The Ballad of Casey Jones: Familiar Refrains
Another workday conversation to move through the day.
CJ: cheney is shug night in a white man's body
HT: ooh
CJ: can't u jus see that fool dangling somebody over a bannister?
HT: Not with his limp upper body strength. He's more like a modern capone, sneering and smirking at the camera
HT: untouchable
HT: and blood under his fingernails
CJ: not if the person was 5 years old
CJ: i can see that too
HT: dayum
HT: yeah, okay, I can see him Blanketing a kid for terror purposes
CJ: HAHAHA
CJ: that's messed up
HT: still too soon?
CJ: not for me
HT: excellent
HT: Just took my drug test.
CJ: how exciting
HT: I don't remember, I was high.
CJ: did they give u a lollipop?
CJ: as you should be
HT: they didn't give me ... oh, wait, I got a receipt.
HT: Never got a receipt for bodily fluids before
CJ: it's their way
HT: as it should be
CJ: my best friend from jr high's last name was woodward
CJ: we called her woody.
HT: Uh ... okay.
CJ: now she married some dude named chris beaver!
HT: *Hannibal falls down laughing*
CJ: so woody found her beaver.
HT: Now *that's* funny!
CJ: jus sayin
HT: I could run so far with that joke.
CJ: how does that happen?
CJ: i'd refuse.
HT: I could literally have a week's worth of material from a set up like that.
HT: But I'm at work.
CJ: i'm here to help
HT: Despite all the evidence to the contrary
Watching (TV): Rescue Me, "Zippo"
I get the job done
I work a nine-to-five styled job right now.
After I was laid off by AOL back in 2003, I was pretty dead set on never doing this again. I had a set of skills that allowed me to freelance and make enough money to do most of what I wanted, while sleeping between nine to twelve hours a day. I acted an idiot, I stayed out late, I caroused, and I generally had a good time.
But honestly, that got boring. Singing karaoke at the same bars. Dancing at clubs. Watching people throw up Jaeger bombs. Yadda yadda. I found the right girl and I'm all familied up, and that was the right thing to do.(1)
Anyhoo, my nine-to-five job is with a fairly big company. I've been wary of these since getting laid off by Disney Channel in 2001(2) because of the largely insensate fashion that huge swaths of employees can be tossed out in the street, even while literal buckets full of money are hurled out of the window at the same time.(3) I've sought stability throughout my career -- I grew up with a man who worked 30 years for Milwaukee's Metropolitan Water District, so I could appreciate that kind of mutually beneficial loyalty -- but never found it.
I've been at my job, pushing pixels and project managing for a huge company(4) and commuting to Pasadena, for a little over a year now. I like the work -- interesting but not too hard, challenging but rarely spilling over its allotted eight hour day -- and many of the people I've come to know there.(5) Now that I'm only driving a half hour a day, the commute's actually easy. So that's all good.
Then, a shock in this economic climate, they offered to convert me to become a full-time employee. A rarity, to be sure, and one I was very happy about because it gives me the chance to telecommute ...
... once I can get the paperwork together.
One of the problems with big companies is that often the internal processes seem like they were created by Vogons.(6) For example, they said they wanted to do a background check on me that stretches back ten years. Weird, but okay. I've been with the agency for more than ten years, and I've been working here for a year, I figured they'd just ask them. Nuh uh. They want W-2 and/or pay stubs from places that aren't even in business anymore. I have to drive to USC to get some paperwork.(7) Overall, I have to do a lot of ripping and running and actually end up losing money(8) to get money down the road. Interesting.
I'm not very happy about this sort of thing. Paperwork is one of my weaknesses -- I'm good at tactical matters, taking notes, conquering whatever is set in front of me. But paperwork means archiving and going back to stuff. It's largely a non-digital process.(9) Actual paper ... I get tired thinking about it. I can't index it digitally, can't search for key terms, can't collate the data, can't cut and paste easily. It's so embarrassingly last century. But these are the flaming hoops set before me, so it's time to slap my butt into some spandex and get jumping.(10)
Next week will find me awash in process, dodging the death of a thousand tiny paper cuts, bearing "the curse of the white man from town."(11) I have responsibilities I need to fulfill, and even if asked to do something ridiculous, I am pressed into service. I will not falter.
Playing (Music): "I Knew You Were Waiting For Me" by Aretha Franklin and George Michael
Footnotes:
(1) = Strangely enough, I get way, way less sleep now, even though I'm in bed by 11 most nights. Funny.
