During the course of a very, very, very unproductive work week (Oooh look at the bright screen, pretty colours, bright lights. Mind tuning out. Must look at screen and not move for two hours. It is meditation. Very, very Zen like… Okay, spaced out there for a minute.

Before anybody accuses me of being a lazy good for nothing sot, I did make up for the Week Of Looking At Bright Lights by working over the weekend. (That should be an official Week. The Week Of Looking At Bright Lights. People would look at bright lights and make small, appreciative sounds. They wouldn’t do anything else that week. They may take a break to exhale, or to get out of the way of a large moving object (Like a mutant toaster with an afterburner), or to inhale, but that would be it. ) I probably should register that domain name. www.theweekoflookingatbrightlights.com. (How messed up is it that that is always my logical follow-up for any idea that I have. “Dude, I have got to register that domain name.” The idea may suck, but I’ll own the domain name dammit, and that is all that counts.)

I would like to at this point mention that we here at The Week Of Looking At Bright Lights Foundation, do not in any way, shape or form condone the use of hallucinogenic drugs to produce the Bright Lights. We here at the foundation are of the opinion that while people may choose their own type of Bright Lights to look at, it is infinitely preferable that the lights be outside their heads rather than inside them.) I read a few blogs (Any number less than five hundred is a few isn’t it?). These weren’t blogs written by anyone I know, or anyone I know of. They were blogs belonging to strangers from all over the place.

A staggering number of these blogs had a common theme. Everyone was fucking depressed. Life was full of clouds without a fucking ray of sunshine anywhere. The rain was falling all over the place and instead of renewing life and causing an explosion of greenery it was ruining their suede leather jackets. The glass was half full of poison that would give you the hives, halitosis and an irresistible urge to wear white socks with black shoes.

Every single specimen(blogger) looks out of a window and stares pensively at the heart-breaking sadness of the things they can see from the aforementioned window (The sheer convenience of this makes me suspicious. How often have you looked out of your window and seen the drama of human existence play out in all its tragic glory? Once, twice, thrice? Possible, not probable, but possible. Every single day for four weeks? Um…less probable? ). The sorrow of the human condition. The tragic play of light on the leaves of a tree. The poignancy of the moment when a drop of water falls from one of those leaves into that puddle of muddy water below that tree. The sheer tragedy of the rain ruining the suede jackets.

And sighs. Everyone sighs. “Sigh…I woke up today”. “Sigh, Life it is so full of sorrows”, “Sigh, I saw a little sparrow today and it made my heart ache”, “Sigh, I had a bagel for breakfast today”, “Sigh…”I” before “E”, except after “C””. Stop fucking sighing. All this sighing makes you sound like a fucking herd of asthmatic elephants trundling through a jungle of whoopee cushions. Make this your life goal. Say to yourself, “From today, I will no longer abuse my sighs. I shall reserve them for occasions which truly deserve sighing. At other times, I shall show admirable restraint and control my base urges. I may let out a little whimper or snort in lieu of the sigh. But, but I shall be strong and I will not sigh.”

This has got to stop. The legions of people who think that is cool to be dark and depressed and pessimistic need to be thinned. If you feel the urge to write that you are depressed, go ahead and drop me a line. I’ll swing by your place and punch you in the nose. That is, if you are a guy. If you are of the fiercer, crueler and infinitely scarier sex, I will hire somebody of your gender, probably off of Craigslist, to punch you in the nose.

Um…yeah, ignore the post that preceded this one.

is still the new Brown.

So, to fix my ripped arm I’m on some moderately powerful drugs. Now when you hear moderately, powerful and drug in the same sentence you expect to hear the words, “and its side effects are…” (You might also hear the words Sky, Diamond and Goo Goo G’Joob, but those are not the kind that my doctor prescribes…At least during work hours. What she does during her off hours is entirely her business.) .

A pleasant surprise. I did not hear those words.

A less pleasant surprise. She handed me a folder. A folder of side effects, “Side Effects: A through M”, and another folder “Side Effects: M through Z”, and yet another, “Side Effects, 0 through 9, also including special symbols and punctuation marks excluding “!”.”, and finally, “Side Effects!”. That last folder was either exclaiming in surprise or in horror, or in horrified surprise.

