I’m having Vimeo issues, so here’s a YouTube link. YouTube HD doesn’t look half bad, though. This woman was shrieking outside our apartment for a couple minutes, so I decided to start filming her. It only gets better from there! Enjoy.

I shot this almost two weeks ago and have been messing with editing it off and on, but I think I’m just sick of having it laying around and am calling it good. I think it’s entertaining, but be warned: it’s 20 minutes long. Not only is that longer than most of my friends’ attention spans (including mine), it also prevented me from uploading it to either Youtube or Vimeo, so I have to host it here. My site was just recently moved to a new server, though, so maybe I can successfully host my own video. We’ll see. There’s no plot or anything; it was just Cameron and I walking around for a couple hours talking and I edited it into a random collection of his brain droppings. Enjoy or whatever.

The other day the maintenance guy in our building, Owen, was in a pretty gnarly bike wreck. Since I’m one of probably three people in the building that drive, Nina volunteered me to drive him back to his place. I don’t have a problem with this, I like the guy. So I fetch my car and of COURSE there’s no parking anywhere near the entrance of our building, so I stopped in the middle of the road to wait for 15 seconds until Owen could hobble his way out to the car. Unfortunately, a minivan was in an illegal spot, and there was a parking enforcement officer yelling at the driver to move, but the van was trapped because I was waiting for Owen. The officer made me get out of the way, which is fine, but there’s only room for one car on the road at a time, so I had to circle alllll the way around the block again to come back around to get Owen. This time I temporarily parked in the spot the minivan had been, and the cop looked at me like “…seriously?”

I called Nina to tell them to hurry the hell up and get Owen out to the car, because this cop wasn’t going to let me stay here long. That’s when he came over and started doing his job. I was already irritated and stressed out, not only because of the situation at hand, but because this was also the point in my last job during which I was just ready to snap at any moment. Well this turned out to be that moment. The cop came over and was telling me to move, and I was alternating between telling the cop to hold on just for a couple seconds and yelling into my phone. The situation got hairy quick and I ended up getting out of the car and screaming in the cop’s face. A lot. I just completely exploded. The cop was sooooooo polite about the whole thing. He asked me “Did I raise my voice?” and was just calmly trying to diffuse the whole situation, but I wasn’t having it. I laid into him pretty bad. Finally, Owen and Nina and the other building manager came out onto the porch and started telling the cop what’s what, as if he’d done anything wrong. FINALLY it was explained to him that I was just waiting to help an injured dude out of the building, yadda yadda, and instantly the situation resolved itself. Had I just explained this from the start, there would have been no issue. I apologized, curtly, and sped off to drop Owen off.

During the drive, situation behind me, I started to feel AWFUL about it. That guy has a shitty, shitty job. It was raining and he has to stand out in it delivering tickets and generally just pissing people off. I don’t envy the guy at all. The entire problem with my job at the time was that it was completely thankless and coworkers and managers alike did not respect me on any level, and here I was blowing up at this cop, like I’m somebody. Ugh, what a fucking asshole. I felt terrible and the more I thought about it, the more it was really starting to bother me, and the more I thought I definitely needed to properly apologize to the guy. I don’t know how fast those guys move, but I figured I had time after dropping Owen off at his place, and I parked, sprinted down to a nearby Starbucks and bought a gift card, worth plenty of silly espresso drinks. I bolted back out and zig-zagged the neighborhood looking for him, but no luck. Since I needed to be to work in about an hour and would need my car anyway, I ran back to my car and again zig-zagged the entire neighborhood looking for this guy, so he could have a cup of coffee or three on his break or after work, on me. I mean, it was a shitty, wet, miserable day, and he just got yelled at for absolutely no reason. Fuck, I felt so bad.

