Fuzzy Memories - Part 1

Here's a new installment of my blog. It's called "Fuzzy Memories," and it's basically stories from my past that I vaguely remember. Everything that I write is true to the best of my memory, which Lord knows is about as solid as Jell-O.

This first installment was inspired by the wonderful, family-oriented show The Moment of Truth. For those not familiar, TMoT is a FOX game show where contestants must reveal their most terrible, dark secrets to win money. If they tell the truth, they win money. If they lie, they lose. Questions tend to deal with relationships and family, which is convenient because they always have the contestant's significant other and family in the studio, so they can watch in horror as it is revealed that the their loved one has been cheating/lying/plotting their deaths for quite some time.

The other day one of the questions posed on TMoT was "Have you ever been involved in a car accident and fled the scene?" Of course the woman had done this, and when she responded truthfully, the audience booed and hissed (and then immediately cheered and applauded after she was awarded money; go figure).

This crappy, sleazebag gameshow triggered a memory, a memory I'm not too proud of but every time I think about it, I laugh. I had fled the scene of a traffic accident once.

I was in college, probably a junior. Many of my friends and I were journalists. I was kind of a crappy journalist. I slacked off a lot and spent a lot of time inebriated on a variety of substances. But I was always there to lend a friend a hand. And my friend Patrick needed one.

Patrick was a neurotic, studious student with high hopes for his future (he currently works for a newspaper in Florida). He was always very polite and obeyed all laws (note: he was a fairly straight edge kind of guy). One day he asked if I could drive him to the local movie theater so that he could conduct an interview. I think Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 was coming out, and he was doing a piece on the fervor. I could be wrong. This is called Fuzzy Memories.

Anyway, I took him to the theater in my beat up '89 Oldsmobile. I didn't want to go inside so I sat in the car in the parking lot waiting for Pat to come out. About 10 minutes later he did. He hopped into the car, I put it into reverse and I pushed the accelerator.

SLAM!!!!

We turned around and saw I had rammed a giant, parked pick-up truck. I'm completely calm. Meanwhile, Pat is freaking out. Here we are in a parking lot in the middle of the day, Pat just was in the theater spending much face-to-face time with the theater manager, who obviously knew Pat's name at this point. It was understandable that he'd be a little worried.

So I got out of the car and did a quick inspection. My car had a little bit of a scratch on it. Nothing major. And considering my car was basically a hunk of junk, I could have cared less. The truck too was fairly unharmed. The only damage whatsoever was a cracked taillight.

No owner was in sight. I had nothing to write a note with. The damage was minimal. Pat was freaking out. So I put the car in drive and drove off. All of this lasted about 30 seconds.

So there. I got it off my chest. And I was able to recount a memory that I haven't recalled in probably about 5 years. If any other random memories ever occur to me, I'll write those down too as my next installments in Fuzzy Memories.

Asshole - Texas Style

Meet Joe Horn. He's 61 years old and resides in a nice neighborhood in Pasadena, Texas. He's a grandfather, a gun owner and a real fucking asshole.

Asshole isn't the right word for Mr. Horn. Murderer? Killer? Psychopath? Not one of these encapsulates the brutal insanity that this man wields inside his fleshy dome. I'd call him a douchebag, but that's offensive to douchebags everywhere.

You see, Mr. Horn took the law into his own hands. One day he was looking out his window and saw two men robbing his neighbors home. Like a good concerned citizen, Horn called 911. The dispatcher assured him that the police were on their way. But that wasn't good enough for Mr. Horn. He had to make sure these robbers would be caught and punished. Ignoring the pleadings of the 911 dispatcher, Mr. Horn grabbed a shotgun and shot the two thieves in their backs. In their backs! Even in Texas, a state known for its libertarian, no-nonsense ways, this was an act of cowardice.

