Buggin' out

About an hour ago, an enormous flying black-and-red-striped bug came from out of nowhere, flew toward my head, and landed on the computer. I ducked and ran out of the room, grabbed the flyswatter, and came back in to do battle. I was gone for two seconds, and the thing disappeared. I poked around for thirty minutes, trying to draw it out, but it seems to have exited as mysteriously as it entered. It looked like an exceedingly unfriendly, sting-happy kind of insect, and was the size of a Volvo or cruiserweight championship contender. I must remain on my guard all night in case it returns. I think I'll have some tequila with a couple squirts of Tabasco in it to sharpen my reflexes. Where is it?

(When I started writing this post, a tiny bug crawled out from under the keyboard and I smacked it with the flyswatter. At least I got to use it. It's always so unsatisfying when the flyswatter comes out and the bug goes away.)

UPDATE: At 1:33 a.m., I killed a large flying beetle. I think it was a different bug. This must be Insect Invasion Night.

Two words

It's Wrestling Post Saturday on Spacebeer and Can-Smashing Robot! Whoo!

All art is quite useless.
--Oscar Wilde

We didn't start the fire

Several months ago, I was interviewed for a city editor position at The Onion. I didn't get the job. My hideously brief five-minute interview in the lobby of a hotel and failure to receive a promised follow-up phone interview tipped me off that I had somehow failed to make a good impression. (Since I didn't get the chance to really make an impression at all, I've always wondered what I did wrong.) At the time, I was stuck in a depressingly horrible office job after a year of unemployment (from quitting a job that, though kind of a drag, was 140% better than the place I ended up), and my failure to get the Onion job made me feel hopeless and depressed. To make matters worse, the person who got the job was my arch-nemesis. I'll refrain from linking to his two worthless bands because that's what got me in trouble in the first place. You see, if this person were a Native American, his name would be Chief Googles Self. However, this period of depression and hopelessness led to my decision to go back to school, turn my English minor into a major, and get a teaching certificate. I am glad I didn't get that job I really, really wanted so, so badly. I will be much happier performing a task that is necessary, valuable, and potentially rewarding for myself and the community than I would be pretending to care about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah ("You don't happen to be a David Byrne fan, by any chance?"). Even if I fail miserably at being a teacher, at least I won't be filling the world with more pointless babble.

To illustrate my point, here are two questions asked by Chief Googles Self, the man who is better than me, in his interview with rock hack Britt Daniel of Spoon in this week's A.V. Club.
"Are you incapable of making a bad album?"
"When you say, 'You got no fear of the underdog/That's why you will not survive,' are you the underdog, or are you the one in fear of the underdog?"

Quick, give this man a Pulitzer!

(This post brought to you by Small Petty Man, Inc. and the Lemons Into Lemonade Society.)

Too many cooks

Remember when David Letterman was on NBC, and his band played with every single musical guest, no matter how incongruous? What was up with that? I haven't seen many Letterman shows since I was 18 or 19, but I think they stopped doing this.

I give up

I was about 1/58 of the way through a post, but wisely gave up when I realized the topic I picked was enormously huge and unfathomable and suitable only as the basis for a fifty-volume memoir. What kind of idiot tries to do that all at once on his fourth drink of the night the night before the last day at his job? Whoo!

One thing I do want to salvage from that post is the phrase "the thing I love about teenagers is the simultaneous openness to everything and complete lack of quality control." To illustrate this point, allow me to mention some bands from my record collection, circa then:


Miles Davis
Spin Doctors
Guided By Voices
Better Than Ezra
Pavement
Counting Crows
Minutemen
Alice in Chains
The Replacements
24-7 Spyz
Mudhoney

To cut myself some slack, I grew up in a town of 1,500 people four hours from the nearest city with no access to MTV. But I'm still baffled. How could I be so wrong, and yet so right? (By this I mean, how could I like all these other bands, when the only one worth a damn is Spin Doctors?)

Access: Wood

I was reading and drinking beer last night with the TV on for a multimedia thrill ride, and "Access Hollywood" came on. Tempted to turn it off when the top story was Eva Longoria's wedding, I somehow found the inner strength to continue. After all, if I "weathered an era in pop culture called Bennifer, and [I] weathered it with strength," I could certainly make it through this five-minute segment. I'm glad I did. I think the dullards at "Access Hollywood" were too dim to have deliberately orchestrated this stroke of genius, so, even more delightfully, it appears to have been unintentional: The woman they sent to interview Hugh Hefner was named Cynthia Woodcock.

Note: Since this is a woman's name, I am technically not breaking my no-swearing-in-July rule.

Men first feel the prick of necessity, then the attraction of utility: next they become aware of convenience, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.
-- Giambattista Vico