Story Archive (09/2003)

Killer Dreams (9/26/2003)

In the final hours of the morning, when I'm fighting hard to stay asleep, I have lucid dreams. Last night I watched the horror movie Valentine, where Denise Richards (all while in a bikini) is disfigured with a 24" drill and then electrocuted. The movie inspired a long dream this morning. I'm sorry to say that Denise wasn't in it.

The setting was the home of some blonde girl that just happen to have the exact same layout as my mother's old home. There were four of us watching TV in the big family room. One person went out into the back yard, never to be heard from again. A bit later, a second person went out to look for them, never to be heard from again.

Luckily for the remaining blonde and me, I realized that some psychotic killer was obviously unpleasantly killing these people. While explaining to her the gruesome death I was sure the poor victims had faced, a flash of lightening outside revealed two bodies hanging from the tree by the deck in the back yard. There was the killer wielding a hand axe against them.

Unlike the movie Valentine, the killer was foolishly unmasked. He was (insert long drum-role here) my brother! He looked up from his disfigurement activities and we made eye contact. I did what any good victim would do. I ran like hell leaving the blonde behind. That was the last appearance she made in the dream. I assume she was also horribly hacked to bits by the axe-wielding maniac.

I ran through the laundry room into the bottom of the stair well to my old room locking the two doors that lead into it. I pulled out my mobile phone and called 911. It was no good. I didn't know where I was (remember, this house was owned by the blonde, not me). The emergency operators couldn't track down my cell phone. Then there was a knock on the door and I ran upstairs.

BANG! BANG! Two gunshots rang out as the lock was shot off the door and my brother kicked it in. I ran to the other side of the room, opened the window and jumped out onto the roof. I quickly climbed to the upper-roof above the open window and waited. Like most deranged killers, my brother foolish stepped onto the roof in palpable disregard for where I might be hiding and I was able to pounce! We struggled and rolled off the roof' OUCH!

Once on the ground I grabbed the gun and pulled the trigger multiple times. There was one bullet left that hit him, and then the gun clicked empty. 'It's over.' The shot was true, and by any reasonable assumption he should have been dead.

But this is a dream based on a horror movie. He sat up in that freaky way where one just rises at mid-torso, reached behind his back, and pulled a fresh gun. I swore loudly, and ran like hell. The alarm went off and I woke up. So I wonder' which of the brothers wins in a battle to the death around my mother's old home. The world may never know.

Antisocial (9/25/2003)

My coworkers have recently made jokes that I'm antisocial. When we leave the office around 7-8pm (after 11-12 hours there) we generally head out to dinner. All I really want to go is grab fast food and head back to the hotel. Yet, we have only one car, so it's generally an inconvenience to them and I just go to dinner. That puts me home at around 10pm. Generally, I have only one hour a day 'at home' where I?m not with my coworkers. This drives me absolutely crazy.

I was wondering when I became such a hermit, but I've decided it's nothing new. I only have so much social energy in me. After a while I retreat to quite solace. It keeps me from killing. Coworkers require more social energy as well. There's some level of requirement for you to be pleasant around them. It makes life just a little bit harder. Not that my coworkers aren't friendly, just that I wouldn't necessarily spend 12-13 hours a day, five days a week, with them. You know?

This whole situation is pretty detrimental my social life as well. After a long week of being outwardly social, I hate trying to do that for my free time at home over the weekend. There are a lucky few out there who require no effort on my part to spend time with. If only there were more way cool people in the world.

Tasty Ants (9/19/2003)

I will warn the faint of heart that this is disgusting. It also involves ants. If you don't like disgusting stories about ants, stop reading.

I got home around midnight last night. We've been doing after-hour load tests all week and I've generally been getting home around midnight to 1am. I always get hungry in the middle of the night so I bring snacks with me to Memphis. This week I brought out some sort of cookie snack. I generally leave it sitting out in the hotel room so I can grab a couple in the middle of the night.

So I pull into my hotel room around midnight. All the lights are out and everything is dark. I grab one of the cookies and pop it in my mouth. It is rank. I notice it's soft, so it's gone stale, but I can't understand why it tastes so absolutely disgusting. I look down at the container to see it crawling with a huge infestation of ants.

It's right at this moment I realize that my mouth is also likely crawling with a slightly smaller infestation of ants. I'm very proud I was able to hold off the gag reaction long enough to make it to the bathroom so that I could heave out the putrid cookie. I was, unfortunately, starving at this point, so I sat there dry heaving for a while. If you've never had the joy of dry heaving or heaving up bile, consider yourself lucky. I've spent all too much time doing it.

The vomit reaction also causes a surge of adrenaline in the body. This is why, when drunk, vomiting makes you feel better. It's not that you're somehow magically vomiting the alcohol out of your blood stream, it's that you get a burst of adrenaline which counter-acts the effect. Well, this little surge of adrenaline also kept me awake until around 2am. Also, after my ant experience I had this "phantom ant" sensation for the rest of the night. I'd be lying in bed, trying to sleep, and I could swear I felt ants still crawling in my mouth. "Luckily" I have six hours on planes today to get plenty of catch-up sleep.

Tell Me A Fable (9/17/2003)

I'm bored! Life out here on Harrah's is exceptionally boring for me. Now that we're in testing. Each day the Business System Analysts (BSA) found around one defect (bug) in the code. Most of these are due to environment issues, user error, blah blah. Some are not. It, in general, takes me around one hour to figure out what caused it, followed by one more hour to fix it. That's it; no more work in my eight hour long work day. Except that my ride home doesn't like until around nine each night. meaning I have thirteen hours at the office to do roughly two hours of work.