I didn’t find him. And he was all I could think about all day at work. Maybe he was having a good day and I ruined it for him. Maybe he was having a shitty day and I was just another asshole in a long line of assholes that made it shittier for him. I didn’t like the idea either way. I dwelled on it for a couple days, but had no way to find this guy, short of going to the department and looking for a traffic cop that “kinda looks like the scientist on the training films on Lost.” I didn’t think that was going to work. I kept the gift card in my glove compartment in the event I ran into him again.

So Nina got a new job, so she no longer works in this building, but she is included in the 99.9% of people in our building that don’t drive, so it’s my responsibility to get her to and from work. Today, I had just pulled into our street after having dropped her off, and I saw the little blinking light of a traffic cop car turning the corner. Miraculously, there was a parking spot, and I pulled in, grabbed the gift card, and ran down the street after the guy. Well, I hoped it was the same guy. At this point, it’s probably been three weeks or so since the incident. He’s probably totally put it behind him, right?

I caught up with him a couple blocks away, where he was delivering a fun little parcel to a parked vehicle, and I approached him. It was him! The scientist from Lost!
“Hey, you probably don’t remember me… a couple weeks ago, I was stopped in a no parking zone and I kinda blew up at you?”
“Oh yeah, the emergency guy. I remember.”
Oof.
I explained that I had felt awful ever since the incident, that I was genuinely sorry about the whole affair. He even apologized to me for being a “hardass” about it, but I shot that shit down quick. He was doing his job. I was being a fucking prick. I tried to hand him the card and told him that I would feel much better about the whole thing if he had a couple cups of coffee on me. He refused! I kinda expected that, but he was adamant about it. He said, “I have to maintain a code of ethics.” I said, “What about my code of ethics?” I pleaded with him to take it, even trying several loopholes (“What if you took off your badge for 10 seconds and I just gave it to you as a civilian?” “What if I just accidentally dropped it in your cab?”). He had a Starbucks cup in his console. I pointed to it and said, “Look, it’s even your brand!” He was super cool about the whole thing and assured me that just the fact that it had gotten to me that bad, and that I had bothered to rectify the situation, weeks later, my karma was back on track. He told me that I deserved the coffee, just for the trouble. Reluctantly, I accepted the fact that there was no way this guy was going to take my gift card, I thanked him, apologized again, and we went our separate ways.

I think I’m going to continue to hold onto this card, though, in case I run into him again and he doesn’t already have a Starbucks cup in his cab with him.

I want to describe my dog in spanish language but i don’t know this language. If somebody help me to write few sesntences about dog and his behavior? It will be great.
Best regards
Kipas

Thanks for writing, Kipas. To keep things simple, try describing your dog in your dog’s native language. This way, if you run into any problems, your dog can help!

Best regards,
zhx

Do you believe in fate? Do you believe that “signs” are provided to you from time to time to guide you along a pre-determined path? I don’t. But sometimes life slaps you in the face and says “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!” and I do believe that this was one of those times.

The tragedy of my job is no mystery to the three people that read my blog. It’s been eating and eating at me, and as a result, particularly for the last month or so, I have not been a pleasant person to be around. But I trudge my way through it with the help of my iPod and podcasts and audiobooks, and if I keep the volume up loud enough, it almost blocks the voice that’s telling me I’m above working this job.

I had a scare the other night when my iPod decided to glitch and freeze on me. The iPod struggles with files over eight hours in length; I put a 16 hour audiobook on it, and though I was concerned that the total time said “-1 seconds,” I didn’t have time to do anything about it before work. When I got to work, the file began playing just fine, until about three hours in when it just quit playing the audio. I stopped the file and restarted it. I could skim through the file’s first three hours and audio was there, but the final thirteen were just silence, despite the fact that I could skim through the entire file without issue on my computer before I transferred it. I messed with it for a while, trying a couple different options, but nothing worked. That’s fine, I have podcasts, so I fired up The Moth, to catch up on the last two episodes I’d missed. The first episode played fine, then the second one froze. The iPod quit responding to button presses. Fuck. I rebooted it, the Apple logo came up… and stuck. I stared at it dumbly for a while, restarted it again, expecting different results, but the Apple logo remained, mocking me. Maybe it’s for all those times I’ve said mean things about Apple. I must have had a look on my face like a man lost in the desert that just accidentally spilled all the water out of his canteen while bending over to tie his shoe: a mix of complete denial (“Ohhhh, NO NO NO no no no nononono,” shaking the canteen, in case the water was just hiding) and the realization “I am going to die in this place.”

