More Pipe stuff.

Notes from the Underground, Skinny Legs and All
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Tuesday, July 31, 2007 at 10:26pm | Edit Note | Delete
Incidentally the narrator of Notes from the Underground is probably my all time favorite character in literature. If you want to read the whole book, you can do so here.
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72n/index.html
Also has my favorite or second favorite opening line of all time.
In the translation I first read the line was "I am a sick man, I am a mean man, I am an ugly man...I think there is something wrong with my liver."

My other favorite opening line is from a book about as far removed as Dostoevsky as one can get; Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins.
"It was a bright, defrosted, pussy willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey."
Any favorite first lines, from books, movies, poems? Anything???
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Rambling
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Tuesday, July 31, 2007 at 10:13pm | Edit Note | Delete
Cooper, I'll tell ya right now, you won't like this entry, so don't even read it.
I don't know how this train of thought connected, but I'm going to do my best to reconstruct it here.
Today is the 20th anniversary of Black Friday in Edmonton. For those of you unfamiliar with Black Friday, it was the day that a tornado touched down in Edmonton, killing a lot of people and wreaking untold wrath of God havoc on the peaceful citizens.
So it's been all over the radio, and then wouldn't you know it, this massive, unbelievable straight out of the Book of Revelations thunderstorm rolls in out of nowhere. There was hail the size of locusts and frogs and first born sons raining down and there were no less than 78 funnel clouds spotted by crew members.
Now listen. Black Friday was awful. But listening to the radio, and watching the feverish eyes of the crew scanning the sky eagerly for a tornado got me to thinking. The people on the radio didn't talk about the horror...well they did, but what seemed to come through more, was the excitement of that day. It was if they were longing to relive it. And it got me to thinking that the survivors of this event were nostalgiomasochistic. They wanted the pain all over again. It's an idea I've visited a few times, that people actually like and seek out mental and emotional and even physical anguish to cure them and save them from thier ennui. So I've written about it a few times, but to really do the idea justice, you have to take a look at the following excerpt from my favorite Dostoevsky novel...Notes From the Underground. Here's a link to the lines in particular: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72n/chapter5.html
I was just going to post a part of this chapter, but it's really tough to cut Dostoevsky up....
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The Savage Heart of Infidelity
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Sunday, July 29, 2007 at 4:55pm | Edit Note | Delete
True story:
There's a town in the middle of nowhere, and we were working there for a few weeks and it seemed that everyone in this town had some sort of eating disorder. Almost the entire population consisted of a 70/30 split between the morbidly obese and the morbidly anorexic/bulimics. I mention this because it puts Big Tits Horse Face in greater perspective. Big Tits Horse Face was a housekeeper at the hotel we were staying in. We called her that (behind her back of course) because she had big tits and a horse face. But she wasn't ugly. A few of us commented that if you could just keep her from smiling she might look like Jessica Simpson. Anyway, she was the hottest thing for 100 miles and 2 of the boys on the crew, whom I will generously give false names, decided to hit on her. 'Hooper' and 'Alvin' were putting the moves on her pretty good one lunch hour, and the three of them decided that they would engage in a menage a' trois later that night.
Alright, just a quick aside here...when I was a young guy, if you tag teamed a girl with a buddy, you would both be kind of dirty losers. It doesn't seem to be that way with the young guys today, and I think that probably has something to do with the net. For example, Hooper and Alvin have both been in on a couple of other threesomes (one in the same town the same week!) and usually with a different guy than either of themselves.
Looks don't really seem to matter too much to these guys either. Hooper came to work one day and told me that he and his buddy had G-banged this girl from the bar the night before, and I asked if she was at least decent and he started laughing and kind of grimaced and said "Noooooooooo, NOT AT ALL."
Anyway back to the story.
I went to the bar with Hooper and Alvin to meet Big Tits Horse Face, just to see if all of Hooper's hype about how horned up she was was true. Well let me tell you brothers and sisters it was true. She was in the bar, and she was wearing a hot little Paris Hilton type camouflage skirt, and a supertight spandex blend half t-shirt that was tight enough to finally ascertain that her big tits were fake.
Apparently she'd been a 'model' in Vancouver at one time until an "opiate habit' got the best of her. She was living at Main and Hastings before she left to move to this small shit town with her boyfriend. The boyfriend was now in prison for dealing and assault, and she was happily engaging with basically anyone who wanted to party. I had heard enough to get my spider-sense tingling, and I knew that there was going to be a shit storm before we left that town, but I had no idea how soon it would be. I went to sleep, knowing that whatever happened, I'd hear all about it the next day.
At about 4am I was awakened in my hotel room by what felt like an earthquake. It wasn't any sound that woke me up...it was my bed moving. I blinked awake in the darkness and could hear yelling in the room beneath mine. There were more strong deep thuds, like a wrecking ball hitting the building, and my bed was moving again. Half asleep I remember thinking that some local had gotten drunk and stolen one of our bulldozers to attack the hotel.
I moved over to the window and saw this big mean motherfucker hopping into a pick up truck and tearing away. A moment later he slammed on the brakes and reversed back in. I opened my window a crack to hear what was happening. The guy yelled "Nope fuck it! I'm coming in to punch you out!" and then Big Tits Horse Face screaming "No Mike! You don't understand! It's not what you think!" and then (presumably Mike) yelling "What the fuck is there to understand?! He's sleeping with her, and you're sleeping with him!"
There was scuffling, some more screaming, and then the pickup took off again. I wondered what had happened, but wasn't curious enough to go out and get into that mess, so I went back to sleep.
The next day Alvin missed work. Hooper told me the story in a nutshell. "Basically this guy was her husband, although she said she was single. He tried to break in through the door, and when he couldn't he came in through the window. Alvin was sleeping and he gave him 2 shots to the face, then he threw the girl out the window-" at this point I was sort of incredulous and I said "He THREW THE GIRL OUT THE WINDOW??!" and Hooper sort of thought for a moment and said "Uh yeah, he didn't use the door at all actually. He went out threw the window too. The door was locked when he came in and locked when he left. " Well I thought that part was pretty funny, and for the rest of the day if anyone said "He didn't use the door at all..." I would be lost in laughter.
It gets a little more complicated though. Alvin was a few days away from a hearing on some assault charge he's facing. He's a good kid, but he's got 2 assault convictions on his record already, and when I went to see him in his room at lunch his eye was swollen half closed and bruised and bloody. A judge would take one look at that shiner....
Anyway, despite some of the hurt involved, and the ruined marriage, etc, it was still the funniest story at work in a long time, and it reminded me of a line by the turn of the century newspaperman, Bob Edwards.
"Our tragedies are our neighbours comedies."
That's all for now.
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Updated over a year ago

