Creeped the Fuck Out

I don't know if you're like me and watch a variety of news programs. In particular, I'm a fan of Robin Meade and her Morning Express show on HLN, because she's nice and charming (and very attractive), and I can get my news items in easily digestible bits. They do, however, linger on the Casey Anthony trial quite a bit. I was actually unfamiliar with the case until three or four weeks ago when I started catching their everyday coverage.

It's kind of a grisly thing, what she's accused of, and it's creepy ... but the more I started watching the coverage, the more creeped out I got. There's just something that strikes me a little weird about the whole deal.




Um ....




Uh ....

You ever have that thing where two random things collide in your head and suddenly there's a connection so obvious that you can't believe you never noticed it before? That's kind of how I ended up with my modern take on the Nice Lady and all that. Well, I was listening to the details of the trial, and ....





Well, it's just unmistakeable. It's worth noting that my mom and my dad, both, independantly of me AND of each other made this same connection.




I'll pause here while I feel a little sick to my stomach.





Now, if there's ever any kind of doubt whatsoever that I did the right thing in going to Florida and bringing Sky (and Allison) back with me, let's take a look at the two people represented in those pictures. There's really a hair's difference between them. I could only use pictures from the limited supply available to me, but they even look alike for god's sake. There are pictures in my head, that I've seen, of my ex within the past couple months, and they could pass as sisters.

When I first got to Florida, and Sky woke up and saw me, she was not only very very happy, but I would say she was even relieved to see me. I was there to save her, and she knew that. Yes, this is just conjecture in hindsight ... but I can remember the look in her eye as clear as if it was this morning.

If I hadn't gone after her, something like what happened to Caylee Anthony could have happened. If not to the one, then definitely to the other.

Something like that could have happened.





I believe this in my bones. You can not tell me otherwise.

Something like that would have happened.

Love, Georgia Style

The following post is a little bit self-serving, but as this is my blog I suppose I'm entitled. I'm going to transcribe a conversation I had with Jen this afternoon through text messaging. While the subject matter may seem vile and gross to the rest of you, it is something that I will be chuckling over for a good long time. I don't have the space in my phone to save all these texts, but I do have this handy blog.

Yes, by the way, this is the same Jen who was heavily featured in the early days of this blog. In retrospect, I believe I was a little too harsh with her overall in my posts. Since then, she and I have worked out our old differences to the point where she is now one of the best friends I have (in the top 5). After all, it's not like she Myszkowsied me after the fact. Not to mention that Amy set the bar so high on SCREWING ME OVER that it's forced me to re-evaluate *everything* that's come before, up to and including my first ex-wife -- She Who Will Not Be Named. I've had some bad ones, yes, it's true. But Amy turned it up to 11.

Ok, speaking of her ...

Me: Wait. Who fucked who now?

Jen: Jasper may have possibly FUCKED, HAD SEX WITH HIS SISTER BY BLOOD. LMAO. I guess even his mom asked him.

Me: LOL. Now Amy can get her threesome.

Jen: Oh she got that before Jasper with two guys and again with that Gary guy and his wife. She admitted being a whore the other day.

Me: Well, we knew that anyway.

Jen: Yeah. Guess Amy noticed that his sis kept grabbing his dink and rubbing her ass on him and yeah OMG that was the funniest shit ever when she told me.

Jen: She goes IDK why his sis doesn't like me. I told her to stop fucking her boyfriend.

Me: Ahahahaha.

Jen: I knew that girl was fucked in the head but wow that blew my mind. She goes IDK how I feel about sharing my man with his sister. WTF?

Me: I'm all kinds of creeped out now.

Jen: You're creeped out? I had to hear it.

Me: She's a blue ribbon prize all right.

Jen: She calls me crying. I think Jasper cheated on me, so I'm ready with the he's an ass speech. Then she says yeah, his sister. I didn't know what to say so I busted out laughing. I couldn't help it. It was that or vomit and I'd lose service if I ran to the bathroom.

Jen: Haven't heard from her since.

Me: This is some epic twisted shit.

