. Tell me, what’s your story?

HoBiscuits Revenge

• by GeekMan • In HoBiscuit •   Comments Off on HoBiscuits Revenge

I really hate being sick.

Whatever illness HoBiscuit had she managed to give it to me and now I am completely and totally unable to speak. Really, it’s true. When I open my mouth I can only manage to create this pathetic, high-pitched, squeaking noise not unlike a small rodent being violently folded in half. Backwards. And the amount of mucus congregating in my lungs and around my vocal cords would choke a starving, tapeworm-infested miniature goat.

And everyone knows how much they can eat.

HoBiscuit, bless her evil, cold-as-a-stone heart, has been doing her best to nurture me back to health while simultaneously exacting revenge for all the evil jokes and no-longer-quite-so-funny pranks that I subjected her to all last week. She loves to ask me if there’s anything I want or need and then, when I try to talk, she cups her ear and says, “What? I can’t hear you. Could you speak up please?”

Asking for a glass of water is completely out of the question.

On Thursday evening I did something I’ve never done before. I met Luke, who’s a Web Log Writer just like me, in the flesh for the very first time. I never knew of him before and he never knew me, but we had a common bond that drew us together, even across a crowded bar. Actually, he knew HoBiscuit and since we were all hanging out at a bar we got to talking about our web sites. The reason we were at a bar was because a mutual friend of his and HoBiscuit’s needed ‘Emergency Relationship Breakup Support’, but that’s not something I’m allowed to write about.

And that’s a shame because it’s a real good story. Damn.

Anywaste, it came out that we both maintained Web Logs and we started to talk about web sites and other technical stuff. We were quickly cut off from discussing such important matters as click-through rates and visitor counts when the ladies began rolling their eyes in apparent boredom. It didn’t help that we were the only males in a group of six (that later became a group of 12) and all the females were doing the ‘support the girl, guy-bashing’ type of stuff. I was surrounded and felt threatened and scared all evening.

I consoled myself by watching Charlie’s Angels on the bar TV screen.

Right now I’m trying to recover my health and I hope to be better in a couple of days. My diet consists of soup, Earl Grey Tea (hot), salty crackers and a healthy helping of Humble Pie served daily by my loving girlfriend. But don’t worry, I still get to watch TV all day on the Comfy-Couch of Super Sleep while the rest of the world goes to work.

Hey, just because I’m sick doesn’t mean I have to change my lifestyle, right?

Interview #01

• by GeekMan • In Experiments •   8

Earlier this week I joined up with Blogger Insider. My first Interviewer/Interviewee is the heretofore unknown to me (but now added to my favorites list) C. Dodd Harris IV of Ipse Dixit. Below are his questions and my answers.

My god have mercy on our souls.

  1. Does your girlfriend still think HoBiscuit is funny?

    Yes. At least I think she does. Wait a minute and let me check.

    “Honey, do you still think me calling you HoBiscuit is funny?”

    *Whack*

    “Oooowwww.”

    Uh, no. The answer would be no.

  2. Is being a geek a form of cultural superiority?

    Absolutely, now shut up and peel me another grape.

  3. Choose one: Neal Stephenson or Douglas Adams. Justify your choice.

    That’s pretty tough, but I’ve got to go with Adams. Even though Neal wrote Snow Crash, which is one of the most amazing pieces of fiction I’ve ever read, it is still only one book. Nothing else he’s written has had the same kind of power and sense of ‘reality’ as his first book and I don’t know that anything he ever writes will. On the other hand, Adams wrote the Hitchhiker series and each book was better than the last. Also, Adams is dead which always raises an authors perceived worth.

  4. Do you still have a Flintstones pillow?

    No, but sometimes I miss it.

  5. Have you ever considered murdering someone to get their rent-controlled apartment? If yes, please describe.

    I’m a New Yorker so the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’.

    Describe what? The way I would kill them? Well, I’m a hands-on type of guy, so there would be blood and lots of it. Power tools and drop cloths would be used. In order to make it look like an accident, I would use a power sander since everyone knows that power sanders cause more deaths than any other power tool costing $34.95 or less. It’s a fact. Ask Sears.

  6. How is Marx’s critique of Capitalism relevant to the current War in Afghanistan?

    I don’t think it is. Marx wanted everyone to give up their individual prosperity for the good of the society as a whole, but this ideological view of society failed to take into account humanities ingrained vices and the individual’s free will. In society, he did not see a group of individuals, he merely saw a large mass of living things. The result of course, was that his ideas worked in theory and on paper, but never in practice. Afghanistan’s leadership however, wanted to remove free will from its citizens using fear and hate disguised as religion. They tried to create a nation of unthinking, frightened slaves who would do whatever they were told to do by those in power, without ever thinking for themselves. It is an old, old method of controlling an easily frightened, exceedingly poor, deeply religious and mostly uneducated people. The two ideologies are vastly different.

