Crankapotamus

Daily Crank: Day One

It occurred to me today that as I pissed off the 50th DC driver that my life was starting to turn into Babe 2: Pig in the City; not because the second chapter of my life was going to be a morbid pig-and-city-tale, but mostly because I wanted to bring up Babe 2: Pig in the City, and what other movie would really compare?  Certainly not Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.

That movie sucked.

Ahead is plenty of beaurocracy, as I try to find my own little hole in the whole of the capitol near my friend Anitole.  Actually I don’t have a friend named Anitole.

This post has been built on lies.

But anyway, as the last driver honked past I felt a humbling that could only be matched with a movie-look-he’s-hapless-here-montage, with maybe some Pat Benatar playing in the background.  The next step, of course, is to comically fall down with a bunch of grocery bags, and then meet the love of my life, played by Justin Bieber.

But really, things are going pretty swell, and whenever something doesn’t, you’ll be the first to know, and we can alllllll have a nice, healthy laugh.

Laugh, goddamnit.

Daily Crank: Packing

I am no stranger to the zen-like art of packing, having packed for myself or for someone else at least once a year, or possibly twice, and even the very rare three-time-pack-a-rama, but only when one of my roommates was dying from black mold poisoning (I’m still a little sore that we ended up losing that sweet rent price, even if it was previously a meth-house).  That strange two-week stint in the shadiest-not-just-with-trees-but-with-weird-dudes-asking-to-mow-our-lawn house was a long hot stretch of limbo, with the constant packing and unpacking of boxes between three different “homes”, none of them where the heart was (there was no heart in the mold house, but there were plenty of ants.  And, of course, mold).

Still, packing up this week is an all knew experience for me, one marked with an exclamation point of excitement, followed by a question mark of nervous uncertainty, followed by another exclamation point, which turns the whole affair into some maudlin side-show of “coming of age”.  There’s a Saturn piled up with clothed and books and video games, and…that’s about it.  Once upon a time I never thought I would try and condense my pretty literature, but the time came to say goodbye to the plenty of books I had pretended on hoping to read but now had to blame the recession and give three of my four copies of Frankenstein to charity, along with poetry books that I would never get around to reading, nor would I ever entice a woman into my bed for her having thought I’ve had read.

It’s really hot outside, and already I’m trying to imagine I’m closer to the Potomac, and trying to be all Victorian sentimental about it, and because I’m a sloppy sentimental piece of shit like that, it works well enough for me.  In the drowsy midnight hours driving back to Lockport from Lemont I did wax sentimental for a bit, kind of considering Lemont’s aesthete for something more than just middle class Polish people and geriatrics bumbling about, and thought there really might be something to that place.

Which is something I shouldn’t readily admit, and won’t again, unless you’ve got me half-past-Blatz and I want to make the fourth act of our time at the bar A Very Special Episode.  But, you’ve got me, and my hands are red, and no joke, but seriously, but seriously man, I think I might miss Lemont.

And now we play the waiting game of who throws up at that idea first: me, the drunk, or you, the unwitting reader of that sort of sentimental garbage.

Daily Crank: Blockage

Writer’s block and blue balls are two very specific forms of torture I’ve had to endure in my life, the kind of cerebral pain which extends from the breakdown in the development of a relationship between my mind and a body of work, or in the case of blue balls, my genitals and working a body.  And, much like my charming skills at a bar, there is a very particular drop-off point where the fruits of attainment have all but dissipated because I’ve run out of witty things to say, and commence making fart jokes.

It hasn’t worked yet, but I’m nothing if not persistent, much like generations later Dixie still has its ardent Lost Cause followers, most of whom seem to have forgotten what the original Cause was.  And so, I continue to venture forth and start monuments to bodies of work, then realize I have no idea where I’m going with it, and end up with a lot of half-started projects with the promise of things to come, like my dad coming home if the Angels win the pennant.

Best dad ever.

So, in the throes of this writer’s block, and with a pretty seedy hangover that’s carried on for the last twelve hours, here are a few minutae to mull over until I can prep the Daily Crank back into sassy gear—that is, to bitch about things that annoy me on Facebook and talk about James Bond a whole bunch.

• Of course, the rather long, rather definitive trip I’m taking out to the East Coast should provide a wealthy supply of stupidity and oddities, but it also means I’ll be sorting my life out and probably not having the most time to dick around on Tumblr.  Mea culpa, friends.
• I would link to a Cracked article, but then I’d be a hypocrite.  I would link to an Onion news story, but I’m beginning to think that all of my posts should just come with the tag: “By the way, check the Onion today.  It’s hilarious”.
• Convinced a man last night I was none other than Bruce Wayne, from Wayne Enterprises, out on the town with my friends Selena Kyle, Harvey Dent, Jason Todd and Tim Drake, yadda yadda.  It went on for way longer than it should have.  Memories to keep and cherish forever, children.

