don’t be a jerk

This year’s turkey was a ridiculous 19 pounder that was probably the best I’ve ever made on account of my folks’ new handy dandy oven with it’s built in meat thermometer. I have been gorging myself on Thanksgiving kibbles for the past 48 hours.

Decided to hit up the Central LA Critical Mass on Black Friday to burn off the inevitable belly.

This month’s CM and the ensuing People’s Ride (basically another 10-15 mile ride for folks that don’t feel like calling it quits after CM’s 10-15 miles) were pretty brisk. I liked it personally, but these are supposed to be “no drop” rides meaning we wait up for the slowest person, and it didn’t work out that way this time. I’m fairly certain we were gradually losing riders from pretty early on in the ride.

Here are some blurry pics:

Tim and I rode out the 8-9 miles from West LA for the meetup. Our tally by the end of the night was probably 40-45 miles. With long leisurely rests, of course. There sure is a lot of drinking and smoking of the marijuana on these rides. There’s a Saturday night ride called Crank Mob which is supposed to be even worse.

Big Neil (aka “Optimific” in the LA Fixie scene.) Neil drove up from Irvine to meet up with us. Missed the start of the ride by a few minutes, but after a series of awkward phone calls and texted updates, he was able meet up with us.

God, my little pocket Canon isn’t doing it for me during these night rides. One of these days, I gotta lug out my big camera to really get some of these night shots.

And a video. 2nd street tunnel by bike mob.

…another parrot staring at a turkey. Ed has an appropriate moment of silence for his gigantic, dead brethren.

Cheesy? Yes, but damned if I didn’t get a little misty when it was official.

I really would like to have named this post “5 pieces of practical advice” but I had a hard enough time coming up with 4.

I am in no way implying that I have my shit even remotely together enough to be telling other folks how to live their lives, but I do think that I have a few valid pieces of advice in me.

So here are 4 practical (and unrelated) pieces of advice:

1. Keep a stash of petty cash in your glove compartment.
   Whenever I get some $1 bills in change from purchasing, say, coffee, food, or parrots - I’ll stick one of those bills in my glove compartment and by this I gradually build a small cache of $1 bills in my car. At any given point, I’ll have between $5-$15 in my glove compartment. This has saved my ass countless times at drive-throughs, paid-parking garages, and with the Mexican police.

2. Take the time to make a list of everything in your wallet and on your keychain
   After the last time I lost my wallet (however many years ago) I started keeping a record of every credit, debit, membership, and other type of card that I normally carry. Having had to struggle through remembering which cards to cancel once in my lifetime was enough to prompt me to spend the 8 minutes it took me to write up this list. Every few months I’ll double check and update it.

3. The worst time to get your car washed is on a Friday afternoon.
   Cause rest assured, the fella who’s getting paid minimum wage and has been working all week long and happens to be wiping your car down is trying his damndest to get the queue clear in time for him to start drinking with his buddies before the sun goes down. Find another time of the week to get your car washed. Don’t believe me? Feel free to come over any time and see the crusted turtle wax that’s been on the right side of my car for the past 8 months.

4. No matter how short the line may seem at the grocery store, don’t ever, ever get in line behind an old person.
   This will only ensure that you will have an excellent view of the line that you chose to pass up - the long line of teenagers and single men that you will helplessly watch whittle away while you slowly rot in your short line with the old person in it. That one “Who Needs a Quickie Mart” Simpsons episode was absolutely correct about this.
    
   I went to buy some milk this afternoon and made the mistake of getting in line behind 2 old people. I think that the second old person had actually started out young and had grown old waiting for the first old person to finish their fricking purchase. Hell, I had a fucking beard by the time I got to the cashier. And my milk had expired.
    
   Old people are slow as fuck. They are all very lonely and starved for conversation. And they can’t see well. And they also want to know if this gum is on sale. And they’re very sorry, they thought this coupon worked, but since it doesn’t, they don’t have enough cash so they’ll have to write a check. And one more thing - could you please get them a pack of Benson and Hedges Lights from the cigarette cabinet?
    
   This may seem like I’m talking about one old person, but I’m not. I’m talking about all of them. All old people.

I have two buddies, Neil and Mike G, that have pretty much eliminated the need for me to actually look up any info.

