Category: general

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5th grade teacher sadist

Back in the fifth grade, I had this sadist sociopath of a homeroom teacher who, in the interest of not getting sued if his kids ever decide to google his name, I’ll simply call Mr. Cool. Mr. Cool was not, in fact, hip or neat or whatever; I chose the somewhat ironic name because his real surname is a phonetic synonym for cool. In reality, Mr. Cool was a high follower of one of those overly zealous splinter factions of Christianity like the Mennonites or Quakers or something, the kind of we-think-the-bible-is-a-literal-document idiots that people in New York cannot fathom actually exist when a discussion on gay marriage or posting the ten commandments in courtrooms.

Okay, Mr. Cool. He looked like Les Nesmond’s older brother, with a bad comb-over and a lot of generic clothes and everything but the bow-tie. He came from Kansas or Iowa or something, and like I said, was really religious, but also had a short fuse, and while Jesus may have said to turn the other cheek, this guy would rather put his foot in your ass when you crossed him, and that’s a talent that seldom works out in a fifth-grade classroom. Other than flooring the whole group of us in science class by pulling out a bible and reading Genesis when we got to the part of our book about how the world was created, he also had a bad habit of going completely apeshit when you fell short of the stature of, say, a military school’s ideal behavior model. So pretty much everybody in my class got yelled at or shook or smacked in the back of the head, and regular hellions like Gary Rink got beaten within inches of their lives on a daily basis. In the fifth grade, I was old enough to know that something was wrong with this guy, and it probably wasn’t right for him to be hitting kids in class. I mean, I couldn’t look up the exact law or rule or anything, but I knew the guy was whacked, and I dreaded every day of the fifth grade because of him.

Another reason the fifth grade sucked is that instead of sticking to the books (or his god damned bible), Mr. Cool used to have us do these asinine projects that were meant to broaden our horizons. The most corporal of these was the 50 states and capitals book, which was a thing where we had to draw a picture of each state with its capital and three or four major cities and all of the rivers and stuff, and then list its resources, populations, and other interesting and/or useless factoids. To a fifth grader, fifty pages is a damn book, so this took more than a Sunday night to prepare. And Mr. Cool knew what encyclopedia we had in the school library, and would bust your ass if you simply copied shit out of there. I’m sure he meant good by this sort of thing, and probably got the idea because some Jesus magazine like Reader’s Digest had a fear-inducing article about how kids couldn’t name more than five states or their major cities and the Russians would be using that to our advantage and killing us all Real Soon. And I guess it was better than the fact that my dad had to memorize all of the states and capitals, and could still rattle all of them off faster than I could currently name off a random list of, well, anything. (To be fair, there were only 13 of them when he was in school. Sorry dad, old joke.) Anyway, he was always coming up with dumb shit like this for us to do, little take-home projects which would have been great if we all had Beaver Cleaver families, which none of us did.

So one weekend, he came up with this great project: to prove to us that TV was warping our minds with Satan, we were to completely abstain from the glass teat for the next 48 hours. The project was to tune out and then see what we did with our time when we didn’t rot our minds with cartoons. And in some fit of stupidity, I actually mentioned this assignment to my mom when I got home, and she thought this was a real great fucking idea. So I had both parents lording over me about this stupid assignment, and instead of watching the usual cartoons, I went outside and tear-assed around the neighborhood on my BMX bike.

Granted, I watched a lot of TV back in the day. In fact, since we only got five channels and didn’t have a VCR, I watched pretty much every damn thing on, even if it totally didn’t appeal to me. I mean, I remember religiously watching Barney Miller for the plot, because I was too young to get any of the jokes in it and I needed a way to kill time until WKRP was on. (And it’s not like Johnny Fever’s dope addicts or Herb’s attempts to diddle Loni Anderson would have been that funny to a completely uninformed ten-year-old like myself.) BUT, I also spent a lot of time away from the tube, too. I had a regular gang of friends, and I rode my bike around a lot and killed bugs in jars and buried army men and played out Star Wars episodes two through ten with the unending amount of 3″ tall plastic figures I had and everything else. So I guess I could survive a lack of TV with no problem, except one:

Superman was premiering on TV that Sunday.

Fuck! This was the original Superman movie, with Christopher Reeve and Margo Kidder and live action and all of that shit. I never saw it in the theater because half the time when I asked to go to a flick, my parents would say “god damn it! That’s going to be on TV for free next year, why do you need two bucks to see it now?” And not only that, the network was going to show an extended version of the film, with all kinds of scenes showing Clark Kent growing up and pushing ten-ton locomotives on tracks and bending shit and using his heat vision and everything else. And my sisters were going to get to watch it, even though they didn’t give a fuck about Superman at all. I loved Superman! I had a paperback book of all of these old Superman comics, and I could tell you backwards and forwards every plot of every one. That January, I even had a superman CAKE for my birthday. And I couldn’t watch it because of that stupid Quaker Jesus freak motherfucker and his stupid assignment! I was so god damned pissed that Sunday night. And the next morning, when I got to class, every fucking person but me had completely forgotten about the assignment about an hour after they got home, except me.