When the decision came down in Mr. Horn's murder case, the jury decided to let him off the hook. There's a law in Texas called the "Castle Law," which basically states a person's home is their castle and they are legally allowed to use deadly force to protect it. But Mr. Horn wasn't protecting his own home. He was protecting his neighbor's. And the burglars weren't committing acts of violence. They were merely robbing the house of money and jewelry, items that could be insured and restored. However their lives, sadly, cannot be.

Many are calling Mr. Horn a hero. He saw a crime being committed and did what he could to stop it. I think Mr. Horn is a symbol of the state of the nation. Here is a man that is so crippled with fear that he would take a shotgun to the backs of two burglars. Here is a man who values money over human lives. Here is a man who probably thinks the terrorists are out to get us, that illegal immigrants are taking our jobs, that hate, violence and inhumanity lurk around every corner waiting to destroy everything we hold sacred.

The truth is the world is a peaceful place. It is the fear that Mr. Horn fosters that turns it into the violent, ugly world he perceives. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"I'd say I'm about this much of an asshole."
- Joe Horn

Google All Over My Face!

The Costa Rica recap will have to come in spurts. I just don't have the endurance to keep grabbing pictures off my harddrive and throwing them online and then sorting through them to find post-worthy pics.

So instead I'm going to talk about a higher power...Google.

Google's great, right? I mean I can search for anything on Google. And Google will find it. It's like a dog playing fetch, except it doesn't shit all over my God damn carpet! Stupid dogs!

And if you misspell something, Google knows exactly what you meant. There's rarely a misunderstanding. I could say, "Hey Google, find me stuff about pinapples." And Google won't take offense. Google won't turn around and call me stupid. Google kindly says, "Hey. Did you mean pineapples?" Yes, Google, yes! A thousand times yes! I wonder if Google is single.

And Google knows all about me. If I tell Google to look me up, Google comes back with every little thing on Earth that mentions my name. Google's like God. A kind and benevolent God who watches over all the mortal Web surfers. Google should write a book. Because then I would have a holy text that I could put under my pillow and read to my cat. My cat has no morals. She could learn a thing or two from Google.

And when I die, Google will be there, waiting for me. Google will beckon me toward the white light of its homepage:

"Come, Keith. Enter a world of infinite knowledge. See sites you have never seen before. Look! There is a rabbit with a pancake on its head! Such oddities can only be created by me, the Google!

Thanks Google!

Costa Rica Part 1 - Ziplining!

I finally have some of the pictures from my Costa Rica trip on my computer. So I can now show you what it was that I did.

For one, Matt and I went ziplining. This is when you fly through trees that are a good hundred feet off the ground on a tiny wire. I'm not an adventurous person by nature. The craziest thing I ever did was invest more than 10 percent of my savings in a small-cap growth fund. I know! What a rush! But ziplining is so safe that a little boy or an elderly woman can do it. How do I know? Because there was a little boy and an elderly woman on the same tour as us.

We didn't get pics of us ziplining because the people that run the tour take pictures of you and don't let you bring your camera. It's part of their business plan. Get tourists to the top of a really high tree, strap them to a wire and then demand that they buy photographs of the whole ordeal. They even try to get you to smile as you're practically shitting yourself hundreds of feet above the rain forest. That's why Matt and I only got the following shots.

This is a picture of the first zipline on the course. It's really just a test run to make sure you have the hang of it. The rest were all from giant, prehistoric looking trees. You could feel the trees shaking back and forth with the wind as you stood on this tiny, rickety wooden platform that someone built around the tree's trunk a billion years ago.
This is a picture of a hot guy that worked for the zipline tour company. There weren't a lot of hot guys in Costa Rica, which was surprising. I thought Latin America was the birthplace of hotness in the same way Africa is the birthplace of humankind. In any case, I had to be inconspicuous when taking this shot because the dude was sitting by himself. So I pretended I was taking pictures of some trees. As if there aren't enough trees to photograph.