When I need to find something out, whether it’s about how the stock market works or how babies are made, 95% of the time, I can get an easy, well-crafted explanation from between the two of them. In the unlikely case that neither of them has a satisfactory answer for me, or if I happen to not believe them, then I might actually hit up google. (Note to self: apologize to Mike for not believing him about how babies are made. He was right. He was so shockingly right.)

One of the reasons this is the case is because they’re both smart guys with huge repositories of info in their large, smart heads. The other reason is because they’re both fastidious, borderline obsessive researchers. When either of them wants to find out about something, they really find out about it, and within days they’ll pretty be much experts on whatever they’ve decided to zero in on.

Awhile back, Neil decided that he wanted to start biking and took a week to characteristically make himself an expert on all things bicycle, then spent the past few months trying to get me to start up too. About a month ago I finally started going on rides with him, and two weeks ago I bought my own bike. It’s pretty darn fun. I’m going to hopefully start biking to work soon, cause, I’m telling ya banking accounts don’t mix so well with minivans and $4 gasoline.

Anyways, Neil, Tim, Neil’s buddy Brian, and the other Dave Lee hit up Santa Monica Critical Mass last Friday and it was a hoot. Very chill. The ride moves so slowly that you really don’t need a hardcore bike to do it or even have to be in great shape. It’s more of a social thing.

To start off, we all arrived at the Santa Monica Pier promptly at 6:30pm and did our best Obama impressions.

VIDEO - Critical Mass loves circles!!!
Whenever we came upon one, we rode around it incessantly and loudly, gradually bringing down the property values of the surrounding neighborhood. It was like Mad Max, but with more hippies.

Tim’s a good-looking guy. For some reason I have a penchant for taking not good-looking pictures of him.

So I’ve been seeing a new girl for the past few months. She’s a real cheery type. Ebullient and optimistic, I would even say.

She also happens to probably be the one person in the world that knows even less about football than I do.

I don’t care a lick about the Patriots nor the Giants, but I found myself getting drawn into the game more and more, and by the end I was yelling at the top of my lungs for the Giants.

Aside from having to explain to the girl what a 3rd-down conversion is, and pretty much how the entire game of football works, I also had to justify my decision to root for the Giants. She had decided to root for the Patriots.

“It’s so sad,” she said. “Why don’t you want them to have a perfect season?”

That got me thinking. Why was I rooting for the underdog? Is this a sign that I hate perfection? Does this mean that I secretly resent success in others and, maybe, in myself?

I think the reason I rooted for the Giants was because of the magnitude of the mismatch coming into the game.

Had the Patriots played another team this year, one that, at least by the numbers, more closely matched with the Pats, then I think I would have rooted for the Pats. I would have cheered them into a perfect season. In my mind, it would have been an earned achievement.

However, the press couldn’t stop talking about how much better the Patriots were than the Giants. An unlikely Giants victory would be “possibly the greatest upset in Super Bowl history”. By some accounts, this year’s Giants didn’t even deserve to be in the Super Bowl.

I rooted for the Giants because this wasn’t a fair fight. I rooted for the Giant’s because the mismatch in this game reminded me of standing up to bullies in grammar school. I rooted for them because the pre-game press reminded me of times when I strove to succeed when no one gave me any chance or credit. And I cheered for them because true, compelling, history-making drama does not come from the stronger defeating the weaker, or even from the slightly weaker defeating the slightly stronger, but in the rare times when the the child defeats the giant. The writers of the Bible decided to include the story of “David and Goliath”, not the story of “Biff and Mongo, who was a bit larger than Biff.”

So I’m not anti-success. I’m human.

We all find success in our own way. There are times in our lives when we are truly remarkable and others admire us in these best moments. And sometimes, we are the ones that watch others in their Big Show. And we’re fascinated by these moments and these people. We want to be them, and be around them, and watch them succeed, because these times are as rare as they are significant.

But these moments must come under fair and noble circumstances. They must earned. They must not come at the expense of those that remind us of ourselves - because then we abandon the allure of perfection to rally to the defense of our own…like the 2007 Giants.

That being said, I hope my Steelers make a good showing next season.

Just so folks know, iWeb (good riddance) always splarged out my URL to be “http://www.trickstergod.com/blog/try_and/try_and.html”

It’s just “http://www.trickstergod.com/blog/” now. That way you should stop getting the 404 page that comes up with the old URL.

