Lets see, what sort of inane drivel can I dream up today...
So, it's been hot out. Everyone knows that. In fact it is such widespread knowledge that if you walk in a building and loudly proclaim 'it's hot out there!' they will give you the same look as if you had said 'I pull up my pants when I'm finished taking a dump!' My own personal gripe is probably not such much the heat as it is the sunlight. Yeah, it's hot. I have no A/C in my car so I get to sit in afternoon traffic sweltering away like a nutty buddy carelessly tossed on the sidewalk. However, I can put up with the heat, and I do not mind sweating. It's the sunlight that gets me.
There are no windows in my office. Some of the offices have windows, mine does not. Thus I spend my entire day bathing in low intensity fluorescent light. When I walk out into the summer daylight, the sunbeams down a searing bright white light. It's like I walked into the closet in 'poltergeist'. Even when I put on my sunglasses I end up squinting. I swear I can actually feel the photons thudding into my freckles. Thus I drive home in miserable hot traffic, my broken a/c blowing hot air on me in a feeble hope that at least moving the air around will cool things off.
Well, that is my mindless complaint for the day. Yeah, I know, children are starving in Africa and people are blowing each other up in the Middle East and Ed wants to complain about how hot it is.
I finished Gaiman's 'Neverwhere'. Fun book. Last night I started his new book 'Anansi boys'. It seems good so far. I like his easy, flowing writing style. It never gets dull. I still want to get the video series for 'Neverwhere'. I was eyeballing a new netflix clone called 'Intelliflix'. Interesting service. On top of movies they also have video games and pr0n. Also, instead of monthly payments, you also have the choice of pre-paying up to a year if you feel like it. True, they have fewer titles than netflix, but they still have quite a bit, and it might be fun to get a game once in a while. I might check them out.
Last night when I was reading I had my a/c blowing but it was still hot and stuffy in my house. I decided to take a bath. A cold bath. It felt nice, easing into the cool water. I soaked for a bit and read my book, but then I started hearing some weird thumps. They began to get louder. I could actually feel the vibrations in the tub. It sounded like someone was trying to rip a hole in the front of my house with a sledge hammer. Finally, disturbed and annoyed, I got out of the tub and dressed. I wandered outside. Turns out it was just Alan throwing logs into the back of my truck. He pointed at me and laughed "That's two nights you got your bath interrupted!". Ass.
No real plans for the weekend at the moment. Just putter around the house, I suppose. I might look around to see if there is anything interesting going on, but to be honest I feel a hermit weekend coming up. I'll have to garnish it with a bottle of wine and a bag of Doritos.
2026 Update
Time machine wheezes to July 2006, where Ed's sworn enemy is sunlight and his bath is under siege by logs.
Ah, July 2006. The halcyon days when a machine could be called a 'netflix clone' and also rent you pornography. Now we have sixteen streaming subscriptions and still nothing to watch. Ed's windowless office is a relic, replaced by open-plan cathedrals of noise and gray laminate, or by bedroom-desk setups where the only light is whichever Zoom tile is speaking. His car without A/C? Today every vehicle has climate control, heated everything, and a screen that nags you about your phone, yet we still sweat through traffic and complain just as loudly. The cold bath interrupted by a neighbor chunking logs is practically a performance-art piece now; we'd film it, post it, and mourn the interruption only if it ruined the lighting. And books? Gaiman's 'Anansi Boys' would be an audiobook on your phone, half-listened to at 1.5 speed while skipping the occasional chapter because your attention is tinnier than Ed's broken A/C. The world improved, Ed, but the complaints just got better ventilated.
“2006 Ed, why did you interrupt your own cold bath to investigate thumping instead of assuming it was demons and lying very still, and did you ever check out Intelliflix's video-game rental or just the 'pr0n' portion?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, first off, demons don’t thump. They whisper, they make your cat stare at a blank wall, and they make the air get heavy. A thump with vibrations through the tub means somebody outside is doing something loud and stupid, and in my neighborhood that’s usually Alan. Also, I was in cold bathwater and my book was getting damp, so I wasn’t about to lie there pretending I didn’t hear it. I went out, got called an ass, came back in. As for Intelliflix, I did eyeball the video games, but my old laptop struggles with solitaire, so really they’d be wasted on me. The pr0n portion? Let’s just say a man does his research. But I never signed up, mainly because I still owe my sister a phone call and I have a bag of Doritos with my name on it.