Anyway, I haven’t watched TV in a week now, and I’m back to being TV-less thanks to, not a Jesus freak, but a lack of cable TV. (OK, maybe the people who found out I had illegally had cable and cut it worship Jesus. Maybe it’s even Mr. Cool, fired from teaching and working a minimum-wage job at Time Warner. Who knows.) It hasn’t been that bad this time, though. It’s just a matter of not caring anymore about the regular shows. I will miss ER, but that’s about it. I also miss the background noise, like during a meal, but I have DVDs for that.

Fuck, I feel like there’s more to talk about, but I’m tired and want to do nothing but read for a while.

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Apple Confidential

I’ve been sort of sick this weekend, although I think drinking my weight in grapefruit juice and sleeping 14 or 15 hours a day has mostly stemmed it off. It was that kind of sore throat, coated tongue, back of throat crap that is usually the first stage of something worse. What’s weird is that I have only had this sort of sickness all year, and not a full-blown cold. I hope I did not jinx things by saying that. Anyway, the three-day weekend plan has been to mostly sleep, and do some reading and other vagueness around the house.

The other day I read Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen Linzmayer. It’s a very good history of Apple, from the birth of the two Steves up to the present. It was just published in 2004 by No Starch Press. I enjoyed reading this book a lot, because it reminded me so much of the “ancient” history of ten years ago when I supported the Mac at IU. I read through the various timelines and it made me think back to when we got our first PowerMac, when I first saw a Newton, when I first got to mess with a color Mac, and all of the other intersections with my computing past. Anyway, it’s an excellent book. I paypaled Owen twenty bucks and he sent me an autographed copy. You really should go to his site and do the same.

I had to get out of the house today, so I went to Union Square to shop for books. I went to The Strand, which for the first time ever was actually too cold instead of too hot, but didn’t buy anything. I also bought tickets to see that new hockey movie about the 1980 Olympic team, but I chickened out and decided I’d rather sit around the house for two hours instead. I know that sounds stupid, and even I can’t figure it out. Anyway, I hate sports, but I really like sports movies. I know that makes no sense, but it’s true. I have never sat through a college football game in my life, and I’d rather jam a pencil into my ear than do so, but I really loved the movie Rudy. Go figure.

I won’t go into the whole Valentine’s Day/anti-Valentine’s Day because things are just too far gone for me to deal with it, and I realize that it’s totally my fault. So I did not leave the house on the 14th, and then today I went to Duane Reade and bought about two pounds of candy for 50% off and ate them until I was sick, then I downloaded a lot of really sick pornography. That did not really solve any of my problems, but it took up as much time as the hockey movie would have.

It’s freezing outside, but it’s not bad in here, and it will be even better when I’m in bed reading and staying up late because I have the day off tomorrow. So here’s to that.

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The most popular poet of the 20th century

I think one of the fundamental problems when I read too much is that I find out facts that make me essentially think that my worldview is completely fucked, and I am the only person alive who is not a robot, or possibly I am really in a coma or a heavy dream after taking too much Tylenol PM and Robitussen and I’m just imagining everything around me, like some kind of Twilight Zone episode, and I’ll suddenly be awakened by space alien people with pig faces.

For example, did you know who, by publication volume, is the most popular published poet of the entire 20th century? Put down your drink before you read any further. It is JEWEL. No shit. Not Robert Frost. Not Ezra Pound. Not William Carlos Williams. JEWEL. Jewel Kilcher, the Alaskan elf folk singer. SHE SPELLED BUKOWSKI’S NAME WRONG IN THE GOD DAMNED BOOK AND SHE SOLD MORE COPIES THAN HE DID OF ALL OF HIS STUFF COMBINED.

That is all.

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Snow Crash

I’m getting so restless around the house, I actually cleaned. I really want to go out and do something, but it’s freezing again, and I don’t really want to blow any money, either. So I’m watching Die Hard with a Vengence on TV, although I missed the part where they digitally edited McClane’s sign that says “I hate n-words” to “I hate everyone”. I did just catch the part where the 7 train is at the fake 2-3 Wall Street station and blew up in a way that completely defies physics. Despite about 20,000 goofs, this is still a good movie. If I ever see it in the $7 bin, I’ll have to pick up the DVD.