Without the audio to block out the shit in my head, I dwell on things, little things, and slowwwwly drive myself a little closer to complete insanity. For example, there’s a “superior” in the small back room they coop us up in that is constantly having to explain things to all the morons I work with. She ends every sentence with “Does that make sense?” as if she is programming a robot that responds to voice commands, and “Does that make sense?” is the command that saves each instruction in memory. I sat there, eyes huge, in complete disbelief that somebody could say something so many times and not realize how fucking irritating it is. Or maybe that she could explain SEVERAL concepts all in one group… then say “Does that make sense?” and I’d be willing to bet that IT WOULD MAKE SENSE. Every time she said it, it was like somebody was shooting me in the back of the head with a pellet gun. A little painful, but mostly just FUCKING IRRITATING AS FUCKING HELL. After 15 minutes of that, I wanted to spin around in my chair and scream “YES!! IT FUCKING MAKES SENSE!!!!” But I didn’t. I grabbed my BlackBerry, downloaded the Slacker Radio app, and listened to some of the worst stand-up comedy I’ve ever heard for the final four hours of my shift. Because even the worst, lowest common denominator comedy is slightly better than being shot in the back of the head with a pellet gun for four hours, does that make sense?

That night, I fixed my iPod (it was completely fucked – it required a full wipe and reinstall), and I loaded my audio back onto it, careful to split my longer audiobooks into chunks of a couple hours each. Crisis averted. Well, until today.

I had just finished The Shining on my shift last night, and had loaded a new book up and honestly was a little excited to get started on it when I pulled up to work. I was even a couple minutes early. This never happens, because if I’m one minute late to work every day, that’s like five minutes a week, and five minutes is one third of a break. But audiobooks have been a godsend over the last week. With long, overarching narratives that can last several full work shifts, they’re something I actually look forward to, rather than just something that gets me through the doldrums. I plopped down at my computer, early enough that only one other person was there (I’d be lying if I said my manager didn’t look a little surprised), and started my daily “plopping down at my computer” routine: car keys into the side pocket of the backpack, wallet out of my back pocket of my jeans and into the back pocket of my backpack (cuz sitting on it for eight hours starts to hurt my back a bit, does that make sense?), BlackBerry out of my hoodie pocket and placed next to the computer so I have my Facebook/Twitter/text message/internet hub readily available (fireable offense, by the way), iPod next to the keyboard, and headphones out of the other side pocket of my backpack and plugged into…

Uhh… headphones out of the BACK pocket of my backpack and into… well what the fuck? Headphones out of the main compartment of the backpack? Headphones out of the…

CUT TO: INT – BILL’S APARTMENT, cross town. It is silent, save for the hum of the refrigerator motor and the muffled drone of traffic outside. A pair of HEADPHONES, wrapped up as if prepared to be stuffed into the side pocket of a backpack, lay unassumingly on the coffee table. On the couch in the background, his girlfriend’s sleeping CAT rises up, stretches and yawns, turns 180 degrees, and settles back down to sleep.

I’ve made this mistake ONCE, probably about a year ago, but at the time Kyle was working in another department in the same building, and I was able to borrow his headphones as he left for home. I swore to myself that would never happen again, and ever since, I have kept a spare pair of headphones in my glove compartment in my car. I head out to my car, open the glove compartment and… they’re not there. I check the console, under the seats, the fucking TRUNK — they’re just inexplicably not in their place. That look again: the guy in the desert that just reached for his spare canteen with smug confidence, only to discover it’s not there. My life flashed before my eyes; a historical time lapse of everything I’ve ever experienced — a mini-movie of character-shaping episodes of overcoming adversity — leading up to me, standing alone in a parking lot, staring blankly at my car, 28 years old, and about to cry over a pair of headphones.

