With Orson Welles as Unicron

Ugh. Content. This blog needs content. Something which I am, at present, loathe to provide it, so don't expect any in the following paragraphs. I did have a decent weekend though, so I guess I'll start with that. It was brief, and tasted like cavities... and heart disease.

Hmm, upon further review, perhaps my weekend was only so-so. Although the source of the cavities and heart disease was The Parlour (aka the Jackson Dairy) and its crazy delicious ice cream. The main thing you need to realize about this place, aside from the general goodness, is that their servings are about the size of a human head. Now I was never the greatest at "math" as it were, but I'm pretty sure that's gotta be, what, about five gallons? Yeah. Anyway, it's a tradition I decided to revive on the way back from a track meet at Albion. Back in the day we always used to stop at the Parlour on the way back from track meets and somewhere along the way that got lost. So there you have it; Coach Walline is here to put gluttony and junk food back in competitive running, where they belong. It's called thinning the herd, people, get with the program.

The only real problem with the Jackson Dairy, as far as I can tell, is that it's in Jackson, and that after consuming several bathtubs worth of dairy, someone has to drive the half hour back to the deuce... or fall asleep at the wheel and die trying. Hmmm. Still, a few human lives is a small price to pay for a parfait that's tall enough to ride the raptor at Cedar Point. Wait, no, $4.75 is a small price to pay. I don't know what I was thinking.

Sigh. The rest of Saturday was spent in a dairy-induced coma of sorts, during which a number of violations were visited upon myself by my most vile enemy: Alf Myself. Most notable among these violations was the forced viewing of 1986 animated blockbuster, Transformers: Teh Movie, with Robert Stack, Orson Welles, and Leonard Nimoy (as Galvatron). That seems to have had some effects which I currently perceive as both negative and lasting. Although... when it's not busy being inferior to the TV version in nearly every way imaginable, the movie can actually be sort of hilarious. Allow me to demonstrate.
"Me, Grimlock, not nice dino! Me bash brains!"


Anyway, I'm off to practice now. I think we'll play freeze tag for a warm up today.
And then maybe I'll spend some quality time figuring out a good reason why I shouldn't be kicked out of the gene pool. Then again, maybe that's something best left between me and my CA/HA 220 professor.

.

The Day Year is Mine!

woof.

.

Just Drop a Buick on My Ass and Be Done With It

Look out! Behind you! It's TEH SICKNESSNESS! Aaaarrgh!

(sniffle, cough, dead)

Hi, My Name's Tyler, Do You Mind if I Ralph on Your Shoe?

I interviewed with some lady yesterday for a recurring role as her theatre group's GD graphic designer. During the interview she showed two examples of past programs, one with a plain but seemingly well organized type treatment and one with a generally readable but altogether tacky layout with stupid, ill-conceived graphics that didn't even have a bleed. "The first one," she said all too cheerfully, "is an example of what we do not want."

This is going to be fun.



In other late breaking news, I made no fewer than four of my track kids puke today. One of them whimpered audibly when I announced that I was shortening their rest. And then he puked in a trash can. Well, mostly in a trash can.

Mothers Against Daft Draft-Engineering Rapscallions (M.A.D.D.E.R)

Y'know how when you were little your parents would tell you that you could do anything you wanted to in life if you put your mind to it (and got good grades)? Well, I always thought my parents pretty well fit the profile of the everyday supportive "you can be an astronaut / the president / the Dali Lama / the mayor of Cincinnati /Chucky Cheese if you want to" type parents. What I found out today is that as you get older they are far more likely to laugh at you unapologetically if you mention any career goals that strike them the least bit funny. Before you can begin to express your shock and disappointment in their offhanded dismissal of your comment they will have already turned their back to you and busied themselves with some random task. You may pursue the issue, but they will continue to absentmindedly tidy the kitchen, while occasionally spouting the most insincere penitence. Eye contact will be avoided almost entirely. At length, your frustration will boil over and you will fake-scream, "Quit stomping on my dreams!" and then for-real-stomp out of the kitchen.

