Conversations with My Invisible Friend Jack™, who doesn’t actually exist
Me: Hey man, what’s up?
My Invisible Friend Jack™: …
Me: Umm, hello? Is anybody there?
My Invisible Friend Jack™: …
Me: Dude Jack! How goes the war, man? Are you there?!
My Invisible Friend Jack™: No. I don’t exist. Leave me alone.
Me: …
We are the champions
In a flurry of self-sycophantic activity, I did my bi-annual self-Google-search. Where I was well buried the last time I did this, falling well behind another David Kleeman and his various hits related to his being the Executive Director of the American Center for Children and Media, this time yours truly is top of the heap.
You realize what this means, of course?
I am The Most Famous David Kleeman in Existence!!!
And how many people can say that, really? (here’s a hint: ONE, it’s me). OK, so granted, the link points at my old geocities site, but still, it gets to me eventually. Besides, good old floorpie.net is steady at number four.
Speaking of which, I’m also king of the “floorpie” mountain (beating out those bastards nice people at floorpie.com who somehow registered the name almost immediately after I mentioned I was thinking about it…and then offered to sell it to me for $200. But I digress… Stuff and Stuff is also under my control, though merely “stuff” puts me in at an embarrassing 50. The moral of the story?
I am The Most Famous David Kleeman in Existence!!!
And seriously, that’s at least a (very) little cool.
Last night, my Dad flew in for the weekend.
This morning, ADG flew away for the week.
These bittersweet events have combined to remind me about the important things in my life. Namely: airports are crowded.
m’man, or rather, the man, Tony Pierce is calling for hits. It seems like an easy task, what with the hot chicks in catholic school girl outfits.
Urge to kill…rising!
Granted, I’m unemployed and haven’t anything better to do but complain.
Granted, being in that position is producing internal stress the likes of which I’ve never seen. Stress which will surely cause me to go berserk some day soon, running through the neighborhood naked, screaming obscenities, and inexplicably gathering all Current Occupant mail from any mailbox I light upon. “Odd,” people will say, “usually he just takes the Victoria’s Secret catalogs.”
Granted further that if I had more imagination, I would surely have come up with better things to do than sitting at my computer all day looking for non-existent work interspersed with oops-I-seem-to-have-landed-on-porn-“somehow” meanderings.
Nevertheless, does it really take a rocket-scientist to figure out the alarm on your car? Or better still, does it really take a trained monkey to figure out the alarm on your car? Is it really necessary that you sit in your new-to-you forest green VW Jetta, dumbly staring at the manual and experimentally setting your alarm on and off on and off on and off on and off until my ears bleed…
For three days in a row?
and sometimes at 11:30 because it took you 4 hours to find your way out of the ass your head is usually stuck in you stupid, mother-fuc|||||
**This has been a test of the Emergency Tourette’s Disorder System. If this had been a real emergency, the alarm you just heard would have been followed by the longest, loudest, most obscene string of invectives whose vulgarity would rival the very God of Foul-Mouthedness, should one ever exist.
This has been a test of the Emergency Tourette’s Disorder System. This was only a test.**
I just turned on the TV to see Katie Couric interviewing Elvis’ tour manager, “Diamond Joe” Esposito.
Aside: not, by the way, affiliated with the real Joseph “Diamond Joe” Esposito. So named for his penchant for diamond cuff links, shirt studs, rings, belt buckles, etc…which he wore while being a *cough cough* “legitimate business man” *cough* until he was inexplicably machine-gunned to death by Al Capone’s boys.
To continue, Katie appeared on the screen, be-skirted legs curled demurely under her, as she interviewed Diamond Joe…
in the back seat of a Cadillac…
a red convertible Cadillac…
in Graceland.
I had forgotten what real news looked like.
An aside
I found out today that I totally rock on the didgeridoo. It must have been all those formative band-nerd years; and, at the very least, it’s not something you discover about yourself every day.
In this world of virtual communication at literal light-speed, I have decided to rail against the norm and embark on a snail-mail crusade.
OK, so maybe it’s not quite a crusade…The Crusades were a crusade…let’s call it an effort with minimal involvements.