Jen: Dude what's twisted is I said leave him, she goes I love him!

Jen: I'll admit I'm somewhat forgiving with cheaters, but family members, mine or theirs, is a deal breaker.

Me: Oh she does not want me to know about this.

Jen: I wouldn't have told ANYONE. I would have just said it didn't work out. How hard up do you have to be?

Me: Yeah, she could come back and beg me, but I'm just repulsed by her now.


From here is got back to regular gossiping about her whorishness. This was the good stuff, over which I'll be chuckling for years to come.

Stormwatch

While watching the news lately I couldn't help but notice that a shitload of really big scary tornadoes are ripping up the south, actually not all that far away from where I would have been living. As far as I know, they haven't really hit the Florida panhandle, which is where I almost got stuck, but they would have been just close enough to make me really worried and a little panicky. I like watching the fury of nature as much as anyone, but I prefer it to be from the safety of my television set.*


*except for that one time Dan and I foolishly went storm chasing, although nothing really happened then either.

Those twisters, though, are destroying Alabama and hit Georgia pretty hard, too. At least parts of Georgia. While watching the news on this I couldn't help but wonder ...


why couldn't they have come through about 100 miles further south?








What? Like she doesn't deserve to have a house dropped on her.

Planningses

So I was chatting with my bud Becky on Facebook, and we were talking about writing and other creative meanderings, which inspired me enough to come dig this blog up and poke around in its innards a bit. Some thoughts:

--Of course, I immediately got sucked right into these old posts. This is not surprising as I'm a huge mark for my own writing sometimes. It's really pretty shameless.

--I also came across some cringe-worthy moments inside of a few posts that are horribly ironic in hindsight. Given that they were written in 2008 (pre-Amy), I'm sure there's a lot more where that came from.

--I came in specifically to look for the Kudoverse posts. I'm very happy that some of the ones I was hoping to find were here. I'm more than a little pissed that some of the ones I was hoping to find are lost forever.

I really miss blogging. I'm not sure if I'm going to do it here or elsewhere, but I have to do it somewhere.

The Writing Blues

I want to do more with my life.

This is, of course, about the writing. I want to be a writer. I want to have things published. I want other people to read my stuff. It's not all just about the one thing you've all heard about ad nauseum, though.

Yes, it is in part about the book. I've been working on the damn thing for so long that I'm afraid now that it'll never be finished. Then again, it's been shelved for quite a while, too. It doesn't have anything to do with not prioritizing it due to my being in a relationship, before anyone thinks that, because the truth is I haven't worked on it steadily since before Amy and I got together. In fact, if you rememeber back to when my other laptop fizzled out on me, that's pretty much when the juice ran out. I have worked on it since, but it's just been herky jerky here and there stuff.

I'm not sure if my committment to THAT book is waning or what. The reasons that I felt were so important to write that book that way and have it come out to that conclusion are nowhere near as compelling to me as they used to be, and haven't been for years. As someone once said: Living in the past; there's no future in it. And for many many varied reasons I'm going to decline to talk about, I'm not feeling all of the story nearly like I used to. I love the characters and the basic plotline, but a good chunk of the thing is leaving me cold. And that's no way to write a novel.

You are not going to want to hear this, but I have to try and alter things so that I am once again writing a book that I give a shit about. What that means .... we'll see.

However, there are other things I'd like to do as well. I would love to have a job writing about either wrestling or comic books online and get paid to do so. I have gone so far as to look into how I can do this. I applied at Examiner.com, and got a good response to my writing, but they want me to somehow tie in my writing to some kind of "local angle" or such, and I haven't quite wrapped my head around how to do that yet. And that has led to me feeling somewhat discouraged. I know that gig is something I could do well and often, but I have to get hired first.

There's another site, too, where I think I could do well, but when filling out the application I got to the part where they want two writing samples of about 600 words or so ... and I blanked. Complete writer's block. And when I get to the point where I can't even pull 600 words out of my ass on a subject I enjoy so much, I know I'm in some deep trouble. Maybe it's because I haven't done jack shit for actual writing in so long that I've gotten rusty, or maybe I'm just putting too much pressure on myself, but I got stuck and stuck hard, and it pretty much destroyed my confidence.