Basically, any time I bring up something I might like to do (coaching was originally one such thing), my mother thinks that this means I'm going to quit the job I don't have and either make a burden of myself for the rest of my natural life or go live in the streets. She tends to remain convinced of this for some time, and will attempt to snuff any conversation regarding (insert inappropriate interest here) via passive aggressive knitting, channel flipping, or cleaning. But I think the bottom line is, if you are at all concerned about getting pissed off (though I admit, simultaneously amused) at your mother do not announce to her your later-life ambitions if they resemble any of the following: Starting a microbrewery. Starting a brew pub. Starting a restaurant. Naming a beer after her called "Big-Headed Seamonster." Threatening to make Big-Headed Seamonster the foulest brew this side of the bottom of the Mississippi River.


In Lady's defense, she did start to come around on the idea of a brew-pub after I told her it would be on a river or a lake and would have a big back deck for her to chill on. Also, she did express interest in making a "Jimmy-Dog Ale" or some related "Mr. Jimmy" brew. In short, I think she's sold.

.

I've Got Ways to Make You Sorry (for reading this)

The Bugatti Veyron was not at the Detroit Autoshow. I repeat, NOT at the biggest autoshow in the known universe tha hood. How am I supposed to sexually assault an automobile if it won't even come within a continent of me? Holler when you figure that one out, 'cause I'd really like to know.

Some of you are shaking your heads right now for the wrong reason. Others, those who we might call "in the know," are shaking their heads because I called the Veyron an automobile. True, it probably does deserve a better word, but even the term "super-car" isn't really fitting. Lots of things are "supercars." But all of these other supposedly "super" inanimate objects failed to be sexually assaulted by me. Well, I suppose the Veryon failed as well. But not for lack of trying.

The truth is, I hate writing this as much as you hate reading it. I've never really been a sympathizer to that particular crowd who gets off on cars. Sure, I've seen some Austin Martins or a Z-4 or some fighter jets or something that got me a little turned on, I've even described certain cars as "sexy," but I've always stood a few arm's length from erotic-fanaticism (a word I thought I'd never type). I have friends who can give you detailed model progressions of the Audi A-6 all the way back to the fucking stoneage. I don't do that. Maybe it's because these people plan on being what we might call "successful" and so think that this knowledge may become relevant in a potential purchase. I don't. All I know is this: The Bugatti Veyron, with a top speed of roughly 253 mph, is currently the fastest production car on any terrestrial planet we know of. The McLaren F-1, with a top speed of 242 mph, is the former "pan-terra-champion," as it were. You could start the two machines side by side, allow the F-1 to reach a speed of 120 mph before even hitting the gas on the Bugatti, and the Veyron would beat the McLaren to 200 mph.

That's all I'm sayin'.



Aside from all that aforementioned bunk, the Autoshow was pretty cool. There were some fun cars and we didn't get hassled by any scary street people. Earlier in week some cool stuff happened as well. Tuesday evening saw the return of the Toaster to The Deuce and, more specifically, to The Deuce's bars. We (Heather, Kyle, Tom, Anna, Aaron, Brian) started out at the Brown Jug where we were shortly rewarded with free booze. If you're interested in what true fear looks like then you should have seen Heather's face moments after the words "I'm buying" escaped her lips and eight wild eyes swung around and pinned her to the back of her seat with a look that staggered drunkenly between desperation, confusion, and lust. After some of the normal antics, including the crude illustration of Kyle's feline predation habits on any/all available CCA Strategies business cards, we were off to Charlie's and, ultimately, Tom's apt where we would indulge our latest tradition, the Pizza House cinnamon sticks orgy. The "orgy" part of that equation is less about the gettin' down than it is about moaning euphorically while eating more-delicious-than-should-be-legal breadsticks, which is a little lame and wrong for sure, but hey, we can't all be winners now can we? In any case, it was a good night, so hooray.

.

Watch it Sucker, This Ass is Insured for Two-Miiiiiiillion Dollars

Short-term medical, next day approval. I gotta tell ya, they don't really mean it. What they really mean is 45 minute approval, next day coverage. Or maybe that's what they said originally and I didn't hear them correctly. The point is, it's not for me. 'S fer me mah.

Lady was getting a little bit more antsy about my ass being uninsured than I was, so she made me sign up for some STM that I can't afford. I do admit, I feel a little better now that I have insurance as of sometime tomorrow morning, even better knowing that if I sold a kidney I could probably pay about half of the deductible.

.

