Everything you need to do great things is either in that meatwad sitting on your neck, or at your fingertips. Everything. EVERYTHING. SERIOUSLY.
So you can go on Reddit and Youtube and watch other people doing things you wish you could do, OR you can open Word and start walking directly down the path to doing those things yourself.
You KNOW this is true. You knew it when you wrote this, and nothing has changed.
Carry on.
Have a great day.
- yourself
I really wish I could see Terminator 2: Judgement Day for the first time. I was pretty young when I first saw it at the theater (thanks, Dad!), and I can’t remember if I was able to appreciate the masterful way the two terminators were introduced.
I was watching it years and years later for probably the fiftieth time when it even occurred to me that a completely unspoiled audience might be taken completely by surprise to find out that Robert Patrick was the assassin and Arnold Schwarzenegger was the protector when they have their first battle in the mall. Up ’til that point, you knew enough about T-Arnold to intensely distrust him. And all T-Patrick has done is…well…something bad to a cop, but that’s par for the course. He’s just a handsome, affable young man with a warm smile and a badge.
“He’s a good lookin’ boy. Mind if I keep this picture?”
I imagine precious few moviegoers got to experience this twist, seeing as the trailers didn’t hold back. I was actually reminded of all this while watching the first Terminator movie the other day. It struck me as kinda funny that when the terminator shows up the first thing he does is chat up some troubled youths, then ask one of them for his clothes. It goes as well for him as it does in the 2nd film, but the point is, he asks first. The Kyle plops in and just immediately steals pants from a homeless man. Stay classy, human.
I want to see this alternate scene from T2:
Terminator: I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.
Biker: You’ve got balls, fella. I like that. Sure thing, just give me a minute.
(Biker stubs out cigar, drops to one knee and starts unbuckling a boot. Terminator watches impassively.)
Terminator: You can keep your underwear. I really appreciate this, by the way.
There once was a young man named Vincenzio, who lived in a tiny garden apartment behind a snooty expensive condo building in a snooty rich town somewhere on the coast of Maine.
Having invented and patented the world’s first single-use disposable stapler, launched a fabulously successful coin-operated vending machine company to distribute said staplers in college campuses and engineering firms all over the globe, and retired a multi-billionaire before the age of seventeen, he naturally had quite a bit of time on his hands. And being named Vincenzio, he was naturally a bit eccentric too.
One day Vincenzio was startled by the realization that even at his tender age he had already bought every consumer good he could think to buy, had had every worldly experience his money and influence could make possible, shared thoughts with every great mind of his time, kissed all the prettiest girls, drank the most expensive fruit juice blends, drove all the cars, petted all the dogs, and worn every style brand and colour of underwear known to science. And he still had, statistically speaking, another sixty-eight years or so left to fill.
Vincenzio lived in the small, dank garden apartment only because he had already lived in every single condo unit in the building, which he also happened to own. In each unit he would live a month or two, before becoming so impossibly bored that he had to move on to the next one in the hope of finding some new feature, some new faucet fixture, some new linoleum pattern, some new line in the woodgrain, anything to stave off boredom for just a few weeks more.
Having moved out of the boiler room and into the tiny garden apartment only days before, his patience and contentment was already waning. Every screw head on every light switch and outlet cover had been counted, catalogued, and gently adjusted to allow for the most efficient possible flow of qi energy through the room. Every room had been painted and repainted so many different colours so many times, that the apartment had actually shrunk by 3 cubic feet. Every single spider, waterbug, and silverfish in the place had been given not only a name, but a full geneological background and an airtight alibi for every day of the past six years (on the offchance they should ever find themselves in a bad way with the FBI).
There was simply nothing left for him to do there.
All this occured to Vincenzo all at once one mild October evening. So Vincenzo did the only thing he could think of to do. He picked a duffel bag off the great pile of duffel bags he had accumulated as a result of a brief flirtation with duffel bag collecting, filled it with bottles of exotic fruit juices, Slim Jims, a gold-plated Swiss Army knife (in addition to having purchased a British knighthood just for kicks, he had also purchased the honorary rank of captain in the Swiss Army), a pocket atlas, and twelve of the most comfortable pairs of underwear ever crafted by human hands. He slung the bag over his shoulder, and set off on foot down the largely silent and empty street in search of high adventure.
Two blocks later as Vincenzo paused to contemplate whether it would have been wise to wear socks that day, he realized that he was quite hungry. He walked a bit further until he found himself outside Five Guys Burgers & Fries. The warm glow from the windows and the muffled chatter of the happy people inside quickly drew him through the door and to the counter. Vincenzio absently stuffed a $50,000 bearer bond into the tip jar as he contemplated the menu, which was brilliant in it’s simplicity, if not simple in it’s brilliance. A framed plaque on the wall assured him that he was standing in the home of the “Willy Wonkas of burgercraft”; a proclamation which both thrilled and physically aroused Vincenzio.
