The Diary of A Simple Man

It turned out they didn't have either of the pastries that I wanted. So I got a muffin. That and my coffee was on the house, and they said the pastry would be free next time, too. I also got about fifty apologies, none of which were necessary.

That much cheerfullness is hard to cope with, particularly early in the morning when I'm as tired as this...

It must be some sort of promotional thing. Wait, I'll back up.

Jeeze, I'm tired. I went to sleep on the late side, around 11:15 last night, but that doesn't explain it. Waking up this morning was like waking up dead. I slept on the train, and when I was walking through Ruggles, I suddenly discovered that my zipper was wide open. This was not a dream.

I mean, I'm so tired this morning that I can barely function. So I went downstairs to Fresh City to get some real coffee, non-decaf. Incidentally, the girl who implied that I was a thief doesn't seem to be there any more.

Anyway, I'm walking in a half-daze towards the pastries to see if there's anything I like. As I'm walking, one of the girls behind the counter (about fifteen feet away) smiles at me and calls out "How are you doing, sir?"

Startled, I answered "Good morning! How are you?" and continued to the pastries. There was nothing that really grabbed me, though. As I walked back to check a couple of small pastry platters by the cash register, a man in a red embroidered Fresh City jacket walked up to a customer in a business suit, said something like "Hello, sir, thanks for coming in today!" and shook his hand. I started to suspect that something was going on.

Jesus. I'm so tired that I'm actually saying these words as I type them. I probably sound insane!

Anyway, there were no pastries that interested me by the cash register. A man who was sitting nearby jumped up and asked "What are you looking for?".

"Oh...a cinnamon swirl, or an apple strudel, maybe," I said. He told the girl to bake me one, and she said it would be ready in ten minutes; then he told her that the pastry would be "on him". I thanked him, said I'd be back, and left. I'm feeling pretty freaked out, but I guess I should go back.

Weird, weird, weird. Corporate-enforced false bonhomie always makes me feel weird.

I didn't know this product existed:



Would you eat it? I wouldn't!

Someone over on Askville asked "When was Christ removed from Christmas?". I couldn't resist answering...

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Christ was removed from Xmas in a two-step surgical procedure on November 17th, 1952. First, an incision was made along the dorsal seam of the holiday. A set of custom-built expanders were used to keep the incision open. Then, a pair of forceps specially crafted for the occasion by the Business Roundtable were used to extract the Christ (already in a moribund state) from the internal chamber. The process went relatively smoothly, and once complete the incision was closed, surgically stiched, and healed normally. The result was a healthy non-religious commercial holiday, able to serve as a regular stimulant for the American economy.

I'm not sure what was done with the Christ. It might have been disposed of as medical waste...or possibly it was picked up from a dumpster and swallowed by a passing evangelical movement. If so, I'm afraid it metastasized into a cancer of the right wing. In any case, none of the original Christ remains in the now tumor-ridden movement.

Merry Xmas!

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I was tempted to make a reference to that Japanese monster movie where a homeless boy, a survivor of Hiroshima I think, found and ate the deathless heart and brain of Frankstein, only to grow into a Godzilla-sized Japanese Frankenstein. But how many people remember that movie? Not many, I'll bet!

For the last couple of days I've been listening to the first disc of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway over and over and over...

Apparently the government is considering an enhancement for airline security. It's a bracelet that every passenger would be forced to wear while on the plane. It would contain all their personal data, and act as a flight boarding pass. Removing it while in flight would be a crime.

And, oh yes: it's got a built-in shock device that can be used by TSA and airplane personel to stun passengers at will, immobilizing them for several minutes. As an added bonus, it can be used as an interrogation enhancement.

Can you believe this shit? I'm sure Obama will "reluctantly" support it, too.

Salvatore Minella is at his favorite restaurant, dining on salmon. But he doesn't know that this particular salmon was a magic fish; she could talk. Her name was Ella.

Ella did not ask the fisherman who caught her to let her go because she couldn't speak English. She could only speak Fish. In any case, she wasn't feeling well that day. She was badly infected with Anisakis nematodes.

On Friday Boston was hit with a pretty powerful thunderstorm and violent downpour.

How violent? Violent enough that water came pouring out of several mechanical closets at my work, on the sixth floor. One of them is less than 20 feet from my desk, so I grabbed a video:

That's my voice warning people to avoid the water (although I'm sure they all knew not to touch it - call it a parental instinct on my part. Or maybe arrogance). It was probably safe, but in my old job water leaked out of an electrical closet, and they had to shut the whole building down for a week or two. A maintainence guy told me later that we'd been lucky; there could have been an explosion that would have wrecked the whole building.

Anyway, they cleaned up here and there was no problem. I wish the phone had picked up the sound better; it really sounded like a waterfall run amok inside that closet.

I had to go pick up a friend at the bus station in downtown Providence tonight; I got the call just past midnight. I'd been expecting her earlier, but the bus was running late. It was raining and dark, not my favorite weather to drive in even when I'm not dying of sleep deprivation.

So I took I95 down. As I was getting off the 22A ramp - a long, gently curving ramp that most people take at high speed - I suddenly saw a huge accident in the road ahead. A white car was upside-down in the middle of the ramp, with broken glass and debris everywhere. It must have happened only seconds earlier, because I was the first on the scene. People were dragging each other out through the windows of the half-crushed car. It was two girls and a young man; there was no visible blood or injury, but injuries still seemed likely.

I put on my hazards, kicked some of the debris to the side of the ramp and dialed 911. Fucking AT&T! I got a tone and a "This call cannot be completed as dialed". What's the point of having 911 if it doesn't work when you need it? Fortunately someone else was able to get through to the police.

Some guy came up and asked me to move my car so he could get past. "Drive around me" I said. He did, with loud popping sounds as he drove through the broken glass. Another car followed him. A few people were trying to comfort the passengers from the car, who were making the usual sounds of distress - not screaming, just sounds of lamentation. I noticed that the girls from the car were wearing remarkably revealing dresses - not torn, they were designed that way. Is tonight prom night?

I couldn't figure out how the car had gotten upside-down. There was a loop of another ramp almost directly overhead, but the guard rail was undamaged.

I was shaking, to be honest. The ramp was pretty much blocked up (there's a lot of traffic in downtown Providence, even after midnight), so I shouted that we should clear a path for the police and ambulance, and went carefully around the crash site myself. I avoided the worst of the glass and didn't hear any popping sounds. Picked up my friend and came home; on the way we passed the crash site from a distance, and I could see flashing police lights.

What a weird experience!

Ever heard of "fainting goats"?

I'd never heard of them before this morning, when I read a comment that the media was acting like fainting goats over Obama's "bitter" comment. It was such an odd phrase that I had to look it up.

When startled, these small goats basically faint and fall down. The thing that kills me is this line from the wikipedia article:

In the past they were used for protecting livestock such as sheep by involuntarily "sacrificing themselves" to predators, allowing the sheep to escape.

For some reason that thought makes me sad.