But I have no spirit anymore, so, resigned to my fate, I shut the car door with a sigh, paused for a moment, then turned to head back inside. I’ve mentioned before that it’s not fun inside my head, but I normally have outside stimuli to keep me from dipping in that pool too often. At this job, and without the audio, I don’t get that stimuli, except for the infrequent, inane banter of my coworkers, the hum of scanners, the clatter of a dozen keyboards, the occasional cough, the occasional sneeze, quickly followed by a group blessing, all distilled down in my brain to the sound of thick glass, spiderwebbing under extreme pressure, threatening to shatter at any moment. I wouldn’t say I’m a ticking timebomb while sitting at that computer, because that would imply that you know when it’s going to go off. I’m more like a defective landmine that, miraculously and despite all the footfalls I’ve sustained, has not yet gone off. But could. I knew that I was going to be on edge today, and I just hoped that I looked miserable enough to be left the fuck alone until my first break, when I would speed to the nearest store and buy a cheap pair of earbuds to get me through the rest of the day.

That’s when the “does that make sense?” girl started explaining something to somebody in the back of the room.

I stopped typing. “Biiillll,” I reasoned with myself, like a negotiator addressing a PCP addict that’s holding a knife to a baby, “this girl is going to say ‘does that make sense’ and you are going to ignore it, because you need a steady paycheck, Bill.” Time slowed. I could feel my brain releasing chemicals, new chemicals, like it was taking old chemicals and mixing them into new anger cocktails, shaken, not stirred, right under the surface of my skull. “Holy shit,” I thought. “I’m going to blow up. I’m seriously losing it.” She left the room, without saying “does that make sense?” but the tension was just caught there, my brain a screaming, thundering boiler with no release valve. The possibility that she could come back and say “does that make sense?” became one of the most terrifying thoughts I’ve ever entertained. A sudden sense of empathy for every postal worker that ever walked into work with an automatic weapon and unloaded a clip before offing himself filled into the base of my head like a warm, thick liquid. I became dimly aware that I had just been staring at my hands for several minutes, and that the woman next to me kept glancing over at me to try and figure out what the hell was going on. If I’d had headphones on, maybe she’d be thinking “Oh, he’s just caught up in his music or his book or whatever he’s listening to.” but I was just sitting there. I can’t even IMAGINE the look on my face.

An email notification popped up on my desktop, and I am not exaggerating the timing of the receipt of this email for dramatic effect. The popup on the screen was what snapped me out of my trance. I figured it was my boss, too lazy to walk 10 seats down to me to tell me to get back to work. It was the representative from the temp agency. “Hey, sorry for the mixup, but we accidentally had you in the system under your old pay scale, and this position actually only pays $10 an hour. Your next paycheck will reflect the change in pay, and we’ll just go ahead and take out the amount we’ve overpaid you.”

Ten.

Dollars.

An hour.

Ten dollars… an hour? I’m gnashing teeth, writhing, clawing my way through this personal fucking hell for TEN DOLLARS AN HOUR??!! I could taste battery acid in the back of my mouth. Then, nothing. It was like somebody grabbed the boiler of my brain and threw it into the ocean, where it exploded in silence, sparing all the oblivious civilians that had been going about their daily business right in its blast radius. I calmly reversed my “plopping down at my computer” routine, without the “wrapping headphones up” step, wrote a note on a sticky note explaining that while I thought my boss was a nice guy, I just found out what I was being paid and that it wasn’t worth my sanity, stuck it to my keycard, placed it on his desk, and walked out. No shattered windows. No computers through walls. No keyboards smashed over heads. I didn’t even manage a snarky response to the email; they know why I left. No, they probably don’t understand the full depth of it, but they get the gist, moot as it is, and work will continue uninterrupted there. On Monday they won’t even remember my name, and on Monday some other sorry sucker will be sitting quietly in my seat, with headphones in, thinking to himself, “this job kinda sucks.”

