When you utilize our basement shower, not only do you get to avoid the queue for the upstairs shower-- and we only have one shower upstairs and it's soccer season, so that shower gets busy-- but you also get to do battle with spiders while you wash yourself.
As a bonus, there's excellent water pressure, so after you squash the spiders, it's easy to sluice their crushed corpses down the drain.
Last Thursday, I went to the pub after Back to School Night. It was a long day, and I was a bit wound up (although that is no excuse for my behavior).
We shot some darts and then Paul put five dollars into the digital jukebox. I looked over his shoulder at his selection and noticed he was about to play something awful-- The Doobie Brothers or The Eagles or such-- and so I boxed him out, usurped his credits, and told him that I would be handling the music for the evening.
Because everyone loves Dave's eclectically hip taste, right?
I played "Since You're Gone" by The Cars-- not because Ric Ocasek died . . . I hadn't heard the news-- but simply because they were advertised prominently. I played some Ween and some Pavement, some New Order and a funk instrumental by The Meters. I tried to find some Wu Tang, but the jukebox didn't have it, so I settled on A Tribe Called Quest.
The jukebox played my first selection: "Since You're Gone." Then, oddly, it played an old awful Irish country song entitled "Whiskey in a Jar." And then "Eminence Front," a song I like but had not selected. A song Connell had played last week.
Weird.
And then some other songs that I don't recall, but songs I had definitely not selected. And I saw Paul, out of the corner of my eye, his fist raised in glory. Rejoicing. And I knew what had happened.
Musical vengeance.
My so-called friends, fed up with my condescension and musical elitism, had exacted their revenge. While I was pondering over my eclectically hip selections, they had fired up the jukebox app on their phones, paid for a bunch of credits-- enough credits to push my songs to the end of the line-- and played a bunch of shitty songs. Songs designed to piss me off.
It cost Connell eight dollars to play "Eminence Front" and a few others. He said it was well worth it.
It cost Paul more than that (not that he cared).
Tom realized what was going on and asked Paul how much he had spent on the original credits.
Paul said, "Five bucks."
"And how much did it cost to disrupt those songs?"
"Eight bucks."
"Huh," Tom said, "Spite is expensive."
But-- according to my so-called friends-- spite is well worth the money. I've certainly learned my lesson. I've got to tone down the musical snobbery, and just sort of lurk about and insert songs I here and there. I can't bully someone out of the way and steal all their selections. That's uncivilized ( even though in the end, Paul conceded that I did play some good music).
There's no question that when you're hard at work, it's always exciting to a get an unexpected text from your lovely wife, especially when it mentions high heels and a dress . . . but there wasn't much innuendo in this strand (also, note the lack of punctuation and spelling error-- she was obviously freaked out). I read between the lines and understood that I was going to be the one to remove the eviscerated dead rabbit from the low-ceilinged shed under the porch, which I might add, is populated with billions upon billions of those creepy long-legged cave crickets.
And for those of you that care, the dead rabbit is now in a plastic bag in our trash. I shoveled it out. I'm not sure what got to it, maybe a fox or a raccoon-- or perhaps it was our dog, Lola, as there was a tennis ball placed on top of the corpse--but needless to say, it wasn't pretty (unlike my wife in her dress).
It's impossible to be in a good mood when you know that 12 hours after you show up to school, you're going to do it all again: run through the entire day in miniature, for the parents (although it is fun to see adults stuff themselves into school desks) .
Do you respect wood?
I respect wood, but-- luckily-- so does my wife, so I won't have to divorce her. In fact, it's my wife who suggested that I run to TJ Maxx with some of our hard-earned garage sale money and buy a a shelving unit made of genuine Acacia wood so that I have a spot for my amplifier and loop pedal.
The piece of furniture is awesome, shelves on hinges, cool looking hardwood, but when Ian and I got it home, we noticed that there was a crack in one of the bottom pieces. So I took my respect for wood and put it to use. I got some wood glue and a clamp, and went to work. Hopefully, it will set.
It's over. We cleaned out, set up, and raked it in. All day Saturday and half of Sunday, my wife channeled the soul of an Ottoman bazaar storekeeper and turned our driveway and front lawn into a souk. Once almost everything was gone, we put up a FREE sign and hid inside while the vultures picked over the carcass of our sale. Then Alex and I packed up the remaining odds and ends and drove it over to Goodwill.
And while the cash we made was significant, the purging of the house was priceless (as were the arguments between my teenage son and her about exactly what constituted his stuff, the sale of which he could claim full profit on . . . I tried to stay out of the debate and just warned him that you don't f-@% with mom on garage sale weekend, especially since she does the bulk of the set up and organizing).
Never again, my wife says.
I hope she's right (but the fact that the same older son who got into all the debates bought a glow-lamp in the shape of a box turtle doesn't bode well for us keeping the house clear of garage sale crap . . . and I bought an ancient Bakelite View master, thinking it would be worth thousands of dollars, but I was wrong . . . I paid $5 and it might be worth $12 . . . so there's probably another garage sale in our future).
I often see people running on concrete and I want to yell to them: "Don't run on concrete! It's much harder than asphalt!"
While I've never actually yelled this out my car window, I'm factually in the right. Concrete is definitely exponentially harder than asphalt.
But it may not matter. Running shoes and other factors may make the difference negligible. So while I'm going to continue to run on grass or asphalt, I'm not going to chastise anyone for running on concrete (until I finish my advanced materials physics degree).
Head down Woodbridge Avenue to the Edison Tex-Mex Deli and get the al pastor tacos-- I promise you won't be disappointed: the pork and pineapples are on a spit!
Someone (or something) has hacked my Blogger account and so Sentence of Dave keeps doing weird stuff, which is as good a reason as any to start writing sentences over here.
I might write one sentence a day, or I might write several.
I might write nothing at all.
But the best thing about the whole hacking of my blog is that I was able to import all my brilliance from Sentence of Dave over to Park the Bus. So if you need to catch up, it's all here.
Being able to migrate all my sentences (and zman's comments!) is almost as awesome as listening to my son Ian dictate quotations from Catcher in the Rye into the journal entry he is writing on the kitchen desktop computer (he is doing this as I write).
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| Freedom! |
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| Freedom! |
