Man I can barely see straight. I was up until late working on a project. This, however, doesn’t mean I am going to leave you to your fate as you head out into the big bad world. Today’s motivational thought is actually a bit of practical advice for those of you who work your nine to five in an office. Yes, it beats working as a roofer or a sewage plant manager or even a cage cleaner at the zoo, but it still entails risks. That’s right, because staplers can be deadly if not used correctly and everyone knows that a shredder is a lethal weapon if left within reach of the wrong person… like your boss.

So my advice today goes to those bold knights of the pen organizer who brave the treacherous lands of sticky notes and mouse pads. When it comes to the office, there is no place more treacherous than the break room. It’s a dark and dangerous lair where shady deals are made and questionable characters trade in dirty secrets regarding the Receptionist and the Financial Manager and all the time they spend in the copy room after hours. But to find real treachery, you have to go further than the tables and the coffee machine and the microwave over that hasn’t worked since the Civil War.

You have to go to the refrigerator.

That’s right, because no other place is witness to so much treachery and back-stabbing as your break room’s refrigerator. Yes, it’s a dirty thing and it barely even keeps anything cold but where else are you going to keep your humus until lunch time? And inevitably at some point you will be tempted to take something really good to work, like your grandmothers beef casserole or that last piece of flan from last night’s party at Pepe’s. But you know that on the day you do that, you will not get any work done, cause every five minutes you will need to run back to the break room and make sure some sneaky bastard didn’t steal your treasure. Well here’s my bit of advice to you for such a situation.

Always, always, always use a decoy.

That’s right, take something else with you that looks really good but is in fact a rotting insult to nature, like that slice of cake that has been sitting on your fridge since before the invention of the DVD. Place that item in front of the real treasure, in a very visible and inviting way. You see cake can stay looking good forever, even after it starts tasting like dead maggots and while your victim goes for the decoy and curses life after the first bite, your treasure is safely hidden in a bag right under their nose.

But lets say you have nothing like that at hand, maybe you’re one of those freaks that cleans their fridge regularly. Not to fear. In that case you can always set-up your decoy by hiding the real treasure behind a regular piece of pie… laced with a healthy dose of laxatives.

One last thing. If you do decide to follow this advice, you might want to stay clear of the bathrooms for the rest of the day. Have a good one!

Originally Published 09/15/2009

I feel I must apologize to… well, I guess anyone who’s bored enough to read this stuff on a regular basis. I have been engrossed in a project for the last three days and in order to meet my deadline I had to neglect many things; my novel, my family, World of Warcraft, personal hygiene and yes, my blog. But that’s all over and I’m back to the old grindstone, hoping all my hard work pays off. For those of you interested to see the fruits of my labor, you can go to mythangelo.deviantart.com and look for the art piece titled Built2Rock. Yes, it might look simple but it took a lot of work.

Anyway, so we’re two days away from yet another weekend and I have that ever present dilemma heading my way: what to do? What do I do on the weekend? Where do I go? It happens every Friday, like a bad rash that keeps coming back. Work is over and yet I have one more important decision to make. Do I go out? Do I stay home? Do I spend money? Do I have any money to spend?

A lot of times the answer to that last one is a huge resounding “no”, and that kind of solves the entire thing right then and there as I realize I am in for two days of World of Warcraft and pizza. If I’m lucky they have the 2 liter coke bottles on special at the Dollar General and I can get a drink with that pizza.

But what about the weekends when I actually have a little money to spend? You know, it happens! Some freak accident caused me to keep my finances straight for a whole week and lo and behold, weekend comes and I have not wasted all of my money in trivialities like, oh I don’t know, groceries and diapers. So here I am, money in the wallet and a decision to make. I could go the responsible way and stay home, save my money and maybe have something to buy breakfast come Monday. But I’m not going to do that. These opportunities are too few and precious to waste them with things like mature decisions and responsible behavior.

Hey, I could leave town. Why not? I have a good car, the same car responsible for the fact that most weekends I don’t have the cash to buy a beer can from a hobo. But when I do have money, at least I have the option of skipping town. And that opens up my choices that much more. A lot more, in fact.

You see, where I live we have essentially two choices for entertainment. We can go watch a movie in one of our two third rate theaters, an activity which involves the risks of food poisoning and becoming permanently attached to the impossibly sticky floor, or we can go hang out at the local book store and renew our Geek Club Membership. Yes, we do have one mall, but you can see all of it in the time it takes to shave a baby.

No, I never shaved a baby, but I imagine it can’t take too long.

Well, It is obvious that you have no intention of helping me with my dilemma so I’ll let you go deal with your own. After all, I still have two more days to figure this out. Then again, right now it’s looking like it’s going to be a “no money” weekend so I might not have a dilemma after all. Have a great day!