  7. How many children would you like to have? Any time soon?

    Three kids. A boy, a girl and possibly a radioactive, mutant broccoli but don’t hold me to that last one. Two children of one gender and one of the other would also be fine with me. And no, not anytime soon.

  8. Made any money through CafePress?

    Very little, but then again I’m only making 50¢ on each sale so I didn’t expect to get rich. I just think it would be really cool to walk down the street one day and see my face on someone’s shirt. Heh, that would rock.

  9. How the Hell does a freelance designer afford a surround sound system like that?

    I’m a very good freelance designer and my clients are very happy to pay me handsomely for my services. No, really they are. I swear.

  10. Having had a chance to use it for a week now, would you recommend the Lernout and Hauspie speech recognition program to users interested in such a product?

    If they have the patience and are willing to actually use it then yes, I would recommend it. However, it does take some getting used to, and training it to recognize what you say can be both time consuming and frustrating. But it’s definitely worth it.

  11. Do you consider yourself to be paranoid?

    No. (Yes you do)

    No, I don’t. (Then what’s with the tinfoil hat?)

    It’s a… a fashion statement. (Hah! So why do you live in an old WWII bomb shelter?)

    Uh, low rent? (Nice try. And all the canned food with the labels removed?)

    I, uh, like to be surprised? (Why is there a gun-slot in your front door?)

    That’s easy. I live in NY and every apartment has one. (But yours is chrome plated.)

    That keeps the rays out. (Rays?)

    The mind reading rays from the satellite the government keeps over New York at all times. Everyone knows that. (Uh-huh. And why would the government want to read minds?)

    To find out where I am, of course. (Why?)

    They want my teeth! The secret plans are written on my teeth and they want them! So do the giant, alien llamas! But they’ll never get them, never! I’m too smart for ‘em! I hid my real teeth and replaced them with marshmallows! HahahahaHAHAHahaha!

    (Ah, I guess you’re not paranoid after all. You’re just plain crazy)

    Llamas got my teeth! Llamas got my teeth!

  12. (Optional) What is your name?

    I choose option ‘E’. None of the above.

You can check out Ipse Dixit for the questions I asked him and his answers. This is fun.

The Pain Of Cooking

• by GeekMan • In Geek Life •   4

I’ve been sitting here for most of the day trying to figure out how to write my Christmas story. Now, I’ve been working on it all day, but I’ve run into a little problem. I just don’t know how to start writing it.

Yeah, yeah. I’m an idiot.

So instead of beating my head against the wall trying to come up with the “right way” to write my story, I decided to simply write it when I can. Since I’ve already written three pages of the story, I think I deserve a little break.

Especially since I was losing my voice.

I also wanted to tell everybody about a little thing that happened to me last night. It’s a little thing I like to call ‘dinner’. You see, last night for some strange reason I decided that I would cook. That might not seem so important or awe inspiring to you, but to me it’s a very big deal. I don’t like to cook. In fact, you could say I actively avoid doing anything that even resembles cooking if it doesn’t also involve an open flame.

Every man knows that a barbecue is the only way to really cook.

There’s just something so right about an open flame slowly roasting the outside of dead animal flesh. Everything tastes better when it’s cooked over an open flame. Steak, potatoes, chicken, small children, or anything else that you could ever want to eat. They’re even better when drowned in barbecue sauce, pink on the inside and slightly charred on the outside.

Especially the small children.

Anywaste, last night I was going through my pantry what I discovered that I had pasta. I don’t know how old the pasta was, 1988, 1989, or maybe 1991, but it didn’t make a difference to me in the least. All that mattered was that I had something to cook that I might actually be able to eat.

And lord knows I was hungry.

I scrounged up some pasta sauce from the bottom of a ketchup bottle and noticed that in the back of my freezer there was some mold that looked like it could have been some sort of meat at one time in the past. I scraped this mold off the back of the freezer, put it into a pan and started cooking. The pasta was boiling, the sauce was simmering, and the meat was browning nicely. It was at this point that I had another one of my revelations, an epiphany if you will. I realized that I was only cooking for myself and therefore didn’t have to tone down the spices.

My god, I could finally make the perfect sauce.

I literally flew to my spice cabinet and took out all the spices I would need to create the perfect sauce. I had them all, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper, ground red pepper, and crushed red pepper. I also had my secret ingredient, the one thing that’s guaranteed to rip apart the stomach lining from any human being on the planet. I won’t tell you what it is, but you need to be licensed by the government in order to have it in your home.

Yeah, I got the hook up.

So I added all of the spices, including my secret ingredient, to the sauce and let the whole thing simmer. Then I added the meat-like product (which I am now convinced was sentient) and let the whole thing simmer for about fifteen minutes.

