Oh, Yeah...Forgot I Had This...

Five years, huh? Where does the time go?

Is this thing still on?

Guess so...

Holiday Spirit (An Excerpt)

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This is an excerpt from a paper that I'm writing for my English class, but I thought that it might be appropriate to post some of it here...

It’s around midnight, Tuesday, December 22 of last year, the time of year when you should be in the holiday spirit, full of cheer and good will towards men and all that crap.

Unfortunately, at midnight on Tuesday, December 22 of last year, the only thing I was full of was anti-nausea drugs, none of which seemed to be working. And the will I was feeling towards men was not exactly good—specifically one particular person.

To be completely fair, this particular person was not a man. In fact, even though he was probably barely sixteen years of age, I won’t even call him a boy. And “feral animal” would have been an insult to other feral animals, but it at least comes close to an accurate description.

The hackneyed phrase “If I could go back in time” suddenly didn’t seem so lame anymore. In fact, as I lay there on the gurney in the ER, blood belching from every possible orifice above my neck—and several that aren’t supposed to do that—going back in time sounded pretty damn good to me. No sales pitch needed there.

The time I would have gone back to would probably have been a quarter to eight on the previous evening. That would have been the time I would have been loading my laptop into my backpack in order to get out to the bus stop, so that I could catch my bus. Unfortunately, my most brilliant ideas usually come to me after the disaster they could have prevented has already happened. Case In point.

I decided that I wasn’t quite ready to go yet, so I decided to stay at the coffee house for the remaining fifteen minutes, and then pack up. Besides, it was also kinda cold, and I was in no mood to stand out in it for any great length of time. Which is ironic, because ultimately that’s precisely what I ended up doing.

I exited the coffee shop, and headed towards the Morse “L” stop. As always, I decided to walk up Lunt. I’d been doing it almost every day for the ten years I had been going to the coffee house, and I saw no reason to change my routine. As I made it across the intersection, I noticed someone kneeling down, apparently tying his shoe or something like that. I did as I always did; I simply walked around him, with no more thought than I would have given to tying my own shoes. I turned my iPod up louder. It was a song I liked. Or at least, used to like...

A few seconds later, I found myself starring in my own personal episode of Wild Kingdom in the role of the gazelle that gets pounced on by the cheetah. There’s a hand on the back of my neck, and hovering somewhere to the right of me, just out of my field of vision, is something that looks familiar. Too familiar. Entirely too familiar. A gun.

There’s a line from the movie Magnolia, where Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character is talking to an agent for Tom Cruise’s character, trying to convince him that he is not some crackpot, but rather his father’s personal nurse and he has to inform him that his father is dying. He tells the agent that this is that scene in the movies where the dying father is trying to reach out to his estranged son, but there isn’t much time left. He goes on to observe that he believes that those scenes exist in movies for a reason: they really happen. I’d like to add my own scene to that list—the one where you’re getting mugged and everything slows down, and all the voices sound like they’re being spoken by James Earl Jones talking through a jar of molasses. “Gimme the laptop, gimme the laptop,” he’s shouting.

Scientists have often observed that during times of stress, the human mind will fixate on strange things, things that have no bearing whatsoever on the situation at hand—curiosities, as you will. In this case, it was the movement of his gun hand. There was something wrong with it—something other than the fact that there was a gun in it. It was moving entirely too fast for something that was supposed to have about a couple pounds of metal. And it was right then that the portion of my brain that normally engages in rational thought simply turned the light out and hung the sign on the door that said “Closed.”

Finally, an Update...

It's been a while, so I figure I should let you all know (all one of you) where things are at:

1. The punk who mugged me finally decided to cop a guilty plea to everything he's done. I say everything, because apparently I'm not even the worst misdeed he's committed in the past year. In addition to me, he also fought the cops who arrested him, fought the cops who took him back to Juvie after the first hearing, and if all this wasn't bad enough, he got caught with some pot on him. But enough about that. The judge has decided to let the assault on the cops dictate her sentencing, and she wants to give him 30 days of house arrest with the ankle thingy and a year of high-intensity probation--which I'm assuming is just short of the parole officer moving in with him. Why the light sentence? Apparently she feels that even though this kid's obviously a bad seed, this is--amazingly enough--HIS FIRST FUCKING CONVICTION! But if it's any consolation (and it ain't), they think he'll re-offend within the first 30 days. That's crossing the fucking street!