Originally Published 09/17/09

I arrived home from work yesterday after an uneventful day at the restaurant. Nothing of interest had really happened during the day. Customers came and went. Some were nice and friendly and good tippers. Others were bastards. But in general it was just another day in another town in good ol’ USA.

When I arrived home, my wife was not there yet so I parked on the grass by the driveway. I could have parked on the driveway itself but that would have meant she would park behind me and if I needed to go out again, which I inevitably have to almost every evening, I would have to use her old Geo Prism instead of my brand new 2010 Corolla and that just wont do. A guy needs to have standards.

Anyway.

So I park on the grass and I turn off the car. I look out my window and there is a man standing on the yard of the house next to us. Decent looking fellow, maybe in his fifties and this is unusual in itself because the house next to us has been unoccupied for almost two years now. Evidently it is on the market for purchase or rent but no one will touch it with a ten foot pole. I’m not sure why… maybe it’s because of the lousy neighbors, who knows.

Back to the gentleman on the yard. Well I assumed, naturally that the man standing there was either the current owner or someone unfortunate enough to buy the property and I was going to leave it at that, until, I noticed the man was holding a rather large machete.

Well, now we have a strange man on the yard next to us, by a house that is all but abandoned and he’s holding a big machete. That is the kind of thing you want to pay attention to, if only for the sake of knowing which way to run.

I took a good look and he certainly didn’t look threatening, in fact he kind of looked like your average middle aged fella who serves as a CEO somewhere and plays golf with his old buddies on weekends. I waved at him and he waved back with the hand that was not holding a machete. A good sign. So, being that it didn’t look like he was going to come after me, I decided to go on my merry way and leave him to his own devices.

I was about to turn away in fact, when this man, this completely ordinary, smart looking middle aged gentleman, unexpectedly grabs his machete by the blade and casually throws it up in the air.

Well you better damn well bet I’m paying attention now.

The machete disappeared up into the branches but gravity being what it is, its came down equally fast a few feet in front of him. Undeterred, the guy walked over, picked it up, walked back to his original spot, and threw it up again.

Well, now I’m thinking I’m about to watch a very innovative and unique, if rather inefficient and probably gory form of suicide by machete. I’m imagining the first Japanese samurai that invented the hara kiri ritual suicide probably tried this method a few times before coming up with something better. At this point, as casually as I could I walked around to the other side of my car. I was almost certain death by machete would not cause too much blood splatter but hey, better safe than soaked.

By the fourth throw, however, I realized our suicidal fellow was talking to someone. This just kept getting better and better. He was killing himself by throwing a machete up in the air because voices were telling him to. Some voices will tell you the weirdest things.

I was trying to come up with the best way to describe this to the police officer who would question me but I was sure I was going to have a hard time with that one. But then, as fate would have it, I looked up took a closer look at the branches and realized he wasn’t talking to himself. He was in fact talking to another guy who was lying over a thick branch up on the tree.

Assisted suicide by machete! How clever is that! But it was soon apparent that the guy on the branch had a much more mundane mission than helping a poor friend exit this world in an original and gory way. Evidently, he wanted to trim off some branches from the tree; with a machete; which he didn’t have, because it was currently being held by this fellow standing under the tree.

Ah, now I am no longer watching an attempted assisted suicide by machete, I am in fact watching a Darwin Award in the making! Because everyone knows that if you want to transfer a machete from the ground up to a guy lying on a brand thirty feet off the ground, you simply hold your machete by the blade, throw it up as hard as you can, and hope that Isaac Newton was just bullshitting everyone about this law of gravity thing.

Well I sure as hell wasn’t going to stop watching now. This story was getting easier to tell by the minute. I was actually going to enjoy explaining this one to the police, after I wrote my full report to the Darwin Awards, of course.

“Why yes, officer, the guy up on the tree came very close to grabbing the machete that last time, unfortunately he missed by a few inches and I didn’t see very clearly what happened next but I haven’t heard that particular sound since I used to watch my grandpa split open coconuts on his backyard.”

Well, sadly after a dozen attempts or so, the guy up on the branch managed to defy the laws of physics, luck, common sense and even Murphy and actually caught the machete. Yes, I was forced to go home empty handed and dejected.

When I told my wife about the incident, she agreed with me, of course on the natural idiocy of the players involved and then she asked me why I had not offered my humble opinion that the activity on which they were engaged was not only marvelously stupid but also potentially fatal. My answer was as logical as her question.

“I am already going to write about this on my blog,” I replied, “but can you imagine how much better the story would have been if the machete had actually hit the guy standing on the ground? What makes you think I was going to interfere and ruin a potentially great story?”

She seems a little scared of me now… I can’t imagine why.

Originally Published 09/18/2009