“Side Effects! Yes, things that you could not imagine as side effects are in this folder. Bricks, Truffles, Cell Phones, Puppies, Promiscuous Capitalization, Sudden Stoppage of Life, Sphygmomanometers…”

“Wait, what was that last one?”

“Sphygmomanometers!”

“Eh?”

“Sphygmomanometers.”

“Ah.”

We weren’t quite done yet, “Side Effect…the Comic”, ”Side Effects the Song”

And that was it. They had me sign a waiver. Waivers make me nervous. You know that every waiver has a provision in there for your sudden untimely demise.

“I waive my right to the candy kept in the kitchen…and I completely understand that at any moment come to a sudden an untimely death and this sudden and untimely death is no fault of the creator of the waiver, even if he/she is directly responsible for the death, it is not their fault because I signed this waiver.”

Now, the moment I signed the waiver, they began to refer to me as the “Specimen”. It might just be me, but isn’t specimen a downgrade from patient? (Specimens are always patient, because most specimens are in a state of not being alive. Patients aren’t specimens all that often. I was the notable exception) Rarely do you see medical shows where the pretty doctors desperately try to save the specimen’s life. No, they dissect the specimen to save the patient’s life.

So, that was my naked ploy for sympathy. Did it work?

So I finally unpacked.

A month after I returned to Jersey.

I’m not normally this tardy(Well I am tardy, but not this tardy.), but unpacking is a bitch. Packing is also a bitch, but Unpacking is a much larger bitch. It is to Packing what um…a large thing is to a much, much, much smaller thing. (When it comes to similes and metaphors and illustrative language, I have no peer.). Aha! Packing is to unpacking as a cabbage is to a large, angry anaconda.

(A large, angry Ninja anaconda! Anacondas are deadly, but imagine anacondas that could use shurikens and look cool dressed all in black from their heads to the tips of their tails. There would be no stopping them.

…rustle rustle…

Guard One (The newbie, first day on the job, bright eyed and bushy tailed. Full of enthusiasm and a can do attitude. Will die in the next minute, quite possibly with a shuriken horribly inserted where no shuriken should go): Hey what’s that sound?

Guard Two (Obviously a veteran of thirty years, a person who knows that not investigating that rustle is probably the wiser course of action, but who will allow himself to be swayed by his youthful comrade’s enthusiasm, and will accompany him into the darkness to investigate that rustle.)

Guard One: What the he…snick. (Snick being the sound that shurikens make. Well known fact.)

Guard Two (A strong silent chap, not given to verbosity or emotion.): Ninja Anaco…snick.

…rustle rustle…

Ninja Anacondas. Unstoppable. Like Mutant Toasters. Teenage Mutant Ninja Toasters.)

Unpacking is a bitch. But I finally needed to get around to it. The delicate balance, the circle of clothes, the System was becoming dangerously unbalanced. The cycle works like this: Dirty clothes dumped in the washer, clean clothes in the dryer and other clean clothes in the laundry hamper. The temptation to use a closed suitcase as a raised clothes platform was too strong to fight. That became a repository of clothes of indeterminate party affiliation. They might have been clean but ended up on the floor, or they might have been dirty and ended up in the dryer. (Clothes are ambulatory at night. Well known fact.) The indeterminateness would force me to wash them again, but there were already clothes in the washer which could not be emptied until the drier was emptied, and that was waiting on the hamper which was waiting on the washer and now the suitcase. Chaos. Mobs roamed the streets. Lawlessness. People using ”U” instead of “You”. The end of civilization as…Well, you get the point. Mildly unpleasant.

Unpacking is a bitch. I cranked the suitcase open. I began to remove stuff from it. And then I realized that a) Stuff that I had packed had disappeared into thin air. b) Stuff that I hadn’t packed was sitting in the suitcase. Grinning innocently. The kind of grin you hear when a Ninja Anaconda is stalks you.

Given the facts I could come to only one conclusion. Stuff in a suitcase comes alive when the suitcase is closed. Some stuff eats other stuff, (ergo the missing stuff), a predator prey relationship. And then once the hunter stuff has killed, and partially devoured its prey, it brings the remains back to the other stuff in the suitcase. The other stuff is suitably impressed. They dim the lights, put on a little Barry White and let nature take its course. And one transcontinental journey and a month later, the little spawn grin up at me as I stare down at them, wondering what the fuck happened. (The explanation of course is that the fuck happened.)