Daily Crank: Helpful Advice

Summer is coming up, which means that everyone is going to have much more time on their hands to go out and have fun and social network every single moment of their lives.  So today I figured I would offer some helpful advice to make sure those Facebook statuses live up to their full potential:

1.  No one cares you’re at Applebee’s, so stop checking in.

2. Coincidentally, no one cares that you’re at an Applebee’s with your boy, your boo, or your besties either.

3. In fact, I don’t care that you FINALLY get to hang out with your boyfriend! <3 <3  Although I am concerned that you exhibit safe sexual precautions.  Wear a condom, people.

4.  Let’s go ahead and assume you will and forego the “I’m Having Safe Sex!” App.  While we’re at it, I’m still apathetic about your Angry Birds score.

5.  Wall posts about Skype Dates are masturbatory, at best.  Just Skype the person, or, since I don’t use Twitter, keep it to the tweet hashtag #skypedate

6.  Yes, I have seen that Cracked article.

7.  The only time anyone cares about a countdown is New Years, before a new Batman movie, and when preceded by the words, “It’s the final”; that is to say, I don’t care how long it is until your anniversary, summer break, or your trip to Las Vegas.

8.  GRR!  YOU HAVE TO WORK!!!!! Isn’t traffic HORRIBLE!  Why can’t I have some Starbucks RIGHT NOW Life sucks! >: I

9.  Unless you’re me, or you actually like good music, go ahead and stop posting youtube videos to terrible 90’s acoustic garbage.  Blues Traveler is only fun to listen to when you’re staring into a toilet bowl puking out your Southwest Chicken Eggroll appetizer.

10.  The cake is a lie is not funny; it never really was funny; let’s all stop pretending internet memes are a substitution for wit.  Neckbeards, Jesus.

Daily Crank: Sega Thumb

Let me tell you about the relationship I have with my hands.  Years ago, I was at a crossroads in my life, not knowing whether I should apply my skills towards labor or more artisan pursuits, when I came across an old man along the way.  He told me many things, like long forgottn words or ancient me-elodies, and he also told me that my future lies in working not with my hands, but my mind.  He mentioned that my hands were too beautiful to commit to a life of work with tools and sweat, and mentioned that the weird way they bend and morph probably shouldn’t be a highlight, either.  He was probably the best doctor I ever had.

So, I treat my hands well, like good servants in my house, which is my body, which is really a temple, which is kind of like that little house where God lives when you go to church, and you’d think it would be kind of small but no man, its pretty cozy, and it’s not like God has to pay rent.  I’ve stayed away from The Labors, and kept a quiet life of book reading and prosyletizing and video games.

Ah, video games, my hand only hand-vice (okay, my second hand-vice*).  When I was a child, I brutalized my hands on the warm sweaty plastic of a Nintendo or a Sega—so much that I acquired the dreaded “Sega Thumb” at an early age.  My doctor was not pleased.  If I were a Bond villain in those formative years, my bruised or blistered thumb would have been my calling card (besides being a seven year-old oil magnate, but that’s besides the point).

Which brings me some seventeen years in the future, with a new copy of Mortal Kombat out and my left thumb hurting like a bitch.  It took a few moments to realize what was wrong with me—I thought, perhaps, I had slammed my thumb into a door or possibly beat my dog too hard, but as I continued to examine the bruised area, I realized the mark correlated exactly with the spot where I would press to jump and uppercut.

The moment of realization was like a lynchpin of my life, where I saw the multiples of me across the timeline accessing that Sega Thumb moment.  This must be what the monks, and post-birth suburban white women, feel during an intense hot yoga sesh.

So what if my hands are meant to be pristine, and never meant to be shown to other people?  There is another glory to be achieved, the honor that is unlocking an arbitrary achievement on X-Box which tells the world I linked a 10-hit combo (with any character of my choice).  And those 20 “g” is much more validating than anything anyone can say, including my mommy.

*What was your over-under on me making a masturbation joke?

Daily Crank: Packages

My grandson duties are all unique, and often times strange, like Alice went through the Looking Glass and turned up in a world controlled by an eastern-european babushka.  Usually these duties revolve around meats, and dear, sweet Gregor, unspoiled child of innocence and thin-slice, but my grandmother’s “needs” have variance.  She has a pretty diverse portfolio of necessities and accommodations that find their little ways of breaking my sanity in their fundamental absurdity, layered in the gravitas that I take care of this now, and to the point.

Besides procuring veal-and-pork wieners, I often create and deliver packages like a low-grade mob peon in some shitty Grand Theft Auto universe—where, instead of delivering cocaine to Slit Dick Phil while ducking the cops, I’m delivering cans of salted cashews to nuns or rye bread to old ladies in Chicago or sending parcels of fish oil vitamins to der Materlund (I guess my previous statement about diversity is false; she really does mostly focus on digestibles).