When I got home, both Nina and I expected me to be distraught, undergoing the complete meltdown that I had thought I had dodged, but had only temporarily delayed. But I couldn’t help but smile. Does that make sense?

I posted something about work a while back again, but changed my mind the next morning and privatized it. Well, here we go again. We’ll see how long this one stays.

I just feel defeated. I feel like I want to accomplish something with my life and I just don’t know how to. So I decided to try and set a simple, attainable goal. I thought, “Okay, I’m going to focus on trying to get my photos hanging somewhere.” Doesn’t matter where. A coffee shop for all I fucking care. Just something to make me feel like I’m doing something with the only passion I have yet to be robbed from me in life.

Another dead end. I have the goal, how the fuck do I reach it? I hate my photos. I’ve never seen one of my photos printed. Matting and framing isn’t cheap, how the fuck am I gonna swing that? I can’t even afford to live. Fuck. So a while later I decide “Okay, I’m doing all this street photography on film, maybe I should learn how to develop and print my own black and whites.” I feel like, even if I shoot 99% digital, that somehow legitimizes what I do. So I check out a photography center in town that runs a class that teaches you just that. Perfect. The class runs monthly, and runs right in the middle of my FUCKING work schedule. A plan starts to formulate in my head. Maybe I can get an extra day off a week by asking for Mondays off to take this class. Even more perfect, right? Eight fewer hours a week spent punching myself in the face, a class involving something I actually want to do, and my photography moves forward, no matter how little.

Let me preface this next part by saying I did have a complete meltdown at work the other day. Well, actually I guess I avoided a complete meltdown at work by leaving two hours into my shift. I called my dad on my first break, like I do a couple times a week, and he asked, “How’s work?” I thought I was doing okay, but it must have been right under the surface because I just ended up screaming at him for 15 minutes. I was BOILING. I came back in, told my boss something had “come up,” and since I looked visibly distressed, I left them to assume it was a family emergency or something. Though the rest of that day was not pretty, I worked the rest of the week without incident.

So I go in early today to grab a “superior,” explain that a class I’d like to take is starting in two weeks and that I’d like to have Mondays off to fit the class in. She says that’s not possible, but another “superior” in the cubicle next to us overheard and stuck her head over the wall. “Normally at times like this we try to accommodate employees, but we’ve had some attendance issues with you, so you’re kinda on thin ice.” Keep in mind, in the two fucking years I’ve worked for these fucking pricks, I have taken a total of maybe ten days off, five of which were spent in and out of the hospital with an infected cyst. Very rarely have I called in because I just-don’t-feel-like-going-in because, as I mentioned, I can’t fucking afford to live. But the “attendance issue” she was referring to was the day last week when I walked out. Never mind the fact that I consistently outperform every other fucking schmuck there, literally without trying, and probably had just as good of numbers as some of the other people on my “team” despite leaving 6 hours before my shift ended. Just a couple years ago I would have told them to fuck themselves but I’m so fucking browbeaten anymore, I instead had to smile and say “thank you!” in order to keep my bullshit pittance paychecks coming. “Attendance issue.” Is this fucking grade school? I’m so fucking SICK of being treated and spoken down to like a fucking child.

So okay, whatever. I miss the class this go-around. It starts again in July. This contract will be up in a month and I’ll have the time to take the class then. I just have to continue going in with my fucking head down, not saying anything to anybody, keeping my fucking headphones plugged into my skull, and trying to keep my anger from boiling over for another month. I’ll get through it. But the problem, I’m starting to realize, isn’t just the shitty dead-end job. The shitty, dead-end job is just a manifestation of a deeper, more serious issue. The shitty, dead-end job is just the mole on the tumor that’s my shitty, dead-end life.

