I am going to walk into an Arby’s and tell the manager I have a complaint to make.
I’m being stalked by the Oven Mitt.
He says that sex with him might be too hot to handle for me, but it won’t be too hot for him, because…well…he’s an oven mitt.

I don’t know what he wants with me, anyway. The people in the commercials with their hands up his backside are far more attractive than I ever was, or ever will be. Why would he want my gnarled meat hooks in his ass when he has the beautiful and racially diverse Arby’s employees servicing him so well?

Y’know, that’s the part of the Arby’s commercials I actually find less believable than the anthropomorphic cookin’ glove: the gorgeous people in the Arby’s uniforms.
Arby’s doesn’t have the ugliest people on earth cookin’ up their gelatinous sandwiches–that’d be White Castle–but I’ve yet to walk into an Arby’s and reflect upon the beauty of the folk behind the counter.
No, I think of the people working at Arby’s as the final warning sign which I must ignore in order to partake of their coagulated beef. Their craggy smiles seem to chant ominously, “One Of Us! One Of Us! One Of Us!”
If I were smart, I would take a pass on it. But I’m not smart, and I would like some horsey sauce with that, thanks.

Oh, new content on the essays and scenes blogs. The essay entry is a short speculative story involving Blaise Pascal and St. Thomas Aquinas. The scene involves what might happen if there were a communicable disease called, “Narcism,” which in my weakness at writing ended up coming across more akin to autism than narcissism.
SafeTscenes.blogspot.com
SafeTessays.blogspot.com

I regret calling Tomas “Licky the Bling-Bling” in an email yesterday. I now believe I should have called him “Licky McBling-Bling.” Much neater as it rolls off your tongue. Tomas, really, a tongue stud? The Tomas Piercings

At some point today I became aware that my right nipple was soaking wet. No other part of me or my clothes was wet. I could discern no scent on the patch of damp shirt; tasting revealed it to be nothing more than water. The source of this nipple moisture is still a mystery to me. I welcome all suggestions.

Today my wife convinced me to pay a learning disabled youth to mow our lawn for $20. This is regardless of the fact that my pudgy ass could use the excercize.
Anyway, he did a retarded job. Fitting, really. So I had to patrol the yard for twenty minutes after my twenty dollars departed–I was looking for tufts of unmowed grass. *sigh*

I took full credit for my wife’s pants today, going so far as to announce it via SMS message broadcast to several person(s) cell phone(s).

Which leads me to where she went with those awesome pants on:
Heather went to a party today, leaving me to entertain my daughter, Samantha, all on my own. A pleasant, if challenging task.
At one point we found ourselves at Grant Park. Swings, slides, tube slides, faux log cabins, solid steel boingy animals (my favorites!), and a playground carousel.
Ah, the playground carousel, where I briefly held sway over the fate of six children, five of which were strangers and therefore unimportant to me. Their tiny, helpless little voices, raised as one in supplication, brought me joy as I toyed with centrifical force itself! Beg for mercy, beta citizens. Only I can stop the playground carousel. Lets see which of you can spray enough vomit to make a complete circle in the sand! Quit crying, I’m sure it won’t stain permanently. Oops….some got on my shirt. Right on my nipple….hey!

IS there anything more annoying than a bottle-fly doing laps in my living room? Makes me feel guilty for neglecting my physical fitness. I should do some laps, too. I would call you an inspiration, little fly, but it doesn’t count as inspiration unless it goads me into positive action.

Lord help me, I really like the alien designs in the Jimmy Neutron movie. Puddles of green ooze with eyestalks in egg-shaped exoskeletons with transparent canopy and robotic arms….

Crap, I’m tired now; I’m mouth-breathing.

So one of our clients is located in the historic Piquette Avenue Model T plant.