I swear I could hear the meat crying in agony the whole time.

This was going to be the best sauce I ever made. If any of you out there like spicy things the way I do, then you would have loved this sauce. I was crying as I ate this perfect concoction of spicy bliss, this wonderful, acidic nectar of the gods. It didn’t even bother me that I knew I was slowly destroying myself from the inside out.

Oh yeah, I knew I was a dead man come morning.

Throughout the meal I could feel this delicious, spicy, almost-sentient sludge burning a hole in my stomach as it sat there like a piece of white-hot lead in my stomach. I just knew that my anus would be a blistering, festering, open sore for the next four to seven days and that should I venture forth from my apartment people would die on the streets as I walked by. I knew all of this, but it just tasted so good I couldn’t stop eating it. Consequences be damned, I was going to enjoy my spicy meal because it was everything that I ever wanted in a sauce.

This sauce was so good it should go down in the history books as the greatest sauce ever conceived by man.

As I sat on my porcelain throne this morning, bent over double, breathing through my mouth, holding my knees and praying to god that the pain would stop, I knew that I only had myself to blame. I smiled as my sphincter convulsed in agony and the sweat formed on my brow and back. I knew that if it weren’t for my years of training in the back alleys of Chinatown, Korea-row and Indian-alley, eating anything with the little symbol for hot on the menu, I would have died during the night.

And you know what? It would have been worth it.

Poor, Sick, Long Suffering HoBiscuit

• by GeekMan • In HoBiscuit •   5

Yesterday, HoBiscuit was a little sick. Not very sick mind you, just a little sick. Since she was in my apartment her sickness became my responsibility and I did everything I could to help her feel better. As we were lying on the couch watching TV she asked me if I could please go get her some water because she was thirsty.

Of course I screwed it up. I’m a guy.

It sounds like a simple request, doesn’t it? When necessary, Wild monkeys in the jungles of East Africa have the necessary social skills to stop flinging their own poo at each other and bring food and water to their sick monkey friends, so it should have been a simple matter for me to get up off my perfectly healthy ass and pour my girlfriend a glass of water. I mean, the fridge was only a couple of feet away and it wasn’t like she was asking me to paint her toe nails or, god forbid, snuggle. Don’t get me wrong, snuggling is great when we’re both healthy, but if one of us is sick and sweaty and having respiratory problems it’s just not the same.

Frankly, it’s just yucky.

So, as I got up to get her water I realized that I still had a full glass of water sitting right there on the coffee table. For a moment, I just looked at it. A nearly full glass of cool refreshing water perched there, virtually untouched, just waiting to quench someone’s thirst. Suddenly, too little geeks appeared in my mind and had a little conversation that went something like this:

“Well, will you look at that. There’s a full glass of water right here.”

“I think she wants water from the fridge.”

“She didn’t say water from the fridge, did she?”

“Well, no. Technically she only asked for some water, but I’m sure she meant fresh water.”

“But this water is right here.”

“You’re going to get us in trouble.”

“Shut up and be a man. It’ll be fun.”

Let me tell you, the look HoBiscuit gave me as I artfully poured my room temperature, slightly used water into her glass was priceless. The look of incredulous astonishment will forevermore be etched in my mind as one of the times that I really ‘got’ her. Of course, she doesn’t see it that way. She thinks I was just being mean and lazy and was angry with me for a couple of hours. It wasn’t until much later on that she realized that I had done it as a joke and wasn’t trying to be deliberately mean. Of course, she thinks it’s funny now, but she’ll never let me live down the fact that I was mean and heartless in her time of need.

And I still think putting the ice cube in the glass afterwards was a stroke of genius.

The Perfect Solution

• by GeekMan • In Rants •   4

Today I am going to try something new. Actually, it’s something very old that I just decided to a put onto my machine today. Instead of typing in everything that you see here, today I am dictating it to my computer with the help of Lernout and Hauspie’s speech recognition program. Of course, L&H have filed for bankruptcy and are currently auctioning off all of their assets, so if you see any spelling or grammar mistakes it’s not my fault.

This is sooo cool.

I’ve tried these type of programs in the past and they’ve never really done what I wanted them to do. I always seemed to be spending more time correcting what I wrote instead of simply writing it. However, after only fifteen minutes of setting up this program it’s running like a charm, and my hands don’t even hurt. One of the reasons that I don’t write as often as other Bloggers out there is that I have the beginning stages of carpal tunnel syndrome, and that makes it difficult for me to write as much as I would like to.

Not that you’d notice.

I can’t tell you enough how cool this is. I’m just talking, not even looking at the screen and everything I say is being typed as I say it. It’s really saving my hands.

