윤

Define it as the perception of sound without a corresponding external source, and I’ve had it all my life, that noise I’d just assumed was from the pressure exerted upon my skull I could hear in the silence, caused either by the tides within or the radiation that’s only become more pervasive since the Zenith in the other room. But last week I woke and it was louder, I couldn’t yawn it away, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid the cracks were finally starting to show… What am I saying, they’ve been here all along, it’s the damn burst I should be expecting. The soundtrack I had always imagined to be from Curb Your Enthusiasm (or Joker) was instead replaced by the low hum of machinery in the background at a deserted facility, designed by David Lynch. It’s let up somewhat, I’ve noticed it dissipates almost entirely after exercise or orgasm, or I’ve grown to accept its symphony with the computer fan, cracked skylight, WiFi and what I presume are the reverberations of my crumbling reality.

Stacy was super-intelligent, but this intelligence sometimes proved to be a curse. He was bored with school but managed to finish high school, with his share of troubles along the way. After high school, he went to work as a tool and die maker at his father’s company Rabco. He was very good at his job but being the boss’s son came with its own set of issues.

He also was a lifelong fan of punk rock, Rush Limbaugh, MST3K, Weird Al and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He became an “expert” in all of these. Stacy dealt with anxiety his whole life, and often self-medicated with alcohol and drugs.

Stacy never married nor had children but did have several longtime girlfriends.

Stacy lived at home in his parents’ house until his father’s sudden death in 1990. He was unprepared to live on his own and the drug and alcohol use worsened. He was arrested in 2000 on a charge of manufacturing methamphetamine. Even though it was his first arrest, mandatory minimum sentencing laws in place at the time put him in prison for 10 years.

While the minimum-security prison was for the most part terrible for him, he did do something there that became one of his happiest memories. He formed a punk rock band called The Criminals with several other inmates.

After prison, the anxiety got the best of him again and once again alcohol use became an issue. He really tried but it was difficult to hold a job. He was homeless for a period and was hospitalized after a brutal assault and robbery. It was then he found the Restart program, thru which he received housing and opportunities for job training. He got a job he really liked at Sprint Center on the night shift cleaning up after events. During the day, he went to training to get his CDL to drive big trucks, something he had always wanted to do. He developed relationships within Restart, including special friend Brandy Redell. Life was on the right track for him until 2016 when the esophageal cancer diagnosis first hit.

A 63-year-old cancer patient in Kansas City named Stacy Blatt told the Times that he gave $500 to the [Trump] campaign in September, despite living on less than $1,000 a month, and was completely blindsided by what followed.

“That single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied,” the report stated. “Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen.”

He was forced to seek help from his brother after his utility and rent checks bounced and he learned his account had been drained of $3,000 in under 30 days.

Getting back to my very boring story about faucets and dishwasher. So I said to the head, I called up– great dishwasher company from Ohio that we saved, by the way. I said, what’s the problem with your dishwasher?

Well, they don’t give us any water. I mean, you know, it’d be nice to be able to get enough water. What’s the problem? We need more water. Not that much.

Like, I said, how much you need? This– would you like more? Well, I’d love more. Would you give us– well, yeah, I’ll give you more. You have so much water you don’t know what to do with it, right? So we gave them what they need. And now the dishwashers are incredible. They work beautifully.

And you go one time, and you come back, and your dishes are nice and beautiful and clean and dry. You don’t have to go 10 times. The same thing with the restrictors in the faucet. So I hate to say the three things. It’s the shower. It’s the sink. And you know the third element in the bathroom. But I don’t say it because every time I say it, they only talk about that one because it’s sort of gross to talk about, right?

So I won’t I won’t talk about the fact that people have to flush their toilet 15 times. OK? I will not talk about it. I’ll only talk about showers and– OK? But there is three things. I won’t talk about it. This way, they can’t report it.

So what happens? So what happens, I call my environmental people. Why are we doing this? Because when you wash your hands, it takes you five times longer. You know, the water’s [INAUDIBLE]. You get soap. You can’t get it off. I said, open it up. They said, what do you mean? Take the restrictors off.