(2) = I swear, my resume is a freaking fountain of fail. Eight of the twenty companies listed there are completely out of business, and many more have taken huge financial losses, had massive layoffs and gone through other craziness. On the other hand, I have often said "if stuff didn't break, they'd never need me to come fix it." On the other other hand, had they hired me in the first place, they wouldn't have had to go through the "broken" phase and maybe would have had more money at the end of the day. It's hard to tell, your mileage may vary.
(3) = Never close enough to the ones being booted that they could catch any of it.
(4) = How huge? Like "with facilities in more than five states" huge. Like "five digits worth of employees, not even counting contractors and outside vendors" huge.
(5) = One has become one of my new best friends, like on that Craig level, for real. Others I'm working with to develop a sitcom pilot. One bakes the most amazing pies, based on the LA County Fair-winning recipe three years running. There's a lotta swell people.
(6) = Look it up.
(7) = Some people believe that I have not completed my degree. I have not removed this delusion from them. I had two credits lingering when I stopped going in 1995, but those are all done -- it's not like I don't have the units or what have you.
(8) = I'm paid hourly. If I am standing in line at USC or what have you, I'm not at work making money. I rather bloody enjoy making money.
(9) = I can tell you with reasonable certainty where virtually every file I have is located. Literally thousands upon thousands of them. I know where the hard drives are, I could probably recite the directory paths. It's kind of scary.
(10) = That image is disturbing to me too. Sorry.
(11) = I remember reading those words in Thinner and thinking, "I'll have that phrase handy in my brain for the rest of my life."
204,361 Blog Views Later, Hannibal & MySpace Blogging? Done ...
I have to say "goodbye" to blogging on MySpace.
Why?
Well, despite the fact that I can track my traffic (sort of) and that I can post from the road (I've posted a blog while sitting on the toilet at Norm's in Lomita) and I enjoy the blogs of many people here ... it's just not working.
Most of my online interaction has been through my smartphone in the last year or so. Despite having a glorious, superbly powerful 15" Macbook Pro, I very rarely get time to work with it (and even less as the days go by). So, when I am online, I'm largely on a smartphone browser. MySpace's mobile site? Oy. My blog subscriptions don't work on the mobile site -- it can tell me when I have a new blog, but won't show me when other people do. On the phone or on a browser, the only way I can look at older blogs is to go back ... and keep going back ... clicking "older" over and over again in a disorganized fashion. So ... uncivilized. How inelegant!
For some time, I've been talking trash about web blogging engines. Blogger, Blogspot, Wordpress, Movable Type ... I've said they were for the weak and for pansies. I blogged the old fashioned way -- in HTML, making the files myself, coding my own bolds and what not. It was awesome.
When I had a lot more time in front of a computer.
In this day and age of RSS and WAP and unlimited data plans, I had to step up the game. I had to do more. So I used some clients and even a side project of my own as test cases and learned how to do something my good friend and Image high muckamuck Eric Stephenson has known how to do for almost a decade -- as of a few days ago, fit Blogger functionality into the look and feel of my own website. What's that look like?
It goes a little something like this, hit it! The Soapbox is back.
You can go back to previous months, you can leave comments, you can see titles, I can blog from the road, I can post photos from the road, my Twitter feed is right on the side there ... it is, in a word, awesome.
"Hannibal, why not just use 'notes' on Facebook?" Well, the same "go back" shtick is a problem, you have to be a Facebook member to see the dang things (or maybe not, given a Google search I did today), I don't like the formatting ... it's just a hassle. Moreover, Facebook's even more of a privacy invader than MySpace. I'm happy to syndicate there (and yes, Facebook has a number of more functional things going on -- when you watch somebody else screw up, you can normally do better) but it's not a solution.
Moreover, I've had to make things more clear. I'm putting my "chaos abroad, tranquility at home" motto to work, putting all "external" ideas -- blog fu, reviews, futurism and what not -- on The Hundred and Four (new and improved with 75 percent less failure) and things more specifically about me -- personal commentary, stuff about family and what's going on with me -- on the Soapbox. I'm *this* close to figuring out how to have both blogs show recent links from the other (it works on The Hundred and Four right now, but the code breaks the formatting), and that's about it.
Will I come back to MySpace? I'll keep posting things here as announcements: when I rock something on either site, I'll blurb it up here. But despite a lot of holdouts, many say the writing's on the wall.
Me? Man, I love MySpace. It's where I came to really enjoy social networking after the message boards at sfgate.com disappeared. I built a network of friends that -- by and large -- are people I know and like. But to be honest, I liked Friendster. I liked the message boards on sfgate.com. But when technology and people march along, you can be like the Los Angeles Sentinel and stay on Central Avenue years after your constituency couldn't even find your dilapidated offices? One has to do, et cetera, et cetera.