The Wings of a Second Avenue Angel (Ode to Marg)
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Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 9:10pm | Edit Note | Delete
Second Avenue and 25th Street
Intersection of streets
Intersection of hearts
Intersection of hungers and wants
Intersection of madmen and poets
Intersection of the damned and the doomed
Intersection of the promised and promiscuous
And in a 7-11 on the corner
She passes the nights
What better home for an angel
Than the graveyard after all?
Flourescent lights beam unearthly light
And She,
The only thing real amidst a sea of
Labeled brand name instant satisfactions
In wrappers
In bags
In boxes and cups
And She too
Labelled for your convenience
Cashier Marg
Her voice is older than her already aging self
And it has a coarseness and a raspiness like ice cubes settling in the soda fountain
Raspier than it should be from too many "Will that be all Sir?" and "Just the gas today Ma'am?"
Her skin is even raspier
Red and flaking with some sort of condition
Raw and naked like graveyard security guard in the hour after last call under Flourescent light in a downtown 24 hour snack food paradise.
They come in droves
Zombies whores
Baboons buffoons
Drunks and dregs
And nervously paranoid vulnerable princesses
And they all want the same thing;
Sugar and fat.
Marg is all sugar and fat and flaking skin and gravelly voice
I wait patiently in the line soaking in the fumes of the nightclub refugees
Too much cologne too much perfume
Smoke machine residue and smoke residue machines
Underlying it all the sweet mixed smells of alcohol infused pheromone exchange And 7-11 chicken counter cholestorosphere
Trans-fat transfusions and post bar confusion
Salutations and celebrations
Agitations and copulations
Inquisitions and suppositions
Propositions and loose inhibitions
Insults and consults
Threats and frets
Marg takes it all as fast as She can
As only She can
Her flaking fingers snowing Her own flesh over the register as they fly over the keys
And each customer gets a "You have a good night now"
And it's empty and cold and utterly indifferent so that it seems downright fucking Zen!
Finally I get to the front and it's wing night so I order 6 and she says what flavor and I know
I KNOW
that regular is always the safest
In a flash
In a zip
In a blink
In a beat
In a bang
In a bag I have 6 wings
And She doesn't even look at me
She is looking at the next customer when she says
"You have a good night now"
Listen; A few weeks back there was gunplay
And I know Marg was there and for that hour of terror
(Resplendent at the flourescent helm of that great and varied ship of convenience in the night)
And for that hour of terror She made less than ten bucks
But Marg's alright tonight
And I have known the wings of a Second Avenue angel.