What adds to the pain of these little missions isn’t just the annoying and awkward conversation about Jesus and Bunt cake with a nun, or the price haggling with the bartender slash parcel delivery woman, but rather, the cloying, specific nature of the projects my grandmother puts together.  Stuffing vitamins in a box might be a fairly simple task to some, but for her, the process is akin to defusing a timed bomb.  When she gets one of these cocameenie ideas in her head, a whole day is liable to go out of the window through the delicate process of making sure the canned nuts are positioned just right in the gift bag.

And I thought I would have the whole day off to indulge in pornography read books and celebrate the mysteries of life.  Which, I guess I can still do, as the mystery of why Lithuania needs so many goddamn fish oil tablets remains to be solved.

Daily Crank: Bullet Points

This post brought to you in random thoughts.

• The official move countdown is now set at one month, and with each passing day I’m feeling more and more jazzed to get out of Dodge, or more specifically, Chicagoland, and although I’ll miss the sweltering heat that comes on the heels of seven to ten months of winter, I’m sure I’ll become quickly acclimated to the sticky summers in D.C.

• A student snubbed her nose at the thought of my move out east, to a place “That isn’t even a state”, to which I wanted to pull out a tobacco pipe, take a short puff, and retort, “But that is the metaphor of my soul, without state, taxed but not represented, my dear”.  Maybe I’ll do that at work tomorrow.  WE SHALL SEE.

• Along with the move comes the heavy burden of cataloging my things, assigning precious value to some and discarding others.  Once upon a time I thought I would never have reason to throw away a Mr. Potato Head.  But recently, I stared into his poor vacant eyes and wondered what in the world I would do with a plastic spud, even after I sodomized it with it’s own nose.

• The things I no longer need nor care for are given to charity, which is basically a glorified garbage can, but with the added benefit of giving a poor child a Mr. Potato Head with a nose up its ass.

• So it was time to cut the fat from my suburban life, to cut away the kitchy klotchkys that took up way too much space in my closet and garage.  Soon my life will be able to fit inside my little Saturn, which in turn will take off down a miserable stretch of land the Yankees call “Ohio”.

• Nothing makes Ohio bearable.

• After yesterday’s near real-life-dick-experience, I’ve decided it’s much healthier for me to vent my frustrations on the moronic and unwitting internet denizens, because I really needed to tell the moron who posted a thread on a forum about an AIM argument he had about Batman’s voice actors that he was ugly, and fat, and probably alone, unless he had a fat girlfriend, that was into cats and Kogepan and being “different”, because high school was a pretty rough time, but some of us got over it and didn’t resort to getting a Hello Kitty tattoo to “stand out”.

• CBS Nightly News might call that “cyber bullying”, but I call it internet justice.  Like Judge Dredd.

• I AM THE LAW.
• I’ve been slacking on good links, but you see, there aren’t that many interesting links out there right now, besides the obvious places, and topics, like Osama wearing flood pants in Memphis.

Daily Crank: BLOG ABOUT IT, WHINY

I straddled the line of asshole today, and not in the fictitious internet facade I put on for e-yucks but really, truly in-the-flesh full frontal assitude I usually reserve for my closest companions and girls I’ve tangled with between the sheets (sex).

Warning: the following is an account of a middle-class, mid-20’s white male having a rough time of it.  Somewhere a Libyan just got slaughted.  SO WHAT.

First stop on the errands agenda was to swing by the used book store to unload some books I had been hoarding in a desperate attempt to look more sophisticated than I ever would have the dignity or energy of being.  Amongst the discarded literature were a handful of Dover Thrift editions of books I wasn’t interested in reading in college and wasn’t goddamn interested in reading right now, some old print collections of web-comics (it sounds so oxymoronic right now, but I was 18 and impressionable back then), and several random copies of Frankenstein whose origin I could not ascertain, except that maybe I had a seasonal desire to snag another copy, you know, to compare notes.

Here’s where the situation gets hairy—I come in with my boxes of shit, and the nice man goes to start figuring out how much store credit my shit is worth.  He tells me to go wander the store, and I do so dutifully, and considered picking up a used CD of the Cranberries for a moment until I saw an old woman laughing at me.  Meanwhile, the dude is counting up my books when a girl comes out from the woodwork with her resume.  The two begin talking, and the man decides to take her in for an interview, leaving my books on the floor.  There’s another girl working, but she takes this moment to go on break, and there’s a doofy looking teenager working, but he takes this moment to be a doofus and starts helping the other customers.

It took quite some time before any of us figured out what the hell was going on, and apparently I had missed the standard protocol of the man leaving a post-it note on the books declaring how much I could spend.  Having missed the social cues of second-rate used books stores, I ended up standing around like a cranky idiot for the better of a half an hour, waiting for one of the dutiful employees to perhaps explain the situation, or, in the least, point me to a sign or a pamphlet that gave me the gist of things.