One fun thing about watching the Sunday afternoon movie is you see the most pathetic, low-budget infomercials for junk As Seen on TV products. There was just one for the Eggstractor or something like that. It starts out with black and white footage of a woman with really crappy, frizzed out hair and no makeup, trying to peel eggs in the most pathetic way possible. Then they switch to full color and show the woman with totally Jenny Jones makeover hair, full makeup, and happily plugging eggs into this device that looks like a plastic squeze tube and another piece of plastic that extrudes off the egg shell. She’s happily de-shelling eggs like the thing’s giving her ten orgasms per egg. Then it shows the kids using it, and it’s the greatest thing since GI Joe with the Kung Fu grip. They also use the phrase “high protein” about 80 times in 30 seconds to placate the Atkins freaks. I never knew peeling eggs was such a god damned problem.

Anyway, I finished reading Snow Crash, and I was really happy with it. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve read in a while, and something so completely different. I’ve always wanted to like cyberpunk, but the Gibsonesque stuff wasn’t that great too me. It was good, passable, but too much like the crappy SciFi shows that they make to fill up time on the WB network on Saturday afternoons, and not enough like the very first time I saw Star Wars or something like that. But this book really blew me away, because it was like one part Mark Leyner’s humor with one part Kurt Vonnegut’s ability to take a couple of disparate stories and slowly weave them together by the end of the book. It’s also got all of this weird religious theory in it that almost threw me, but was still very interesting, and I wish I could learn more about that without tackling some giant, 1200-page theory/reference book I will never read.

Nothing else going on here…

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In the library, Djibouti

I found out something interesting today: the Monroe County Public Library in Bloomington has ordered a copy of Summer Rain! This is, as far as I know, my first library sale. It’s very strange that ten years ago, I was picking through their used book sale books trying to find something to write about, and now they have one of my books. So if you go to their site, do a search on “Konrath”, and there it is.

Two copies of the annotated Rumored just went to Djibouti. Try to find that one on your globe. Hopefully, I will get some good photos to add to my collection.

Not much else is going on. I got a metric assload of new CDs this weekend, and got the new Simpsons game. Plus I had a ton of books show up today, so I’ve got a lot of media to consume. But now, I need to shut down this machine to put in a hard drive switch, so I can boot from Windows or Linux without having to swap cables each time.

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How to upgrade linux

GOD DAMN IT I hate upgrading linux. Well, I hate it mostly because the easiest way to upgrade it is to throw your fucking computer out of the window and then hit your testicles about five or six times with the sharp end of a claw hammer and then pour everclear in the wound and spend about 200 hours trying to download a brand new distribution at teletype speeds just so you can get a system that allegedly works better than Windows. As a side note, I plugged in my new DVD burner and TV tuner card and fired up Win2000 just for shits and giggles, and in about four minutes, I was watching TV and recording video and burning DVDs and having fun. Tonight, I have invested about the last five hours into installing Debian, and I just decided to fuck that and turn around and install Red Hat 9, despite everything that everyone tells me about the big evil corporation called Red Hat. I’m sorry, but I don’t like the ass-backwards bullshit factor in Debian, and I really don’t like the fact that it has an interface that only a sysadmin would love. I don’t really like to write a sixty page paper about the internal workings of my machine every time I upgrade, and I don’t want to have to write down the numbers of every chip of every board of my computer so I can search them all on google and find out what kind of obscure module needs to be added to my kernel on its 863rd recompilation. Fuck all of that.

I got the skydiving video today, and it’s pretty cool. I’ll try to tear a few images out of it and put them on the web when I do up the Vegas trip page. I haven’t had time to write anything about it given the machine situation, but it will happen.

It is once again so god damned cold that I probably won’t leave the house for the weekend. I am reading that Po Bronson book on what to do with your life, I forget the exact title. I enjoyed his book Nudist on the Late Shift, and a few people have evangelically mentioned this new book, so I bought a copy while waiting for a plane in Houston. I haven’t thought it was anything spectacular, but I’m still reading it. I think I like the way he has interviewed a bunch of people about their lives and how he strung this stuff together. I like the journalistic sense of it, mostly because I wish I could write a book like that. But as far as being motivational or telling me how to change my life, it’s mostly dreck. But like I said, I keep turning the pages.

It’s going to take another two hours to download Red Hat 9, so I guess I’m going to bed.

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Hell travel day

OK, I’m back. I had a hell of a travel day today, but everything seemed to go my way, which I guess means a grand piano is going to fall from orbit and hit me tomorrow, so maybe I shouldn’t have said that. I had to get up at FOUR AM this morning to make my flight, so I went to bed at ten and loaded up on Tylenol PM. For whatever reason, I couldn’t sleep though, and I ended up waking up at about two and watching the clock for a while. Then I spent the rest of the day flying or hanging out in the Houston airport (oh sorry, the GEORGE BUSH airport) or trying to sleep on planes. I got back to 25-81 around 7:30 PM EST, and now I’m waiting on my sushi and listening to Spock’s Beard and bitching that my CD-R is not ripping CDs correctly. Business as usual.