So don't call this "good bye." Facebook and Twitter have serious server problems. There's no telling where things will end up. But this is "thank you" to MySpace and a sign post to where things will have to go.
So long. Oh, and thanks for all the fish.
Playing (Music): "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday" by Boyz 2 Men
Weave Down and Fatback for Mr. Charlie: The Return of Casey Jones
Last seen in Fourth and 17, my coworker Casey Jones is back for another IM conversation filled with unusual factoids. The core of this discussion is a mutual co-worker -- a weird girl of African descent with an odd voice, a face like the Grumpy Old Troll on Dora the Explorer and stylistic patterns that are equal part Skid Row Chic and 78th and Western alley. Enjoy.
CJ: I have a funny story.
CJ: so your loopy friend here told me of a date over the weekend.
CJ: for which she prepared the suitor a gourmet meal.
CJ: wanna guess what was served in this gourmet meal?
HT: What was the substance of this gourmet meal?
CJ: oh so this is special.
HT: I suspect toads and thumbscrews
CJ: fried steak. with gristle
HT: *Hannibal cringes in terror*
CJ: gets better
HT: *Fried* ... not grilled.
HT: Classy.
CJ: cheese grits. collard greens with fatback! and black eyed peas and more you guessed it fatback!
HT: You did not just type "fatback."
CJ: oh yes i did
HT: also: who would go out with her? Yowza.
CJ: exactly what i was thinking about who would take her up on the offer
HT: tell me we have photos
CJ: the funniest part is that the story was retold to my boss to illustrate her cooking skills!
HT: Your boss and fatback. Oh my stars and garters.
HT: How has she not gotten fired yet?
CJ: seriously. at least twice a week she IMs to ask if i can clean up one of her messes
HT: Messes of fatback.
CJ: it's stupid stuff. like not approving something for production and being confused why a job didn't post
CJ: back to the fatback dude.
HT: Pictures. Tell me there are pictures.
CJ: so you're a guy. any surprise as to why he didn't take her out?
HT: I must see the man who would quest for those ... Oh. oh, he didn't wanna be seen in public with her ...
CJ: hell to da naw. he came over to get a free meal and dessert that no one will ever know about
HT: Personally, I couldn't imagine anybody eating that "dessert," but I suppose somebody could be that "hungry."
CJ: i've seen a recent object of affection and it's exactly as you would think
HT: The idea of her and anybody canoodling makes me a little queasy.
CJ: also she's exclusively into fraggle rock looking white guys
HT: "fraggle rock looking." That's wonderful.
HT: Sparing the brothers the pain and suffering.
CJ: i called her on that a few weeks ago asked why no brown crayons in the crayola box
HT: Fatback for Mister Charlie, a Lifetime original movie starring Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson.
CJ: said she can't find one that fits the physical discription that she's into. some bs about being into "hipsters"
CJ: serious
HT: What brown crayon would "get" into that crayola box?
HT: The carboard looks all raggedy ...
CJ: haha
HT: I could find her a Black hipster dude -- two come to mind immediately -- but they've never done anything that bad to me.
CJ: there you have it
CJ: i was dying when i heard she was showing off her "cooking" to my boss
HT: So are there photos of these mutants, er, love interests she has?
CJ: not that i can find
CJ: i saw one on her desk
HT: That would have made this all complete. I wish your phone's camera wasn't so wack or you could send me a shot of 'em.
HT: Fatback for Mister Charlie. I have officially heard it all now.
CJ: such a mess huh
HT: I'm amused beyond my ability to comprehend.
CJ: does frying somebody steak and putting fatback in their greens count as cooking them dinner or setting them up for a colonic?
CJ: i mean why not just put out doritos and skip the small talk
HT: *Hannibal falls down laughing*
CJ: it was really about getting to dessert. so mission accomplished for both.
HT: In her case, if nausea doesn't occur immediately upon removing her clothes, she should just lead with that.
CJ: jiminy cricket
HT: Too far?
HT: I never know.
CJ: oh to that point today was equally amusing
HT: Go on
CJ: she wore this dress that zippers in the back
CJ: well it's supposed to zipper in the back
HT: *Hannibal stifles vomit*
CJ: instead of doing just that. she put on a cardigan because she couldn't zipper the damn thing up.
HT: Ooh
CJ: i tried to help but when your back fat has to be fissured together to get your clothes on then maybe you should chose a different garment
HT: fissured fatback!
CJ: so she's walking around with her clothes unfastened
CJ: who does that?