“Burgermonger! I would like a cheeseburger with nearly everything, a large fries in the Cajun style, and a large beverage!” said Vincenzio through a curtain of hungry drool.
“Nearly everything, sir? What would you like left off?” asked the burgermonger.
“Oh surprise me! Please!” said Vincenzio, suddenly turning grave. “Seriously, please surprise me.”
Moments later, the burgermonger handed Vincenzio a large grease-soaked bag. At the bottom of the bag, underneath enough french fries to build a Volkswagen Golf to scale, was Vincenzio’s cheeseburger. The burgermonger had taken Vincenzio’s challenge head-on and left out the beef, which would leave Vincenzio as pleased as a sheet of foil in a lightning storm when he eventually discovered it, but for the moment his solid food was all but forgotten. Vincenzio had walked not ten feet from the counter and stumbled into the promise of fullfillment and purpose so long absent from his life:
He would never stop drinking, and would never drink the same thing twice. He was home.
Last night, I found myself sitting in my car in my driveway. In the dream, my car was a sweet-ass Dodge Daytona… although in life I drive a rusty ’86 Civic. As I sat there doing whatever the dream me does in his sweet-ass Dodge Daytona, this guy Matt I worked with at Mosquito Abatement walks over from next door where a crowd is gathering and it looks like a party is going on. He says, “Hey…Ed…I need you to help me out…” And he starts stuffing 40s of malt liquor into my car. Under my seat, under the floor mats, in the glovebox…everywhere. Then I look left down the street, and I see a police car coming at us in slow motion. Like, it was mid-drift as it came around the corner, kicking up dust, yet it was moving veeerrry slooowwwly. I mutter an expletive under my breath, quickly start the car and park it behind the house. I go inside and up to my grandmother’s room. She’s in bed, but awake. I sit down at the foot of the bed and look out the window to see that the street outside has filled with police cars from some city I didn’t recognize. I turn to Grandma and say, “Umm..there’s something going on that you should probably be aware of..” but then I guess I fell asleep in the dream. I wake up at the foot of her bed and look out the window, but all the cops are gone.
Suddenly I’m looking at a large black woman talking on a phone in what looks like an antiques shop. But I’m not actually there, I am in fact talking to her on the phone, but I’m seeing her like it’s a scene in a TV show. Somehow the part of me is being played by a very suave, Billy D. Williams-esque black man, and we are just seducing her right out of her pants over the phone. And yet, I know it’s actually a prank call.
Suddenly, she and I are together, and we’re literally dancing in the streets all over some city. It’s like a musical..I look in a diner window and people are singing along, and I see a bunch of people in a bus kinda rocking out to the music.
They used to be like that all the time. All. The. Time.
I went outside for a bit, which is weird since I didn’t have a class or a therapy appointment. As often as not I regret it when I do that, but not this time. It was a beautiful day by most anyone’s standards, and it also met my particular standard of not being so warm that I’m uncomfortable in a hoodie.
Windows and tailgate glass down on my 30-year-old Oldsmobile station wagon, wind on my scalp and the Spirit of Radio rushing through my FM dial. I fell into traffic behind a really nice old 280ZX, and even though I was about to pass my intended destination I decided to stay in the 80s and drive behind the Z-car for awhile.
Eventually I wandered into Burger King, which decided to respect the theme of my day and featured a 3rd-generation Camaro prominently in the parking lot. I pull into the drive-through the DJ-bot says “Yeah, we love the 80s, too!” followed by Bobby McFerrin strongly encouraging me to be happy for four minutes.
Sometimes that song really rubs me the wrong way when he gets to the “Don’t being everybody down” part cause…y’know…fuck…Bobby…seriously…that’s the kind of help I don’t need right now. They’ll survive my frown, and when they’ve earned their own I won’t begrudge them, okay? But today I was way ahead of Bobby. I arrived smiling, I left smiling, and in between the guy at the drive-thru window complimented my car.
“Man that interior is clean!” he exclaimed.
“Like fuck it is, but now you better have yourself an awesome day!”
Yeah, that would have been a great response.
Anyway then I got home and found out Burger King’s food sucks now and my whole day was ruined. But the outside part? Wizard.
Good news everyone! I have finally decided, for real, to embrace this blog with the entire wholeness of my being. I know the joy you’re feeling is a little overwhelming, but please try to stop crying. Please. It’s making me extremely uncomfortable.
This is not my first foray into the blogosphere. I was blogging before blogging was a thing, then everybody started doing it and I was like “whatever”. That sentence was just for my wife, who loves to accuse me of hipsterism.
Seriously though, remember Diaryland? Probably not, since it never really had the mainstream success of Livejournal or Blogger (there I go again, honey!), but I had a diary there that achieved a very mild degree of popularity. I think at its peak there were some fifty total strangers reading it, which honestly, at the time, felt like a lot. I haven’t updated it in ten years, but I don’t think I’ve had the attention of fifty people at a time since then.
