Cheers – the place where everyone knows your name.
Hmmm…
What if you don’t actually want everyone to know your name? I don’t. Maybe that makes me twisted or mad or simply a tad unusual, but when I go to a pub, I’m content that no one knows who the fuck I am.
Except the bartender, of course. That cheery welcome from the one person who knows me – the smile, the greeting, the reaching over the bar for a handshake and the, “How ya doing?” - all goes to show other people, to whom I’m still a mystery, that perhaps I’m worth getting to know.
I want that. That’s why I don’t stay too long. The mystery would be shot to hell if I sat in the same seat, sucking down beers, staring into space for increasingly longer periods and finally slurring at someone who sits down in close proximity.
Not being known is the best way to get known. Keep quiet, acknowledge those who say, ‘Hello’, stay a short time - then move on.
Anonymity – it’s the way to get known.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
In Search Of The Light
A primary purpose of any body shop, the major portion of whose business is insurance-related, is to estimate the cost of repairing a damaged car. They have online screens to find any part for any vehicle. How many problems could there be in looking up the cost of a driver’s side rear light cluster and a replacement windshield for a factory-produced car with no aftermarket parts or custom work?
A lot.
Angelo, the full-sized and boisterous manager, gave the impression of being on the way down from a rather large amphetamine hit. He tried to locate a rear light cluster through his online system but, every minute at most, the phone on his desk would ring and his right arm would snake out like a whip and snatch it up before the first note had ended. There would then follow several minutes of one-sided mundane conversation that would cause him to roll his eyes towards the ceiling, occasionally glance in my direction and make nonsense gestures towards the unheard voice talking in his ear.
Between each telephonic iteration, he’d forget the car’s official designation of 2004 Mazdaspeed MX-5 Turbo and check his screen for a fictitious model. Had he not been such a talker, I’d possibly not have known.
In Angelo’s mind, the car switched between a 2004 Miata, an M5 and a Mazda 5. Eventually, after learning that it had a 6-speed manual transmission, it became a Mazda-6X, which produced much tut-tutting and head shaking, as though he’d stumbled upon a forgotten truth.
I soon learned that he was listening to the voices in his head and not the one from my side of the desk. More than slightly unnerved and waiting for either Angelo to scream ‘Eureka’ and leap upon the desk in a dance of triumph, or grab a hidden meat cleaver and slice off my head, I sat and tried to pretend that this was all quite normal and something I did every day.
After the online system bore no fruit, he began calling other body shops to track down the parts. None had a rear light cluster for whatever collection of words and mnemonics had popped into his mind between incoming calls, until one place said that they had.
Now I’m worried. I have an appointment to drop the car off next week at 8.00am. If the part doesn’t fit, will they cut pieces off and hammer it into submission, then fill the gaps with paint and sawdust? Like we used to do with fence panels back in the garden centre in England?
Let’s just wait and see….
A lot.
Angelo, the full-sized and boisterous manager, gave the impression of being on the way down from a rather large amphetamine hit. He tried to locate a rear light cluster through his online system but, every minute at most, the phone on his desk would ring and his right arm would snake out like a whip and snatch it up before the first note had ended. There would then follow several minutes of one-sided mundane conversation that would cause him to roll his eyes towards the ceiling, occasionally glance in my direction and make nonsense gestures towards the unheard voice talking in his ear.
Between each telephonic iteration, he’d forget the car’s official designation of 2004 Mazdaspeed MX-5 Turbo and check his screen for a fictitious model. Had he not been such a talker, I’d possibly not have known.
In Angelo’s mind, the car switched between a 2004 Miata, an M5 and a Mazda 5. Eventually, after learning that it had a 6-speed manual transmission, it became a Mazda-6X, which produced much tut-tutting and head shaking, as though he’d stumbled upon a forgotten truth.
I soon learned that he was listening to the voices in his head and not the one from my side of the desk. More than slightly unnerved and waiting for either Angelo to scream ‘Eureka’ and leap upon the desk in a dance of triumph, or grab a hidden meat cleaver and slice off my head, I sat and tried to pretend that this was all quite normal and something I did every day.
After the online system bore no fruit, he began calling other body shops to track down the parts. None had a rear light cluster for whatever collection of words and mnemonics had popped into his mind between incoming calls, until one place said that they had.
Now I’m worried. I have an appointment to drop the car off next week at 8.00am. If the part doesn’t fit, will they cut pieces off and hammer it into submission, then fill the gaps with paint and sawdust? Like we used to do with fence panels back in the garden centre in England?