HT: Someone who can be used to induce vomiting?
CJ: re damn diculous
HT: Wow
CJ: or someone who should lay off the cheese grits and fried steak
CJ: hannibal seriously if a woman offered to cook you dinner and that was served what would you think of her?
CJ: for real
HT: If I was in an apartment on a date with the person in question, I'd be too busy wondering where my life went wrong.
CJ: lol
HT: The looniest, craziest person I ever boinked could still be taken out in public.
HT: Well, that I bothered to go on a date with anyway.
HT: Not counting hoodrats who I never actually spoke to. But that's not the point right now!
HT: This sounds like that verse about the food from "Rapper's Delight."
CJ: it seems like some hoodrat mess right?
HT: She's too strange to even be a proper hoodrat.
HT: I'd have too many hygiene concerns.
CJ: all that was missing was the tahitian treat
HT: I don't even know what that means.
CJ: you don't remember that stuff? You're of the age.
CJ: it's an old school red beverage served in a can
CJ: it's like if kool aid had a pop top
HT: I was a pretty dedicated kool aid man before I made the snapple switch towards juices.
CJ: extremely hood
CJ: it was tampico before tampico
HT: It sounds vaguely familiar, but we had hot and cold running kool aid at my house. Also: I avoided Tampico like the plague, so if it was like that, I'd have avoided it as well.
CJ: or maybe she would serve the pineapple soda that would be gourmet
HT: Stepping up to Shasta, at that level of classiness.
CJ: what i love is that she has no clue that she has no clue
HT: That's both tragic and funny.
HT: Sometimes all at once.
CJ: this is a 35 year old woman. she should know better.
CJ: if you're inviting a grown man into your home for a meal it shouldn't be one that will kill him
HT: Wait, she's only 35?
HT: I'm *older* than her?
CJ: yes you are
HT: Wow, either I'm holding up really well or she's gone to seed really, really fast.
CJ: oh and here's more comedy.
HT: Go on ...
CJ: last week. a part of her weave fell out somewhere in the building.
HT: Stop.
HT: Stop everything.
HT: Stop.
HT: Weave down?
HT: Weave in distress?
HT: No.
HT: I am not reading this.
HT: Sweet spirit singing.
HT: I need to call somebody in on this.
CJ: weave down!
CJ: dead weave walking
HT: hang on, called in phillip to consult
HT: I'm gonna put on Phillip Jordan(1)
HT: [Phillip reads the whole discussion thus far and then types] yeah...one word...ghetto! thx have a nice day :-D
CJ: LOL
CJ: if you are gonna be weavalicious. then don't have a busted one
CJ: how does your weave fall out and you don't know until you feel a draft?
CJ: lawd lawd lawd
HT: I'm without words.
HT: Weave down.
HT: Fatback for Mister Charlie.
HT: and "I can't zip my dress."
HT: Is she gonna be a whole week of shows for Tyra?
HT: But yeah, that's some mess right there.
HT: I've got to say your desire to watch train wrecks hit gold when you befriended this sad creature.
HT: Lemme save this chat for my blog.
HT: would you mind?
HT: The Return of Casey Jones.
CJ: g'head
CJ: You talkin bout the weave or fatback part?
HT: The blog will be called "Weave Down and Fatback for Mr. Charlie: The Return of Casey Jones."
HT: It's a classic.
HT: That's the guts right there.
HT: Here I just wanted to help you stay awake, and we got all this happening! Mercy.
HT: Casey!
HT: We need to make a *reality show* about her.
HT: Just following her around. It'll be like Anna Nicole on a budget!
HT: We could get *paid*!
CJ: anna nicole on a budget. You're insane
HT: Hang on, I forgot to ask -- how exactly did you find out that there was a weave emergency?
HT: Follow up question: did she leave work, or just keep rockin' like nothing was wrong?
CJ: i was called over to inspect the outage
HT: Follow up question: was there visible scalp?
CJ: said she thought her neck was drafty
CJ: more like tatters
HT: Casey Jones, weave inspector!
CJ: you membah tatters?
HT: I remember all too well
CJ: like a buncha angry black men with their fists balled up back there
HT: *Hannibal falls down laughing*
HT: Lemme put on my jacket, because that was cold.
CJ: i'm just keepin it real
HT: Is this gonna be a new line of work for you? You'll have a clipboard and a federal mandate?
HT: So did she stay at work like this?
CJ: hannibal if the woman knowingly came to work with her clothes unfastened what do you think?
HT: *Hannibal falls down laughing*
HT: I forgot for a second. Fair enough.
