November 8, 2002

please hold

I’ve been trying to call Best Buy to see if they have Grand Theft Auto Vice City back in stock. Word on the street is that the Duluth store alone sold 200 copies in the first week after the game’s release. I hate Best Buy for reasons that are numerous enough to jusify separate paragraphs for each.

When I applied for a job with Best Buy I got turned down… by a computer. I wrote about this before. I think it ran in the Statesman. I don’t remember. I don’t care. What matters is that they’re heartless jerks that can take their employees and shove it. Which brings us to…

Best Buy hires idiots. Idiots with pimples. Pushy idiots with pimples that try to get you to buy a replacement plan for your new toaster. I carry a pair of pliers around with me just in case one of these kids gets in my face. There’s a reason their voices still crack. I mean, I don’t stress out over gross incompetence in the retail world (if I did I would need to throw my belt over a rafter immediately), but please. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, admit it. Trust me, I know when you’re bullshitting. I haven’t survived four years in college by wit alone.

They have a name like ‘Best Buy’. What kind of boring, uncreative trash is that? No one has any fun naming their companies these days, and as a word-monger it fills my soul with pints of distilled hate. If I have a company I’m gonna name it Plastic and Steel Gewgaw Center, or Ezekiel’s Bucolic Zany Buy Things Place, or Lucky Land of Shoes and Beguiling Verbiage, or Stupid Crap to Placate the Masses, or Uncle Dane’s Global Oppression Concern.

Maybe I’ll just name it Corporation.

Anyway. I’ve tried to call Best Buy a number of times in the past, and I see a definite pattern in how the telephone system is hooked up over there. When you call the listed Best Buy phone number you end up at their Installation Center. You tell the poor soul there to direct your call to Media or Computers or Cat Torture or something, and he hits a button and the music starts. Loss Prevention picks up, so you tell Loss Prevention, now, to redirect you to Media.

You wait and listen to the music for a long time. It is intoxicating. Soon enough, Loss Prevention picks up. You utter a few syllables and the fellow remembers this stuttering idiot from before. He asks if you are still holding for Media and you say yes. He is kind and redirects you again. The phone rings a few times and an annoyed someone at Media picks up the phone and hangs it up again. His action pulls you out of the infinite swirling eddy between Loss Prevention and the store at large, and throws your flopping body to shore. Your signal dries out and goes dead.

You call back again and run the same gambit.

You call back again and finally reach a soft-speaking mademoiselle that makes your head spin all the hate melt away. No, they don’t have Vice City yet, but now it’s really not all that important.

November 7, 2002

sorting out heaven from hell

Some unsorted thoughts from this weekend:

Driving through Superior smelled like a trip into a foul lake of sulfur. I hate that town, I really do. A Superior gas station advertises that they sell postcards. I want to get one, but I’m afraid to stop and get out of my car.

I managed to finish all my reading. My parents now hate John Locke almost as much as I do.

A month ago, when we had a fire on our beach after my sister’s wedding, we almost froze to death it was so durned cold. Last night we drank Wisconsin micro-brews and ate S’mores around the fire, soaking in air as warm as a brisk summer evening. Impossible November weather.

Shell Lake was a mirror this morning, dead still. Upon returning to Duluth, I saw that the Lake was the same way… hardly any ripples at all. What a beautiful weekend.

I listened to the Phish Sugarbush show again, and was reduced a second time to a weeping ball of overemotional goo. I think passing cars were concerned about me. Antelope>Catapult>Antelope>Harpua>2001>Harpua is the most incredible sequence of music known to mankind. Beethoven, Mozart and Stravinsky have absolutely nothing on this band. Nothing.

It feels good to return home after three days, check my email, and find only six message of no importance. For all my responsibilities I have and imagine I have, I take comfort in that I can still drop everything and run off in the woods for a weekend, no problem.

I never want that to change. I never wish to be a fellow of such great importance that I give up that freedom to escape.

November 6, 2002

be more selfish, dammit!

The problem with a moral theory based on selfishness is that humans are so irrational you can’t even expect them to act in their self-interest.