To get a better shot, I asked Matt to pose for a picture. That way it would look like I was merely taking a shot of my travel companion in front of a bunch of trees. I think the guy was beginning to catch on to my game. You can see him in this shot kind of looking up as if to say, "Not this shit again." I can't blame him. Costa Rica is a big gay travel destination, and I'm sure we weren't the only fags ogling this overworked and underpaid stud.

Land of Confusion - A Facebook Story

Yesterday marked a monumental moment in my life. I joined Facebook.

For years I've been a MySpace man. It wasn't because of anything in particular. MySpace wasn't any more appealing than the other social networking sites on the Web. It just so happened that's the one that everyone I knew was on.

But the times, they are a-changin'. And everyone seems to have a Facebook account. So in order to stay with the times, I too have joined your ranks.

The site is extremely confusing. The moment I signed on I was bombarded by a crapload of information:

What networks do you want to sign up for?

Here are some people that might be your friends.

Do you want to write a wall message?

These were all foreign to me, as MySpace kind of took the laissez fair approach. Sign up and here's your page. Go. Not Facebook. Facebook wants you to work at making friends and maintaining your page. Hell, it tells you what everybody is doing, just so you can keep up with the Jones'.

So as if my life wasn't busy and convoluted enough, I now have yet another thing to make it even moreso. If you're already on Facebook, and we're not friends, befriend me. And then tell me how to work this crazy site.

Give Me My Money Back, You Bitch

It's only been about two weeks that I waved goodbye to the 9-5 world. So it's no surprise that I would still have a few unresolved issues that need some resolving. That's what I've been working on in my spare time in between attracting clients like ants to a sugar party.

One of the biggest issues is reclaiming all the money sitting in my flex transportation account. This is an account I set up through my old employer that would withhold money per pay period for transportation purposes. After each pay period, I would fill out a form and request they give me this money back. They would then promptly write a check, and all would be right in this world. The purpose of an account like this is to shrink your taxable income by removing your transporation expenses from your paycheck per month. You could just claim all this in one lump sum during tax time, but most people are too busy forgetting to do their taxes for this to be a realistic option.

When I left my last job, I had forgotten to claim several months worth of transportation withholdings. This was awesome for me because it was like winning the midget lottery, assuming midgets need only a fraction of the money that big, normal people like myself require. So I called up the company that handles these accounts, spoke with a rep, and was instructed to file a claim for the full amount. So I did.

Weeks go by and I receive a check for not even 50% of the total amount owed to me. Why? Because I can only claim so much per pay period. I explained I am no longer an employee of the company and that I was clearing out my account in full and that I was instructed to do so. The woman on the phone (who works in Kentucky or Ohio or some bumble-fuck state that is full of bumble-fucks) didn't quite grasp my logic, which is the logic of the universe. Her logic was obviously rooted in some parallel dimension where insanity = sanity, up = down and people drink horse milk and ride cows. After a futile battle with this customer service sphinx, I was told to speak to another woman.

After making multiple calls to this other over the last several days, I am still waiting to speak to her. It's like Waiting for Godot, I guess. I'm waiting for a nice-sized check that will never come due to a customer service rep that will never call. God is dead, people. God is dead.

Day Time Drama

So many things go on during the day that you, people of the 9-5 world, are not privy to that it would blow your mind.

For one, as it turns out, many people work on their cars during the day. I know this because I went on a bike ride yesterday and saw at least two different people tooling with their cars. It wasn't in the best part of town. And I got the suspicion that they weren't their cars. And I'm pretty sure they were removing crucial parts to sell on the black market. But that's the way things are out in the real world during the day.

Also, people that don't work 9-5 are all friends. You heard me right. Every time I pass someone on the street or in a store, there's a definitive unspoken bond between us that we are major bad asses living on the fringes of society. I'm sure there's a secret handshake that I haven't learned about yet, but with due time I'm sure everyone will let me in on all their secrets, including where that big pile of money is that everyone else must be dipping into.

And finally, my cat leads a very exciting life during the day. Who knew she used my t-shirts as pillows?
Yes. She is that big. But her head is soooo tiny. Like a squirrel.