Luke to Tha Squidad: Keep the Change, ya Filthy Animals

Teh Burgler has left the building. Needless to say, the send-off was, in the parlance of our times, relatively epic. At least for me. Because, I mean, c'mon. I puked up two pounds of corned beef hash. And that's just something I don't really do. Unless I have a really really good reason. Which I didn't. Which makes it all the more unlikely and, for the purposes of this awkwardly constructed paragraph, all the more epic. Anyway, Luke knows, ask him.

The night really was more entertaining than all that, I mean, it was entertaining enough to keep us going till 7AM, but I just don't have the gumption these days to bust out a five page narrative of how the teacher from Billy Madison is hot and about 50 cent PBRs from elicit co-op vending machines. Or about my arm getting broken in Monty's kitchen because of an ill-advised lunge at Burgler's throat when I already had the headlock, followed by some ill-advised rips on Steve McQueen... but mostly 'cause I aint got the sense that God gave little green apples.

Anyway, what I'm really trying to say here, is that it snowed a butt-load last night and I have to go shovel it.

.

WWJTF?

I imagine that some of you will rather enjoy this link.

.

Fish Slaying Eric and his Grim Crew of Fish Mercenaries Welcome You to God's Golden North Country

I made the Cap'n a new website for his fish-slaying business. It's still a little rough around the edges, but I'd say it's an improvement. I hope. Anyway, ch-ch-check it out.

.

Last Night, Hastily Recorded: DetroitRockAbductionCrisisInChicago... Naturally.

Dream One:
Dream One begins in a dark, dilapidated flat with not enough walls in the middle of Detroit. There is some brief chit-chat with Marshal Mathers, who lives there, and then it's off to the races, zooming around D-Town at night, going to various parties. At some point in time, Detroit becomes Ann Arbor, which is bloated to about 400,000 residents or so, and is probably in Georgia or Tennessee. More parties in places with not enough walls, but at least with people I actually know. Then come the robots. Faceless robots ranging in height, shape, and function from leggy death-machines with gun-arms to squatty cylindrical diplomat-bots, who more or less just get blown up. It's still night time. The party I'm attending in a tall, square, house-ish building with not enough walls is out of drinks. They have all sorts of coolers and glass cases and such around the food/bev area downstairs, but I really want a frappaccino or some orange juice or something and they're out. Then the party gets blown up by some deathbots, whose machine gun arms prove effective enough at shredding brick and mortar, thus weakening most any building (with already not enough walls) to the point of collapse at an alarming rate. Interestingly, no one perishes. This is roughly where I think I gain the ability to inhabit a robot shell and take over its soul. Or something like that. This is probably how I do battle with a lead deathbot who is a slightly lighter color gray than me. We blow up a lot of buildings. We both have ghastly machine gun arms. Some how, everything is wrapped up pretty neatly, aside from I think we may have both been destroyed. Good thing for me I wasn't really a robot.
At this point I find myself in a giant taxi, still at night, and the dream takes a decidedly cross-country turn which really doesn't make much sense, but it was basically just a cameo special of a lot of runner-folk, and I think Ferris State was involved.

Dream Two:
Dream Two is a little trickier to pin down in my head, but it is at least fifty times as fucked up. It begins back in Saline where, after some stuff I can't remember, I find my man Adam J. Schrigger sitting in the driver's seat of an enormous red semitruck cab which is parked in the driveway of a house on a steep hill. Turns out he is an employee for some moving company. We decide to leave his truck idling in the drive and stroll down to the dream-version of wilderness park and take a nap on some picnic tables. Soon it is night and we are floating down a river (or maybe just sitting on a wet street?) talking to some kid Adam knows who used to work for the same moving company, and failed to move the very people out who Adam was at that moment supposed to be moving out. Which is all well and good, because now we're in a tiny theatre, and I am sitting next to Reverend Jesse Jackson's wife, and beyond her, The Rev himself, who actually in this case looks and speaks more like Don King. In the row behind me is Schrier, someone forgettable, and OJ Simpson. And in the final row, some forgettable people... and Nicole Brown's mother. What ensues is a low key but none-the-less IN-FUCKING-SANE conversation, which I don't really care to sort through. Suffice it to say, nothing made sense. Which brings us to the final leg of our journey, which unfortunately is near impossible to properly explain. I think the basic group I just spoke of and I were now in an episode of some supposedly cool TV show, but today's episode was kind of teh suck. We stroll down a dirt road into a seemingly empty town, which is actually inhabited by some weird cartoonish ghost children who are impervious to bullets but can manipulate nonghostworld matter at will... which seems to be why they are flying around with very shiny and sharp looking things in their hands. I don't think they were outright trying to kill us, but they certainly could have. That is, until I went all crazy and just grabbed one by his sharp, shiny, death-utensil and yanked it away from him, accidentally impaling his finger with a shard of its pointyness in the process. I was actually very upset about this, as I had not wanted to harm anyone, and though still very silvery, the child was seeming to become more real and upset himself. That's about where that dream leaves off.