Case and point. The library forbids beverages in disposable containers. The likely reason is because people would leave them behind and generate an unsightly pile of trash that would look a lot like my room right now. Now, I’ve smuggled disposable beverages into the library a couple of times, but am always prudent to smuggle them out. There is no sense in fanning the flames of this controversy, just for the glorious reward of leaving my trash where I choose. It’s in my best interest to keep my beverages on the down-low, and not leave them around the library and attract interest to the issue.

I don’t want increased library security for beverage control, as it’s already to the point where Ryan can’t even ritualistically set off the alarm system without getting harassed by library personnel.

Not everyone shares my sentiments, apparently. I drifted into the library to do some reading, shot towards my usual window-seat cubicle… only to find some slob has left his (or her) styrofoam coffee cup behind. Could this be classified as a selfish act? Yes, but it would be more accurately classified as a stupid act. I will speak nothing about the public good of throwing your trash away, keeping a low profile when willfully breaking rules, etc…

But please, when you can’t even be trusted to act in your own self-interest, where then can you be trusted? I mean, for fuck’s sake. Act in such a way to avoid confrontation and allow your unhindered enjoyment of a disposable beverage.

News and controversy around here seems to be at an all time low. Follow Ryan’s link to stolen penguins, instead.

November 5, 2002

funeral for the circus

Tonight was the funeral for the circus,

But Jane was not allowed to attend so

She cried her blue tears in the bathroom sink.

She missed the elephants led to slaughter,

The clowns with make-up streaked with carnage, in

A howling mass of fake hypocrisy.

The ring-leader shouts, ‘The show must go on!’

From his padded room in the asylum,

His lips pull back in grins for no one, who

Watches him rave in the cold steel window.

Meanwhile a crowd gathers outside to watch

The big-top tent alive in flames, and nine

Dancing monkeys with organ grinders, as

Smoke stings Jane’s blue eyes in the bathroom sink.

November 4, 2002

how was it?

I just spit beer all over my keyboard and monitor.

It wasn’t really that funny.

the monkeys are loose

Sunday a bunch of Woochers went down to Louie’s for some breakfast. I became irate that day when I read an article on the front page of the Duluth News Tribune that more and more and more and more and more scholarships are based on merit these days, and prissy-ass rich kids are taking the money and buying new cars as mom and dad foot the college bill.

Hmm. More merit-based scholarships? That’s a fucking horrible thing to do. Good god, the day we reward achievement will be the day meteors rain from the sky and the seas boil off this chunky rock. Additionally, if there are so many merit-based scholarships out there going to kids that don’t need ’em because their family eats exotic parrot embryos for breakfast and bathes in Goldschlager, why the hell am I still paying full price for this foul academic experience? Come on, I’m just as smart and my family is just as spoiled rotten as the next one. We don’t deserve any of what we earn so long as all those kids on the other side of the world are eating coal, so why can’t I just get more of what I don’t deserve and smear their blood across my face?

My friends took up a collection to buy the newspaper, but it was a Sunday edition and nothing the Tribune prints is ever worth $1.50 so I just picked up the free copy they had floating around Louie’s. Then a very rude man had to knock me over on his dash outside to have a cigarette. I hope he gets hit by a meteor.

Our waitress was the smartest girl alive. She’s still in high school but is taking classes full-time at the University, and through some loophole in not fulfilling her high school graduation requirements she can take her classes post-secondary and get the state to pay for everything. Unfortunately she may accidentally fulfill her requirements this year, and will soon have to pay for college.

Apparently she is in Al’s lifeguarding class this semester, and he’s likely gonna catch hell for our antics. She went to bed at 5:00 am that morning and got called in to work at 7:30. She was in no mood for us. She brought us extra napkins, wet naps, crayons, children’s menus and pancakes shaped like Mickey. Al pointed out that his word-find had ‘pancake’ but not ‘pancakes’, as the key demanded.

