January 2011
3 posts
Take Two...
Hey to who(m?)ever might be reading this. After weeks of not wanting to look at it, I feel—Read: my girlfriend tells me—it’s time to take another crack at my entrance essay for my first police background exam. Again, feel free to skip this in its entirety and move on with your life; this is basically just me thinking out loud.
~
Nearly four years ago, I entered college without...
Why I want to be a police officer
Feel free to skip over this if you’d like. I’m trying to work out my thoughts for what I should put down as my goals essay for my very first background investigation.
~
I am pursuing a career as an officer because I believe in the laws that govern the order of our society. I believe in the criminal justice system. To protect citizens and serve a community, I wish to pursue justice...
November 2010
1 post
Start of a short story...
If her head had still been intact when I showed up, I’d say the broad is lying face-down. As it stands, anything resembling the face of the late Anne Connors burst like an overinflated tire the moment she wrapped her luscious lips around her husband’s service weapon and pulled the trigger. She’s sprawled out on her stomach with both of those blue-gray eyes staring up at the ceiling. Everything...
October 2010
2 posts
The Ritual
You’re sitting at work with your nose buried in a book. Someone has cranked the volume down on all the ambient noise of the office, and the warm glow of overhead florescence casts the perfect shadowless light onto your trashy novel. The world melts around you, and you find yourself flung headfirst into the fiction on your desk…
You don’t hear the phone until the third ring. By...
Do clothes make the man?
I’m 21 years old in my senior year of college. If everything goes according to my rough plans, I’ll be a college graduate and be starting a career in the next nine months or so. I’m old enough to drive, gamble, drink, own a handgun, and enlist in the military. By all accounts, it appears that I am on the cusp of true and absolute adulthood. What could be more “grown...
June 2010
4 posts
“Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self-destruction…”
– -Tyler Durden (film version)
To clarify my last post, I’m beat to hell and sore all over, but I couldn’t be happier. Feeling like I’m about to completely fall apart is like I’m punishing myself for all the time I wasted with inactivity and sloth. In a fucked up sort of way,...
Caffeine is a piss poor substitute to health...
Last night, I went back to Aikido for the first time since high school. It’s been something like three years since I went, so I was a little nervous about how much I’d forgotten. Luckily, it seems my muscle memory is much more reliable than wherever the hell I stored all the math I reviewed last semester and have already forgotten. With relatively little prompting, I was able to do...
from John Dies at the End by David Wong
“Sooooo …” Amy asked, “how do you know when it’s working?”
I said, “You just, uh, start noticing things. it’s hard to explain. Like bits of radio signal coming in through the static.”
With that, a thought passed through my head, a flash like a shooting star. Pro wrestling was real. But not real in the sense that we perceive reality. It was...
Progress!!
To get into the academy I’m aiming for, I need to pass a physical test. Push-ups, sit-ups, vertical jump—most of the test is just a measure of basic muscle strength, which isn’t exactly something I’m worried about developing. What’s got me is the cardio.
Based on my age and sex, I have to be able to run a mile and a half in 12 minutes, 53 seconds. Generally, this...
May 2010
1 post
I'm twenty-one, and I just finished my third year...
I hate my job, and I’ve grown to resent what’s become the culmination of my education. I’m old enough to drink, and I own a handgun. Why am I still in school?
I’m trapped in a loop of higher learning because I have a scholarship. To give that up would be like spitting in the face of people who actually have to pay for school. So I suck it up and go to class. I have one...
April 2010
4 posts
Spacing out in class
I think I’m slipping.
With my junior year of college drawing to a close and no immediate plans of attending grad school, I’m getting restless. I resent the time I spend sitting in an office and pretending to work. I’m reluctant to put in any effort toward achieving an academic degree I may never use. Really, the only thing I want to do is work out. I’m serious about...
from Homicide by David Simon
You are a citizen of a free nation, having lived your adult life in a land of guaranteed civil liberties, and you commit a crime of violence, whereupon you are jacked up, hauled down to a police station and deposited in a claustrophobic anteroom with three chairs, a table and no windows. There you sit for a half hour or so until a police detective—a man you have never met before, a man who...
from Sleepless: A Novel
“There is nothing more mysterious than a marriage.” That’s what my father told me when I called him and my mother to say I’d gotten married. Nothing in my marriage to Rose has proved him wrong. When I finally took her east two years later to meet them, he was strange with her. Not strange like he was with everyone else, not his standard detachment, something else. I...
Far away
For a while, something didn’t feel right. Everything was far away, real life a poor photocopy of the original. Ink lines from a faulty cartridge. Smudges from a dirty scanner.
I tripped coming up the steps to class. I nearly fell over my desk.
Now, I feel fine, perfectly whole and undamaged. The ‘girl’ sitting in front of me is an ogreish Freida Kahlo. Her mockery of anything...