I just checked, and some thirty people still have me listed as a favorite! Thirty people waiting with bated breath for my return, which the prophecy says will be heralded by trumpeting angels!
Well I’m afraid The Project has ended, but a new era is just beginning. It’s called Chiliwaffles, and… and there’s really no point in maintaining this facade of mock majesty is there? It’s called goddamn Chiliwaffles.
I’m not linking to the old diary or even referring to it by it’s proper name, for two reasons. First, I’m going to rip it’s goddamn guts out and hang the entrails here (I’m going to re-post my favorite entries from the old diary). Second, if someone who used to read me recognizes me and mentions the old diary, everyone within a hundred miles of Indianapolis will hear the “squeee!”
Chiliwaffles Dream Journal – from the archives of The Project:
Before I woke up, I was dreaming that I was on a bus when I spotted someone who looked a little too much like Jimmy Kimmel’s portrayal of Karl Malone. I jumped up and yelled “Oh my god you are soo Jimmy Kimmel as Karl Malone oh wait no you’re not..”, and then sat back down. The man looked quite embarassed, as was I…I don’t make a habit of yelling on buses. The guy sitting in front of me eased Karl and I by pointing out, in a friendly disarming tone, that he really did look a lot like a chubby white guy dressed as an aging black basketball player. Karl smiled and said that he got that sort of thing a lot.
Then I woke up 40 minutes after I was supposed to open the animal hospital.
I think I remember the exact moment in the dream when my alarm went off. It was when I and about 100 other people were packed into a diner, and suddenly nearby a school bell went off. Everybody in the diner simultaneously realized that they were late for something, got up, and pushed out the door. Many people left their keys and cell phones sitting on the table. I (always one to stay as far from the surging end of a surging mob as possible) scooped up several nice phones on my way out the door.
Like so many times before I was sitting in my work truck, driving along some nondescript country highway in central Indiana, when I thought of AT LEAST three things I wanted to write about later. Three really good ideas that I could easily flesh out into stories.
A couple hours later they’re (POOF) gone. Like they never existed. I knew this would happen. I thought about recording some voice notes onto my mp3 player, but just the idea of having to hear my own voice later on totally turned me off that idea. So I did nothing. Just kept my hands at ten and two* like some responsible creep.
What is my issue with my own voice? I’m quiet to the point of creepy around most people. I hate talking on the phone, and I LOATHE hearing recordings of myself. It’s really just NOT THAT BAD. It’s not like I open my mouth and modem handshake tones come out.
If I were shopping around for a voice it’s maybe not the first one I’d choose, but if it were the only one I could afford or even just a REALLY great bargain, I’d take it home without excessive shame.
*(more like eight and coffee if we’re being honest)
Emerging in the early 21st Century, the comedy team of Collier and Collier quickly became the premier act of it’s day.
And it’s a legacy that has endured.
Even during the heyday of iconic funnyman Proton Poopypants in the 2130s, Collier and Collier remained as popular and influencial as ever.
While the literal meaning behind the phrase has sadly been lost to time, Collier and Collier’s signature punchline and send-off: “Descending lower colon? The man almost died!” has remained synonymous with the comedic arts for nearly two centuries.
…whether we’re ready for them or not. I have to learn to forgive myself for the bad ones, and pat myself on the back for the good ones, because my thoughts are MADE of ME. They’re literally built from my grey matter, from the blueprints of my experiences and situations. I have to own them, master them. I need to learn to build from them.
That’s the biggest difference between me and so many of the people I admire. They take everything that comes their way, good or bad, and mold it into bricks to build great things.
I just let it all pile up on me until I can’t think or even move.
I have to become a builder.
Chili lay awake, pondering his pointless existance. Suddenly, the closet door flew open, and in burst Hagrid, the big-hearted gamekeeper from Hogwart’s school of wizardry!
“Chili Waffles! There ye are m’lad! C’mon… it’s time t’go!” roared Hagrid with a smile.
“Go.. go where?” Chili stammered.
“Why, ter ‘Ogwarts! Yer a wizard, Chili!” replied the giant.
Chili frowned with confusion. “But… I’m 30! Why am I just finding out about this!?”
Hagrid looked nervously at the floor. “Er… filing error! Don’ worry ‘bout that. Yer goin’ ter the land o magic! Ye kin be young again!”
Chili gasped happily. “I can have my childhood again! Oh wow, is this really happening? HAGRID, IS THIS REALLY HAPPENING!?”
“NO!” said Hagrid, throwing his hands up in the air. “Ye…ye had a damn stroke! Yer in a coma, ye are!”
Chili thought for a moment…
“Works for me!”
And together they strode hand-in-hand through the closet door, and into a world of infinite adventure.