I was really hoping that this would work as well as it seems to be working because that will make it very easy for me to write everything that I want to write about. Since my Christmas story is such a long and involved piece, I was actually afraid that I would ruin my hands trying to write it. But now thanks to this wonderful program I’ll be able to say everything I want and bore you all to death with my meaningless rambling. Of course, doing such things as links, bold text, or italic text will be a little bit more involved than what I’m used to, but I think I can manage.

Only five mistakes so far! Not too bad. Not too bad at all.

Well then, now that I have this brand new toy these posts of mine might get a little bit longer. In fact, whenever you come to visit you might need to be sitting in a comfy chair and have plenty of time, because if you think I used to type a lot before, imagine how much more I can say when I’m not even typing.

Oh, I bet you’re scared now.

It might take a while for me to input all of the made up words that I use on a daily basis. Words like GeekMan, anywaste, and the names of any web sites I might go to will have to be input as they come along. But man, this has really gotten my Geek juices flowing.

My nipples are hard.

I think that’s all for today, I’ll be back tomorrow or Friday with something a little more substantial. Right now I’m just a little too… uh, excited by my new toy. That’s right, I’m a big geek and proud of it. And I know you wish you had this program, but you don’t. I do, and that makes me the coolest Geek around.

Or the most pathetic loser to ever walk the face of the earth. Whatever.

Past And Future Slices

• by GeekMan • In Geek Life •   5

Well, since no one has any complaints about my writing so far, I guess I’ll just keep doing what I like to do and be as funny and entertaining as possible. If that just happens to include writing about silly new products, then so be it.

And if that’s not a perfect segue, I don’t know what is.

How many people out there like peanut butter? OK, now how many of you think that it’s just too difficult and time consuming to have to open up that jar of Jiffy and use a knife to spread that peanut-buttery goodness onto the bread? Wouldn’t it be great if peanut butter came in individually wrapped slices just like cheese? The people who invented PB Slices thought so too, and now they’ve turned that fabulous idea into a marketable product! Oh, yummy!

Morons.

Anywaste, I’ve uploaded the CAN-Struction pictures I promised, you can find them here. I’ll be back to writing more substantial entries tomorrow or Thursday, but be prepared for something special in December. I’m going to be writing an ongoing series about my favorite holiday memory from my youth. It’ll be long and involved so it might take a few weeks of entries to tell, but it’ll be worth it. Trust me.

And if anyone from my family is reading this then yes, that Christmas.

[Evil Laugh Here]

Help Me Help You

• by GeekMan • In Experiments •   10

Dear Visitors,

Having recently perused my site’s logs, it is as clear as Pamela Anderson’s breast reduction to me that I have lost touch with you, my audience. I don’t know what it might be that’s causing this rift between us, but I intend to fix it.

Who loves ya, baby? That’s right, I do.

So in the spirit of two-way communication, I am going to ask for your input. I want to know what I can do to improve my content. Usually, what I write on this site can be broken down into three basic categories; my day to day life, memories from my past, and satire. Examples of each would be:

Here’s the big question, what would you prefer me to write more of? I enjoy writing all three and will continue to write them all, but if you, my audience prefer one type of story to the others, then I will write more of that type.

Yes, it really is just that easy.

Also, in regards to the length of my posts, would you prefer them to be longer, shorter or the same? I know I can ramble on at times but I always try to control myself before I write an entire novel, obviously with varying degrees of success.

Stop rolling your eyes.

I hope I’m not asking for too much here. All I really want to know is how I can make this site more enjoyable for you. I’m perfectly happy with it now and don’t really want to change anything, but I also feel that since you’re taking the time and making the effort to come here and read what I write, I should do my best to make it worth your while. I really enjoy writing entertaining stories and making people laugh. Help me do it better.

Please use the comment system to give me your thoughts. Thank you.

Tell Me About Your Mother…

• by GeekMan • In Geek Life •   Comments Off on Tell Me About Your Mother…

Snippets of a conversation I had this morning with my mother. Please keep in mind that she’s a sweet and loveable person with a huge heart and everyone who’s ever met her loves her. But sometimes she just says things that sound wrong unless you really know her.

“Well, you tell Papaya (Fishman’s girlfriend) that I want my soup! She should be in the kitchen, barefoot and slaving over a hot stove so my soup is ready by tomorrow.”

“Would you like her pregnant, too?”

“No. She should get married first.”

“HoBiscuit is how old? Oh my! She had better marry you and squeeze out some kids before her time is up.”

“She better what?”

“Well, you know what I mean. I want to see some grandchildren.”

“If she hears you saying things like that, I’ll be sure to bring them to your gravesite.”

There was more, much more, but she might die of embarrassment if I post them all so I’ll stop now.

Since it’s Thanksgiving tomorrow, the next few days will be a little hectic so I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything new until this weekend, but you never know. I’ll be posting the pictures of the CAN-struction exhibit this weekend and I’ll hopefully have a new skin up sometime next week. Be afraid.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!