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Updated over a year ago

Saskatchewan Uber Alles!
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Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 12:00pm | Edit Note | Delete
So there's this guy at work and everybody hates him. He's a lot like the character in the story I'm writing. He has excess body hair, he's really outspoken about really stooooopid things, he doesn't work very hard and he's extraordinarily argumentative about non-issues. He has tattoos of Jesus all over him, and has threatened to stab anyone that fucks with him. Naturally everyone fucks with him, and he's yet to stab us. Something about him just sends me into a nearly instant rage whenever he speaks. So the other day Sorge and I were standing by my car on one of our breaks and this guy looks at my Saskatchewan plates, and with this derogatory derisory disparaging tone he says "...Land of Living Skies...", as if to say that Saskatchewan is in fact NOT the land of living skies. So I reared up a bit and got into his face a little and said "YEAH IT IS!" and Sorge gave an immediate and affirming nod. I try to bait this guy a lot, and he shut up right away and took a few steps away and I went on, first mocking the lifelessness of the Alberta skies (which normally would have gotten me a sound beating from the rest of the crew, but they all seemed to realize I was just trying to get a rise out of ape boy.). I then went on to make ridiculous claims about what constitutes a 'living sky'. "It's not a living sky unless there's a minimum class 4 thunderstorm going, the sun is shining and the temperature is 35 degrees or higher." Then I commented that I had yet to see a wild rose in 'Wild Rose Country" and he described one to me and said they're everywhere, little pink flowers. So I bugged him about pink flowers and couldn't get him to flip out. Anyway on the drive home Sorge and I were laughing about it. Sorge was saying, "I hate Saskatchewan, and normally if someone slams it I slam it right along with them. But that fucker made me feel a surge of provincial patriotism...if he goes off about Saskatchewan again I'm going to knock him out." Then we laughed about how vehemently we defended the Living Skies claim... "Yeah that's right, LIVING SKIES, we ARE from the Land of Living Skies!"
Woo Hooooo! Saskatchewan Uber Alles!
No false claims here!
In this note: Andrew Sorge (notes)
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Updated over a year ago
Catch and Release
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Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 12:30am | Edit Note | Delete
For all intents and purposes I'm a married man (just missing the marriage part), and a happy one at that. I have 3 beautiful children and a beautiful wife. I would do nothing to jeopardize that. Some would say otherwise though. Some would say that flirting with others outside of your relationship is dead wrong. I disagree. I'm an incurable flirt. But I'm a catch and release flirter. I like to get the chemistry going and get the little self esteem boost of not being rejected, I like the adrenalin rush of a 'click' and I like to feel a little nibble on the proverbial hook (but nibbling anywhere else is strictly forbidden.) But that's where it ends, as soon as I get the catch, I make the release so that I don't wind up having to eat any fish (sometimes analogies go too far.) My wife knows that I'm a flirt. She's a flirt too. There's a rich guy that comes into her work and tells her all about the 3 Brazillian children he adopted while he flirts. (I told her to tell him '3 Brazillian children, WOW! How many is a brazillion again?)
So I was talking with my wife about her latest catch and release; a phone tech support guy, and my at work roomie overheard while he was on the phone with his girlfriend. He told her about how my wife and I were talking and laughing about flirting with other people, and his girlfriend was appalled. Is it really so wrong? I ask ye!
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I've got your backs.
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Sunday, July 22, 2007 at 5:09pm | Edit Note | Delete
Just wanted you all to know that I'm taking one for the team whenever I can. I've probably saved more than a few of your lives already. And what pray tell, have I saved you from? I'm talking about one of the greatest dangers faced by western civillization in the 21st Century. I'm talking about the e-mail chain letter. Generally these letters promise great rewards if you forward them to 10 friends in 24 hours. However, if you fail to forward them, you leave yourself vulnerable to the horrors that have befallen all the others that have broken the chain; houses burning down, hideous car wrecks, murder, etc. Well I personally would never put any of you in a position where you had to choose between unlimited wealth and well being while endangering 10 of your friends, or taking on some e-mail chain letter curse yourself. So I'm taking all the curses, bad luck etc. The chain letters stop here! And I would encourage all of you to do the same. Essentially, when you send one of these things, you're telling your friends. "This letter arrived telling me I have a slim chance of falling into incredible wealth, but I have to risk putting 10 of my friends lives at risk to do it, or my own life will be endangered, so naturally, I thought of you."
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You want fries with that?
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Saturday, July 21, 2007 at 8:28am | Delete
I was asking a guy at work about converting a car to run on natural gas, and he told me about this. I didn't believe him at the time at the time and then I found this article. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070720.wlveggie20/BNStory/lifeMain I'll cut and paste it here if you don't feel like clicking the link.
My Volkswagen runs on veggie oil