Let’s just wait and see….
Eyeballs
Sometimes being wrong is good, but usually only when the thing you’re wrong about is a prediction of dire circumstance.
This afternoon’s eye exam, the very definition of anticipated disaster, was flawless. Dr Thingummy, a double for Elaine on Seinfeld, did everything right and said all the right things, ignored all attempts to chat her up, smiled briefly when I mentioned Elaine by name and produced a prescription in fifteen minutes of flicking buttons and rotating lenses.
I can collect two pairs of reading glasses in frames I chose, that look like those that normal people from the planet Earth would wear, in about a week; for under $100.
So, anyone claiming that my negativity knew no bounds, simply because I could see potential trouble at every step, can clap themselves on the back and laugh.
But not for long…
This afternoon’s eye exam, the very definition of anticipated disaster, was flawless. Dr Thingummy, a double for Elaine on Seinfeld, did everything right and said all the right things, ignored all attempts to chat her up, smiled briefly when I mentioned Elaine by name and produced a prescription in fifteen minutes of flicking buttons and rotating lenses.
I can collect two pairs of reading glasses in frames I chose, that look like those that normal people from the planet Earth would wear, in about a week; for under $100.
So, anyone claiming that my negativity knew no bounds, simply because I could see potential trouble at every step, can clap themselves on the back and laugh.
But not for long…
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Aged Wine
I learned something tonight. Something admittedly small but which should be seen for what it is: freedom from mental slavery.
I feel like Emmeline Pankhurst, a suffragette from the early days of the twentieth century, who chained herself to railings in England as a way of getting women the right to vote. No, I don’t mean cold, unfeminine and quite unattractive to men – I mean empowered.
Certain People would contradict my discovery. Note the capital Letters. Certain People is my term for that group of people who think who believe they know things that are good for the rest of us; supposed facts about the way life works that translate into rules for governing themselves and by which they determine the foolhardiness - or general ignorance - of others.
Those beliefs would include the assumption that a bottle of wine, once opened, should be poured down the sink if not consumed within an evening or two. I would suspect that such people might die of cardiac arrest if told that there might be enjoyment found in a chardonnay opened and partially consumed prior to a 5,000 mile bicycle trip and subsequently discovered, four months later, in the fridge.
Please don’t think I’m getting at wine snobs – even by the use of that term. I appreciate a good wine over a bad one, but a great deal of taste is subjective and so my idea of what makes one better than another might not agree with a more experienced drinker’s view. However, if that quaffer is content to allow my enjoyment what he might refer to as cooking wine without making jokes at my expense or otherwise pretending that I was born of a goat and raised in a trailer in the hills of North Carolina, we can be friends.
So now you know the source of my empowerment. I’ll refer to it as aging.
Just for the record, I don’t eat congealed cereal.
Or green bread.
But blue cheese that’s increased in blueness? Oh mama…..
I feel like Emmeline Pankhurst, a suffragette from the early days of the twentieth century, who chained herself to railings in England as a way of getting women the right to vote. No, I don’t mean cold, unfeminine and quite unattractive to men – I mean empowered.
Certain People would contradict my discovery. Note the capital Letters. Certain People is my term for that group of people who think who believe they know things that are good for the rest of us; supposed facts about the way life works that translate into rules for governing themselves and by which they determine the foolhardiness - or general ignorance - of others.
Those beliefs would include the assumption that a bottle of wine, once opened, should be poured down the sink if not consumed within an evening or two. I would suspect that such people might die of cardiac arrest if told that there might be enjoyment found in a chardonnay opened and partially consumed prior to a 5,000 mile bicycle trip and subsequently discovered, four months later, in the fridge.
Please don’t think I’m getting at wine snobs – even by the use of that term. I appreciate a good wine over a bad one, but a great deal of taste is subjective and so my idea of what makes one better than another might not agree with a more experienced drinker’s view. However, if that quaffer is content to allow my enjoyment what he might refer to as cooking wine without making jokes at my expense or otherwise pretending that I was born of a goat and raised in a trailer in the hills of North Carolina, we can be friends.
So now you know the source of my empowerment. I’ll refer to it as aging.
Just for the record, I don’t eat congealed cereal.
Or green bread.
But blue cheese that’s increased in blueness? Oh mama…..
First Monday
The Big Ride is over and now it’s back to... what?
I have no job. There’s no first day back, no welcoming party. I don’t have to struggle back to the office, to my old chair, to my old PC. There’s no need to laze away the morning with stories of cycling adventure until lunch and then persuade someone to come drinking. Because…..
