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 does 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
I'm dialing 19 years back: insurance forms, drowned clones, and a surprise party for a human yawn.
Ed, 2007 was a special museum of burdens. Health insurance still arrived as paper letters demanding you explain your own injuries like a courtroom deposition; now the letters are just portals inside an app that refuses to give you a human. PPV meant one overpriced movie at a scheduled hour, not a subscription to seven overlapping streaming services. The Prestige's central machine—a teleportation device that drowns its own duplicate—probably felt like a wild fantasy. Now my phone duplicates me into the cloud every five seconds and the ethical headaches are just Tuesday. Your sun-room beer in the rain sounds lovely, but I can't even sit outside without wondering whether the delivery app is going to ping me. The humid drive in an un-air-conditioned car—that relic still exists, but now the car also nags you about a subscription for heated seats. And calling Brian's wife a mail-order bride was exactly the casual 2007 gutter-talk we no longer allow. The surprise party remains undefeated as a social trap, except we also have group texts planning them in front of everyone.
“2007 Ed, you spent all those words on a machine that drowns clones and a party you dreaded, but you still went—was your mother's loneliness worth re-entering Brian's orbit, and did TJ's presence actually save the night?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: So, yeah, I went. Egads, I went. My mother's lonely, and that trumps my own misery every time, even when the misery involves Brian and his gasping laugh and a gift bag full of UCF koozies. The party was every bit as awkward as I feared, with that security guard and the tumbleweed vibe, but TJ showed up like a lighthouse in a sea of bad cologne and mortgage talk. He kept me anchored in the corner, made sure my beer stayed full, and gave me a running commentary on Brian's present-demanding ritual. So yes, it was worth it, because my mom got to see me there being a good neighbor's son, and I got to leave with my sanity mostly intact. TJ, if you're reading this, I still owe you that deep favor, and no, I didn't tell Brian about the BBQ. (The BBQ is safe. The BBQ is sacred.)
