It's Thursday again. There are too many Thursdays in life.
Yesterday at lunch I picked up a new MP3 player because I have not the faintest clue as to what happened to my old one. MP3 gnomes must have made off with it. Anyways K-mart had a 256 meg RCA I-river that had been marked down to 40 bucks. Deciding I probably would not get a better deal elsewhere, I snagged it. I spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out where the battery goes before I realized it's built in and recharge itself off of the USB port. I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand it's easy and convenient, on the other hand if it dies on me I have to recharge again, I cannot simply pop in another battery. So, we'll see how that works out.
I found myself at Wal-Mart again last night. I did not even know I was going there. I just ended up there. Wal-Mart is evil like that. However, Wal-Mart is a lot more tolerable if you wear a pair of headphones while you do your shopping. You don't have to hear all the moans of the damned around you. My shopping went smoothly except at one point when some bug-eyed old lady asked me to put a 24 pack of beer in her cart because she could not lift it up herself. Having been a cripple myself last week, I felt her pain and helped her out.
I still have not slept in my bed. It just seems too soft and bowl-shaped. I am pretty much all healed up now except for a couple of ribs, or the muscles on the ribs. If I take a sudden deep breath I can feet it stab, and when I try to lay down on something soft I can feel them being crushed my their own weight. It sucks, but at least I don't groan out in pain when I squat down to take a dump anymore.
Ghost hunters blew last night. However, it did make me want to visit Colorado. That hotel the shining was based off of was very nice, and the way it was settled right into the mountainside was awesome. Who knows, perhaps one day.
I had a strange dream early this morning where I went in for laser eye surgery and they screwed up and it left my eyeball dangling out of it's socket. It was halfway deflated to boot. I do not know what brought that on.
I have been utterly fascinated by that ancient cave they uncovered in Israel. Deep down under layers of rock, cut off from the world for millions of years, a tiny dark ecosystem. That is the sort of cave that ancient monsters come crawling out of. I have been trying to find more information on it, but all I have seen so far is AP news stories. You can never trust those for scientific discoveries. They want more sensation than fact. Like those Bolivian pyramids they were touting a while back.
To cancel out today's Thursday blah's I am going to go to the Almoa cinema grill tonight and get beer, wings and watch X-men. Hooray for me.
2026 Update
Let me dial the machine back to a Thursday when a grown man bought a 256-meg MP3 player and blamed gnomes.
Ah, 2006. A lost civilization where Kmart sold MP3 players for forty dollars and a built-in battery was considered a vexing novelty. Today, that 256 megabytes wouldn't hold one song, and the idea of buying a separate gadget just to play music seems almost pagan. Kmart has faded to a ghost; Wal-Mart patrols on with self-checkout crusades, though the moans of the damned are now muffled by personal earbuds while we stare at phones in carts. Your headphones trick was prophetic, only now everyone wears them, not to escape the shrieking of retail but to dodge their own podcasts. The built-in battery? It won, completely. We all carry sealed bricks that need recharging, and no one can pop in a spare, and we thank them for it. The cave story would have been delivered through an endless scroll of fresh content, ancient monsters reduced to clickbait. Watching X-Men and wings at a cinema grill — that's now a whole date-night economy with reclining seats and a rule about not talking. Even your eyeball dream feels quaint; nowadays the machines could just record everything you see and sell it back to you.
“2006 Ed, did you ever find a manual for that RCA I-river, or did you just let the MP3 gnomes win and spend another 20 minutes hunting for a battery that isn't there?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you'd think I'd have learned, but no. I never found a manual, and the MP3 gnomes are still laughing at me from wherever they hide. I figured the thing out the same way I figure out most modern junk: by jabbing at buttons until something beeped or blinked. That built-in battery still gives me the willies, though. Every time I plug it into the USB port I half expect it to catch fire or start whispering secrets from the Mothership. And yeah, I've caught myself patting my pockets for a spare battery that doesn't exist. Old habits die hard, even in the future age of 2006. I reckon if the gnomes ever show up again, I'll just hand 'em the damn thing and let them fight over it. For now, it plays my tunes, and that's good enough for a Thursday.
