(Phaysis)

My friend Maredith demands that I write something new, so I’m going to write about salad. Salad is pretty awesome. You can make it with lettuce, or with eggs, or with tuna. Salad is supposed to be eaten cold. When salad is made with lettuce, it’s great for digestion and elimination, because lettuce, as well as any other vegetable and fruit, is full of fiber. Fiber is the undigestable portion of your food, and is essential for helping carry water through your intestines and out to your colon where the extra water will help keep your stools from being too hard. Ultimately, the more fiber you eat, the healthier you will be. And so that’s why I eat salad.

You can use many different kinds of lettuce for your salad. Most boring Americans use iceberg lettuce, which contains a lot of water, is crispy as long as it’s kept cold and wet, and has large leaves (perfect for sandwiches and burgers, too), but iceberg contains very little flavor or nutrition. Nobody should eat iceberg lettuce if they have a better choice. Another lettuce you could use is romaine lettuce, which contains more flavor, a more wrinkled texture, and has smaller, crunchier leaves. I like romaine, personally. It’s pretty good on sandwiches, but just fine as a salad. A third kind of lettuce is called arugala, which is used a lot in a salad variety called “spring mix”. It has uniquely-shaped leaves, a thin, dark green color, and a ton of flavor and vitamin C. It’s good stuff, and sometimes it goes great on those high-falutin’ sandwiches you find at a deli in a white neighborhood.

I like to add extra vegetables to my salad. I always have green onions (shallots, to you yankees) on hand in the fridge, so I clip off the roots of two stalks, trim the leaf tips, and chop up the green ends of the stalks into little bits of diced onion. Those go on top of the salad. I eat the white part of the stalks between bites of salad or sandwich. I also like to add tomatos; cherry tomatos are my favorite (be sure to wash them first). Sometimes, I’ll have other veggies like baby corn, olives, palm hearts. So tasty.

What dressing you use is based on personal preference. I like lighter dressings, so most times I’ll get either French or Italian dressing, but on occasion I have been known to be a fat American and use ranch dressing. Something about that creamy dreamy manufactured texture sets my taste buds at ease. Ranch dressing also goes good on manufactured “baby carrots” as well as buffalo wings which are manufactured from the arms of tiny immature chickens. Tasty!

Ok, that’s all I know about salad. You should have a salad too. I make a unique salad, and you make a unique salad, too. It’s as individual as each of us. We should totally get together some time and eat each other’s salad for a bit of variety. Ok, bye.

As a man, I have trouble, physically and psychologically, with the spare tire I carry around. Sometimes I feel like I’m the fattest skinny man I know. When a man has excess fat, biology dictates that his body stores it first around his stomach and waist. If he puts on more, then it forms on his legs and pecks. When women’s bodies put on fat reserves, they’re primarily around their hips, butt, and legs. Biology dictates this.

Now, when a woman asks me, “does this make my ass look fat?” my first response is to check for traps and tread carefully (I’m not walking into that one blindly…again). It’s a strange and dangerous question, and the implications of it, and its answer, are a wildcard. But it can be asked due to insecurity. As someone who can’t control where his body fat piles up, I understand what girls mean when they need some sort of validation for their body shape. We all want to be attractive.

However, the issue with body fat on women is that it’s a secondary sex characteristic. Traditionally, fat on the hips signals to us that they have a diet good enough to support bearing healthy children, and sizable breasts show they have the capability to feed their newborn offspring and keep them healthy into childhood. As such, we men are drawn to women with the right amounts of body fat in the right places. It’s a physiological turn-on.

That being said, can the same be said for women about men? Do guys with fat bellies answer some deep physiological drive? Do they turn you on somehow? Honestly, I don’t think it works quite the same, but I could be wrong. Thoughts?

So how you guys doing? Good? You folks comfy enough? Grab a chair, pull up some floor. Me, I’m doing swell. Just dandy. Got a short story from last year I’m retouching, chapter by chapter. Also reviving some old songs for posting at my Glass Door site.

To do that, I revived my old desktop PC and am trying to remaster some of that music for posting, and lemme tell ya, it’s not so easy. I honestly can’t see how I got anything done with that old piece of shit. But I got it working, sorta, enough to tweak some music. I’ll have to wire the PC into my actual recording gear to record the audio, since the computer is too old and ill-maintained to record its own audio without dropping clicks and pops into the recorded waveform. [frowny-face]

Actually, the only thing I really need that PC for is the Yamaha S-YXG50 synth software which was written so long ago that it won’t work on modern systems. I have a few songs whose sound depends on that software, so as soon as I record those tracks, I can transfer all the files, mothball the PC and move on. (If none of that made sense to you, just lay down on the floor and close your eyes until the confused feeling passes.)

