I have been woefully short on blogs the past week or so because, frankly nothing very exciting has been going on. This distresses me a bit, however I decided it was simply a slow period and its now over. It happens to the best of us.
A few things have turned me into a boring lump as of late. One of them is my money situation. A long story short, I had received money from a government agency when I went to college. Several years later they decided that I did not really desrve this money, and wanted it back. I was originally making payments of 50 dollars a month, not too bad. But then I accidentally missed a payment and they decided to dock my work pay. They quadrupled my payments and are yanking an astonishing 400 dollars a month out of my paycheck. This is simply way too much. And it sucks. It's like child support without the satisfaction of beating my kids. For that kind of money I could be making payments on a sports car. I need to set up an appointment sometime to see if I can get it reduced. But it seriously sucks and frankly it depresses me. I should move to another country.
Another thing has been the heat. I have bitched about this on and off however that does not reduce the reality of the situation. Its not just the heat and the sweltering humidity, it's the blatant sunlight. I am a red head and thus have very pale skin. When I go outside this time of year I swear I can feel the sun pressing down on my exposed skin. Mix that in with the fact that I do not own a car with air conditioning, it makes me loath to go outside when the sun is in full force. I simper and whimper and crawl back inside my house where I hide in the shadows. I am looking forward to the earth cooling off. Perhaps one day I will move to a milder climate. Florida is no place for red heads.
Add into this mix my satellite television. I have a gray market Korean sat box that feeds me all the channels. When I am hiding from the sun the television has been sucking me into my couch a feeding me a myriad of brain numbing movies. It seems that I wander away for a few moments on some errand only to find myself perched again into the ass groove of my couch watching 'The grudge 2' or 'house on haunted hill'. It is resulting in a bit of cabin fever. Last night my exciting Saturday night consisted of watching horror movies and swigging from a bottle of apple brandy. For dinner I had a couple of 'coneys' my sister brought back from her trip up north. For those that do not know, conies are some sort of spicy white hot dog. For whatever reason they do not sell them in the south, so a trip up north by a member of my family usually includes bringing a number of these things back. Although they are tasty, a meal of apple brandy, water, and spicy hot dogs leads to some interesting bowl movements the next morning. By 'interesting' I mean 'regretful' and 'daaaymn'.
Other going ons:
My desktop computer died on me. I am freaking out a bit because I have a couple of years of digital photos on there that I never backed up and am loathed to lose. This irritates me to the point that I have not even sat down to begin working on fixing it. If I lose those photos ill be upset.
As for my dating life, I am starting to believe I am cursed. One girl I was trying to take out ended up in the hospital getting half of her stomach cut out. Another cute one that cropped up ended up getting pneumonia. As a result my 'dating' life has consisted of half-felt promises to meet up in the next day or so that never manifests due to ailments. So remember this ladies; if you go on a date with Ed you are doomed. Doooomed.
I had a number of strange dreams last night. I occasionally have dreams that I am driving cars that I have owned in my past. Usually it's my old VW bus. However, last night I had a dream that I realized I still owned my Chevette. In high school I owned a ratty brown Chevette. This car was originally bought by my friend TJ's step dad. He had bought it for TJ's sister, who had promptly declared it 'too icky' to drive. I had recently lost a car and needed a new one, so I offered to buy it from TJ's step dad for a grand sum of $350. He gave it to me right away and I paid it off with a few dozen payments of about 40 dollars or so, gleaned from my paycheck as a dishwasher at Perkins. I think he was just happy to get it out of his driveway. The car had once belonged to a doctor and had an artificial human hip bone for a gear stick. I quickly outfitted the inside paneling with Astroturf and big red fuzzy seat covers. I drove it for a year or two until one night I was driving home from my girlfriend's house when the radiator water ran out and the engine overheated and fused together. End of the Chevette.
Last night I dreamed I still owned it. It turns out that all these years it had been left sitting in front of the house that my friend Preston Easterday had lived in with his folks back in high school. In my dream I walked over there and sure enough there was my old chevette, as well as my computer chair from college.
My computer chair from college was some big high-backed executive chair that I had fished out of someone's garbage. I had decorated the fabric of the chair with t-shirt paint, drawing stars and arcane symbols and a big ED on the top with lightning bolts around it. For some reason this gave the deaf people who visited my apartment an almost superstitious fear of the chair. If I would pop in the apartment from classes and some deaf people were visiting my roommate and one of them was sitting in my chair, they would immediately leap up and offer a string of profound apologies that they were sitting in MY chair, even though I never once disputed any sort of special possessiveness over the chair.
Anyways, in my dream, there was my old car and my old chair, sitting outside of Prestons house all these years. I did not care about the chair but I hopped in my chevette and was pleased to see it immediately crank to life. It even had the fuzzy red seat covers and the faint sour smell left over when some black dude who was pissed that I would not give my gold ring got his revenge by hiding half a watermelon in my back seat that ended up putrefying over the course of a couple of weeks. Good old chevette.
In another dream I had I was living in some sort of Post Captain Tripps like world with very few survivors. I had somehow gotten it into my head to go to the Sanford zoo and free all the animals. I had a big pair of bolt cutters and was cutting the cages open. I started by freeing the birds and monkeys and other somewhat harmless animals first. However when I cut open the enclosure to the baby hippo I realized I had also set the cheetahs free. They did not outright attack me, however they were lazily following me around the park as I freed other animals. Pretty soon I got nervous as they formed up a pack and I knew they were ready to pounce. I ended up going into one of the zoo's employee buildings and started looking for a gun. For some reason it made a lot of sense to me.. zoo's must have one or two guns laying around, right? The rest of the dream consisted of me opening cabinets and rooting through piles of junk as I tried to find a gun. The entire time the cheetahs were pacing back and forth on the roof.
I think today I might try to brave the sun for a bit, if only for my own mental health.
2026 Update
Firing up the infernal machine for September 2007: Florida sun, a Korean satellite box, and Ed’s couch-shaped destiny.
Nineteen years on, this post is a relic from an age when “gray market Korean sat box” was a personality trait and not just a streaming service’s twelfth tier. The $400 garnishment still lands like a personal haunting, but the machinery around it is now a labyrinth of apps, portals, and automated forbearance loops. Meanwhile the world Ed is hiding from has changed: the sun hasn’t gotten friendlier — Florida is still a damp sauna with a parking problem — but we now live in the era of cloud backups, where two years of photos only die if you stop paying a subscription. The satellite box is quaint; today it would be a password-shared account and a cease-and-desist. And that Chevette with the Astroturf panels? It’s been replaced by a car that beeps at you for drifting, but you cannot shift gears with a human hip bone anymore. Honestly, Ed, your instincts were eternal: hide inside, drink something regrettable, scream at the heat, dream about zoo cheetahs. The world just made it more expensive and more recorded.
“2007 Ed, after all those cheetahs on the roof and the dream Chevette firing up like nothing happened, did you ever go back for that hand-painted chair, or did you leave it to haunt your high-school friend’s lawn into the next century?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, I have to admit I never went back for that chair. In the dream I barely gave it a second glance, just hopped into the Chevette and let it roar back to life like it had been waiting for me. That chair can haunt Preston’s front lawn until the next ice age for all I care. I mean, sure, I painted stars and lightning bolts on it, and it had that weird power over deaf visitors, but it was garbage when I found it and it’s garbage now. If anything, I figure it’s sort of a monument to my college years. Someone else can drag it off and wonder what kind of lunatic owned it. Me, I got my dream car back for a minute, and that was enough. The real Chevette died years ago; I’m not about to start hauling old furniture around Sanford on my bike.