Perhaps you're jealous? Don't be. The firewall is strong, the work environment is crowded. That makes doing other distracting things difficult. Plus, there's always work other people are doing which is not my responsibility. They will pawn that work off on me if they are under the impression I'm not working. Clearly, as a team player, I should be helping them out. But I dunno... I still remember when I got my big raise at work, and the director said "you're doing the work of two people, so you should get compensated accordingly." I always thought, if I can do my fifty hour week in twenty five hours, the compensation I want isn't money, it's to not work for those other twenty-five hours!

Wanna hear a story? I remember being a punk kid. I remember being brainwashed by hippie liberals into thinking that using styrofoam and other resilient polystyrene plastic would make me an evil person. Were you brainwashed into that mentality? One day, on the way to school, my father grabbed me some orange juice in a styrofoam cup and handed it to me in the car. What did I do?

Being the punk kid I was, I refused to use it. "I won't drink from a styrofoam container." He foolishly tried to argue logic with me commenting the cup was already used and going to be thrown away anyway. I held firm the beliefs that someone else had told me to have. He eventually went in and poured it into a reusable cup for me. I drank it. He appeased my foolish wishes well. He also has never brought me something in a styrofoam cup since.

Mission Complete (9/13/2003)

It's taken a decent amount of patience and searching, but I have finally found the quaint community coffee house with free WiFi access that is reasonable close to my home. It is, alas, a bit of a drive. It takes around ten minutes to get here, and I haven't gone searching for the nearest free parking (it all looks metered around here). Yet, that is just a small side quest to complete.

The place is called Zocalo Coffee House and it ROCKS! The corner has a little kiddie area with all sorts of neat play equipment. I'm currently sitting on a nice cushy easy chair with my feet kicked up on an ottoman. There are lots of books for reading, including a nice encyclopedia set. Did I mention the free wireless? Plus there's a hot girl working behind the counter. I would wager she's in high school, but maybe she'll hit on me like the Memphis high school girls like to.

I moved another significant hunk of money in SRI mutual funds. There's something neat about sitting here in a nice cushy chair in the middle of a coffee house and moving thousands of dollars around in my bank accounts. I feel like such a nerd... or preppy... or something! It's just cool.

The real key to this place is when I finish up in Memphis and can work from here on the weekdays. That will rule!

Jenny, Part Deux (9/12/2003)

My brother reminded me of a lovely poem I wrote for Jenny in the few months after we dated. I submitted it to Jesuit's creative writing journal anonymously and it got published that year. I remember being quite proud of it at the time. I remember Big Chris saying it was his favorite item in the journal that year.

I went digging through my hard drive, and sure enough I found it. You want me to post it, don't you? Well, I'm not going to! My god I'm embarrassed by it. The meter is atrocious and the rhyme is stretched painfully in multiple places. It's not a forced rhyme, it's a rhyme that should have never been attempted. Actually, at this point I had done no academic study of poetry and went entirely by ear without a concept of what "meter" really was. My later stuff is often shoe-horned into iambic pentameter. Man I love writing sonnets.

And the theme? A fourteen-year-old contemplating if his first two month relationship was love? How childishly immature is that? Like how about this crappy verse:

Yet love is simple,
love is strong.
If you have it
you can't be wrong.

Anyway, I like to think I got a lot better at writing poetry over the years. I almost feel bad I gave it up. Though, without all that teen angst messing with my head, I'm not sure if I have a lot of emotional turmoil inspiring me to write.

Guess I'll stick with fiction. I'm through part two of what I envision to be a five party cyberpunkish story. I'll look at getting those posted as soon as they've been reviewed by my editorial staff.

Baked Potato (9/10/2003)

I went to lunch with a coworker from India. He stared blankly at the baked potato. "How do you eat this?"

The Compass Rose (9/10/2003)

Crazy! CRAZY! Someone (Herman) got the great idea of trying to resurrect the community that was The Compass Rose. It was a BBS I spent many hours on during my time in high school. It had great chat features for all of us in the Sacramento, Davis and Woodland areas. Unlike the stupid worthless Internet chat rooms of today, you knew that everyone in this place lived in your local community.

It was very cool at around 3am to hear the other people mention the song playing on KWOD and know you were listening to the same thing. You could actually schedule MUPTs and CiTS and have people show up. It's the sort of community you just don't seem to be able to create on the Internet where most other people are across the globe... and perverts.

Anyway, I'm all nostalgic.

Spending Spree (9/2/2003)

Someone has gotten hold of my corporate credit card and gone on a spending spree. Lots of DVD players and computers from the Home Shopping Network. Some nice ladies wear from Victoria Secrets as well. I'm jealous I didn't get any of that stuff. I kind of want to know who this is. It clearly sounds like a really cool hot chick!

So what happens anyway? I don't pay American Express for that. I assume they don't pay the HSN. But I'm sure HSN has already shipped all those great products. They do have a shipping address for it. I just don't know.

Labor Day (9/1/2003)

Labor Day weekend has come and gone. As is tradition, the father's half of the family spent a lovely weekend up in Lake Tahoe at a cabin in Alpine Meadows. We saw Mars from the top of Squaw Valley on Saturday night looking through the telescopes of amateur astronomers. Sunday was a peaceful day of biking, hiking and rafting. Though I mostly stayed indoors, played cards and help with a puzzle. Another year down. My brother gets home from Europe tomorrow and I take off for Memphis in about 2 hours. I really should be out the door by now.