Instead, the girl ate Panda Express at the counter, and the doofy looking boy awkwardly glanced at me several times for several minutes before sheepishly telling me the scenario and giving me the “hook up”.

Angrily, I told the kid I was going to be late for work and he apologized and scribbled out a gift card, redeemable at any time.

I was so mad I didn’t buy the Shelby Foote Civil War series—which was a steal at $24—even though I really wanted to.

I fumed in the car for a few moments at this predicament, how dare they treat a customer like this, a good customer who just donated three boxes of worthless books, no less, and maybe they should get their heads out of their asses

and

before I could go completely white on their ass, I decided to turn that negative cranky suburban white boy energy into something positive, which basically means I went to eat away my feelings at Subway.

Where in front of me was a mother ordering 11 goddamn footlongs.

Daily Crank: A Continuation

As a woman struggled for five minutes to back out her car in the Wal-mart parking lot, I thought to myself that perhaps I had not thought my driving utopia completely through, and then I began thinking that maybe there should be designated lanes for even more various people—polish soccer moms, douchebags with vanity plates, people who hate “Jap cars”—and then I thought that, historically speaking, the Master Race has been tried before, with pretty mixed results. 

That’s probably an icky road I don’t want to go on.

Back to the woman: she was struggling, and had the scrunched up face of a person trying to solve a really hard math problem, like dividing fractions or something, god, don’t judge me for my math skills, okay, and I tried to smile politely even as my brain put the word “cunt” on infinite repeat.  I think the combination of politeness and hate created some sort of glitch in my system, for at that precise moment I had an epiphany.

I’m a big road dick, too.

And not in the sexy, phallic way.

Of course, instead of humbling myself in any way or trying to use that inspirational moment for learning, I breathed the word cunt instead of screaming it and began scheming about how we, as a nation, can develop a system where I can still be a cockbag when I drive, guilt free.

Here is my solution: each month the people in charge of like, driving and stuff, Jesus or Jesse White or whoever, sends you three red bumper magnets in the mail.  Each of these bumper magnets correlates with one (1) day where you can tell the world that you’re in a bad mood, fuck off, let me drive like a cock, whatever.  You slap that red thing on your bumper and people are all like, “Shit, I’ll give this guy some space, his tooth hurts” or “oh, his girlfriend is mad at him over what he said on Twitter”. 

And girls can get an extra bumper-thing per month, too, because honestly, I have no idea how menstruation works.

Now, you might be wondering about the logistics of this, such as cost, or why you wouldn’t just keep the bumper tag on your car all the time, or the absolute chaos that ensue from people using such a stupid system and other people not caring about those people, and well, shush, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Obama got Osama, right?

No, no, you are correct, this plan would never work, and now I’m just upset that I missed my chance to call that mom-driver a see you next Tuesday, and that I have another half-baked idea to throw onto the funeral pyre.

#hotdoghamburger, #chickenshake

Daily Crank: Ol’ McDonald

My road rage comes in short bursts, the needle of my temperament swaying back and forth spastically as I come in contact (contest?) with other denizens of the earth, other glorious human beings full of wonder and intelligence and friendship and majesty, and baby photos probably, but against all odds morph into some sort of seismic, useless vagina on the road.

I was cut off today by no less than three old men, two of which were chomping on cigars and putting about in vans much larger than necessary for a quick trip to CVS to pick up their old man vitamins.  And each time I tried to be sensible, to consider their hard life, their grandchildren, their fading hopes and dreams as they enter their twilight years—until the goddamn geriatric crapbags decide driving over 20mph would be a hazzard to their bum ticker.

I’ll show them a bum ticker.

The problem isn’t old people driving, as honestly, they’re kind of adorable if you get past the smell and the racism, but more of the fact that I am constantly in a position to drive around them.  And I’d rather they would have their own separate car lane, complete with rubber sides so they can bounce around if they have a seizure, and the normal-aged people (that is, whatever age I’m at right now) can go about pretending that old people are a myth.

And, if Obama gets his way with those Death Squads, that just might be the case.

But if old people were to be systematically exterminated, we would lose a lot of essential things in our lives, like smelly refrigerators and inappropriate jokes about black people, or accounts on how the Nazis were “rude” (that last one is pretty specific to my grandmother, I think), and we’d lose that twenty bucks every Easter and Name’s Day, and those precious moments when you’re stuck explaining how the remote control works, again.

So, we should really consider the pros and cons about switching out your grandparent’s insulin, is what I’m saying.  They might stink, and they have lousy taste in television, but if we build those bumper car roads for them, think how nice it would be to start betting on them and turn old people into a National Pastime.