I know, I know, this sounds cool; but I must say I dread going there. The interior is a repulsive mess of misshapen walls, dust, bacterially cultured carpeting, and, and, and, dust. Dusty dust. Beyond bunnies, these ravenous hounds of particles roam the short and twisty halls of this filthy pit, recognizing no master.
I tangled with them so many times that I felt as if a dingo got my baby; I washed my hands at least ten times during my ordeal.
Ordeal, because I was there to clean a server, and I was successful at this. Took me twenty minutes in the post-apocolyptic parkinglot with a screwdriver and a tag team of two pressurized air cans. But when I reassembled the server in its warm, swaddling APC equipment rack, it did not boot.
I could produce a timeline of the events that then transpired–I could copy and paste it from my invoice–but its technical, and boring, even if one of the events involved the creation of a magic boot disk and another involved inadvertantly transporting a server back in time to 1999. Suffice it to say that I arrived at around 10:00am, and planned on being there for a maximum of two hours.
I called for reinforcements and food at around 5:00pm. I, my reinforcement, and two hamburgers from McDonalds attacked the problem and we left victorious at 9:30pm. All of us…except for the burgers. I’m sorry to report that they didn’t make it.

Interesting ancillary bits of information:

1. This problem was actually caused by an exploit in IIS4, and had nothing to do with the spring cleaning.
2. This is not the first time I’ve had shit hit the fan at a job site.
3. You know, last time I think I brought the food and acted as the reinforcement.

Nighty-night.

LOST season finale is over.
Funniest moment, to me, was when Locke said that everyone on the island was brought there for a purpose. I thought about the science teacher, who had already beed gibbed by this point in the show.
We first met him two episodes ago as the embodiment of a clunky bit of exposition on tropical weather psuedo-science. He started an episode off by telling everyone about how the monsoon season was coming, and that they would have negative-one day in which to launch the raft. After the scene was over, I remember thinking, “That man had only one purpose in life. To tell us about the monsoon season. He will never be seen again.”

I suspected that the writers, sensing that the audience felt no urgency in the plight of the raft, hurriedly added the scene and the character to lend a bit of tension to the boat sub-plot.

I was wrong about our pudgy science teacher! He was also there to blow up into little bits after providing yet more clumsy exposition, this time on the subject of aged dynamite. I salute you, fugitive from Matlock (thanks, mom, for pointing out this character actor’s past on the southern hick lawyer/detective show of southern hick lawyer/detective shows) and I salute your liquified remains! You will always be remembered by me as “Clumsy Exposition Man!”

There was a job to be done, and you did it. That you didn’t exit the stage gracefully is a fact I won’t hold against you. There is grace in chaos and confusion, and you are a confused pile of chaos now. I love you, man.

Other observations:

• Are the miscellaneous hooligans about the boat the “others”? If so, they probably have no connection at all to the “Security System” or the hatch. At least, that’s my supposition based on their behavior as mundane, albeit creepy, criminal scum stereotypes.
• French woman, I loved you as D’Len(sp) on Babylon Five. As a baby snatcher….not so much. I still dig the Jane Goodall look, along with the handsome rifle strung over your back continuously. Hot!
• Sayid, dump the sour-face spoiled bitch. You should concentrate on being a anti-stereotype. One queation:why do we never see you praying to Mecca? Have your writers so forsaken your supposed identity?
• Sour-face spoiled bitch, I hope your character dies soon. I know that would be bad for your actress, but I never liked you anyway. I don’t care if you DO speak French. Mi Casa es su casa!
• Hurley, man, you could be the REAL fat ninja. With your luck, I would’ve volunteered to carry the dynamite in my teeth or pants. Um….I think I’d go with pants. I don’t think his luck would change the taste of nitro glycerine. You can’t kill me, I’m the Morbidly Obese Death Bringer!
• Oh, and little black dude, use that voodoo to conjure up some polar bears on their asses. Better yet, start fantasizing about body wash and high pressure water hose. Your new friends look a bit spicey.
• Jack, what are the tattoos about? TELL ME! TELL ME NOWWWWW!!!

Thats it for now. Bye!

Follow up to the Bomb Scare:
If you are the sort of person to watch our excellent local television news, rife with wit and pertinent information to Improve Your Lives, and happened to watch last night, you would have seen the denouement to the little tableau I detailed to you yesterday. (My, our French quotient has spiked today. Perhaps I’ll eat a French Bread Pizza this evening in celebration. I should at least get my striped shirt an baret out. Magnifique!)