At any rate, some of you may be familiar with those advertisements, thinly veiled as free postcards, that are made available to anyone standing around waiting for the restroom in various bars or (as the kids say) “hip” hangouts. I’m going to take advantage of this free media and send them out to anyone who wants them. So far, I have some pretty awesome terrible ones, which are funny in their awfulness (how ya like that grammar?). To continue, anyone wanting an original, Stuff and Stuff approved, lovingly written postcard, send me your address, and await the fun. Your anonymity isn’t really assured, per se, but I at least won’t sell your address to telemarketers. (probably)
PS I just realized that I totally stole this idea from sarah hepola after being inspired by her article in The Morning News. At the time it didn’t occur to me, but the memory must have bubbled back up almost a week later. Not that anyone should notice, of course, as I make my small blip on the postal radar.
The Story of _______: Second in a Series
Today’s Feature: Andy
I want to say it was sophomore, but it was almost undoubtedly junior year in college…towards the end of the year, in fact, which surprises me, as we ended up such good friends in what must have been a very short time. I was toiling away under my engineering classes, and starting to see a glimmer of hope for my beleaguered academic life, when I met this guy outside this one class doing this one thing.
This was not Andy.
This was his roommate, Aaron, whom I’m still friends with, as well, but not telling his story. At any rate, Aaron and I get to be friendly in that we sit near each other now, not pay attention in class together, and generally do whatever. And that’s how I end up going to his apartment. I don’t remember why; actually, some assignment we had to work on, or something cool he wanted to show me, or more likely the promise of food or food-related material. Either way, I went to his place.
While walking through the living room, the couch moved and stopped and moved again and stopped again, and Aaron threw his thumb over his shoulder with a “that’s Andy, he sleeps a lot”. And he was, and he did.
From what I can remember, each of the three initial times I met Andy, he was asleep, or lightly napping, or resting his eyes, or catching a quick snooze…to the point that I’m fairly certain he didn’t even know I existed until at least a month after I considered him at least an acquaintance.
Then summer came.
The three of us were staying in IV for the summer for various reasons (not the least of which is that you’d be crazy not to) and we needed a place to stay. My girlfriend at the time had a horrible studio apartment that she would be vacating, and we thought to ourselves, “what better? a cheap studio apartment for three guys!”. But that’s another hundred stories.
At this point, Andy and I weren’t really friends, yet; at least not without Aaron there as glue, and I’m sure you know what I mean.
To continue, in the words of my dad: so there we were: three guys staring at each other in a tiny box. And the power goes out. And stayed out. For about a week. Because of this, Aaron ditches us to live at his parents’ until the power returns…his lame excuse being that he needed reliable electricity to power his alarm clock to wake him up to go to work to make money to pay for the power we didn’t have. The end result being Andy and I stuck in a box in the dark with little to no alone time under our belts.
We became friends very quickly.
In the race for people whom I’d consider having as my best man someday, Andy is one of the finalists, and, we owe it to one awful terrible summer in the darkness of a tiny little box with the thinnest walls imaginable. In fact, this one time…
Hello…ello…ello?
What every happened to Sacagawea?
According to various articles the new dollar “bill” just wasn’t as popular as the gub’ment had hoped. One source goes on to pin the blame on Americans inherent resistance to change.
What utter crap.
I don’t think my having seen exactly three gold coins in the two years since their introduction has anything to do with my resistance to change. And I hardly think that if the mint started hoarding the paper version and replacing them with coins that we’d exactly throw up our arms and refuse to buy Doritos anymore. As they say, if you build it they will come.
People point to the successful introduction of the Euro in, err, Europe and say why couldn’t we be like that? Well, if they took away all our play money and gave us the real stuff like they did across the pond, we would be like that.
Same goes for cell-phones. Americans aren’t ready for all the features and small sizes seen in Japan. Like hell I’m not! If you sell it to me, I guarantee I’d like it. How can we be punished for crimes we haven’t even had the chance to commit?! (yes, fine, Minority Report, but we’re talking consumerism here).
The personal hypocrisy here is that if and when Sacagawea finally gains a foothold, I’ll probably be complaining about that. A lingering theme through my stories of lingerings overseas has to do with how you’d start the day with 20 bucks and end the day with two fist-fulls worth of coins. But I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.