E*star LA tagged me awhile back. I don’t always do these things, but this seemed open-ended and fun enough. I’ll try not to repeat revelations from this post.

The Rules (as copied from her blog):

• We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.

• Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

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Okay, so here are 8 things:
 

1. Fruit Flavors
   Cherries are one of my favorite fruits, but I tend to dislike artificial cherry flavoring. I gravitate towards foods with strawberry artificial flavoring, but I’m a bit indifferent to actual strawberries. Real bananas are okay but I hate anything with artificial banana flavoring.

 

2. Co-Dependency
   The one person that I’ve spent the most time with - more than anyone else in the world for the past 8-10 years - is Mike G. This includes my parents, girlfriends, other friends, and even any of my roommates. We have been at the same workplace for the past 7-8 years and literally in the same room for most of that. We’re cordial, but at this point, we’re both a little dead on the inside.

 

3. Fucking Cat
   This fucking cat is in my room right now. I left the door open for air and he just walked in. Noooo Kitty! Go outside. I am allergic to you. This is not your home. Don’t eat my fucking bird.
   

 

4. Sleepy
   I slept on a futon for over 10 years. A really shitty one. I finally bought a bed last last March (a little over a year ago) and I love it.

 

5. Scary Man
   There was this one week in college where at least 4 separate friends individually mentioned to me that they thought I didn’t like them when we had first met. They all thought I was “scary” or “intimidating”.
   That made me angry so I punched all of them a lot.

 

6. Transportation
   The vehicles I have owned (or been in charge of): Toyota Cressida Station Wagon, Hyundai Sonata, Jeep Wrangler, Suzuki SV650 motorcycle, Toyota Sienna minivan. The bike was named Suzy, and the van is currently named Herbert. The other cars didn’t have names. All were boys, except for Suzy who was a girl.

 

7. Regular
   I drink Metamucil every day. A few months back, I ate red meat almost exclusively for an entire week. It was awesome. It started to become less and less awesome as the week went on and somewhere around the end of it, I decided to try some Metamucil to get things going again. I liked it so much that I’ve been taking it ever since. It makes me happy regular. It also makes me wear black socks and sandals with my short pants while I yell at those god damn kids to get off my fucking lawn.

 

8. Dirty Slob
   I hate cleaning my apartment. The process isn’t necessarily that unpleasant, per say, I just find it to be an incredible waste of time. The number one reason I want to make lots of money when I grow up is so that I can buy the love of other people, because I’m sure the hell not going to waste time trying to earn it. The number two reason I want to make lots of money is so that I can afford for a person to come out and clean my house every week, because I’m sure the hell not going to do that either.

 

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Okay, apologies to E*star for taking so long to finish this. I’m apparently supposed to tag 8 other people to do this. I thought I’d only hit up 4, but sho’ nuff, I found 8 that I felt like hearing from. Those are (whether they decide to do it or not), Mike G., Spiffy, Sasstastic, Chezmiko, Freddie, Suzy, Marv, Rickmondo.

The spiders are coming. Big ones.

How do I know this? Simple:

It’s hot as fuck.
And humid too. I went to New York last week, it wasn’t as hot and humid as it was here in LA, and that’s quite a feat in the middle of July. Whenever it’s this hot and humid, all spiderkind collectively decides to start turning into tarantulas. Tarantulas, on the other hand…they just stay tarantulas. No need to overcompensate.

Spider babies are everywhere.
I’ve been seeing them in room, in my bed, on the outside wall of my building, and everywhere else really. I haven’t suddenly stopped drinking or anything, so I know that these are the real deal. When spiders are this small I tend to leave them be. But it starts to get unsettling when you ignore the seventh one in the same evening. Especially when you know that they’re striving to grow up into tarantulas.

Some bastard-whore spider keeps spinning a web across my front step.
Every night for the past week, I’ve approached the front door of my building and walked through a spiderweb that was spun across the walkway, and then did the ensuing “Get them off me Get them off me Oh dear sweet Moses get them off me” dance. What other reason would a spider have to spin a web across a walkway unless it was planning on capturing human-sized prey - the human-sized prey that would be required to feed its monstrous tarantula babies.

I normally don’t kill adult spiders. I usually pinch them in a tissue and toss them outside so that they can protect my home from the cricket hordes. But I think I may just start whacking these guys with a shoe pretty soon. There are too many of them and it’s too damn hot these days for me to care.