…rustle…rustle…

Temporal anomalies occur all the time. Sometimes they are interesting ones. For instance, the Terminator goes back in time to fight a rogue…um…shining blob of mercury. The coolest blob of mercury ever.

I have my own temporal anomaly. My past haircut is always the best haircut I ever had. My current haircut is always the worst haircut I’ve ever had. The only explanation for that is that some vast machine intelligence sends a Terminator into the past every four weeks or so. This relentless killing machine retroactively changes my haircut to be my best ever. And…I dunno. This doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere. The terminator haircut bit worked well I thought.

I was mistaken

I turn on my laptop mid flight. The little wireless signal light flickers on and off as my wireless card hunts desperately for a signal. Any signal. It’ll take what it can get. It isn’t proud. It has lost it’s last shred of dignity, as it sits on the sidewalk, desperately pan handling for a signal to satisfy its dreadful habit. One of these days it will catch a signal. Maybe the one that the machine intelligence uses to communicate with the Terminator. And then it will die in an orgasm of delight.

That last phrase sounded icky. Lets change it to, “And then it will die in an explosion of delight”…yeah…that was better.

I know absolutely nothing about the constellations in the sky. But when people ask me if I know what constellation it is that they are pointing at, I reply, without missing a beat, “The Big Dipper.” It doesn’t matter. Any constellation is the “Big Dipper.”

“But I don’t’ see it.”

“You’re looking at it from the wrong angle, and this is the wrong season.”

“Which one is that one, then?”

“That’s the Big Dipper.”

“But…”

“Astronomers are not a very imaginative lot. It’s called the Big Dipper. What’s next? The Moderately Sized Spatula, the Hidden Saucepan? The Great Colander? You know those names make no senses in a constellational context. But the Big Dipper does. Think about it.”

And some point those last few lines became a dialog between me and an annoying whiny voice in my head. Not that I hear voices in my head. A hypothetical voice.

No voices here.

Really.

Apparently stores are having midnight sales for Windows Vista…That’s about it. I need say nothing more. Use the absurdity of that premise to make up your own jokes. Unless of course, you are one of those people actually in line waiting for a copy of Windows Vista…in which case you have my everlasting sympathy.

I can see it right now, grizzled I.T. support personnel and managers queued up in front of a store. A smile on their lips, (Just one smile shared between the whole bunch of them. It’s a communist thing.), a song in their hearts (Again, just one song. A different reason.The DMCA and all that crap. The song is Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.), and a spring in their footstep (surgically inserted, without local anesthesia.). Stretching their necks to catch a fleeting, tantalizing glimpse of the box, taking photographs, blogging about it through their cell phones. (Face it. These are I.T. folks. You know they’re going to be doing that.)

So yeah, Midnight openings to sell Vista, not so good an idea.

Short Posts are the bomb!

No agonizing over circular references. Not having to agonize over pop culture references. (By pop culture, I mean previous blog posts.) Not having to agonize over whether my brackets matched and weren’t dangerously unbalanced. Joy!

But now I begin to fear that this post is too short.(I’m not overcompensating!) It needs a filler. The slice of bread that goes with the meat of the sandwich, the staple that makes the stapler the joy of the modern world.

I decided to cook today. A stir fry sounded like a fantastic idea. It was coming along swimmingly. However, half way through I decided that everything goes better with an egg, and so I added one. After a brief pause for effect, I added another. The stir fry became a scrambled egg with a lot of vegetables. Fascinating eh?

Notice how I snuck that filler in without anybody noticing? I’m cool like that.

Stream of consciousness follows.

My new favourite simile (analogy), “Like a stapler in flight.” Incredibly graceful and deadly.

Every cellular service provider wants me to sign a two year contract. Two years is far too long. Anything more than a week is far too long. A year I can deal with. Anything longer than that makes me antsy.

Hotel beds have far too many pillows. I have six fucking pillows, two cushions and a long cylindrical cushion. I’m sure that there is a technical name for that and I’m now going to have to Google it.

Five minutes later, I’ve been defeated.

And then Mary and Wikipedia ride to the rescue. It is a bolster. I was under the impression that a bolster was more pillow-ish, but apparently it is not. The very foundation that supports my belief system has been rocked. I’m all shaken up. What other delusions have I been labouring under?

