With A Bunch of Exclamation Marks

I had a great time in Chicago. It's a growing trend, what can I say. My mind and body are kinda shot right now, so there will be no five page play-by-play or other blogging heroics, but yeah, I'm very glad I went. I got to see Heather and the cousins (which continue migrating there at an alarming rate) and Anna and Max all while mucking around with three of the fiercest hooligans this side of Guy Richie flick. Throw the Toaster in there and we form some sort of alcoholic Voltron that is powered by bourbon and cheap hookers and communicates in Adult Swim references and recycled diction from high school science textbooks. Oh and cussing. Lots of cussing.

Actually, that kind of sounds like the lamest creature alive. Oh well. To be near or a part of this creature is to experience an intoxicating dynamic of warmth, humor, and smellyness of four of the best people I know.

But yeah, highlights included hilarity, hilarity, booze, mooses, shivering, and an outlet-powered mass grave named Guiseppe.

The explanation for that last bit is pretty simple. Guiseppe is Heather's computer. And Heather, in a drunken rage, murdered hundreds of my emails. She came home (drunk), sat down (drunk) and saw (drunk) a gmail screen (logged in as "walline") on Guiseppe's face, became horrified (drunk) at all the email she didn't recognize (drunk), decided (drunk) that these alien emails were a threat to life as she knew it, and concluded (drunk) that the only reasonable course of action was to delete them (drunk) as quickly as possible. She even shouted (drunk) as she was frantically destroying my internet identity that the names on the emails were "all Brian's friends!" This confusing development only sharpened her resolve (drunk), and as gmail asked her if she wanted to delete the two hundred innocent emails F O R E V E R, she could only blurt, "YES! Please yes, delete them forever!"

And so there you have it. Heather Costello deleted every single email I ever received in 2006. FOREVER. If Kyle hadn't stepped in and told her what she was doing she probably would have deleted them all. Sigh :)

In any case, this led to the establishment of "stupid dept" and the agreement that I am now fairly deep in said stupid-debt. That is to say, I owe Heather some stupid. Which is good, because let's face it, when you're associated with Brian Walline, as I happen to be, stupid happens.

See what I mean?

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Looks like an Ampersand...

(Friday's Post)
A little time is a good thing. If I had written this post Wednesday, or perhaps even yesterday, it would have come out looking something like a Pink Floyd song taped to a carrier pigeon that got sucked into a turbo-prop before it ran into a glass door a million times. Messy. Anyway, I can't guarantee that what you are about to read will fair much better, because around here it seems that the occurrence of interesting and distracting things is quick on the rise, not unlike the local population of flying foxes. No, not the bats.

See, already I'm mucking things up.

Fuck it.

The stick, as it were, upon which will ultimately be placed "the shit" is much to do about a simple job gong wrong. The job starts nicely enough, with the design of some lovely t-shirts, a task for which I am well suited. The job then moves to the 30 some odd page clusterfuck of cheesy advertisements and cast bios and eventually print deadlines that is the Young People's Theater program for their production of Beauty and teh Beast. To be supremely brief, it is an unrewarding task in most appreciable aspects, but especially those aspects resembling greenbacks in my bank and smiles on my face. Actually, I suppose supreme brevity would have been simply, "It's a shitty job." Anyway, we were do for print on Monday. What actually happened Monday was the addition of some ads, the tweaking of some shit, and some more ill-advised tweaking, thus moving the print to Tuesday morning. What came Tuesday morning was the beginning of the end of my perceivable life. Hyperbole, for once, be damned. I worked on that fucking thing from 8 in the morning February 14th till 8 in the morning February 15th, with about 4 or 5 hours break taken for coaching and eating. I spent the night in the fishbowl basically redoing the previous 10 hours work in what I hope was not too shoddy a fashion. Although, by 6 in the morning a fashion too shoddy is a fashion that I would like to take out for martinis at the disco, have unprotected sex with and rob blind as I sneak out of its apartment in the morning.

I won't go in to why all this had to happen like it did, because part of it is just my own inexperience, but at length I was able to make several satisfactory proofs, create a file that could play nicely with CopyMax, and go the fuck to bed from about nine to five. After which, my life, every so slowly, seemed to resume.

I don't know. I've put myself through far worse bouts of sleep deprivation (a span of 84 waking hours to 96 total hours comes to mind), but very few where I perceived the consequences of failing to be so disagreeable. So in many ways I am recovering from the angst over-drive I occupied for thirty some hours as much as anything else. Anyway, that's about all I have time for today kids. I have a ride to catch to that Windy City a few hundred miles west of here so I have to get all packed and then mentally prepare myself for some previously unexpected dubious encounter upon arrival, which is another story entirely.


PS- Russell, happy birthday, thems was some good beers/times the other night. This needs to happen more often.

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With Powers Comparable to Wonder Boy

I tuned in for the last five minutes of a late night edition of Sportscenter and witnessed the following: a Big Lebowski quote, a Doobie Brothers reference, a Tenacious D reference, a Burger King reference, and what may have been a Simpsons reference.

Those dudes be crazy.

I also found the image below in an old notebook of mine. In these days where I occasionally long for the familiarity and ease of an undergraduate college classroom, I sometimes forget how bored I was at times.

(I ate your teacher. He tasted like stupid.)

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Tender Crispy Visa Bacon Ranch

I hate my credit card company. I hate my credit card company for no reason other than that they routinely raise my limit, knowing full well that each time they do this it gives me no end of grief. The reason why the raising of my personal credit limit gives me no end of grief will now be dutifully illustrated via cumbersome simile: It is like putting a starving orphan in an Old Country Buffet full of signs that read, "If you touch this a bad man will come chop off your hand!" It is like tying a hunk of cheese to a cute little mouse's tail and telling him that it's laced with cyanide, knowing fully well that mice can't understand you and that he probably wouldn't believe you even if he did understand. It is like luring a baby seal to you with a frozen mackerel and then clubbing it to death with said mackerel. It is like creating life and free will but then making up a bunch of rules that no one can follow and telling them they are going to burn in hell for eternity. It is like giving a man a free Ipod Shuffle.

Ok, I may have gotten a little off track, but simply put, I could fly myself down to New Zealand and vacation myself silly in Auckland for three weeks and no one would stop me because some company in Milwaukee says I'm good for it, and this knowledge, as Marshall Mathers might say, tears my ass apart in a very figurative but still meaningful way.

Seriously though, what good is an Ipod Shuffle? For a hundred bucks I'll take a month's week's supply of PBR, or barring that, a hooker with bad teeth.

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Yes Yes, Let's All Get on the Bus Why Don't We?

I am very much considering taking a drive into The D tomorrow morning to scope out all this Super Bowl madness. It looks reasonably exciting on the idiot box, and 40 miles is just too close for something this epic to go uninvestigated (is that even a word?). I mean how can I go for the Autoshow and not for the biggest sporting event in the country? Cold Pizza, one of my favorite sports shows, is holed up with the rest of the ESPN gang in the Ren Cen and is filmed live a good portion of the day, so that will probably be my first target. It's really a charming program at times. They have two hosts, one from the mighty U of M and one who is a fan of tOSU, so who knows, the proper wolverine pandering might get some attention. Which is nice because let's face it, I'm an attention whore.

...yeah.

Anyway, someone should come with me. Gimme a call.

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