GOOBLES?

Every once in a while I will be walking somewhere and think, "this seems like it would be a pretty good place to sleep if I was homeless". Not that I intend to ever be homeless, but I figure it can't hurt to have a plan just in case. However, one thing that I don't really have a concrete plan for yet is what I might put on my cardboard sign that I hold while milling around the freeway exit or outside 7-11. It seems that this is a pretty cutting-edge field in the landscape of being homeless, where innovation is heavily rewarded before it becomes adopted as industry standard. I'm thinking that the first guy that made the "It's For Beer" sign made a killing for the first couple of days before everyone else on his street adopted the "charmingly honest about my vices" approach. The thing is, it's probably not that people wanted to buy this gentleman a beer, but rather they were responding positively to the creative marketing effort he was employing.

I think the first sign I might try out would be the logical extension of the "It's For Beer" paradigm: "It's for her" with an arrow, and I would just hang out next to a prostitute all day. See, people would probably think, "I don't agree with his behavior, but I cannot deny that that guy is really honest, thus is probably the most worthy of my change", but in reality the joke would be on them because I'd probably use it to buy beer. Another thing I might try if I was one of those homeless dudes who has a dog would be to make a sign that said, "Need more ingredients for dog stew". I bet people would think it was a pretty good joke, chuckle, and give me a quarter or two, then a few minutes after they drove away the doubt would begin to creep in. Sign for outside a coffee shop? How about, "drip coffee instead of a latte could save you hundreds of dollars on an annual basis", then I could collect for my helpful money-saving tip when they exited the store. They would probably also appreciate the irony of receiving financial advice from a homeless guy and might kick in a little extra.

It is also entirely possible that the writing on the sign is completely irrelevant. Probably my first homeless project would be to build an abacus out of beer tops and coat hangers to perform some statistical analysis on the collective panhandling experience of my new colleagues. One guy in particular that I'd like to gather data from is the guy who operates the cardboard sign that reads "GOOBLES?" on the Greenlake off-ramp from I-5. Whether by the inherent lack of precision of his materials, or by poor stylistic choices and shoddy execution, it took me at least five minutes to figure out that it was probably intended to read "GOD BLESS". Since the "GOD BLESS" signage flavor is so ubiquitous, it would make an excellent control sample to base the specific performance of "GOOBLES?" on.

My gut would tell me that the brilliantly incomprehensible "GOOBLES?" should massively outperform the forgettable "GOD BLESS", for reasons not the least of which is the innovative quality of asking a question to inspire interaction with the end-user. I don't want to rely solely on my gut here, though, because if I'm wrong and the cleverness or uniqueness of the sign is irrelevant, I just wasted a dollar on a black marker that I could've put towards my next alcohol purchase. Kids, this is why studying statistical analysis is important.

We should barronk to tabo tuesday!!

From the opening of 'A Christmas Carol', by Charles Dickens: "There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate." I feel this is a pretty good format for the opening line of this story. With strategic word replacement, here is how my story is going to begin:

There is no doubt that 'Carpool' is in the dictionary. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

If you are not absolutely riveted by this introduction, you may choose to begin your reading adventure with a special edition "Alternate story beginning", which is pretty much exactly like the intended beginning, but for one important change:

[Special Edition Alternate Story Beginning] There is no doubt that 'Taco' is in the dictionary. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

If you do not believe me, you may see for yourself at dictionary.com that both carpool AND taco are actual words, and if you don't believe the internet either, you may choose to use your analog, flammable, paper dictionary to convince yourself that for once I am not lying to you. However, I am going to hazard a guess that your non-internet dictionary does not include as awesomely succinct of a definition for taco as "Mexican cookery".

Anyway, I find the "T9" predictive text feature on my cell phone to be amazingly handy for all of that intense tex'in that I do, and I am constantly amazed at how accurate it is, even for a lot of common names and places. Overall, I would have to grant "T9" the highly sought-after "pretty much awesome" rating. However, consider the situation in which you wish to enjoy discount tacos for a local sports bar's "Taco Tuesday" promotion, and you wish to consolidate transport among your colleagues to this event. A reasonable text message for this situation might be "Hey we should carpool to taco tuesday!!" Here's where the amazing power of T9 has a chance to save precious seconds to be used on tacos instead of pushing tiny buttons on your cellphone. After all, all of those words, as previously alluded to, ARE in the dictionary.

