I haven’t said anything about my conversation with that one, nor mine and the other one. I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but please do not put me in the middle. 
And I would rather lose two friends than put up with that, because I have enough stress and bullshit without this.
Back in January, I was looking for an Xbox 360 and scouring and scraping to get one. I got screwed around with tremendously, and with a lot of false leads, ended up without one. Finally, thanks to Lt. Cpl. James who was shipping out to Afghanistan, I managed to get one. I didn’t have games — only Uno — and he said prior to shipping out, he’d send me a few from home. True to his word, he did.
And thus, I ended up with Call of Duty: World at War (he’d said Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but hated World at War, and send me that instead). And, of course, our friends decided to send me a lot of their old games, as well. So I’ve ended up with quite a collection…
Working in and around military for so long, I’ve met a lot of good people like that. And getting back in touch with a lot of those guys has helped me get through some of the shit-in-my-head that’s been bugging me for so long.
Last month, I came upon a weird opportunity, whereby I could basically “trade” my Xbox 360 Pro (the one with the 20-Gig hard drive) for an Xbox 360 Elite and not have to shell out any cash for the upgrade. I jumped on that like white on rice.
Unfortunately, even though it was new in the box, the damn thing red-ringed on me after two days. Iit wasn’t a 2008 Holiday Bundle, but one built in July 2008, but still, yeah, yeah, my luck. Fortunately, I called Microsoft, and they shipped me an empty box, which I dropped my Xbox in it and gave to the UPS guy. They shipped it back in under a week! The “bad” ones are so few and far between now that the repair center just rocks the party — especially given that they extended my Xbox Live account, to boot.
Even though I enjoy playing a lot of different games on there, I still end up playing Uno. This is especially true if I’ve been drinking so much that manual dexterity falters, something which happens quite a lot lately. It has the alternative positive effect of keeping me from blogging while smashed.
Now, playing Uno should be pretty sedate, right? It’s a relatively passive game, so you end up chatting a lot. And if I turn on the Xbox Live Vision camera, then it’s always mildly amusing.
“Dude, you’re that guy from Crank, aren’t you? You the fuckin’ Transporter man?”
“Ahh, no. I’m just some old, psycho bald fucker. At least that’s what someone I cared about told me in December.”
“Ahh, man, you’re not old. What are you, 25, 28? Nah, whatever, man, you’re cool!”
Some days, I admit it … I need that kind of validation, because I feel like a right-royal ass most of the time any more. And I definitely feel old. And I am bald. And sometimes it’s nice to hear, “Nah, man, you’re alright. That guy was an asshole,” because … sometimes, playing Uno, chatting becomes a bit of a chore.
I mute, kick and block communications from an innordinate number of people… usually after I put up with their shit to critical mass and tell them exactly why they don’t deserve to have an Internet connection, and perhaps that they are the perfect argument as to why Abortions should stay legal.
At around 5PM, the drunks start coming home from their UK pubs and acting like pricks. At midnight, you start ending up with drunken Americans and Canadians. By 3AM, the west coast of the US and Canada are purely lit, and they end up coming in with so much off-the-wall insanity that you end up having to jab a spork in your eyes and ears.
When the asshats show up, it’s usually for one reason: To be disruptive pricks and attempt to garner some attention that they obviously didn’t get in whatever bar they were in. I’m constantly amazed at how many otherwise introverted, perhaps even awkward, people go completely and totally insane over Xbox Live. It is even *worse* than the way they act on the Internet alone.
It seems Xbox Live also adds incontrovertible proof to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory… And as the link says, “Be glad for the anonymity; it’s why you still have teeth.”
Although, I sure many do not…
Another week of Hell down, with the next round starting in about eleven hours.
Wordpress bugged and posted a completely random draft last night that wasn’t anywhere near complete and made absolutely no sense. It’s been sitting there for at least a week in draft mode, and was perfectly happy… but this morning at 5-something AM, it just decided, all by itself, to go live. I know that I didn’t do it and just forgot because I was playing Uno on Xbox Live all night… Ahh, well. Yet another mysterious bug to track down…
I had two stupid visitors from Leslie County this week. I took a souvenir from Friday’s Fool, and left him with a few of his own in the form of pain and bleeding. Neither of them will ever be back. Apparently, while either before or while I was busy with that asshat, they messed with my car. And that, itself, is the ultimate pansy thing to do, and speaks volumes to the severe lack of balls that these idiots possess.
An old friend and customer of mine died on the 1st after a long battle with cancer. Fifty-nine years old, the sort of person who treats everyone like they’re her kid.
I couldn’t bring myself to go to the memorial service today. I’m not handling things as well lately because I’ve been too on-edge, worried and crushed.
On a brighter note…
I slept for the first time in three weeks.