Dream Three:
Dream three is a family vacation/reunion in Chicago. FUTURE CHICAGO! Just in case you're wondering, FutureChicago is a tall, golden city on the opposite shore of Lake Michigan from the location where Actual Chicago currently resides. There have also been some interesting seismic happenings, as the view into Lake Michigan is littered with an array of dazzling cliffs and other rock formations. As for the rest of the dream, it's actually far less fucked up than most of my BEHOLD, THE FUTURE dreams, but it takes place mostly in a fancy, futuristic hotel type building, and there are probably some strange creatures, beautiful women, and objects-once-inanimate-turned-creature-battlers. Most notably, no crocodiles or werewolves.

.

Do You Know Who the Fuck I Am?

One of my track kids had the misfortune of being dumb enough to argue some dinosaur trivia with me last night at dinner. Not only did he argue, but he was flat wrong. He doesn't yet know the magnitude of his folly, but I'm sure he'll figure it out somewhere around his 15th quarter mile repeat tonight.

The rest of dinner was just swell. We stopped at Pizza Hut after Spirit of Pre Track Club's first indoor race of the season last night. Out of the hundred some odd registered athletes in the club, three runners chose to participate in the meet held mere minutes away at Eastern's Bowen Field House. Believe it or not, that's exactly how I like it. I'm sure I would have lost my mind if too many more showed up, each one lost and fucking up in their own special little way, next to me, lost and fucking up in my own special little ways. Not that anything went terribly awry, it's just that taking three cool kids is much more fun than a band of misfits.

.

Bored. Weezer is Playing. It's Way Too Late.

Some may recall a post from last spring in which I said some silly things about punching through walls and so forth. Turns out that fist-based demolition of Alex Bryan is a trickier business than fist-based demolition of drywall. That is to say, my left index finger never looked quite so swollen and black and blue and, well, just plain busted-ass, from punching a wall as it ended up looking after I punched Alex this weekend. We're talking every point of articulation. Swollen. Blue-ish, but mostly black. Gross ass.

This happened a couple days ago, and a few of you have already heard the bitching and moaning about my busted ass finger.

That's not what this post is about.

This post is about the fact that, aside from the last knuckle which still kinda looks like it has frostbite or something, my finger is almost completely better, and so I am left sitting here, bored but feeling like I should post something, with nothing to write about besides my general amazement, gratitude, and affection for whatever human healing process is at work in this scenario.

In other news, I forgot my breakinzies for track today, but the spell check is working.

.

Walline at Thirteen

I was cleaning my room and I found this cross country pic from '95. I think that would put me in 8th grade? Freakishly enough, I recognize that course as Grosse Ille. Don't ask me how, but I do.


I wonder if 11 years will seem like such a bizarrely long/short time in 2017?

edit: I also just found this pic from the same course my senior season, just 4 years later.

No puberty jokes, please.

.

I hate Peas.

There, I said it.

Lost Souls

As you probably know, I've got some code hidden about that tells a certain website whenever someone stumbles through one of my pages. This website, when I ask it nicely and it feels good and ready, then tells me what its sneaky little code told it. Usually it's nothing more exciting than, say, that Kyle's mom has checked the site about a hundred and fifty thousand times in a single morning, and that her aftershave smells like coffee grounds. But sometimes it tells me funny things, like that some poor bastard found my site while trying to look for a dude puking on a naked girl, or looking up Brazilian undie-goddess Alessandra Ambrosio, or looking up instructions for their new purple anthropomorphic sex robot.

Yesterday it told me that my site is ranked #1 in the Google search results for "face-eating spiders," and that a couple days ago it was ranked in the top ten results for a search of "Jack White's house" and that it came up right behind College Humor in searches for "drunken shamings."

Excellent.