Eager for tacos, I watch as the magic T9 letters flow and unfold upon my cellphone screen:
I
If
Hey
Hey x
Hey we
Hey we s
Hey we pg
Hey we sin [who are you to judge, cell phone?]
Hey we shot
Hey we shoul
Hey we should
Hey we should a
Hey we should cc
Hey we should car
Hey we should cars
Hey we should carro
Hey we should carson
Hey we should barronk

At this point, I press the "+" key to advance to the logical next word in the T9 queue; Carpool. I press and press and press, but "barronk" has clenched it's iron fists upon the 2277665 number combination. Where is my "carpool"? Also, what the hell is "barronk"? Alas, my stalwart champion, dictionary.com, can provide no insight into this mysterious, sinister Barronk character, so I desperately turn to the greatest reference source ever devised by man: urbandictionary.com. Never before have I been denied a definition by the finest compilation of real and made-up combinations of letters available to humanity....

Until now.

Completely striking out on Barronk, I glumly resign to splitting "car" and "pool" so as to proceed with my important message. I continue:
Hey we should car pool to t
Hey we should car pool to u2
Hey we should car pool to tab
Hey we should car pool to tabo

Again, I press the "+" key to cycle to "taco", for SURELY taco is part of a dictionary that includes the word "barronk"...

Nope. Tabo it is. Again, dictionary.com lets me down, and I am forced once again to slum around in that wonderful seedy wasteland of urbandictionary.com. Unlike the failure with Barronk, however, urbandictionary comes through with the flying colors I have come to expect. Tabo, naturally, is a man with a small penis, and it even offers a suggestion for usage: "She couldn't even feel anything, he's a total tabo." THANK YOU URBANDICTIONARY!

What is my phone trying to tell me here? Why does it want me to communicate "Hey we should barronk to tabo tuesday!!"? Ordinarily, I would find this amusing and inconsequential, but I find it disturbing based on how common of a message this is. In fact, here is a graph of common text messages by usage patterns:



Clearly, subjecting 18% of it's T9 aided messages to a desperate plea for "tabo" is an indication that my phone has a problem. A sick, sick problem. And I'm still not sure what "barronk" is, but now it seems likely that it is some sort of dirty phone talk.

Anyone know of a good phone psychiatrist who might have some fringe techniques for scaring my phone straight?

Stir-fry or Stew, a MYSTERY

I have a mystery for you, detectives. I recently embarked on a journey to the grocery store for to obtain meats for my belly. I felt that pork was providing a strong argument for it's election to my innards, so I went to the deli to research my price and configuration options. I found a package of delicious-looking little chunks of former pig that seemed to fit all of the criteria I had assembled for my dinner, and was throwing it into my basket when I noticed that this meat came with a recommendation for it's usage: Great for Stir-fry Stew. Stew had been hand-written on the package with the same marker that had been used to cross out Stir-fry, a technique that I find lends a certain confidential-FBI-document-like touch. While it did take me a minute of angling the package to the light to decode the hidden stir-fry message, this was clearly sloppy document protection. The proper technique would have been to photocopy the blacked-out tag, thereby concealing the message forever in a pleasingly uniform black box.

I may not have gotten as far as deciding exactly how I was going to prepare the pork for it's journey into Stomachfornia, but I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be stew. The written word, a handwritten deli meat label included, has a powerful effect on me, so I began to second-guess that this was my meat soul-mate after all. I was about to dip my feet back in the pork pool when I noticed that ALL of the little chunky pork bits came with the same modified recommendation. clearly, this meat is Great for Stir-fry Stew only. 30 or so packages had been modified to carry this special message, and I couldn't help but wonder why someone would go through all of this trouble.

Admittedly, I am no cooking expert, but something tells me that there is not nearly as much difference in stir-fry pig and stew pig as this marker-wielding grocery employee would have me believe. Am I wrong? Perhaps there are vast cultural differences between Pigs of the Stew and Pigs of the Stir-fry, a constant rift that threatens the stability of our world. Has my sequesterment from the threads of current events left me ignorant as to the shifting control over our nation's delis, and the reckless power play by the House of Stew (Pig Chapter) that instigated this seemingly trivial relabeling job? Or does it have something to do with corn?

This seemed like a diversion, a dead end, so I took a step back in this mystery of mysteries. I stood in the deli section, letting the facts swim about my head like a dark ocean about fleshy, um, head-shaped crags. At this point in the pulp mystery novel version of my story, a sinister figure knocks me unconscious with a cunning blow from a salami or a roll of aluminum foil or a can of chili, and I awake to make an important connection that I had hitherto ignored. I waited, but no clarity-inspiring concussion ensued.

