An Excuse

If my laptop isn't broken then it's doing a hell of a job pretending to be. I can't get it to stop freezing up on me every minute or so. Not good.

What is good, though, is that Jonny and I are getting closer and closer to finishing our script (using his computer, of course). Right now we are planning on having the rough draft done by Sunday, at which point we'll take a few days off before going back in and tightening it up. The more we write, the more I like it.

There's a Mersey Buckets show Sunday the 28th at Nite Cap in case anybody gives a shit.

I hate to say it, but I should get back to work...

Correcting The Mistakes Of The Past With The Errors Of Today

Looking back at what I wrote here the other day, it seems that I failed in my attempt to write a post about not succeeding. I wrote, "One of my favorite ways of keeping myself from being successful is to reward myself for my success in advance with whatever it is that I need to avoid in order to succeed," and then went on to tell a simple (yet crummy) little half-story about procrastination. While I have nothing against procrastination, and would even be willing to die reading a magazine while sitting around drinking beer and putting off fighting for its cause, that is not what I was (at least attempting to be) talking about.

What I was at least attempting to be talking about was something like this:

Every once in a while, I feel the need to trim down a little bit and get back to my fighting weight. It doesn't matter if I am wanting to squeeze back into an old pair of pants, looking for a good reason to shave my stomach, or just trying to get the hookers to quit pinching my belly; I have only one method to losing weight, and that is to stop drinking beer.

This goes swimmingly for the first week. I am not drinking, my pants are close to fitting, my stomach is almost ripe for a shaving, and the pinch marks are starting to fade. I am feeling more energetic, thinner, and better on the whole than not just my former self, but every ugly, fat son of a bitch that has the gall to waddle his colossal ass past me.

And since I am doing so well with my non-beer drinking diet (and can envision myself staying on it for the next several months, or at least until I get in a little bit of stomach modeling), I decide that I deserve a little something for my world beating efforts. That little something turns out to be a potentially dangerous amount of beer. Soon enough I'm back to the elastic waist band, my belly's somehow hairier, and I'm threatening to go home and get my gun if these whores won't fucking stop pinching me.

That's pretty much my favorite way to stay clear of succeeding. When all is said and done, however, and I'm sure I'll make this perfectly clear as this blog progresses, the best way to avoid success is to just do a really shitty job.

PS: I'm not planning on commonly pointing out why my other posts are so bad, but this last one has gotten such a tremendous amount of feedback, that I felt the need to address it.

Success Ain't No River In Egypt

One of my favorite ways of keeping myself from being successful is to reward myself for my success in advance with whatever it is that I need to avoid in order to succeed. It feels good to get the early reward, and most importantly, it keeps all those goals out there for you. A man needs to have goals, so I don't think it's very wise to go around accomplishing them willy nilly.

During the first half of the Bulls game tonight I was going to figure out how to do some essential blog-related things (things like link to other blogs and put pictures in my posts, etc.), but I told myself that since I had done such a swell job of typing random bullshit and posting it on this blog last night that I was officially a blogger and therefore shouldn't sweat learning how to do these essential blog-related things, because these are things that bloggers (like me) know how to do. So I watched the game, got angry, forgot the rules of grammar, and then typed some more random bullshit on this blog.

Happily, my anger is starting to give way to a sort of irritated sleepiness, but I still don't know how to do any of these essential blog-related things.

I do, however, have a goal for tomorrow.

PS: Does anybody have any other favorite ways to avoid success? I hear that just sitting around smoking pot all the time is pretty cool.

An Introduction

The first thing a person does when he meets someone new is take the time to explain how he got his name. Sometimes this takes hours, sometimes weeks, it once took a year, but it usually only takes ten to twelve minutes and a couple of good, strong bear hugs to get the point across. In the case of this blog it should only take three or four hugless paragraphs and here they are:

Back in the days before he sold off his pocket thesaurus for a handjob from the cleaning lady, my brother Geoff (I can still remember asking him how the handjob had been. He instinctively dug around his empty pocket for a moment, looked off ruefully into space, and sighed, "Good.") and I decided to publish a zine. It would be a collaborative effort between the two of us and our shared friends. We quickly assigned everyone a subject that suited him: Roc got Men's Fashion, Baumann got Xenophobia, Kevin got Violin Storage, Freddy got Running And Jumping, Jonny got The Society Page, Geoff got Pretending To Sleep, and I got Strength Speed and Explosiveness. We contacted our friends and they were just as excited as we were about the zine.

Several weeks later, I had written twenty three of the finest articles ever on the subject of Strength Speed and Explosiveness, but no one else had written word one on their subjects. I confronted Geoff about this one evening while drunk and shirtless in the front yard. Needless to say, Geoff and I had a little bit o' rasslin' to do. But once we got done doing our violence, we got to talking, and it became clear that no one else was interested in the zine because we hadn't named it yet.

I must have made quite the impression during our dustup, because Geoff wanted to name the zine The Strong Drunk. While I liked the sound of this, I felt we could do better. I suggested that Geoff consult his thesaurus for a moment. He did and came back with The Mighty Inebriate. I told him we were close. Moments later, The Mighty Sot was born.

It died not long after that when it became clear that name or no name, nobody was going to write shit about shit.

This blog lives in its honor.

PS: The Speed Strength and Explosiveness Papers were lost in the Great Wind Gust of '99.