And …
Rich and LissaKay got married last week. They’re both great people, and they deserve some serious congratulations. I wish them both the best.
Happy Birthday, Susan.
You taught us to enjoy life, live every day like it was our last.
Sorry I forgot how.
Last year, the Wildcat celebrated with us.
It’s just not the same when those you love aren’t around…
Whenever I think, “I have no heart,” something always comes along to prove to me that I do.
My immediate thought is always to be skeptical of Internet Chain Letters and such, but with this one, I dug a little deeper and found that it’s totaly legitimate…
Why the one million friends challenge? I get asked the questions, Why 1 million friends? What will it achieve? on a regular basis. So I thought I would try to explain. James and I used to come onto myspace to listen to music and look at the videos just before he was diagnosed and added a few friends.
When James was diagnosed and we came to terms with the fact that his cancer and its treatment was going to take over our lives we needed a distraction and the “James and Daddy” page was born. I asked James if he thought we could get one hundred friends and then one thousand and the ten thousand. When we reached ten thousand friends I asked James to set the next target. James said ONE MILLION.
We will gain nothing financially from this page but have gained friendship from people around the world and we have shared our story with you all and in return shared your stories. This page has helped us as a family deal with the tough times and share the good times. Now as a father I feel I have to achieve this challenge as I made a vow to James the day after he was born that I would never let him down and I would only make him a promise if I could keep it.
So there you have it, the reason for the challenge and why I need you to help me get more friends. We have tried the celebrity route with minor success so all we can do is keep sending out the bulletins and searching out the profiles that have loads of friends and big hearts.
I mentioned a while back, I can’t have kids… Rather, not healthy ones, anyway… I always say I found my peace with all of that a long time ago.
But then again, maybe that’s why stuff like this tears me up so bad… Like it did with Ambriel… Like it does with someone else even closer who went through a bout of it herself (I love you, baby girl, I miss you, and I’m proud of you).
There’s the futility factor, wishing I could do something to make it better, and I can’t…
And then, of course, I see their faces they’re smiling right through it most days.
That…
…is one of the few things that I glean hope from.
And I know damn well that despite everything else, those kids are toughter than I will ever be.
If you’ve got MySpace, be sure and add him as a friend. Spread the word. Make a donation.
One of the things I really enjoy is people threatening to sue me. That has happened so much the last few years, mostly from people who refuse to pay their bills and I take some action against. They claim they’ll be suing me for defamation or some crap like that most of the time, not that I ever go talking about them to anyone except courts or police. It costs me too much money to actually sue them and get nothing from it, so I just make the motions as necessary and let it be on the record.
The particular asshat, however, doesn’t really have a dog in this fight. I wasn’t trying to screw her over in any way, but since her asshat boyfriend felt it was okay to not show up to court, leaving me in a serious bind, I simply felt it was a good idea to stop allowing him to screw me out of $175 a month for all the sites he hosts on my server for the price of one. And then he doesn’t pay his bill properly, at that.
Her email was down for a grand total of four hours in the mess, and instead of either of them calling and asking that I turn them back or making any attempt to try and resolve the situation, she starts running her mouth. Estrogen abuse!
As I said, her email was down for a grand total of four hours and then I realzed, “Wait, she might actually need that, and it’s not her fault her boyfriend is a dick,” and I turned it back on.
But apparently, even going that far wasn’t good enough.
She’s threatening to go to the Better Business Bureau, having her father do the same (yeah, Asshat hosts sites for a bunch of his friends, on my servers, which I pay for, for free!), and then bitches and complains that if I don’t transfer all domains over to them by 12PM, worse things will happen. Oh, if I don’t burn all their data to DVD and mail it to them by Monday, they’re going to sue me.
Customers are responsible for their own data backups. Asshat’s known that forever. They have the data — they put it up there! It ain’t like these are friggin’ dynamic, data-driven sites or anything!
And her, she can’t even figure out how to do a Domain Transfer.
Sorry, dear, but you don’t DEMAND anything of me. If you’d asked nicely and either of you had even attempted to be civil, this would’ve turned out a lot different.
So you people go ahead and go to the BBB — that requires that you were actually doing business with me, which you weren’t. You all never paid for hosting, anyway.
And go ahead and sue me — it’s so baseless, that I’d represent myself, and you’d still lose.
As for the other allegations that I owe him money and crap like that? You better take that up with your asshat boyfriend. I don’t owe him a dime — he was paid up with interest and it’s easily proven. And hey, when I did all that cooking, I bought half the ingredients. How ’bout that? And how many times have you people called me for help with everything from moving to car repair to even helping you two sort out your personal problems between each other, what did I do? I was always right there.
I asked for one friggin’ thing. And waiting til the Zero Hour to back out like you both did — and maybe he didn’t bother to tell you, which is his fault, not mine — is pretty reprehensible.