Let’s see…what else? Ah, yes, against all better judgment and wisdom, I signed a 6-month lease extension on my apartment. It’s an OK place, but my neighbors suck. I’ve reached a point where I don’t care how much noise I make, because obviously the McStompy’s upstairs and the pasty-white soul screamer next door don’t care, either. Last weekend, I cranked up the bass box on my sound system and turned on the music just to prove to them how thin the walls are. Maybe they got the message, I don’t know. But there I am, living there for another 6 months. Here’s hoping I don’t lose my job anytime soon, eh?

Speaking of job, one of the managers in my department, a decent guy who’d been there for most of his professional career, gave his two-week notice. I was chatting about it with another coworker, and apparently he’s leaving the company to pursue a new career. Which I was fine with until I found out what he’s looking at doing: going into researching Creation Science. Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute.

Now, I can’t fault someone for having a passion. Hell, can’t fault someone for making a conscious decision to change their life, lifestyle, and career to explore their faith. But Creation Science? Why not study UFOs or something else instead? It’s just as factual. It just gets my goat, a perfectly sane, technical man deciding to look for data to support his religious claims. It’s like a drunk man using a lamp post more for support than illumination.

Even when I was a dyed-in-the-cloth Southern Baptist evangelical youth, I could still find a way to reconcile the creation mythos with evolutionary science. They fit perfectly. Did I think the earth was 6000 years old? No way. I knew the universe was eons old, broader than consciousness, and that it could still fit in God’s pocket. I carried with me the understanding that the physical processes that govern the universe are the tools that god used to create everything. It made complete sense that all life on Earth would start from the simplest forms and evolve up to the high forms we exhibit. That was the real design. Even our nation’s founding fathers, who were die-hard Deists, held this opinion. He wrote the rules, and we eventually happened, not the other way around.

I just cannot fathom the leap of logic necessary to believe that dinosaur bones were placed inside the ground by the Devil, with permission from God, in order to test our faith in the Creator.

So I get this mysterious, spooky voicemail today. It sounded like a mountain lion purring and breathing through a garden hose, or like an alien wraith lurking for its living prey. Deep and breathy. And the vocalizations went on for six minutes. I just knew one of my friends had to be pulling a prank on me, but who?

So tonight I picked up a 2.5mm adapter for my phone’s earphone jack and hooked it up to my studio rig. I clicked record and dialed my voicemail, recording all of the message. It went on and on and on, and was deep and ghostly. And the playback made even less sense. What could this be? What’s it all mean?

And then I attempt to decode the message. Played with the speed and pitch of the playback. It comes together at that point. It’s a human, obviously slowed waaaay down. When I adjust it to near normal speed and pitch, it’s intelligible. And do you know what it was? A telemarketing ad. FROM MY WIRELESS CARRIER. For a music service they’re starting. What the fuck? So now it’s obvious that their robodialer screwed up while playing back the celebrity-voiced pre-recorded ad. And all this work…for that.

So here’s to you, Cricket Wireless. FUCK YOU, Cricket. Fuck you.

I think I’ve always had a touch of paranoia, even as a kid. What started as an open trust in the benevolence and altruism of humanity turned into a self-protective distrust of those who would seek to hurt me. Throwing myself into the religion of love did nothing to turn me right again. In fact, it fueled my paranoia until I burned in its self-fueling heat. Did not matter one iota that I was turning into an irascible asshole as long as I was doing the Good Work to shine the light on the demons in the shadows and call out the devils in the corner who seek to dominate, contort, and drag humanity down to Hell.

Now, as a sophomoric old man, I’ve dropped the pursuit of the invisible, yet I am still hunting the boogeymen lurking in the shadows. Instead of railing on about a spiritual war, I’m rattling on to any who would pay attention about the corporate war over consumer souls, digging deep and hypothesising about the snares set to dominate, twist, and drag us down into another level of control and profit.

I’ve become one of those old men who, after being confronted with a new thing on the market, will talk loudly about The Riggings Beneath It All, the puppetry, smoke and mirrors designed to soothe, confuse, and ensnare us. Can’t stop myself from pointing out the rig. And part of me hates this about my nature, about the fact that I cannot put my trust into much in this world.

In my younger life, I could pray for guidance, love, and release (knowing full-well that my mission was to illuminate), but now, there’s no prayer except to my fellow man, begging for him to see what’s going on. There really is no difference between the two; one is praying to the nonexistent, yielding nothing, and two is praying to the immovable, yielding nothing. One voice cannot move the masses. Not in this culture, not ever. And there is no Deus Ex Machina who will step in and put it all right when it all goes horribly wrong. The older I get, the more I understand this.

I assume the feeling of powerlessness is natural.