It does seem clear to me, though, that someone is trying to tell me something. Maybe someone is in trouble, and this is their message to the world, a desperate plea, a riddle in meat.

Help me, detectives, someone's life may be in your hands. Also I'm hungry.

LIFE: KaBloomers, Des-truc-tion!!

I am filing this under "Life", because death is a part of life, and this story deals with death. The death of a building. I have heard that death is really just a transition from one state to another. I think this is especially true for buildings, where death is merely a transition from being a Building to being a Pile.

One morning, I woke up, stretched, and looked out my bedroom window to find that sometime between Thursday morning and Friday morning the building behind my condo had undergone the transformation from fully-functioning building to fully-functioning pile. Check it out:



Awesome!

I stared dreamily at the pile for a bit before deciding that I needed to go investigate closer, to check out if there was anything awesome to score from this wreckage. I went up to the next street up to check out the pile from it's natural vantage point:



Hey! The fridge is totally winning the King of the Hill challenge! You would think that the pile's construction would be analogous with the original building's construction; you know, roof material on top, and so forth. So how did the fridge get up there? Did I just never notice that there was a refrigerator on the roof?

Also, it brings up another interesting point: Why was the refrigerator still in the building when it was demolished? Wouldn't you have thought to remove all of the non-attached stuff before you started recklessly bulldozing everything? This is better illustrated by this:



Dude! That's someone's TV! This makes me wonder if someone went out to grab some tacos or something, and came back to find their home totally converted to pile. Crap! How am I going to catch CSI:Miami now?!

Another great feature of this pile is the requisite pile of beer bottles:



If you look closely, you will find that not all of the empty bottles belong to the associated half-rack box! This means that multiple packages of Henry's were consumed to celebrate some element of this pile, and we are only seeing a tiny projection of this consumption onto our visible world.

What's great about drinkin' by this particular pile is that the Boxcar Alehouse is approximately twenty feet away. But no! I eschew the social acceptability of enjoying ice-cold brews served by an attractive waitstaff in the company of interesting people for sitting in the shadows of the messy remains of a crappy apartment building and pounding bottle after bottle of cheap local beer!

Alas that this aloofness is feigned, for I DO love me a twelver of Henry's Dark.

So at this point in my exploration I begin to circumnavigate the perimeter of the destruction, thinking that this is a pretty boring pile, TV aside, but lo! What is there to greet me on the north side but more evidence that this demolition was indeed in haste:



NOOOO! You left your dildo in the building! Now it is all covered in dirt and broken 2x4's! NOOOO!

You might be thinking that perhaps this device was planted on the scene after the actual demolition as a joke or something, but I poked it with a stick and confirmed that it is indeed half-buried in the rubble. Why would someone intentionally go through the trouble of submerging half of a dildo in the remains of a crappy apartment building?

I guess this is another one of life's mysteries.

Miracles of Modern Medicine!!

OK, so I was really sick last weekend. I think I was really sick because my body is so in tune with the universe that it can predict when I actually have interesting things going on, and swoops in to make sure I still know who's boss with the metaphysical equivalent of a bitch-slap. Anyway, even after an intense weekend of sleeping, eating saltines, and plotting revenge on my immune system, I wake up still feeling like crap on Monday. This is problematic because a) I actually really have to go to work and b) Explosions in the Sky is playing in the evening. Being that I have been unable to stay awake for longer than four hours at a time over the weekend, it occurs to me that endurance is going to be a potential problem. Also, being that I can't go ten seconds without blowing my nose or coughing, it simultaneously occurs to me that being closely packed into a warm damp crowd of other people is going to be a potential problem.

My first few snotty, sleepy hours of work only underscore these concerns, and even add the inspired flourish of a headache for good measure. After hacking through my pressing responsibilities at work in a bitter daze, I finally manage to peel myself away an hour early to rush home to feed my depraved sleep addiction. My trip home is like when a cartoon character falls in love and their eyes become throbbing hearts, except that instead of hearts my eyes are little throbbing beds, and instead of being in love I just really want to sleep. So actually, it's nothing like when cartoon characters fall in love. Except for the throbbing.

A couple of months ago, the building directly behind my condo switched careers from Professional Occupied Building to Professional Pile. The next stage of its strange life was a stunning transformation from Pile to Hole, and in recent weeks I have had the pleasure of witnessing the last link in the circle of life, which I like to call Phoenix Rising. In this gripping episode, a young and misguided but undeniably promising Hole learns that to succeed in this hard world, apparently you must belch forth the exact same building that was totally freaking destroyed three months ago. I call this Phoenix Rising because it is exactly like the ancient myth of the phoenix, a beautiful bird which bursts into flames every 500 years and is reborn from the ashes, except replace "beautiful bird" with "crappy apartment building", and "500 years" with "every 6 months or so".