So much for being my “friends.”
“everyone I know
goes away
in the end…”
— Nine Inch Nails, Hurt
When you know someone for twenty four friggin’ years, you expect them to show up in court to vouch that certain events happened when they were around two and half years ago.
I think it’s a pathetic as Hell that at the Zero Hour, I’m told, “Nope, won’t be there. Don’t worry about it! You don’t need me there.”
Yeah, I damn sure did, too. It was “required” for my case, and I certainly appreciate the way you just cast me aside at the last minute, claiming I never gave you a date — which I certainly did two weeks ago, and then mentioned it again on Saturday.
I really appreciate you. That’s a Hell of a way to end a friendship.
The Wildcat won’t be there, either, apparently. But at least has somewhat a more reasonable excuse.
Thursday night, my car all but died. Friday morning, I was supposed to have a fix, but didn’t. Friday afternoon, I was supposed to get picked up, but wasn’t. Friday night, I was so stir crazy I couldn’t stand it.
Saturday morning, I was supposed to get a call to help with the car, but didn’t. At 11AM, I decided, “Screw it, I’ll find someone with tools to help!” And while he got the bolts out of from behind the exhaust manifold — and directly under the intake manifold — to change the thermostat, I removed and replaced the water pump.
After all that, I started onto the process of body work where I hit the deer back in June…
Now, the car is fixed. As long as I leave the air conditioning on… which means, there’s obviously a temperature sending unit bad, since it’s not turning on the second radiator fan.
I also managed to scald both my hands in process, get various cuts, and break the top of my right hand — it now has something akin to half a golf ball atop it, just like two months ago.
Only one word comes to mind: F#&$.
And so, last night, stir crazy and exhausted, yet unable to sleep (two and a half months now), I went to walk around downtown. At Market Square, I sat and reminisced about the days of old when Preservation Pub was Mercury Theater. I thought about the Snakesnatch Lounge and all the other places that were there twelve-plus years ago.
I thought about celebrating Pirate Susan’s birthday there in 2006, when she stood atop one of the benches near the door of Preservation Pub, arms outstretched, yelling, “I am an asshole bleacher!”
But even more, I thought about the day the Wildcat and I went to Preservation Pub… QSL later… and that night… and that kinda did it for my mood, because I miss her more every day.
A drink would’ve been in order, but I had to quit that after a few too many bad nights…
Then I learned that last night, a friend of mine was sexually assaulted in her home by a “friend” of hers who she actually knew very little about. Packed her kids in the car, drove them to a mutual friend to be watched and took her to the ER. I prepped her a little beforehand about what was going to happen, having been through this with other friends I’ve known, and just pretty much tried to be there for her so she didn’t feel totally alone.
Fortunately, the KPD investigator was really good, as was the crisis unit who performed her exams and tests. They were pretty unbeatable, and I was out of the room most of the time — I didn’t need to be there the whole time, anyway, because it just makes me wanna kill someone that much more.
She’s really young … and all I could think about the whole time was how bad I missed the Wildcat, how bad I missed the kids, how much they meant to me, and what I’d do to someone who tried something like that with any of them.
Finally discharged, I took her to get some food after her battery of medication, fill another prescription and back to her place, where I stayed until her sister could get there. I can handle the “crisis” portion calmly and capably, but for the rest… she’s gonna have a long road ahead.
Sometimes, life is hard.
And sometimes, other peoples’ are even harder.
When I was much younger, a friend of mine — a customer — was married to this guy who used to beat the crap out of her pretty much on a daily basis. I hated that guy … just because I felt he was a total pansy to beat on a woman like that.
One day, I went over there working on their computers, and he delivered a fist to her face while she was sitting at the kitchen table, just a few feet away from me. She fell on me.
I beat his sorry ass.
And guess what I got for the privilege?
Yep …
Her ass beating on me.
A couple years later, I went over there, and he hit again. Right in front of me. But he didn’t stop there… He picked up an iron skillet and began beating her in the head over and over…
While their kids watched…
So I carried one of the kids to their bedroom and put him in his crib, and talked the other two into going to bed early.
Then I proceeded to destroy his sorry ass.
It was fun…
Beat him within an inch of death, in fact.
But then, I turned back to her, still struggling to get up off the kitchen floor. I screamed at her for being so stupid. And in retrospect, I shouldn’t have.
But the questions I was screaming … How could she put her kids through that? How could let them watch all of that? What kind of mother was she?
I called another friend of mine, who lived close, and together, we packed her stuff and drove her out of state to live with her mother.
She hates me, still.
And this is precisely why Cops don’t like taking Domestic Violence calls… Those women most always seem to defend the bastards who put them through the most Hell…
But at some point, with a lot of caring and understanding, they do get over it.
Or, at least, you hope they do.