March 2010
7 posts
Bathroom Graffiti
“I’m beginning to doubt your commitment to sparkle mountain.”
“Meep.”
Question: “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?”
Response: “Because my woman suit is tight in the groin.”
“I :heart: Cock!”
…
I guess it’s nice to have reading material, right?
Waiting...
I’m at work (the-soul crushing office job that drives me to the gym at least thrice a week so I can get in shape and become a cop instead of actually using my degree), and my mouse dies.
Despite having enough reams of paper to make a small fort and a decade’s worth of pens, my office ran out of batteries. But I’m free to wait until they come in!
Why do I even need a wireless...
I'm too manly to shop at H&M
I’ve been looking for a lightweight jacket to wear in the Spring and the cooler days of Summer. Sure, I have three different colors of zipper hoodie, but those aren’t exactly classy. So I’ve been shopping around…
I don’t know why, but no department store seems to think that this is jacket weather. I go anywhere from Sears to JC Pennys to a goddamn Walmart and my...
From Thursday's Community
Pierce: Jeff, when I was born, I got my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, both arms, and one of my ankles. Mom said that there came a point when the doctors stopped delivering me and just started laughing. I mean, if I ever let being bad at something stop me, I wouldn't even be here. That thing that some men call Failure, I call Living. Breakfast. And I'm not leaving until I've cleaned out the buffet.
Jeff: Good luck, Pierce.
Pierce: Don't need it. Never had it.
Insomnia is a bitch
Spring Break’s coming to a close, and I managed to go on no vacation whatsoever while still thoroughly fucking my sleep schedule. I’ve been up since 4AM or so. Strangely enough, I haven’t wasted my time as thoroughly as I do when I’m procrastinating life rather than sleep…
I finally got around to watching Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog (on Netflix), and I...
I have new pet rats
I bought two new little rats to befriend my older larger rats after I moved them to their bigger cage. Unfortunately, the new rats easily slip through the bars of the big cage, so I need to keep the newbies in a ten-gallon tank until they fatten up…
February 2010
7 posts
beginatthebeginning:
“I feel I’m not getting photographed by the paparazzi enough, so I figure I’ll go and hang out in Venice with Brad and Angelina.”
—
Johnny Depp
Aw, why isn’t there a picture to go along with this?
Heavy Rain →
A friend of mine just picked up Heavy Rain for his PS3. Even though the thing won’t work on a 360, I decided to check out a few trailers. This one gave me chills…
Clever
I just got through my first exam in Statistics class, and I feel like whatever the intellectual equivalent of a bad ass is. There was a hole in the sheet of notes I wrote up a half hour before the test, so I was forced to backwards derive a property of independence by logically figuring out what would make the problem have an interesting answer. Basically, I made shit up and ran with it after...
Coffee: An anecdote
Yesterday, I realized there are four competing brands of coffee on campus. Since Chartwell won the bid for food service, there’s been an Au Bon Pain in Commons, and there’s that shit coffee kiosk in the library atrium that adopted the name Pura Vida. Their coffee is advertised as “fair trade,” but it’s shit. A new Starbucks opened in the UC this semester, and the...
I miss coffee
I have recently discovered that my life feels shallow and incomplete without coffee, which is damned inconvenient seeing how my apartment has nothing but instant swill, and I’m not in a mood to go buy grounds and filters.
I’m in my statistics class, and we’re giving a slow review of shit I covered in high school - boxplots, histograms, probabilities. The guy in front of me to...
I had a nightmare.
Nothing exciting, really. This dream didn’t even have zombies, for fuck’s sake! It was the standard “I’m dead, and no one can see me or talk to me except my one roommate who’s too busy running errands to even call a paramedic or mortician to take my corpse away” kind of deal. Same old, same old.
Now, the cool thing is, that I realized I was having a nightmare...
pet peeve
Why does every episode of House have to start with a misdirection?
Two or more people are on screen, and one is developing obvious symptoms. Gasp! A case? But wait! A random person to the left or right develops an even more sudden and inexplicable set of symptoms out of the blue. BOOM! That new person is incapacitated. Good, time to roll the intro.
I mean, I still like House, but hasn’t...
January 2010
19 posts
I do not want to be a cubicle drone.
“Look at it this way. A man takes a job, you know? And that job - I mean, like that - That becomes what he is. You know, like - You do a thing and that’s what you are. Like I’ve been a cabbie for thirteen years. Ten years at night. I still don’t own my own cab. You know why? Because I don’t want to. That must be what I want. To be on the night shift drivin’...
Exercise is grinding
It’s been about two weeks since I decided to change my career goals, and things have been going fairly well. I’m sticking to a 3+ day/week exercise regimen that involves heavy use of a treadmill. In order to make it into the academy I want to apply for, I need to be able to run a mile and a half in 12:53. Right now, I can do about a mile in 10:00, so I’ve got a ways to go.