Yes, the “pipe bomb” was a hoax. Did anyone doubt it? As helicopters circled overhead, earnest and worried newscasters looked on and spoke in the earnest and worried tones normally used by people threatened with row-boat spankings. They zoomed their cameras in, all shakey and close, and watched as a bomb disposal unit “detonated” the suspicious object which turned out to be nothing more than an innocent little lead pipe.
Fear of the stupid and insignificant will tear this country down, people. We’re such a whiney bunch of paranoid fucks that we insist that every possible element of risk be removed from the world around us. When one out of a hundred thousand cop cars catch fire when hit from behind by cars going fifty miles an hour, we recall a hundred thousand cars and sue the car company for millions of dollars. When some dipshit eats a furniture prop bannana and gets a spastic colon, the furniture store is held accountable for not having signs stating, “Plastic Bannanas are For Display and Perverted Sex Acts Only. Do Not Eat.”
Christ.

Guess Where I Am?
I am standing at the counter of Auction-ItTODAY Sterling Heights. The interior is done. The computers are set up. Signs are on the wall. Phone system, removed from hibernation these long 5 years, has been fired up and is working swell.
We open next week, and I’m getting excited! So….off with my pants!

News at 11! No, really; my wife was forced to evacuate, and for once this didn’t involve my ass and a water bottle.

Heather works in a courthouse in Eastpointe, Michigan, as the titular chief and, in actuality, the only probation officer for that illustrious judicial body. Last week she was on vacation in order to bone up for a certification exam which she took on Friday (but won’t know the results of for awhile).

Along with studying, breaking her mother’s foot, and not having sex with me, she went to the zoo with my daughter, Sam. As animal gazing companions she brought along her mother and grandmother (Debbie and Iris, respectively). Thus, four generations of Gribble women traipsed through the Detroit zoo in search of enlightenment, polar bears, and any activity that could possibly tire out Samantha Ann Whited. Of these three missions, I think they might have seen one bored-off-his-ass polar bear gnawing on a fish carcass. The rest of their goals were left sadly unmet.

So Monday–that’s today, for those that are counting– was to be her first day back at work in a week, and one which she knew would find her desk piled high with unfinished business.
Unfinished, that is, except for the business of one Lurch, the canine court mascot, which had finished his business definitively twice within Heather’s office while she was away. Lurch is the quintessential example of a damaged-goods dog. Adopted from the animal rescue side of the police station, the patchy mutt is alternatingly neglected and spoiled mercilessly by the court staff, %80 of which just want to know, “Who’s the good doggy? Who is that good doggy?”
A question which Lurch, himself, is at a loss to answer.

Where was I? Oh, evacuation. Anyway, whilst she was out, some very odd political games between the judge and city council have been in the offing, the details of which I will not list here for fear of reprisals. Suffice it to say that her job is not, we think, in jeopardy; the situation, however, is quite uncomfortable. So, in summary so far: Piles of work on her desk, piles of shit on her floor, piles of dangerous politics in her lap. And we haven’t even gotten to the evacuation!
Speaking of which!

Midday a shabby pickup truck was left parked with the bed towards the courthouse, right out Heather’s window. Shabby cars are par for the course, considering the degenerate denizens of Detroit and the inner suburbs whose fates intertwine with the court system in Eastpointe. The grand parade of Baby-Mommas, thugs, white trash, drunkards and junkies makes a marvelous pageant of reality-TV proportions at the 38th District court. Keep in mind that Eastpointe is a downwardly mobile community with the infamous 8-mile as a southern border, and lower Warren to the East. Delicious.

So, in the bed of this pickup truck was a pipe-bomb. And while it didn’t appear to be connected to any triggering device, or flames, or madmen with incendiary devices, and even though it was but one wee little bomb, the decision was made quickly to evacuate the entire building and wait for a county bomb disposal squad.
So the judge in her stockings, my wife sans-cell phone or car keys, and the rest of the court staff stood out in the drizzling May rain and subjected themselves to a far higher risk of pneumonia than shrapnel, I’m sure.
Heather fumed for awhile, and then defied police admonishments long enough to storm back in the building and retrieve her phone and keys. She fled the scene shortly thereafter. Perhaps they are searching for her still.
1 – Day complete with multiple piles of metaphorical and actual shit, made complete by ridiculous bomb scare.
2 – We all win.

Click here to jump to Remember Milla?

Systems Move In Today:

I have been at my office since 6:30am, readying the LAN-in-a-can for transplantation to Auction-ItTODAY store#3 in Sterling Heights. Time is getting near, and this is getting pretty exciting for me.
I’ve been the same schlub for 13 years now, VP of Tech services for about 4 years at Integrated Data Solution, Inc.
Soon that will be only one of my two business identities. Scary stuff.