My whole fucking life I was told I was a genius. My teachers, my parents, my friends and peers — they all just knew I was going to go on to do great things. And whereas most people in this situation might then feel pressured to actually live up to this expectation and try to perform in some capacity, I went the opposite direction and figured, “Fuck, I’m a genius? Well, my work here is done.” as if I was I was going to graduate from high school, enter the real world, and would just be handed my genius grant. And sure, I was a slacker, but it’s not like I really fucked up along the way. I didn’t smoke any more/less weed or drink more/less alcohol or spend any more/less time skateboarding than any of my friends, but I think I was mentally more in cruise control than any of them, due to this deep-seated, ill-advised sense of entitlement. “Sure, we’re just drinking 40s and throwing ourselves off stairs now, but I’m a genius, so one day everything’s just going to fall in place for me because I’m so goddamned smart.” And this attitude is why a great deal of my friends are now professionals, many in fields they only DREAMED of working in, or at the very least, my friends can support themselves and function as normal cogs in society and I struggle with the most fucking basic of real-world concepts.

My high school orchestra teacher summed up the futility of my situation to me recently, over a couple beers: “In this world, there are thinkers and there are doers. Steve Jobs is a thinker. He just surrounds himself with doers. You and I, we’re thinkers. You’ve just got to find your doers.” Well, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, and think I just wish I was a doer.

Digital technology makes sense to me. You got ones, you got zeroes, a processor contains the logic necessary to convert that into data that makes sense to people: an mp3, a digital photo. Analog technology, on the other hand, is fucking voodoo. Record players were the dominant music playback technology for like a hundred years and for good reason; the concept is still baffling. Record players make zero fucking sense to me. I’ll maybe grant you that a fine pitted groove somehow reproduces sound when a stylus is drug through it and the vibrations are captured and amplified. MAYBE. But stereo records are absolutely bonkers. HOW DO TWO SEPARATE CHANNELS OF SOUND COME FROM A SINGLE GROOVE AGGGGHHHHHH FUCKING VOODOO.

And okay, I’ll maybe grant you that we’ve discovered light sensitive compounds that can be used to reproduce a black and white photograph. It’s just tonal information. But color photography? Somehow, a hundred years ago we figured out how to capture and freeze not only the intensity of a source of light but its frequency?! The airplane was a pipe dream when we figured that shit out! Fucking. Voodoo.

I guarantee if this technology came out after digital technology, we’d be blown away. It seems almost an accident that their chronology is reversed. Analog’s some crazy shit.

Just a couple pictures from my friend Brandon’s band. You can check them out here. They’re pretty sick.

Couldn’t move a whole lot; it was a show in a basement that realistically could hold about 20 people with probably 60 people down there. Whole show was lit by a single lightbulb. I wouldn’t have come home with anything with my old camera, unless I’d used flash.

It’s almost 6AM. Turns out working til midnight can fuck up your sleeping schedule even when you’re on a fucked up sleeping schedule. Joel miraculously called me tonight — something that happens once every three months or so — and we had a fun night working on some flatground tricks in a parking lot, followed by drinking, which of course precedes super cereal conversations. Anyway, I think I’m writing this down for my own records more than anything else.

We were talking about how much more fun it is to tear a shitty art piece apart than it is to appreciate a good one. And I realized that when I see a photo I don’t like, I can normally list off the reasons I don’t like it. But when I like a photo, I’m hard-pressed to explain why. So I’ve decided that when a photo works, you shouldn’t be able to run off a laundry list of reasons why it’s a good photo; it’s just a good photo.

Here’s a photo I like. I could probably pick out a couple technical flaws with it, but I don’t feel the need to, because something about it just says “it doesn’t matter that this isn’t perfect, there’s something here that trumps technical perfection.” I tend to find that all the best photos I’ve seen are often a bit off in sharpness or maybe have a compositional distraction or three, etc etc. I’m thinking this is maybe why I’m often disappointed with my own stuff; I’ll nail a single technical element if I’m lucky, but rarely does a photo jump out at me and say “show this to people, it’s worth looking at.” I’m working on it.