In...
Change directions
Over the past few weeks, I’ve realized that my life is heading in a direction I don’t really want it to go. I spent winter break toiling away in an office, mindlessly slapping my hands against a keyboard in order to further a project I’ll never see to fruition. Data entry, data entry, data entry…
Fuck, I don’t want to waste my time toiling away behind a desk.
I want...
I want to try dressing nicer...
but I don’t know if a white blazer looks tacky. Does it? Here, I’m looking at this white one I found at Old Navy. And it’s linen, so it should be light-weight enough for me to wear it in the Spring/Summer. Right now, the only casual blazer I’ve got (and the only blazer that even fits me) is corduroy, and that’s gonna be hellishly too hot in a month or two. Really,...
I just realized
kandles:
lmosworld:
I just realized that when my phone runs out of power it sings a little song as it is turning off. I never thought about it before. If it didn’t sing a song, it’d probably get an extra minute of battery life.
It wants to sing a dying song! The least you could do is give it that!
You know, we’d probably all be less mad at technology if it played a pleasant tune...
Genre shift.
When I’m not sure what to read in my spare time, my default is zombies. But I’ve read about all I can read of the shambling undead without branching off into the deep end of absurdity, so I recently switched to pulp; it’s like romance novels, but replace every instance of sex with a gun fight or barroom brawl. I find it strangely compelling…
hey sg-centralia
beginatthebeginning:
You’re my 190th follower!
Thanks for following :)
Your “about me” had Vonnegut, Simon Pegg, and zombies. How could I not?
from Caught Stealing: a novel
He’s reaching inside his coat, and as he pulls out his other gun, I step forward and bring my foot down on his wrist, pinning it to the ground. I point my gun at him.
He opens his mouth and spits out a little rain.
—You… you really are making a mistake. You don’t know what it is, but… Christ, that hurts. But this is a mistake. Trust me.
I nod.
—I trust you,...
from Caught Stealing: a novel
When I wake up, the first thing I think about is the fucking cat.
I’m looking after this guy’s cat for a couple weeks. God knows how long I’ve been out and if the thing is even alive. Fuck! I knew this would happen. I told the guy I wasn’t good with animals, that I can barely take care of myself, but he was really up against it, so I took the damn cat. Then I see...
I have never been overly aggressive or forceful with women. I’m not that guy who throws her on the kitchen table and rips open her blouse, popping all the buttons and ruining a perfectly good shirt. or who fucks her up against a wall in a dark alley behind some Dumpster. I never wanted to be Mickey Rourke. I don’t think he did either. it takes a willful suspension of absurdity to be...
“‘There are no good ideas anymore,’ I said… ‘Just be...”
– from Apathy and Other Small Victories
kandles:
sg-centralia:
kandles:
One of my friend became a fan of ModCloth on facebook and I looked at their website and I kind of like their stuff. Some of it.. some of it I think is really ugly. But this is some of the stuff I like and wish I could buy. the other problem is it’s kind of expensive. But I might buy one or two things at some point.
I like the first and the fourth dresses,...
kandles:
One of my friend became a fan of ModCloth on facebook and I looked at their website and I kind of like their stuff. Some of it.. some of it I think is really ugly. But this is some of the stuff I like and wish I could buy. the other problem is it’s kind of expensive. But I might buy one or two things at some point.
I like the first and the fourth dresses, and I prefer the first to the...
I wish all troll attempts could fail so...
This is a chat dialogue from mspaintadventures, a webcomic I read.
— adiosToreador [AT] began trolling turntechGodhead [TG] — AT: hEYYY, AT: fIRST, oK, i THINK YOU’RE AWFUL, AT: lET’S PUT THAT FACT ON THE TABLE WHERE WE CAN BOTH SEE IT, AT: nOW YOU HAVE BEEN PRIMED FOR THE DIGESTIVE RUINATION THAT’S ABOUT TO TAKE PLACE, aND THE COMPREHENSIVE SOILING OF THE LAUNDRY...
December 2009
19 posts
Horror Movie Teenagers
Work’s been pretty slow today, so I’ve had a ton of time to kill. Once I ran out of decent new shows to watch on Hulu, I switched over to my Netflix account to check out some bad slasher flicks.
For one thing, watching the original Scream has shown me how decent the first Scary Movie was. Those guys really stuck to the source material they were trying to parody. It’s a real...
Fuck yeah, fashion
Okay, so watching TV shows on Hulu made me feel under dressed, which is a little weird considering the fact that I’m at work and supposed to attend a company luncheon in a half hour, so I actually took the time to dress up… It’s probably the fact that I’m wearing jeans and sneakers below my fancy blue shirt with a gray knit sweater vest… At any rate, I started looking...