After Corey spilled his water all over the table and we got kicked out of the restaraunt and we tormented Annie by flipping her fuel door open again and again as she tried to leave the lot, we took Monica to the Greyhound station. It was off in some nether-region of West Duluth that we never knew existed. In the station lobby they had two pay phones right next to each other, so we coughed up 50 cents (that we had saved by not buying a craptacular newspaper) and called one phone from the other. I was attached to one, Ryan to the other, and this kept us entertained for fifteen minutes. We even got to do the COOLEST THING EVER. At one point I found that a little red light went on whenever I made noise, so I kept singing rhythms into the phone to watch the light flicker. The desk jockey finally asked us if we needed to use the phone.

“We are,” said Ryan. I hung up my phone and gave him a word-thumbs-up.

Feeling we had worn out our welcome inside, as we were getting a lot of red, weepy glares from the usual bus clientele, we stole off to the outdoors. Ryan disappeared behind the storage garage and five seconds later came running out shouting my name. Ryan had discovered a huge labyrinth made out of teetering piles of wooden pallets stacked fifteen feet in the air. In the maze we found a stuffed animal graveyard and Ryan shoved Clifford the Big Red Dog in his coat. We continued walking, and as we tried to figure out how to climb in a large rusty crane a longshoreman peeked around the corner, so we decided it was time to go.

On our way out we found a shopping cart. Coupled with 350 feet of bubble wrap and twenty pounds of ingenuity, we now have an entry for the First Annual Wuda Wooch! Custom Sled Competition.

We left the Greyhound station before the cops showed up and went to Menard’s to find runners for our sled. There is something unwholesome about walking aimlessly through a lumber yard, especially when you find loose bb-guns sitting around. We looked at lumber, PVC fencing and sheet metal for our sled, but nothing seemed fitting.

“Guys, we’re gonna need to think unconventionally,” I said. “Let’s go look at the lawn gnomes.”

The lawn gnomes had been taken out to the lumber yard and shot to make room for a motorized Santa that shook his groove thing. Seasonality is weird and cruel. We left Menard’s with only ideas and a tape measure and an emergency shovel for use in case of emergencies and building jumps out of snow in case of an emergency.

That night we went over to the Wooch! house to watch the Simpson’s Halloween special, but I had too much sugar before I left my apartment. I kept calling their kitten Delicious, and Ryan said to grab two forks. Ryan had Clifford. Clifford now goes everywhere with Ryan.

November 1, 2002

herbane ka-chunking

Today is Friday. You are likely looking for something fun to do. Here are some inspirational urban spelunking sites.

Action Squad -A group o’ punks that do it up in the Twin Cities area. Their presence in the spelunking world is matched only by their extensive website. These guys are permalinked here at Dane’s Bored.

Sydney Cave Clan -Aussies are crazy, and these guys have flung together a nice site. Look at Featured Places for missions, pictures, etc. Do you yearn for kilometers of unfettered underground exploration? Have you ever wondered what lurks beneath the Sydney Opera House?

Minneapolis Drain Archives -Super hardcore group that uses inner-tubes, climbing equipment and canoes to reach their underground destinations. The journals went dead in ’99. I really hope these guys aren’t stuck down a hole somewhere.

Minsk Diggers -My familiarity with the Russian language ends at ‘da’, and I don’t even think I spelled that right. If anyone out there can decipher this site… whee! I tried Google’s translator, but it doesn’t do Russian so I tried to do a Spanish to English translation instead but that just gave me a whole bunch of question marks and it seems Google and I are in the same boat. Phi-otos leads to the photo gallery. There are a heck of a lot of photos, and that’s a language I speak.

Subciety -Look at the size of that room! Click on Expedition Info for the meat. Sad that you live in boring new-history Colorado and can’t find anywhere to explore? Just go check out some Abandoned Titan Missile Silos.

Wraiths -Urban exploration in Vancouver, British Columbia.

FortunateMind -Mostly asylum stuff. Not underground, but exploration nevertheless.

October 30, 2002

chillin’ at the luce

Pizza Luce Chillin'

I thought I was going insane, but it was just Winamp set to random, cueing up the Muppets’ version of Pennsylvania 6-5000.