There’s.
Just.
Nothing.
I get up at the crack of dawn, despite my neighbor’s alarm clock not jingling me awake through the wall. (Thankyou God). Naturally, I don’t wish her any harm, but moving, dying, developing an alarm clock aversion or simply losing her job and no longer needing to have it trill into redundant life at 6.00am – and then snooze it every 20 minutes until eight o’fucking clock – would represent an improvement to the quality of my life.
Anyway somehow, without my knowledge, a couple of hours vanishes before my eyes. One moment it’s early and the next, half the morning is over, stolen by the Time Bandits or whoever it is whose job it is to make you late for everything.
I do nothing. I accomplish naught. All I gain is a little wonderment that the computer still works. There’s not logical reason why it shouldn’t, of course, but my experience with such things is that a perfectly working PC, tuned off and untouched and left alone, will not function when reactivated. Don’t ask why, it’s a fundamental rule of the universe.
If personal computers had been around in the time of Copernicus, he’d no doubt have discovered their foibles rather than those things he said about the Sun not going around the Earth, which might have saved him an awful lot of trouble. It’s a matter of timing, I guess.
So, despite doing nothing documentable except going to the gym, I still manage to be late for lunch with Francisco, which is not good as he’s buying lunch and the meeting represents my best possibility to get back into employment. It occurs to me, albeit briefly as I cross the parking lot in a flustered rush, to make up a small white lie to cover my tardiness. Something about discovering and single-handedly eliminating an alien hive in Tampa would have done, but sense prevails and I rely on that old chestnut of being a total dick and forgetting where I was supposed to go which, quite by chance, is the truth.
Lunch involves no wine, which must surprised Francisco no end. There’s no point wasting the remainder of a perfectly good day of unemployment by getting wasted, no matter who’s picking up the tab. It’s different when you’re on a client’s site and a little alcoholic stimulation pushes the day towards conclusion, but none of this is good policy to explain, so I order coffee and let him wonder whether I have experienced an epiphany.
Later, with a pleasantly satisfied belly and no little smugness for the lack of booze, I wander across the mall to a familiar place of legal intoxication and get a small Starbuck’s. It’s to sweeten the anticipated trauma of dealing with the insurance company – oh yes, my car got hit sometime during the last 3 months.
It’s actually pretty smooth, which surprises me, so I wander again until an ad for Sears glasses – two pairs for $99 – drags my unwilling body up their escalator. I need new reading glasses, but getting them is worse than buying shoes and paying for them hurts.
If you’re American, you probably think $99 is the deal of the century. That’s because you’ve been conned by everyone in the eyeball business into thinking that glasses should require a second mortgage on your house or, at least, selling off slave shares in your first-born. The usual price of such things here is so high that it would be cheaper for me to buy a plane ticket to England and get half a dozen pairs, than to purchase two at regular price in an optical store in America. Besides, $99 avoids jet lag.
The guy on the desk is insistent that I need an appointment. I can see this (excuse the pun) but first, I want information about the frames and lenses that I can get for that $99 deal. It seems like a waste of time to sit for a fifteen-minute eye exam (which I have to pay for separately) and then to find that the choices comprise styles that only Dilbert’s grandmother would wear.
No.
All he’ll say is that the selection is limited. They can fit me in tomorrow afternoon.
I can already predict what will happen. I’ll arrive on time and ask again to see frames first and, if they agree, there’ll not have time to fit in the eye exam.
I know, there are people of the opinion that I am negative and critical and expect the worst – but these things happen to them too. It’s just that I, unlike them, notice and remember. I have put my hand in the fire enough times to know that it will burn.
I have the scars.
Let’s just wait and see…
I have no job. There’s no first day back, no welcoming party. I don’t have to struggle back to the office, to my old chair, to my old PC. There’s no need to laze away the morning with stories of cycling adventure until lunch and then persuade someone to come drinking. Because…..
There’s.
Just.
Nothing.
I get up at the crack of dawn, despite my neighbor’s alarm clock not jingling me awake through the wall. (Thankyou God). Naturally, I don’t wish her any harm, but moving, dying, developing an alarm clock aversion or simply losing her job and no longer needing to have it trill into redundant life at 6.00am – and then snooze it every 20 minutes until eight o’fucking clock – would represent an improvement to the quality of my life.
Anyway somehow, without my knowledge, a couple of hours vanishes before my eyes. One moment it’s early and the next, half the morning is over, stolen by the Time Bandits or whoever it is whose job it is to make you late for everything.