Anyway, Phoenix Rising is currently in that stage of construction where a horde of workers swarm over every surface looking for something to shoot with their nail guns to appear busy. I'm pretty sure they are playing a game that I just haven't fully figured out the rules for yet. I think it's like Marco Polo except that instead of yelling "Marco" while blindfolded in a pool, the person who is "it" goes THWACK THWACK THWACK with the nail gun, and the other players, instead of answering "Polo", answer with a hearty THWACK THWACK THWACK of their own. Also, everybody is "it".

I lay in bed trying to simultaneously decode the finer strategic points of Thwarcko Thwackolo and maximize my afternoon sleeping opportunity, but I am just not a multitasker. Amazingly, however, the afternoon sun's gentle warmth and glow eventually mix with Phoenix Rising's fluttering wind of thwacks and grunts to concoct a fairly solid 20 minute nap. Upon rising from my painfully short sleep, I can finally begin to imagine the world in which I can stay awake long enough to make it through Explosions in the Sky, and maybe even actually enjoy myself. I drag my ass out of bed and head over to Capital Hill to meet up with the gang, now brimming with fresh confidence that I'm going to have a good time, but also still brimming with disgusting mucus.

After loading up my pockets with tissues, I join my peeps at a local drinking establishment where the time-honored process of "pre-funking" is being diligently practiced. Being sick, I opt out of my usual chain-boozing to suck down Coke refill after Coke refill while my colleagues and I swap hilarious anecdotes, spin enchanting tales of bravery and wit punctuated by thoughtful morals and keenly applicable life lessons, and call each other names. Although delicious and refreshing, the constant Coke stream also has a hydrating effect which makes my stuffed-upedness more of an immediate problem, and I begin to worry about the quantity of tissue I have in my pockets being adequate for this amazing amount of material my body is able to produce to attack my having a good time.

After repeatedly performing our amazing beer/Coke/fries disappearing tricks to the delight of our check-bearing waitress audience, we stumble over to Neumo's for the show. Now you must understand that not once throughout the entire day did I in any way crave delicious beer, even when displayed before me glinting in the pale afternoon light, arrayed in rainbow-edged shawls of streaming bubbles, playfully marbling the polished pub tables with shimmering golden reflections. As a matter of fact, the thought of beer was actually sort of repulsive. I like to think that this is also an indication of responsibility for my health, and a sign of commitment to the stay-hydrated, get-lots-of-rest mantra. Regardless of the method, all restraint separating me from beer was vaporized immediately upon entering Neumo's by the inescapable pull of the giant stubby bottles of Red Stripe beer. Giant stubby, you might be asking? That's right, while the giant Red Stripe is twice the size of normal Red Stripe, it maintains the original container's exact stubby proportions. Here is documented evidence from our first encounter:



In retrospect, it becomes obvious that the reason I felt this uncompromising pull toward the giant, two-handed stubby bottle was neither alcoholism nor gravity, as you may imagine. Rather, it was my body signaling to me what it needed to get better. Much like craving strange foods can be an indication you are lacking some sort of valuable nutrient found in those foods, evidently my body was lacking some sort of magical medicinal substance only found in 24oz stubby containers of Jamaican lager.

Ah the miracle of modern medicine! Can you believe that upon completing my prescribed dosage of barley-pop I felt great! Seriously, I didn't have to blow my nose again for the remainder of the night!

More remarkable proof of the completeness of my cure comes the next day, when I awake at my normal work hour on 4 hours of sleep, having a perfectly good excuse to call in sick to work. Ordinarily, even in the midst of being perfectly healthy, I seek endlessly in the murky labyrinths of morning logic for any excuse to stay in bed. However, with my health renewed by the miracle of medical science, I actually decide to voluntarily get up and head into work a few minutes early.

I feel a creeping sense of expectancy for most of the day, thinking that all of this energy is too good to be true and the other shoe is going to drop at any minute. Maybe God is going to show up and be like "Hey Grant, turns out I was casting a miracle on someone who actually needed it, but I, uh, missed and accidently granted you with Infinite Energy in delicious beer form! I'll need that back now..." But alas! I am amazingly productive at work, come home filled with delight at the beautiful weather, and am amazingly productive at home! Amazing!

Medicine, I will never doubt you again.