HT: So, was there visible scalp?
CJ: no. just a buncha kitchen mess
HT: That's going in my twitter. "If the woman knowingly came to work with her clothes unfastened, what do you think?
HT: Hilarious.
HT: All right. Weave inspector. Wow.
CJ: i'm only mean when the voices ask me to be
HT: *Hannibal chuckles* That's what I told the parole board too!
HT: Well, look at it this way -- at least you can always count on something to entertain you at work.
CJ: i swear if i was her mother i'd still be giving her whoopins
CJ: makes no damn sense to be so raggedy
HT: Something. Shock therapy. Lobotomy. Some kind of intervention.
Shocked to say, this is a fairly normal conversation. I hope to have photos of the co-worker we now exclusively refer to as "Fatback" after an August 27th staff meeting, but no promises.
Playing (Music): "Keep On Rockin' Me Baby" by the Steve Miller Band
(1) = Phillip Maxwell Jordan is not just a co-worker at my office, but one of the actor's in this fall's Couples Retreat starring Jon Favreau, Malin Ackerman, Jason Bateman and more, so make sure you check that out. He's a Chicago brother to the core, a talented coder, a professional thespian and generally deeply amusing.
The World Is Moving On ...
Here's yet another reason to love Neil Gaiman: there's an interview with the prolific writer at i09 where he talked about attending the "first officially sanctioned science fiction conference in China, and asked why the Chinese government was sponsoring imaginative fiction after so many years of disapproving of it." Neil said, "It was because the Chinese had noticed that they were incredibly good at making things, but that other people seemed to be inventing the things that they were making, and they had come out to the U.S., and they had gone around Google and Apple and Microsoft, and one of the very few things that the people at Google and Apple and Microsoft had in common was they were science fiction and fantasy fans from way back." The article summed it up brilliantly with this line: "And because they were science fiction fans, they believed the world could be different tomorrow, instead of just being the same thing day after day."
Stop. Think about that really. The world could be different tomorrow. Growing up in Memphis, I couldn't scan the web for directions to get somewhere, because there was no web, no smartphones, no data available. Somebody had to think that stuff up. What sorts of things are you thinking up? Me? Well, you'll see some of that shortly, spirit willing and the creeks don't rise ...
That notwithstanding, "tomorrow" is one of the most prominent things on my mind. The future holds a little girl that's half me and half my wife, due this December, and nothing like that has ever, ever existed in this world. So "tomorrow" is almost the only thought in my mind. Not just the things we'll carry with us -- your days of having multiple credit cards, a separate driver's license and membership cards for gyms and what have you are numbered, believe you me, just like Douglas Adams predicted -- but what our lives will be like. How will we relate to one another ... or not as the case may be?
"Be mindful of the living force," the grave voice of Qui-Gon Jinn(1) echoes in my brain. I have to remember to hug the lovely lady and wonderful little girl in my home, and not have all of their memories of me have an incandescent glow on my face and a glowing Apple logo glaring out at them ... despite the three novels and countless stories bouncing around the inside of my skull, desperate for the lengthy, arduous trip through my fingers into a form of digital life. It's a balancing act, a tough trick for an extremist, and every day I'm shifting my paradigm pole to try and not fall.
Playing (Music): "Sincerely, Jane" by Janelle Monae
(1) = Yes, I'm a Sith. That doesn't mean there aren't lessons I can learn from the Jedi. There's a section in the Revenge of the Sith novelization where Obi-Wan realizes that he simply has to give himself over to spirit (The Force in his case) and he doesn't have to worry about anything. Maybe he'll live, maybe he'll die, but what needs to happen will happen, regardless. In doing so, he became unstoppable with a lightsaber and fought off the deadly four-armed lightsaber dervish General Grevious, which was seen as impossible by many. There's a great lesson for me there.
Tomorrow can be different
Okay, screw that MySpace noise.
After years of fighting the "pansy" way of blogging, I gave in when it became possible from my phone. On my server, with my rules, run by my evil.
Welcome to the new way of doing things. As of now, all Hannibal Tabu-related broadcasts will happen on official channels: The Hundred and Four for that which related to the external world, The Operative Network for things more personal.
Here? You're gonna get serial fiction (The Messenger, etc.). You'll get poetry. You'll get discussions of as much of my life as I'm willing to disclose. You may even get a recipe or two ...
... an EVIL recipe!
Content will continue to be syndicated via Facebook, MySpace and everywhere else. Thank you for riding with me, and buckle up. Safety first ...
Okay sleep soon.
Playing (Music): "All Around The World" by Oasis
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