This is not to say I've given up, by the way. I'm just doing the typical SB thing of using this blog to exorcise the crap out of my system.

The alternative is to wind up a bitter old man full of regrets.

Now Then

Tomorrow, on the 4th of July, Skyler is one month old. While I have made the most of the first month and spent as much time with the baby as possible, it still does feel as though it flew by. I'm sure the next month, and the next year, and so forth will fly on by just as quick. That's what everybody says anyway. Well, whatever. I waited 20 years to meet this child, and I'm going to absorb every ounce of enjoyment I can out of her, and I'm not going to miss any opportunities either. Yeah, there are guys out there who don't give a shit about spending a lot of time with their kids, even if they just pay lip service to loving them oh so much (and I know a few of these guys), but I'm not one of them, and I'll never be one of them. I do expect my future to be a litte more crowded and busy with writing related stuff, but I'll be damned if I'm going to miss a school play or anything like that if I don't have to.

It's that damn Cat in the Cradle song, you know. The message behind it has been stuck in my mind forever. I listened. I get it.

So far, I've done good on this score. During the pregnancy I was there for everything all along the way. I went to every pre-natal visit, even if I had to ditch work for a few hours, every ultrasound (including the awesome 3D ones we did in Keene), every near-miss hospital visit, ... everything. The thought of missing even one of those visits never crossed my mind. I *had* to be involved. The only worry I had was missing too much work and getting into trouble, which could have happened if I didn't work for the supervisor that I do work for, because he's pretty awesome as bosses go. And I was concerned about missing time and not getting paid. Usually I nickel and dime all my vacation time usage throughout the year, taking two hours there and three hours here. Long vacations are usually not in the budget anyway. Case in point, I'm here in NH now instead of in NY with the family (although that also has to do with not wanting to drag Skyler on a six hour trip to nowhere at her age; and the fact that while Amy does get along well with my family, it's better to keep it at smaller doses, because my beautiful wife does get aggravated easily).

Money, and the job thing, are really the only things left for me to figure out. Of course I don't want to stay at my Current Place of Employment for the rest of my life, nor am I eager to replace that job with a similar job doing monkey work for less money than I'm worth. I'm pursuing some writing options (yes, including the book), and while I've been a bit frustrated to start, I'm not going to give up.

Ever since I hit the reset button in 2007 (with Jen's help), I've done some amazing things that honestly I thought might never happen ever in my life, including getting married to Amy and having a baby. Figuring out this job/writing thing is just the next logical step. And if I can do those first two "scary" things, I should be able to work this out, too.

I just need Calliope to get her butt back from the Bahamas.

The New Stuff

So there have been some changes since last we spoke here on the blog:



Here you see my greatest creation, Miss Skyler Jade. She was born on June 4th, which made her about a week early, which was fine enough as her mother was pretty impatient to be done with this whole pregnancy deal.

She is without a doubt the best thing I have ever had a part of.

By Popular Demand

Which is to say... demanded by one person. However, since that one person is pretty cool, that's all that matters.

Anyway, I'm back, and unlike last time I may actually be able to sustain the return blogging experience, now that Amy and I are back in our own place and using our own internet, instead of living with three crabasses and using a computer and internet that should have died out with the dinosaurs. Well, there's lots to talk about, so what I'm prolly going to have to do is break it up into bite-sized chunks, otherwise I'm never going to get through it all.

What I want to talk about first is the baby. Amy and I are having one. During the blogging hiatus last spring we were going to have one, but it ended up being a tubular pregnancy, and therefore no baby resulted. This time, however, it stuck, and the baby is due in June--somewhere around the 14th or so, which puts it just about a week after our one year wedding anniversary. Suffice to say, we are excited.