Are toasters not sentient?

Aren’t handcuffs and butter good for you?

Is it in fact, “Paint you own pottery” studio?

I dislike it when people use “U”, instead of “You”. “You” isn’t so hard to type. “Y” is next to the “U” and “O” is one key over. One happy neighbourhood of keys.

The “2” key on my keyboard is broken. I really need to pound on it to get it to register. And of course it had to be the “2” key. Twelve years ago, the number keys were all equal. Friends and comrades in a classless society. No longer. “2” because of its close association with “@” is now one of the neuve-riche. Like the boyhood friend of a politician, a politician who made it big. And now the boyhood friend shines in the reflected glory of the one who made it big. “2” and “@” could be a book or a movie. Something along the lines of the Godfather or Planet of the Apes or Mary Poppins.

My new favourite simile (analogy), “As sweet as a stapler.” Incredibly graceful and deadly.

Man, that sucked and I’m stone cold sober.

Sober-ish.

…It’s the new brown

Most Inappropriate Analogy Ever:

I’m watching the Tea Time show on ESPN during the second test match (Yes, I was watching ESPN and I was watching cricket. Do get your jaws off of the floor.), and someone asked someone else (We shall make this an A-B story, Someone One is A and Someone Two is B), i.e. A asked B to describe India’s batting. And this is what B said,

“The Indian Batting…is like AIDS.” Most. Fucking. Inappropriate. Analogy. Ever. I do not remember the reasoning behind this analogy, but I assume it was something like this, “The Indian Batting is a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus and has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized. So is AIDS. Ergo the analogy.”

Dumbass.

Least Effective Advertisement Ever:

Courtesy the good folks at Yahoo India, or more accurately the intellectually challenged employees of the advertising company that Yahoo India retained.( I have a point to make somewhere here. Bear with that last clunky sentence.)

On a billboard, “Log on to yahoo.co.in and get a Free email address!” Wow! A free fucking email address. Be still my heart. An email address that I do not have to pay for. All mine and fucking free to boot. A temptation like none other. Nothing could stop me from logging on to yahoo.co.in and getting the free email address. Nothing, except the fact that that was a fucking hook in 1996. Dumbasses. What next? Next they’ll be telling me to log on to yahoo.co.in and search for “Supermodels, butter and handcuffs.” That is so 1998(…um…Perhaps a little too specific an example?)

Grey Anatomy could be the title of a geriatric Porn Flick. (No reason for putting that line in there, and so I did.)

This week I visited an ancient temple tourist trap. This is a place famous (notorious?) for its stone carvings and so I decided to pick up a small souvenir. I dropped by a shop and grabbed the first one I saw. It was a small round stone paperweight.

Blink.

Blink.

(That was not an entreaty or a command. That was description of my reaction. Note the speechlessness and the jaw on the floor)

(Let’s make this one into a C-D story, I’ll be C and the carver/shopkeeper/comic relief will be D)

C: Um…

D: Yessir! You Like?

C: Um…yeah…Um what is this?

D: Paperweight sir.

C: Yeah, I got that bit. I meant the um motif…design on it.

D: Scenes from the Kama Sutra Sir.

C: Ah that explains it. Haven’t ever seen stone figures getting that much action. And I’m moderately sure that that lady’s pose is anatomically improbable.

D: Scenes from the Kama Sutra Sir.

C: That is an awful lot of porn on something the size of a tennis ball, but…Um, yeah I’ll pass.

D: (Insistently) Scenes from the Kama Sutra Sir.

C: Something else perhaps, maybe a paperweight that happily avoids the controversial topic of um…exposed genitalia.

D: (Looking disappointed) Scenes from the Kama Sutra Sir.

C: Yes, we’ve established that. Do you perhaps have scenes from the um…Kama Sutra (PG-13) version.

D: (Enthusiastically) Scenes from the KamaSutra Sir.

Clearly, this man, the porn king of the south, had a one track mind. Any paper weights he would be willing to part with would involve exposed genitalia and awkward, painful looking poses. I beat a hasty retreat, returning the stone paperweight to its boudoir. I think I heard an indistinct moaning emanating from the paperweight.

The paperweight was Grey in color.

It had tons of anatomy on it.

Grey anatomy.

Full circle.