I Pulled a Bomb From My Shoe and Exploded the Trunk...

On an occasion such as my first day of head distance coaching for indoor track, tradition would probably demand that I show up about five minutes late, half dressed, with some ranch on my chin, smelling of cheap booze and strippers... It's probably a good thing I showed up 45 minutes early, with tradition securely bound and gagged in the trunk of my car.... along with so much other seemingly worthless junk*... and strippers...

Tradition might also demand that some mature, coach-of-the-year-worthy, know-it-all type son'bitch be coaching this outfit as well. Clearly, the times, they are a chaaaaangin'.

Anyway, like I said, I swung by the old high school directly after picking up my keys** at about 3:45, and after briefly rummaging through the old coaches office (which smelled EXACTLY the same as it did 6 years ago) I sat quietly in the dark, empty gymnasium, awaiting what I was sure to be a catastrophe.

Three hours later, I left the building much the same way I left most any practice*** I've ever been to; a little tired, but feeling pretty decent, and in good company. Good day if you ask me.

That being said, I can't believe how many fucking kids there are. It takes very little for things to escalate to a full blown code red clusterfuck. There are already almost a hundred kids signed up, the largest percentage of which being the male distance runners which fall under my jurisdiction. In cross country there were about 60 guys running and Coach Spina had 4 assistants. I don't know how many kids I have, but counting the middle schoolers it's probably about 40. Granted, cross country is a much bigger job than this, put I am just a smidge worried about being able to keep track of all this, since it's basically the biggest indoor track team I've ever seen, and it's being coached by basically the most inexperienced coaching staff I've ever seen. But like I said, so far so good.

* But hear you me, one day we'll all be hanging out and you'll be glad you're friends with a dude who not only has a strip-shooters game in the back of his Mercury, but a bicycle, a helmet, some spare clothes (y'know, from the strippers), and the full Van Morrison discography.

** Keys, now referred to as my "break-in-zies". I now have access to a weight room twennyfo-sevin. Although, my set of breakinzies did not include a key for the gym lights, which I handily defeated with a paper clip. Yes, your friend has mad elicit skills.

*** Any practice where nothing more difficult than 3 one-mile repeats at tempo pace was attempted.

And yes, it is now undeniable, the spell check is BROKEN. Breakinzies, spell check, breakinzies. C'mon.

.

Tepid Mud-Plain Drizzles are the New Death Tundra Blizzards.

I think I must not have recieved the memo about how starting in two thousand fucking six, January will be required by unnatural law to behave exactly like March. If I was March I'd be so pissed to have my unique role as "The Crappiest Month Alive" snaked out from under me.

In other news, I think my blogger spell-check is on the blink, because whenever I've clicked it so far something other than flashing red lights and miles of highlighted text appeared. So until further notice, my spell check is broken. I consider the odds of the computer software (whose only purpose in life is to fix spelling errors) being fucked up as being far better than the odds of me, after 23 glorious years of inneptitude, having learned to spell.

.

The Power is Yours

Enter: The Storkapuss. He is charming, no? Yeah not so much. Nor has his conception been easy to to finalize. Anyway, I've been tinkering with the art work and I think I've settled on the slate gray-ish colored shirt (believe it or not AA's color palette is a little lacking in the muted tones dept.), but I could use some help picking which design variation to go with. So I invite you to take a gander at the close up view and let me know what you think. Column A or column B or go back to the drawing board you no-talent-ass-clown(C)?


.

Realizations and Nervousness: People are Paying Money for my Instruction

Indoor starts this week, and my nervousness exists on several different levels, but mostly on that important looking level where people are counting on me to know what the fuck I am doing. Am I allowed to say "fuck" on blogspot? I better be. Anyway, I almost kinda wish that Spinner had just given me a list of workouts with a big heading at the top that read, "Coaching for Idiots." True, I wouldn't never learn nothin' that way, but at this point I'd rather just be competent.

Sigh.

At least The Spinner Man was kind enough to sit down with me and give me a rough outline. I suppose if I can't fill in an outline I'm really no good to the program anyway.

I am so scared.

It's a New Year, I Got a New Change of Gear

Ok, I did it. People wanted me to get a new blog where they could comment and what have you, so here it is. I'll be making an archive page at the ole' Diamondhawk local pretty soon, in case anyone feels like going all nostalgic.