Insurance companies are such douchbags. It's been over nine months since I fell off my roof and went to the emergency room, and yet they are still sending me crap for it. The latest letter wanted me to detail where and why my accident happened, in a desperate attempt to find someone to sue so they do not have to pay for it. It annoys me because I am never sick, there is nothing wrong with me, and yet I diligent fork over a part of my paycheck every month for health insurance. The one time I ever have to use it and they are desperately trying to find a way to weasel out of it.
Anyways.
Last night I caught the movie 'The Prestige' while it was on PPV. (NOTE: SPOILER) I did not even know this movie existed until I watched it last night, which surprises me because I thought I would know if a movie that had David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla came out. Anyways, I found it to be an excellent flick. The Tesla character was merely a gimmick for the film, not based on fact, but I still enjoyed it.
What the one magician was doing towards the end of the movie left a funny feeling in my gut. He had a machine that could duplicate anything that you put into it. What he really wanted was a teleportation machine. So to create the illusion hat he was teleporting himself, his duplicated clone would drop through the floor of the stage into a tank of water where it immediately drowned and was thusly hauled off to a warehouse full of dead-clones-in-a-tank. That arouses so many ethical and philosophical and spiritual ramifications that it left my head spinning. Ultimately I liked the fact that a machine of such power was used simply as a device to one-up a rival.
I have enjoyed the rain we have received the past few days. I went down to the library and re-stocked on books and the past couple of nights I have spent sitting on my sun room, sipping a beer and reading a book while I felt the cool breeze of the falling rain. This morning the rain evaporated into a dense fog that I crept through on the way to work. However, the sun has come out and the delightful fog has been transmogrified into a sticky humidity that is supposed to last for the next few days. So long cool winter, hello hot summer with high electric bills and sopping drives to work in my un-air-conditioned car.
I have to go to a party this weekend that I really, really do not want to. It is a 'surprise' party for a guy I grew up next door to named Brian. Brian was one of those friends who were friends by convenience of location; he lived next door. He was essentially an uninteresting egotistical perverted money grubbing kid who grew into an egotistical perverted money grubbing adult. Despite all those interesting attributes, he still manages to become the world's most boring person. The last time I hung with him all he could talk about was mortgage rates and insurance with the occasional racial epitaph tossed in. The only reason I am going is because my mother is a friend with his mother, who has been a bit lonely since his father died.
I cannot even imagine who is going to be there. As far as I know the guy has no friends. He has his Philippino mail order bride, and I suppose bits of her family. The only other guy I have met who was friends with Brian was some seedy Guido high-rolling security guard that I once met at Froggers, the story of which I outlined Here:
I was rather embarrassed when his mother started rattling off some names of some people for me to invite, most of whom I had not seen in almost ten years. A couple of the people did not even like Brian to begin with. I even asked what kind of present I should get because as far as I know the guy does not DO anything. His mother paused a moment and then said "He likes UCF...and...beer....".
That is all his own mother could come up with.
Thankfully my friend TJ, who knows Brian as well as I do, is going to stop by, something that I am going to owe him a deep favor for. I shudder at the fact that I might have had to gone alone and stood there between this mail order bride and the high rolling security guard with a little paper hat on my head while a tumbleweed blows through the room and Big Bri starts demanding presents. (Oh yes...he will demand presents).
I can already picture him in my head, grining and holding out his hand and bellowing out "Wheres my present!" followed by a loathsome gasping laugh he lets out whenever he says something he knows is obnoxious and insulting but he wants everyone to know he is 'just kidding'.
Sigh.
BTW, TJ, if you read this, for the love of god, don't tell Brian about the BBQ I am having on the 21st.
2026 Update
Dialing the infernal clock back 18 years to watch Ed dodge insurance paperwork, drown clones, and dread a surprise party.
Ah, 2008. A simpler hell: pay-per-view meant paying for one movie, not forty streaming subscriptions; health insurance fought you with paper letters instead of a login and a 'prior authorization' button that doesn't work; cars were merely hot, not alerting you that you left your emotional support water bottle in the back seat. Ed's blog is a museum of these vanished torments. He pays insurance for years, gets hurt once, and the company demands a diagram of his stupidity. Today they'd just deny the claim through an app and ask him to upload his roof fall as vertical video. And the movie: he watches The Prestige on PPV, frets over clone-drowning ethics, then goes back to reading in a sun room with a beer. The surprise party for Brian is the true time capsule — the obligation, the dread, the mother supplying 'UCF...and...beer' as a personality summary. No group chat, no evite, no 'we're all mirroring our feelings about this.' Just a paper hat and a tumbleweed. I miss the analog awkwardness, but I do not miss the humidity.
“2008 Ed, when you were drafting your party-day escape plan, did it ever cross your mind that Brian's wife might also be sitting in a sun room somewhere, reading a book and thanking whatever gods she believes in that she wasn't married to you? Or was it all just 'UCF...and...beer'?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2008 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I gotta admit that thought never once crossed my mind. I was too busy picturing myself trapped in that living room with a paper hat and a tumbler of warm punch, watching Big Bri bellow for presents. But now that you mention it, I kinda hope she's got a sun room somewhere, cracking open a cold one and reading a book and thanking whatever’s up there that she didn't end up with a guy who falls off roofs and spends his weekends painting a plywood boat. Honestly, that sounds like a fine outcome for everybody. I mean, I'm not exactly a catch, and if she's happy and I'm happy and Brian's happy demanding stuff, then maybe the whole thing works out. Still, I'd rather be in my own sun room with my own beer, and that's exactly where I'll be the second this shindig is over. UCF and beer, though. That's all his own mother could come up with. Droll, ain't it.
