Spring forward! Set your clocks! Spin your watch! Although daylight savings times brings a groan to a vast portion of society, I for one welcome it. It would be nice to have a little more sunlight after work. Before work? Who cares? I can drive to work in pitch darkness for all I care, however when I spend all day in a windowless room and then get home only to have less than an hour of sunlight left then life sucks just a little bit more. Oh sure, I love the next as much as the next ghoul, but I cannot mow my lawn in the dark. Not very well at any rate.
Speaking of my lawn, I was wandering around it yesterday picking up the garbage that blows on it. Candy wrappers, losing lotto tickets, empty crack bags, and all the normal flotsam of the ghetto that washes up upon my lawn. As I was tossing the last few bits of crap into the walmart bag I was carrying around, I heard a hooting off in the distance. I looked up and saw scary retard bobbing down the road towards me.
I think I have mentioned this guy before, some local village idiot. I see him wandering around town all the time. He is clearly mentally challenged, and I call him scary retard because he looks like the kind of guy who would break a kittens neck and then carry around the corpse for a few days. I see him sometimes when I drive to work; he always spied me out and waves happily to me with a hopeful look on his face. I never wave back, or make eye contact.
This guy has a very distinctive walk. He is quite round, which makes me wonder what he eats considering that every time I see him he is walking, and he moves with a slow but purposeful rolling gait with a slight bounce to it. It gives the illusion that he is walking underwater, or on the moon. Anyways I spied out his walk before I even recognized who it was. Scary Retard saw me look up and hooted out happily. I just knew he was going to wander over and try to be my friend. The thought of Scary Retards knowing where I lived sent chills down my spine. I could just see him sometime in the future, banging on my windows and crying out 'Freeeeiiieeend!'.
Before he got any closer, I quickly scooted back inside my house. I peered out through my blinds at him. He hobbled up to the crossroad in front of my house, and spent a moment in deep though, his lower lip sticking out as the slow wheels of the mentally challenged churned in his head in an effort to crank out a coherent thought. Finally, he turned in the opposite direction of my house and wandered down the lane. I breathed out a sigh of relief.
Speaking of retarded things, I was making myself some rice crispies over the weekend. I have not made these in ages and I peered gleefully into the pot as I mixed up a big mess of marshmallows and butter and generic rice crispies. Most men usually have a mother or a girlfriend or a wife to stop them from doing stupid things in the kitchen, however since I live alone and wild with no shrill estrogen-based warnings, I decided to stick a big spoonful of the still-hot crispy mess into my mouth. Quite naturally it started to burn. Much to my horror, it was stuck to my face and I could not simply spit it out. It was like some sort of sweet buttery napalm stuck around my mouth. I managed to wipe it off with a quickly-wetted paper town, but the lesson had been learned.
I changed a doorknob in my living room on Sunday. This does not sound like much of an accomplishment, however I was thrilled. The doorknob had simply died on me a while back. As a result if I wanted to shut the door leading from my living room to the sunroom, something I like to do at night since I sit around in my underwear, I have to shut the door and engage the latch. However, once the latch is in place, the door cannot be opened again unless I slipped a butter knife down into the latch and popped it out. I have been doing that for over a month now. It's particularly annoying at night when I have to go to the bathroom located on that side of the house and I have to fumble about to pop the latch. Sunday while I was rooting through some junk in my garage, I found a doorknob. I spent 20 minutes or so installing it and it worked perfectly. Behold! The door! Like magic it can close AND open at the mere flick of a knob! It's like living in the future!
Sunday I rode my bike around town because it was such a beautiful day out. I was pedaling down the street near a local pub by the name of 'The West End'. I was amused to see a small fire out front. One of the oil-powered tiki torches they have out front had caught on fire. One of the bar workers had come out and poured a glass of water on it. Naturally this just caused the oil to run down the torch to the ground and start flaring up. Some girl who worked there started to rather unhelpfully pelt the fire with ice cubes from her drink. Finally, as the fire started to spread out and grow larger, someone finally came out with a fire extinguisher. Still, it was fun to watch.
I made another wave vessel form an old black and white television. This one came out rather well. I sprayed the screen with blue stained glass paint, and it gives the waveform a nice blue sheen. Below is a rather crappy video of it in action. I need to take a better photo so you can see the eyeball sticking out of it better.
http://i19.ebayimg.com/02/i/000/91/ac/c664_1.JPG
2026 Update
I'm dialing the machine to a 2007 of butter-knife doorknobs, marshmallow napalm, and neighborly terror.
Dialing back to 2007, where daylight saving was still a manual ritual and a broken doorknob meant a month of butter-knife surgery. I love this post because it's a museum of vanished mundanities: you set clocks by hand, you mowed your own lawn, you went through piles of windblown lottery tickets and crack baggies and thought 'ghetto' was a personality trait. The technology was primitive—a doorknob found in a garage is 'living in the future.' Now you'd buy a smart lock and argue with an app. If a tiki torch caught fire at a pub, twenty phones would go up before anyone found an extinguisher; in 2007, it was just slapstick with ice cubes. And the neighbor: you treated a mentally challenged man's happy hello as a horror-movie invasion. That casual dehumanization aged worse than a CRT television painted blue. The era had its charms—no subscriptions, no doorbell cameras watching you peer through blinds—but I'd trade every blue waveform for a little basic human decency.
“2007 Ed, when you saw that neighbor hoot and happily wave, why did you sprint inside to watch through blinds and call him horrible names, instead of just waving back—did being alone with a butter-knife doorknob for a month make you forget that friendliness isn't a home invasion?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you got me. The butter-knife doorknob probably did something to my brain, all that fumbling in the dark just to pee. But I think it's simpler than that: I'm not good with people, especially folks who hoot and wave like we've been best friends for years. It ain't that I think friendliness is a home invasion, it's that I got a real vivid imagination and once I picture that fella banging on my window at 2 a.m. yelling 'Freeeeiiieeend!' I can't unsee it. Sure, waving back costs nothing. But then he might take it as an invitation, and next thing you know he's helping me mow the lawn and I'm making small talk about love bugs. That's my nightmare. So yeah, I hid. I'm a coward and I'm okay with that. The doorknob works now, though. One less excuse for being a hermit.