In the early going Amy was hoping for a boy and I was hoping for a girl (like duh), but we would of course be happy either way, because you know it's our kid and you just can't help loving it either way. It really doesn't matter. Nevertheless, we've been leaning girl for the past few weeks. We had an ultrasound done this afternoon and while it isn't definitively certain ... the tech seemed to believe it was in fact a girl. I can't confirm that 100%, but that's what we are tentatively going with for now. If we end up with a bunch of pink elephants and such and then a winkie shows up on future ultrasounds, we promised not to be disappointed, and we'll just save the girly girl stuff for the next one, if in fact there is to be a next one.

We have also already picked names (we did this ages ago). The boy name was set early on, like last February, but the girl name was trickier. We had about 20 names in contention, narrowed it down to a final seven, selected a good middle name for each, but it was Skyler Jade that just stuck with us for whatever reason. That's the name Allison likes the best, too. She's absolutely convinced it's going to be a girl and won't even hear any argument that she isn't going to get a sister.

So that's where we are right now with the Endgame.

In progress.

The Big Return

Yeah, so here I am again. In what will possibly make up to three(3) people happy, Stray Bullets is back on the air. And as you can imagine, after a nine month absence which also happened to be the busiest and eventful nine months of my life, there is a whole lot of catching up to do with y'all. I won't try to eat the whole elephant with this one post, though, like I might have tried to do in the past, but I guess I can hit the highlights. Here we go.

Amy and I worked out. When we last spoke, she and I had just gotten together, and here we are all this time later still together, and not only that ... we got married. Yes. I'm married to Amy. That happened back on June 5th, and there are a whole lot of stories to be told related to that, which I'll get to some other time. But my lovelife is good and stable for the first time in ... well .... ever.

I'm also a step-dad to a really cute almost 4 year old named Allison. That's going very well, too.

Still at the same job.

Still working on the same book, but seeing as I more or less shelved it for a year (or longer due to the laptop issue), you should be happy that I'm working on it at all again.

Ok, I'm a little rusty at this blogging stuff after such a long layoff. Let's call it good for now, huh?

You see, there's this girl ....

I was going to write out the whole story for y'all here, but as it's a really long and complicated story, and I'm tired, and I don't have the four hours I would need to do it full justice, and I still have to do a little e-mail after ... I'm just going to hit the highlights and get everyone up to date on the situation. Now, this may be the post where I alienate some of my audience (those I haven't already, that is), and depending on how this all goes it may be my last blog post for a little while. Seeing as I haven't seemed to have the time or inclination to regularly update this thing since like September, I doubt you'll be missing much. But for those few of you interested in reading, let's carry on.

Long story short, I have a girlfriend again. Her name is Amy. You might remember her from the 65 or so blog posts during the last year in which she was a featured character. Yes, it's that girl. The same Amy who told me about 12 months ago that she liked me. The same Amy I had a crush on that drove me crackers. The same Amy who spent a night on my couch while I struggled with trying to do the right thing. The same Amy who I've been sweet on ever since, and unbeknownst to me, continued to like me all along.

She and I are going out. There's a whole story to this, and it's a good story, too, one I could probably use as part of a book later on down the road.

But I'm not going to do it here.

I'm just going to say that it's been great so far. I don't know if it'll last two weeks or two months or two years, but I'm going to enjoy it while it's here. If anyone doesn't like it, or doesn't agree with it, or is for whatever reason mad at me because of it, well I'm sorry. But I'm going to see this one through.

And with that, Stray Bullets is closed for now. Toodles.

No Longer a Dry County

Tonight ended a dry streak that has been going on since the dawn of time. To put it another way, I have a sex life again for the first time in eight years. And it is with who you think it is. And it was worth the wait. Good god, was it worth the wait. On the subject of something that I was starting to believe would never again occur in my lifetime, it was frikking amazing ...



all seven times.



There, Brit. How do YOU like it for a god damned change.






(full story tomorrow.)

Virgorama

In 1952, renowned modern composer John Cage created the infamous "4'33"." It's a "song" that consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of pure silence. Recently a San Francisco performance artist, Jonathon Keats, did a remix of that tune and made it available as a ring-tone. I'd love for you to be inspired by those two geniuses in the coming week, Virgo. It'll be an excellent time for you to come to a perfect stop, fill yourself with stillness, and bask in the healing power of undiluted nothingness.