REBECCA DUBE

From Friday's Globe and Mail

July 20, 2007 at 8:57 AM EDT

Chantale Doyle needs fuel, but she's not looking for a gas station.

Instead, she steers her Volkswagen van down a narrow, graffitied Toronto alley and parks behind a pub. She walks past the flies buzzing around the recycling bin and peels the lid off a 60-gallon steel drum.

Ignoring the Tim Hortons cup and plastic bags floating on the surface, she peers at the viscous, cola-coloured liquid. "Ooh," she says appraisingly. "That's totally usable."

A few minutes later, and with permission from the slightly bewildered pub manager, she's pumping the used restaurant grease into a plastic container, from which it will fuel her diesel van as she drives to Vancouver. Enlarge Image

Chantale Doyle refuels her modified veggie car in a Toronto back alley, where pubs and restaurants store barrels of used cooking oil. (Ryan Carter/The Globe and Mail)

Ms. Doyle is one of a small but growing number of Canadians running their vehicles on vegetable oil scavenged from the grease traps of restaurants. Most are environmentalists, although getting fuel for free is a nice side benefit. To find them, just follow the smell of French fries wafting from their tailpipes.

"I found it really amazing that it works so well," says Quebec auto mechanic Marc Amsden. Veggie-oil conversions make up about half his business, and he drives a converted VW Jetta himself. "It's free fuel, but even if I had to buy it and it [cost] 10 cents more than diesel, I would still do it because you're helping the environment."

Any diesel car can be converted to run on veggie oil. In fact, Rudolf Diesel used peanut oil for fuel when he invented the engine in the 1890s. Converting a diesel engine requires installing a second fuel tank and a mechanism to heat the oil so that it's thin enough when it enters the engine.

Used grease is just one of many alternative fuels attracting attention these days, though it's the only one you'll find for free behind your local diner.

Biodiesel, which any diesel car can use without modification, may also be made from vegetable oil, but the oil has been processed and blended with petroleum.

Ethanol is an alcohol that's mixed with petroleum; any vehicle can run on low-ethanol blends, while high-ethanol blends require special engines.

Do-it-yourself veggie-oil conversions kits from companies such as Greasecar sell for about $1,000. Mr. Amsden charges $1,800 to $3,200, depending on the model.