I do nothing. I accomplish naught. All I gain is a little wonderment that the computer still works. There’s not logical reason why it shouldn’t, of course, but my experience with such things is that a perfectly working PC, tuned off and untouched and left alone, will not function when reactivated. Don’t ask why, it’s a fundamental rule of the universe.
If personal computers had been around in the time of Copernicus, he’d no doubt have discovered their foibles rather than those things he said about the Sun not going around the Earth, which might have saved him an awful lot of trouble. It’s a matter of timing, I guess.
So, despite doing nothing documentable except going to the gym, I still manage to be late for lunch with Francisco, which is not good as he’s buying lunch and the meeting represents my best possibility to get back into employment. It occurs to me, albeit briefly as I cross the parking lot in a flustered rush, to make up a small white lie to cover my tardiness. Something about discovering and single-handedly eliminating an alien hive in Tampa would have done, but sense prevails and I rely on that old chestnut of being a total dick and forgetting where I was supposed to go which, quite by chance, is the truth.
Lunch involves no wine, which must surprised Francisco no end. There’s no point wasting the remainder of a perfectly good day of unemployment by getting wasted, no matter who’s picking up the tab. It’s different when you’re on a client’s site and a little alcoholic stimulation pushes the day towards conclusion, but none of this is good policy to explain, so I order coffee and let him wonder whether I have experienced an epiphany.
Later, with a pleasantly satisfied belly and no little smugness for the lack of booze, I wander across the mall to a familiar place of legal intoxication and get a small Starbuck’s. It’s to sweeten the anticipated trauma of dealing with the insurance company – oh yes, my car got hit sometime during the last 3 months.
It’s actually pretty smooth, which surprises me, so I wander again until an ad for Sears glasses – two pairs for $99 – drags my unwilling body up their escalator. I need new reading glasses, but getting them is worse than buying shoes and paying for them hurts.
If you’re American, you probably think $99 is the deal of the century. That’s because you’ve been conned by everyone in the eyeball business into thinking that glasses should require a second mortgage on your house or, at least, selling off slave shares in your first-born. The usual price of such things here is so high that it would be cheaper for me to buy a plane ticket to England and get half a dozen pairs, than to purchase two at regular price in an optical store in America. Besides, $99 avoids jet lag.
The guy on the desk is insistent that I need an appointment. I can see this (excuse the pun) but first, I want information about the frames and lenses that I can get for that $99 deal. It seems like a waste of time to sit for a fifteen-minute eye exam (which I have to pay for separately) and then to find that the choices comprise styles that only Dilbert’s grandmother would wear.
No.
All he’ll say is that the selection is limited. They can fit me in tomorrow afternoon.
I can already predict what will happen. I’ll arrive on time and ask again to see frames first and, if they agree, there’ll not have time to fit in the eye exam.
I know, there are people of the opinion that I am negative and critical and expect the worst – but these things happen to them too. It’s just that I, unlike them, notice and remember. I have put my hand in the fire enough times to know that it will burn.
I have the scars.
Let’s just wait and see…
Introduction
Welcome to Grinding The Bones.
Its desired title was The Daily Grind, but some other enlightened individual chose that first. Likewise he (or she) chose variations on the theme of surviving the absurdities of daily life, but then I remembered my addiction to a certain coffee shop and Grinding the Beans but, alas; same story. It was a short jump from grinding beans to grinding bones and remember Jack and the Beanstalk?
“Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll GRIND HIS BONES to make my bread”.
Horror stories for little kids. That what this blog should be seen for – introduce your children to this and they’ll never grow up for fear of what life might do to them. On the other hand, given the right encouragement, you could create mental clones of me. What a thought - hoards of Little Mikes pointing out the stupidities in life whilst on their way to becoming the writers of the future.
Roll over JK Rowling, Stephen King and all the rest – the Little Ones are here…
Its desired title was The Daily Grind, but some other enlightened individual chose that first. Likewise he (or she) chose variations on the theme of surviving the absurdities of daily life, but then I remembered my addiction to a certain coffee shop and Grinding the Beans but, alas; same story. It was a short jump from grinding beans to grinding bones and remember Jack and the Beanstalk?
“Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll GRIND HIS BONES to make my bread”.
Horror stories for little kids. That what this blog should be seen for – introduce your children to this and they’ll never grow up for fear of what life might do to them. On the other hand, given the right encouragement, you could create mental clones of me. What a thought - hoards of Little Mikes pointing out the stupidities in life whilst on their way to becoming the writers of the future.
Roll over JK Rowling, Stephen King and all the rest – the Little Ones are here…
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