daverea.com

I had to concentrate to keep from throwing up as I read this:

Baby who was hurled to floor dies (31 August 2004 – Rochester, NY)

This happened 10 minutes from my home. I couldn’t think straight for a solid five minutes after I heard this news story for the first time. I’m still having trouble accepting that it actually happened – that there’s a devastating reality behind the ink on newsprint.

Nearly anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big fan of rights, particularly human rights. But as far as I’m concerned, you can compost the rights of the piece of shit that did this. Especially the one that forbids cruel and unusual punishment. I think they should make him watch the autopsy. I think they should show him exactly what he did to his own child, right before they drop him 20 feet onto his own skull. And if he somehow survives, I hope they’d make sure the rest of the inmates know what he did before they turn him loose in the prison yard.

…they tend not to know they’re attacking. I think that’s a function of their stupidity – they’re just too dumb to know they’re doing catastrophic damage all around them. Unfortunately for me, stupid people tend to attack me when I’m in a hurry. Maybe I just notice it more when I’m in a rush, or maybe I emit some kind of “I’m busy so please get in my way” pheromone.

Yesterday, as of 5:05pm, I had to go to BJ’s and buy paper towels (10 minutes each way), go to Kelly’s and pick up my dinner (thank you thank you thank you for the deliciousness!) and then head to the ambulance base (35 minute ride in traffic) … and arrive by 6:00pm. You can do the math, but I think you’ll conclude that I was probably in a pretty big hurry.

So I’m approaching BJ’s (a big wholesale club, kinda like Costco or Sam’s) on a 5-lane road. There are two lanes in each direction, and a center turn lane. About 20 yards from the driveway, I signal and pull into the center lane (“no man’s land”?) only to see a woman in a minivan launch out from another driveway at about 2-o’clock, gun it in the turn lane, and stare over her right shoulder waiting for a break in traffic. I had to dart back out into the traffic lane to avoid being snowplowed by the maniacal minivan mama!

After I do my shopping, and after my company debit card gets rejected because they can’t get my stupid PIN right, I finally head for the door. I can practically taste freedom, and then a couple pulls their shopping cart out in front of me. No, this is no ordinary couple…they had to have 600 pounds between them, no joke. Now I’m not trying to be mean to obese people or anything, but there are certain practical limitations to fatness that tend to collide with my idea of punctuality.

So I wait as these two waddle out past the lady who punches your receipt, past the rows of oversized wholesale-club-style shopping carts, only to – for lack of a better word – stall squarely in the middle of the sliding double doorway. My blood pressure rises another 10 points.

FP#1: “Did you get the cupcakes?”
FP#2: “No, I thought you put a box of them in the cart.”
FP#1: “No, you were supposed to pick them up!”

At this point, I lose it and shimmy myself and my 24 rolls of paper towels through the 18″ gap of remaining door frame air space. Not only are they morbidly obese, terminally stupid and obsessed with confections. No, apparently they also bicker a lot too. I bet these people watch TV and eat frosting out of the jar with their fingers.

I eventually dropped flaps and taxied into the ambulance base at 5:59pm. Rock on.

I am, quite possibly, the most “reachable” person I know. I have two cell phones – my personal phone, and one issued by the ambulance corps. I have a pager, also from the ambulance corps. Both phones have e-mail addresses, in case you’re feeling anti-social.

Of course, none of this does me any good when I leave all of this gadgetry at home. I realized it about five minutes into my fifteen-minute commute – and I had a little mini-seizure in the car. What would I do, forcibly disconnected and not 100%-accessible at all times, for an entire eight-hour workday?!

The answer? Cry ‘freedom!’ and enjoy every blissful ring-free minute of it.

Every once in a great while, it seems like all (or at least most of) the pieces of a particular day just fit together just right and I end up … content. It’s almost always retrospective – there’s nothing I can do to force it to happen, but when it does I can always look back at my day and see why I’m so comfortable and happy at its close.

There’s a pork loin roasting in my oven. It’s in the low 70s outside, my windows and doors are open, and there’s a delicious post-rainfall, thunderstorm-tinged breeze blowing through my apartment. Aimee Mann is on the stereo, and my laptop and I didn’t have to jump through any computational hoops to get her there. I spent the afternoon with my Dad, loading rifle cartridges. I spent the mid-day with a great group of geocachers exploring the adventure possibilities afforded by downtown Rochester. I spent the morning at church with Kelly. She smiled through the whole service for the first time ever.

Now I’m going to spend the evening eating honey-mustard-marinated roasted pork, listening to folky chick-rock, and scrawling in my black notebook…

I had a particularly boring shower this morning (not that they’re usually that exciting, but hey…) and a started reading the ingredients on my bottle of Suave body wash. It wasn’t terribly interesting until I got to the end; the last ingredient is Titanium Dioxide.

So I went through most of the day thinking that my body wash is much cooler than everyone else’s since it’s made with Titanium. Then, of course, I figured I’d look up what Titanium Dioxide is – turns out it’s a really white compound that’s often used by artists to give paint an especially lustrous or brilliant appearance. So I guess they just use the TiO2 to keep the body wash from looking too much like … well, nevermind.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll learn something cool while brushing my teeth, instead…

I took a much-needed “sanity day” off from work today – there’s too much going on in life right now, and I needed a day for myself, to sort it out. Spent plenty of time cleaning up the apartment, and the first floor is nearly finished. The bedroom won’t need much – just some laundry to be done – and the basement, well, we’ll leave that for later.

I took another trip over to Beikerch’s to pick up some cartridge reloading supplies, and picked up a Streamlight Scorpion while I was at it. It’ll be good to have, and it was nice to treat myself to a little something to cement today’s “sanity day” status… [grin]

On the way home, I opted to make a stop at Corbett’s Glen Park, one of my favorite places in Rochester. It’s a beautiful little plot of land nestled off Rt. 441, just far enough that what traffic you can hear fades from your awareness. It’s rare to see anyone here, and I spent some time deep in thought, watching one of the waterfalls and padding through the adjacent meadow. I had happened to wear sandals, and the coolness of the grass against my ankles was refreshing in contrast with the rest of the 85+ degree day.

I’m off to take care of a few things from 6-7, then it’s grillin’ time. My good friends Jason, Jeremy and Billi are coming over to burn a few burgers and throw back a few cold ones… If I can find some fire wood, we’ll stoke up my little portable fireplace, too!

You should go read Barry’s Blog – Barry and I work ambulance together on Monday nights, and his blog always manages to remind me what a good time we have running calls together. He’s also a private-pilot-to-be, and his training accounts are always cool to read…

So yeah – I just wrote a nice long, witty account of my initial attack on The Funk that was my first floor. And then it got lost when I tried one of the links in the preview. Or, more accurately, I lost it. Let’s put credit where credit is due – blogs entries don’t just get hosed on their own!

So now you get the Cliffnotes version: Cleaned main floor up, constituting Episode 1: Attack of the Clutter. That is all. Be sure to tune in tomorrow for Episode 2: Tackling the Office.