Sadly, I don't see this happening for a little while.

It's the Same Old Thing as Yesterday

So last night I was feeling the pressure. As things tend to do with me, it built to a crisis point where all I could feel was the weight of the world on my shoulders, crushing me underneath it. And while I can't say today that the weight of things or the pressure is all the way off of me, I have gotten to the point where I can start to plan and counterplan and devise how I'm going to go about tackling the problem, for good if that's possible.

Two weeks ago Cooter and Amy broke up. This is their third break-up just since I've known him, but this time it's pretty serious, and there's a very good chance that they are done and over. Now, it's those two we're talkin about, so who the fuck really knows if it'll ever really be done and over with, but just the same ... it seems pretty final this time around.

People who were around reading this blog last winter surely already have a guess where this is headed, and guess what? You're right! It was pretty quiet on the Amy front for the first week and a half of the split. She moved back up to her mom's house up on the mountain, and I didn't hear from her. I knew inevitably that I would, but I didn't know when. Meanwhile, I heard most of Cooter's side of things, because I work with him, but because I don't work right next to him anymore, I only got sketchy details -- she left, took kid, very angry. I did the sympathetic listener thing that I always do, while trying to share the benefit of my experience with relationships gone off the rails, and he listened to that (and to advice from others) about as well as he ever does, which is not at all.

And then came Saturday. She called. I talked to her. And she's coming after me. Oh yeah. She's coming after me, no doubt about it, no beating around the bush, and she's bringing her A-game along with her. Now, we can go through all the arguments about how this could become a huge disaster that'll lead to a whole lot of fighting and violence and anger and hatred, but nevermind. I know. I know. I know. I do know this.

Yeah, she does have that effect on me. She always has. You know, the Becky Effect. The thing that causes me to lose perspective and my common sense. Any intellectual thought about right or wrong goes out the window, and it's not just a lust thing. And don't make any mistake, there is lust in my soul for that girl. I thought it was gone, because I didn't know she was even still interested in me, but it was lurking. I beat it back before. I could probably do it again. But it's hard. So hard.

Because I'm talking to the both of them, I'm in the unenviable position of knowing more about the situation than either one of them, so every day I walk a tightrope of functional neutrality. They're getting into a custody battle over Allison, and it's set to get ugly -- real ugly. I know things that are going to happen, things that one or the other do not know about, and at some point the shit is going hit the fan, and when it does I don't want to be within 100 miles. So maybe I'll be in Massachusetts that weekend. Meanwhile, I'm in my own sort of custody battle with the both of them. They both want equal time, and it's driving me crazy, man. One or the other or both calls me every day. Sigh.... And if you don't already know which side of things I'm way more sympathetic to then you just haven't been paying attention to the blog for the last eleven months.

Today at work I was wound up. Last night I was crashing under the stress, but today I channelled it into straight hostility, mostly for Matt's and Jim's entertainment, due to a unprecedented ruthlessnes with my sarcastic remarks. I just decided to be angry, and I made sure Cooter realized I was angry due to being completely frikking stressed from the two of them. They are making me nuts.

And she isn't making it easy on me. To borrow a phrase from my best friend, she just puts it right out there. There is a very clear invitation right there on the table on a silver platter. Yeah. Oh yeah. I've spent most of a year imagining it, though, and thinking about all the horrible things I want to do to that girl. And in case you don't remember, it's been a very very long time for me. Jen and I never got to that point, and she was my first girlfriend in a godforsaken long time.

At the end of that conversation we decided that we are in fact going out. Yes, we are boyfriend/girlfriend just like that, lickety split, no beating around the bush. I was *so* nervous that I almost fucked the whole thing up, but yeah. I have a girlfriend again, and it's Amy, the girl I've had this horrifying crush on that y'all have been reading about. It's everything I wanted ... and I'm scared to death. I don't want to screw this up. I screw it up, I might as well just retire forever to a life of loneliness and isolation.