The other part of this is that not only am I not gonna get my stuff back, but the only way I'm going to get any kind of payback is if I go after the parents. According to the DA, they said they wanted to pay me back, but they just didn't have the money. Of course, in the same breath, she also said that the reason the dad refused to show up for the hearings was that his wife threatened to divorce him if he testified against the kid. I'm still torn about whether to sue them anyway. On one hand, I'll look like a vindictive dickhead, but on the other one, any sympathy I might have had for them went right out the window when I heard that. Maybe she'd like to see the pics of me belching blood from every orifice above the neck, including the ones that are not supposed to be belching blood at all. Maybe I could regale her about how her sweet little angel made it so that for the better part of a month, even the slightest light felt like a hot poker right in my skull. And I'm sure she'd love the pic I have that makes me look like I had an eye transplant from Satan.

At any rate, at least it's over.

2. I decided to take the summer semester off. They didn't have anything I wanted to take, I failed my classes anyway, and my head just wasn't in it. Guess my plan to charge headlong back into real life failed miserably...

3. The vacation I hinted at in the previous entries is finally coming together. San Diego is going to the wayside because I hope to spend a couple days there this October if they decide to do Bearquake this year. That's allowed me to expand the other two parts so that I can spend almost a week in each place. Let's hope San Francisco ends up being better than the last time...

4. Finally, the apartment thing is still proceeding, but the vacation is more of a priority simply because I am a nervous fucking wreck and I need a way to decompress NOW! I'm still looking to do it this year, but it's not as big of a concern right now as it was before. When I come back from Cali, I'll see where I'm at. If it doesn't happen this year, it will happen next year. I know a lotta people will be disappointed, but right now I could really give two shits about that. I think I have a pretty good idea of how my mind and body work, and when they tell me that one or both of them are considering checking out for a while, I tend to listen to them...

Well, that's about it for right now. I'll come up with something more cheery pretty soon. That is, providing reality doesn't intrude...

P. S. : Forgot something: I'm back over 200 pounds again. Don't really give a shit about it either.

I'm Still Here...

...more or less.

I'll update you (whoever you are) at a later date about what's been happening for a while...

New Year, New Beginnings...I hope

It's obviously been a while since I last posted anything, so let's come up to speed:

1. I'm still going through school, but I'm not doing as well with it as I was before. I completely burnt myself out this past semester working and going to school.

2. The family members that have moved in at the beginning of 2009 are still there, and apparently have no intention of leaving in the immediate and/or forseeable future.

3. The year ended on a sour note because I got mugged the week of Christmas by some teenage punk with a fake gun, who then broke my face after I broke his gun. The following week I had surgery to repair an orbital blowout fracture (a medical term for what can cause your eyeball to slide down into your sinuses). I finally got the all-clear to go back to work today, so at least that's a potentially good thing--if for no other reason than I'm going to have a shitload of medical bills to pay, even if insurance foots part of the bill. The other bit of good news is that they caught the junior thug who did it (his dad narked him out) and I may or may not be getting back my shit sometime before I die.

What do I hope to accomplish this coming year?

1. I am currently on a spending freeze because I am saving up to get my own place. It's become painfully obvious that I desperately need to be able to have someplace to parade around completely naked if I so choose, and that's obviously not going to be where I am now.

2. I am hoping to still be in school by the end of the year, although the drive to stay in school is lessening with the years. My cousin managed to become the first Wilson offspring to graduate from college, so there's no longer that hanging over me. There's also the fact that the majority of my classes that I would need to take for my major can only be taken during the day.

3. If I have enough vacation days left over from this mugging business (I think I had enough sick days to cover it without raiding my vacation days) and enough money left over from the apartment thing, I am going to take myself a nice long vacation in California. I wanna hit the three big cities there--especially San Francisco and San Diego. I only got to spend a few hours in SD, and I never really got to enjoy SF the last time I was there almost ten years ago.

Obviously I have a lot more I could post, but that I'll save for another day.

Test from within Windows Live Writer

Just a test to see if I can use Windows Live Writer with Blogger. Looks like I can. More to come later.