People know. And if you’re out here, you’ve got to be careful, and you got to do all the things you’ve been doing anyway. Take the restrictors off. And you may leave it in certain areas where you might need it. But most of the country– big portion, it doesn’t need it.

Then on the shower, the worst. You ever get under a shower where no water comes out? And me, I want that hair to be so beautiful. [INAUDIBLE]. I want the hair to look good. I go into some of these hotels– you know, you travel. I go into these hotels, new hotels. They do a nice job. It’s not their fault. And I get in there. I say, Oh, I can look at it now. I know they– everything.

I say, Oh, here we go. Turn on the water. Drip, drip, drip, [INAUDIBLE] drip, drip. But now you go into a shower, and the water pours out. You go into a sink, and you can wash your hands very nicely. Beautiful. And the third thing to worry about, OK, we won’t talk about. Just one time. That’s all.

Got stumped by the following question, which I paraphrase: “Two bookcases have a total of 173 books; if you were to remove 38 books from the first, then the second would have 6 more than twice as many in Bookcase 1. How many books are in each bookcase?” The answer (81 & 92) we eventually distilled to the following equation, where x = the number of books in Bookcase 1:

          x + (2(x – 38) + 6) = 173

                       x – 70 = 173

                            x = 81

How else to describe my appearance after my fall on the 183rd overpass last night, the brunt of which I took on my hands, so that my lips would only gently meet the pavement? As disappointed as I was in my legs for not doing their usual part and keeping me afloat long enough, if not at all gracefully, to regain my balance, at least my aging adrenal glands did theirs to pull me quickly off the street and back onto the sidewalk. I was just on my way downhill, which may have contributed to the instability—that and my annoyance with the unmasked pedestrian who forced me on the outside of the guard rail—and a car speeding blindly over the hump might have easily finished what gravity could not. Some vestige of survival skill or minor damage assessment must’ve convinced me it wasn’t my time to remain prone and become one with the universe.

“Evidence-based” “science-based” “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes”

Things are really coming to a head here… or maybe after eight years, I’d just like them to be in the hopes that some house-cleaning would result. Last week I noticed that the two jokers who should’ve been fired after giving a PowerPoint presentation with a revenue chart that looked like a path up Mt. Everest days before being outbid on a contract that comprised 90% of our business, their current titles are, respectively, “Director of Field Service” and “Director of Field Service Operations.” Their sole supervisor, the newly-hired “VP of Field Services Group” (a position that just had to be filled when the last one took over as CEO, a mumbling anti-labor ex-Marine who himself should’ve stepped down after this shameful start to his reign), also brought on a former coworker to assist him as a “Senior Systems Analyst/ Implementation Manager”, and in an absurd — Amit’s description, not mine — example of his improvements upon our processes, he manually keyed in hundreds of customer addresses because they came delimited by a slash instead of in separate fields. That the department as a whole still has an almost a 1:1 management ratio indicates people going nowhere, too many of them, or both, and comes as no surprise.

You can play forever, but start learning things, and you’re dead.

老婆 and I decided to stop at 大黒家 ら～めん on our way back from the little old lady who twists her back every week and had to drive around blocked-off one-way streets for half-an-hour before settling for a $4 parking lot nearby. We had unwittingly arrived on the one day Angelinos busted out their bicycles (or more likely, the cash for them) to challenge our dependence upon foreign oil, promote green transportation, or something. Of course, regardless of how they actually got there. Now you know me, I’m all for self-flagellation propulsion; I just think it shouldn’t have to be as part of a Flickr event. Wanna experience downtown outside a cage? Move the route over a few and ride up 5th.

Though when it’s 110° out, fat people gonna live. But I made the commute, with a bottle of water to spare. Then again, I used to run for longer at City College in Pasadena, and without water breaks, during summers so hot I couldn’t sleep at night unless I drove to the office in Walnut and would be found on the floor the next morning by co-workers. Of course that was ten years ago.