I'm not going to screw it up. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not.

Let's do it.

There's a Little Black Spot on the Sun Today

Oh, I'm stressed. God damn am I stressed out. And it was all starting to go so well again, too. I don't have the time to discuss it all right now, but it involves some old business (within the timespan of this blog, not the OLD old stuff) that's really bugging me. I'll get into it tomorrow.

:(


Oh, and computers FUCKING SUCK. Except for this laptop. This laptop is great.

































Bleh.

I Can Haz Weekend?

So you're aware that we had an election a couple of weeks ago, of course, and that this Obama guy won it. Because he is to be our next president, my Place of Employment has gone batshit crazy. Everywhere there are Chicken Littles running about proclaiming the sky is falling, which is to say, these people believe that Obama is going to come and shut us down ... or at least the parts of us that make semi-automatic weaponry, and I am part of one of those parts of us. As a consequence, orders for the guns in my line have gone through the roof, into the sky, up past the clouds, and are currently circling the moon.

Since the election orders have been placed for approximately 16,000 of the rifles that I happen to work on. We sold 6000 in one day alone. That's a lot of firepower being let out into the world, but of course ... we have to make most of them first. To accomplish this, the Powers That Be (who are among the Chicken Littles already mentioned) have bumped up our daily numbers. We were at 125, which we were easily making back when I was on bolt-fit. Now they want between 250 and 300 every day from now until infinity until the madness dies down.

Yeah, and we haven't done that. On our best day ever since I've worked there we did 220, and we were hauling ass, man. I bolt-fit my little heart out, and at the time ther was a second bolt-fitter (I believe it was Brad). Now I'm on trigger housings, which I'm pretty good at, yes, but it's really hectic keeping up with the sub-assemblies for even the numbers we're making. I'm supposed to get another person over there to build those subs, but so far it's only been here and there. Bolt-fit, with Cooter over there, is also struggling.

And so we're getting a lot of overtime. I've been working six day weeks (five 10 hour days and 5 hours Saturdays) for what now seems like years, even though it's really only been maybe a month or so. And I'm tired. By Thursday I've totally lost track of where I am in the week and have to stop and figure out what actual day it is. It feels like I've been there every day since sometime in September without break. The weekends fly by, and I don't get nearly anything I want to do accomplished.

But the machine shop is having a hard time keeping ahead of us. They've had some problems, and we've been stuck waiting for parts, and so on. So they're working mandatory Saturdays (8 hours last week, 10 this week). the PTB decided to shut us down and save what barrels are ready for Monday. So today I worked an 8 hour day building up triggers and mag-latches, and hammer struts, and doing miscellaneous other things. Jim and Brad worked, too, doing similar. Cooter wasn't there. If he doesn't *have* to work, he doesn't work. There are reasons that I often hold him in contempt, and this is one of them.

And we're off tomorrow. I have a full weekend to myself, to do whatever I want. So in preparation for the big push next week, you might think I'd want to take it easy and rest up, and the truth is I am pretty exhausted. But no ... I'm going to empty the fuel tanks. Everything that I've had to push back, everything that I've wanted to do -- it's all on the docket. I'm going to cram as much stuff in here as humanly possible, including a good chunk of writing time, and I'm going to live life to the fullest.

Because as things look, I might not get too many more weekends like this for a good long time.

Virgorama

For many people, 10:30 a.m. is the single best time of day to come up with fresh insights and new ideas. But that won't exactly be true for you in the coming week. I mean, 10:30 will be a time when you're likely to be really smart, but then so will 11:30, 1:05, 2:37, 3:46, and 4:20. For that matter, 6:35 may also bring a gush of high intelligence, as well as 7:27, 8:19, and the last ten minutes before bedtime. What I'm trying to tell you, Virgo, is that you're in a phase when being brilliant should come pretty naturally.

In support of this supposed brilliance, Stray Bullets returns to your local stations tomorrow afternoon.


yes, really.