Remember Milla:
Hey, anyone besides me remember that Milla Jovovich had a music album in the mid-nineties?

Legend has it that she recorded the album when she was 16, prior to becoming a model and “actress”. When she hit it big as a model at around age 19, they trotted the still unreleased album out and hitched it to her shiny new coat-tails.
There was one minor hit off the album, the Enya-esque “Gentleman Who Fell”, and on its merits alone I purchased the album.
This album, called “The Divine Comedy,” was very melodic, but a bit pretentious in tone.
Apparently Milla is a Ukrainian Jewess, who came to America with her family at a very young age, and this identity informed much of the album contents. There is one song on the album, very Enya-esque in a way “Gentleman Who Fell” only barely approached, which is a lyrically faithful Ukrainian folk-song sung in it’s original language. The rest of the tracks vary between oddly credulous songs about alien visitation(!) and Nazi holocaust references, with one exception.
This stand-out track, “Charlie,” is about a girlfriend’s reaction to finding her boyfriend dead of a suicidal headshot. Lyrics? Sure:

Oh, Charlie,
A boy and his toys,
I see you lying stiff and cold,
spread out upon the bed-room floor.

Kiss me darling,
with those pale lips once more,
hands could never comfort you,
not so well as steel could do.

She accompanied herself on most tracks with a Ukrainian lute sort-of thing, the name of which I couldn’t search out in the brief amount of time I’m willing to spend searching for it. Sounded pretty nice, really, and fit in with the rest of the musical arrangement.

She had a very adult singing voice for a 16 year old, although it was completely out-of-practice by the time she did the talk show circuit pimping the album at its release. She sounded positively abysmal on Late Night with Conan, for instance. Since that time she has, as far as I know, not released any other music albums. She is, after all, busy with “acting” and being a skinny model and what-not. But I still have the album in my iTunes mix, and am listening to it even as we speak. Not a favorite, but a quirky one-shot with a fun story behind it.
Toodles, poodles.

I have been told by a fellow truth-seeker that there appear to be two separate organizations responsible for the placement and command of the bottle men.
How can you tell the two factions apart?
By careful observance of the equipment issued to them by their dark masters.
Faction A UBM are issued 3 speed ‘cruiser’ style bicycles.
Faction B UBM are issued shabby shopping carts.
In both cases, flags and pom-poms and tassles are usually evident to denote rank and seniority.

Drive safely, folks.

The store opens in less than two weeks. Will it succeed or will it fail?

If you live in Detroit, you’ve met the UBM.
Every city in the Metro Detroit Area has at least one UBM delegate issued to it by the Universal Bottle Man Authority–the shady and secretive organization that distributes UBM amongst our population.
Some theoretical theorists theorize that UBM are alien research students sent to study our culture and practice recycling. If this theory is true, we already know from their appearance that common soap may be an effective defense against any future full scale invasion.
Others speculate that they are time travelers from a future world without aluminum or polyethylene terephthalate*.
That they are organized is beyond doubt. They have uniforms, and are apparently issued field equipment:

• Uniform:Army surplus olive-drab or green jacket, filthy and tattered.**
• Code of Dress:Large unkempt white beard, oil/dirt smudged face.
• Standard issue transportation: Huffy*** ‘Cruiser’ three speed bicycle with saddle bags and/or oversized handlebar basket.
• Standard issue cargo pods:Hefty Cinch Sack or other large trash bag.

They are an undefined threat, and SafeTinspector is on the case.
I’ve attempted to follow a member of the UBM, to see if I could locate a congregation point or local base of operations. Unfortunately, the observed subject entered into a lengthy period of suspended animation after fueling up on alcohol byproducts obtained from A&B Wine, Liquor and Lotto in Eastpointe city, and I lost interest. I purchased a small bag of Fritos, but was forced to concede defeat when boredom overcame me and I was compelled to wander off to a local hardware store to buy wall anchors.
I need your help, citizens of Detroit Metro area and surrounding Urban Sprawl Zone Alpha! These mysterious entities may be harmless, but we can’t take chances that our recyclables will fall into the hands of malevolent beings.

* polyethylene terephthalate=Plastic Bottle Material
**Variations in shade are thought to denote rank amongst the UBM
***Other models, including tassels, banana seats, bells, and American Flags, have also been spotted in use by UBM emissaries
Back to the story…