Mileage from used vegetable oil is about the same as regular diesel gasoline, and the oil helps the engine last longer, Mr. Amsden says. The big difference is at the tailpipe, where veggie-oil vehicles are carbon-neutral - they release less carbon dioxide into the air than the plants used to make the oil absorbed as they grew. They also emit fewer pollutants than regular engines.

Vegetable oil is not, however, the sustainable fuel of the future: Even with all the fried food North Americans eat, the supply of used veggie oil would barely dent our demand for gasoline. But Ms. Doyle hopes that, in some small way, her example may get others thinking about making eco-friendly changes.

She bought her van off eBay, and has spent the past three months living in it as she travels through the United States and Canada, talking to people about her veggie van. (She cooks up fries in the van, gives away the food and then shows people how the used oil powers her ride.)

"If you take on something like this, it's really hard not to examine every aspect of how you live. There's so many other simple things I could be doing," Ms. Doyle says. She's been using the same water bottle for the past five months, for example, and everything that enters her van gets reused or recycled.

"I want to suggest to people there are so many modifications you can make in your daily life that add up," Ms. Doyle says.

Reactions to her veggie van have varied, and not always in the way she expected. Some restaurant owners are so shocked by a request for their used grease that they instantly refuse - even though they'd otherwise pay someone to haul it away for them.

"Some people will be like, 'You want what? You want to do what?' "

On the other hand, she met some of her most enthusiastic audiences in small towns in the Southern United States.

"You go to a general store and immediately you just have a crowd around you," Ms. Doyle recalls. "One guy stands out in my mind, this was in really rural Mississippi, and he was more genuinely concerned and knowledgeable about the state of the environment than people I've met in New York City. People are constantly surprising me."

In Canada, veggie-car drivers say they've always attracted attention, but in the past year more people seem interested in converting their own cars.

"I see a lot more people doing it," says Damian Kettlewell of Vancouver, who converted his Mercedes-Benz station wagon three years ago. He fuels it with grease from the pub where he works. "People are definitely intrigued. They think it's cool and they ask a bunch of questions."

Dylan Perceval-Maxwell, who owns a hemp boutique in Quebec, says people run after him on the street to ask about his veggie-oil-fuelled VW Golf.

His motivations were "purely environmental," he says, "but when I'm driving, the biggest benefit is the fun of people's reactions."

Mr. Perceval-Maxwell is trying to compile a database of veggie-fuel drivers in Canada, to share tips on where to find good grease as well as information on which cars respond best and worst to conversion.

And he can attest personally to the social as well as environmental rewards of driving a veggie vehicle: He met his fiancée when she asked about his car.
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Warning; poker content
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Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 8:53pm | Delete
I've been talking poker with a few people again, and I'm getting very antsy to play. For the past several months I've been staying in hotels and motels with little or no internet connectivity, and it's prevented me from playing. I absolutely refuse to play during the short time that I'm home, preferring to spend the time with my family. Tomorrow however, I'll be in a new town, and we'll be there for the next 2 months or so. I'm almost positive that I'll finally have a decent internet connection and I'll be able to play again. I've been preparing for this day for a long time. I have 2 books lined up and ready to start reading to reset my mind into poker mode. No Limit Hold Em, Theory and Practice is the first. I'm actually not very excited about this one to tell you the truth. I've found all of Sklansky's books to be let downs in the past, and I expect that this one will be the same; endless micro-analyses of exceedingly rare hand matchups etc. The one I am excited about is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. It's not a poker book at all, but it's applications and implications for poker are obvious. The jist of the book is that intuition is a real and reliable sense, once you learn how to use it. I think that I've plugged most of the technical leaks in my game, my biggest weakness is that sometimes I don't trust that little voice that says "I'm beat here." I'm hoping this book will help me learn to trust that voice a little more. It's similar to another book I read on intuition several months ago, however this one promises to focus a little more on techniques rather than examples. That's all for now. I'm eager to start swimming around the tables again. All indications are that poker is still alive and well.
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