Yes, I survived skydiving. It was an interesting experience, but I wouldn’t highly advise it for everyone. There’s something about looking down at the ground from three miles up through an open door and having any reaction other than wanting to secure yourself to the nearest bulkhead, let alone letting someone else push you out of the door.

Anyway, I am writing the story. There weren’t many pictures for the trip, mostly because there aren’t many things I haven’t already photographed. I will also have a DVD of the jump, but they will send that to me in about ten days.

OK, I am a year older. And I have a lot of crap to do, including the ripping of about 20 new CDs, and that whole eating thing.

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In Vegas

I’m in a web cafe on the Las Vegas Boulevard, in a crowded strip mall just south of the Harley cafe. It’s not really a cafe, though: it’s really three computers in a giant gift shop containing Las Vegas shot glasses, ashtrays, t-shirts that disintegrate in two washings, and pretty much everything else that could have the words Las Vegas printed on it and could be made in China by slave labor for under ten cents. It’s also a Budget rental car desk and sells tours of the Grand Canyon. They are mostly empty except for the occasional wanderer, and the overhead speakers are droning some local 80s station, which is marginally OK but mostly sucks. I turn 33 tomorrow, and I’ve got a suite at the Stardust that’s roughly twice as big as my apartment and much better furnished. I have a thousand dollars in twenties in my pocket. I’m depressed.

I spent all weekend with Bill and Lon and Jaime, and just ate a taco dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe with Lon, the last to depart except for me. Then I took the long walk back to the strip to get on this place and delete 188 messages of spam and two legitimate messages from my friend Dani. I have to leave on Wednesday at seven in the morning. But tomorrow afternoon, I will jump out of an airplane at 15,000 feet. I try to do the most dangerous things on my birthday, so both dates will match on the tombstone. This seemed to work well for Shakespeare, because we’re still reading his stuff.

We did a bunch of cool stuff this weekend and I ate a bunch of good food and we saw some really incredible comedians. But sometimes when I’m out here, all I can think of is what I’ll do when I get back. And that’s what’s bothering me right now. These big milestone dates really make me wonder when I’ll get my shit straight, or what I should really be aiming for.

Ah crap, this is all pretty whiny stuff. I should pack it up and get out of here before they play some bad Madonna song that gets stuck in my head all night. I have a long walk ahead of me, and my iPod is in the hotel room. I see a cab ride in my future…

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preflight

I have a 9:30 flight tomorrow morning, so this will be a quick update before the Tylenol PM kicks in and I try to get a few hours of sleep. It is catastrophically cold outside, two degrees with a -17 temp when you add in the 29 mph gusting winds. My old windows in this place might as well be screen doors, because the wind blows right through them. I am very glad to be going to a place where the apparent temperature difference is about 70 degrees.

So I’m packed, I got my damn haircut before I left, and I have the laptop and camcorder ready to go. I’ll be out of town until Wednesday, but I’ll post a full report when I get back. If you know my real email username and know that I have an account at tmail.com, do the math and send me an email on the 20th when I become a year older but not wiser. Anyway, I’m off to bundle myself up to avoid the wind….

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Pre-trip panic

I’m in that pre-trip panic where I think that I need to research or read a bunch about the place I’m going, because once I get there I will want to do nothing but watch TV in the hotel and eat at McDonald’s because I have no better plans. I have probably a whole shelf of books on Las Vegas, and I could probably name off every casino from Tropicana to Stratosphere without even thinking, but I still feel a great need to find other stuff to do.

To be fair, I think we have a lot of stuff already planned. We have tickets (front row!) to see Dave Atell and Louis Black on Saturday. I think we also have Penn and Teller tickets at the Rio for Sunday. Add in all of the meals and some gambling and shopping, and that’t at least two or three days of stuff. But I always want to eat somewhere new, check out something off the beaten path, or do something that isn’t part of the same old routine. So maybe I need to hit citysearch or something.

There’s a small part of me that also wants to do something outrageous and expensive on my birthday this year. It’s the 33rd, not a nice round number of any significance, but I think I should jump out of a plane at 15,000 feet or take an open-wheel racing course at the Vegas Speedway or do something else involving high adrenaline, higher cost, and little practical value. Sometimes I wish I could do MORE – climb a mountain, eat every single item on the Denny’s menu, marry a complete stranger, total a rental car and make my old insurance company pay for it. Something.

I have this vague idea that I am going to write an offbeat, quirky, and hilarious travel guide to Vegas, laced with personal anecdotes and useless advice and trivia. Maybe I will try to write some more damn stuff down this time and see what I can come up with.

OK, food’s here. Two more days of work and I can (temporarily) leave this awful land of high winds and low temps.