“I couldn't live a week without a private library
- indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor
before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.” ― H.P. Lovecraft

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Ok, I’ve been gone for a couple weeks and I know how that gets you mutants going, so I’m gonna throw you a nice long post to tide you over till I decide to post again.

Yeah, aren’t you lucky?

Before I get started, I recently had to wipe my hard drive and reinstall my operating system. This wasn’t too horrible as I have all my important stuff (I-E MP3’s and porn) backed up, but while I was online downloading new virus software I got some little bug that exploits Windows System Messenger to plague me with popups. I just want to say that if anyone knows who created this piece of malware I would pay dearly for the information. Better yet, if you could just pry their living heart from their chest cavity and bring it to me so that I might eat it and gain their power I’d really appreciate it a bunch.

So where was I? Oh yeah, where the hell I’ve been. This should be interesting even to me given my rather unorthodox ideas about reality and the nature of where the hell I am EVER.

That make sense? Oh well, it doesn’t have to. Not even to me.

So Monday, around 11 AM, I get a phone call. This is annoying as it rouses me from a rather sound sleep. I push the button expecting to get a fabulous offer for a satellite TV system or yet another wrong number for some guy named Shawn. There have been a lot of them lately as, apparently, Shawn has a much more active social life than I do. Anyways, it was Mike B, cousin of Brian B (last names withheld for the sake of common sense) calling to ask if I wanted to accompany him and his brother Scott on a four day trip to visit Brian in Harrisonburg Virginia.

It should be noted at this point that both Mike and Scott are terrible drivers and even worse navigators, and the potential for calamity was very high. Being 11 AM this knowledge didn’t come quickly enough and I said “Sure”.

So the plan was to leave at 11 AM on Tuesday. Thanks to insomnia and having to update TerriblyWrongOnline I got in bed at about 7 Tuesday morning thinking “Well at least I’ll get three and a half hours of sleep.” This was a great theory and it lasted till 9 when Mike called me and asked if we could leave at 10 instead of 11.

So I get up, throw a random assortment of clothing into an old army duffel bag and headed out the door.

Now I’ve never really traveled any long distance with Mike before, but we’ve been in the same car together more times than I can count and I have to say he’s improved his driving and vehicle maintenance since he lost his license due to speeding tickets. He drove his first car over 60,000 miles without changing his oil because nobody told him he needed to change it. He just checked it from time to time and added more as it burned off.

Yeah, nobody can tell me I don’t know how to throw caution to the wind.

So we pick up Scott, AKA Dumbass. I’m not sure exactly when we started calling him Dumbass, but it caught on quick and stuck. We even got his parents calling him that, and they had more call to do it having known him longer. Some of you may have heard the story about one of our treks to Ozzfest in the mid 90’s, where he ate an entire container of Tumms antacids, thus neutralizing all the acid in his stomach, and we had to pull over under an overpass so he could vomit a seemingly vast amount of pink foam.

Having said all this, the trip down was pretty uneventful apart from Mike’s inability to keep the vehicle steady and Scott’s unnerving habit of putting his hands in Mike’s face while he was making the attempt. They did both freak out a bit when I acquired a new men’s room sign for my bathroom at a rest stop somewhere past the Virginia border, but you can’t have a really good road trip without some random theft.

Besides, it looks really good in my bathroom.

So we get there, but none of us knows where Brian’s apartment is. I’ve been there before, but it was like two years ago and I’m fuzzy on anything further back than about twelve minutes. So we go to Brian’s place of employment (name also withheld) and waited for him to get off work. We ended up hanging around after they closed and played some X-Box 360 on a big screen high-def TV which was pretty fucking sweet.

Crap. I’m gonna pack it in for now. Part 2 coming soon…