Sometimes our Casa reminds me of a nursing home… We stay in our pajamas on non-gig days and shuffle about, visiting each other’s rooms, talking about “back in the day” and playing board games. Closer inspection may suggest that we have some borderline socialization challenges as well. Take a look for yourself:

I was once in the kitchen happily watching a chess game and listening to the boys’ psychological warfare banter. Our lovely afternoon was interrupted when another roommate bounded in the room and proclaimed, “Hey guys! I just heard that if you’re a REAL JEDI KNIGHT, you don’t NEED a light saber.” I laughed because, naturally I thought Christian was kidding, but this was no joking matter. Stuff of a serious 3 hour debate.

Toadie, another of our roommates, is in a phase. He splits his time between the sleeping/grumbling state (70%) and downloading hi-res rips of every Star Trek episode ever. He beams the mpeg movies over to his big screen cause, hey! That’s just like tee vee! He also bought himself a life like phaser gun off of ebay. Much to his dismay, I was born with an inpenetrable force field. And even though he can cite interruptions in the time-space continuum (as interpreted by Bill Shatner), don’t call him a Trekkie. Cause he has real guns also. And he likes to use them within the walls of our house.

Marcus is a walking encyclopedia. Seriously. I’ve never met someone filled with so many accurate facts. In otherwise non-historical discussions, he often alludes to Auschwitz and Prohibition and Gettysburg. I usually smile politely, vaguely recognizing the names and dates from classes years ago, barely being able to follow along. We share a bathroom and I found a “Civil War for Dummies” in our periodical bin. That’s a definite quality read for the shitter. The thing about Marcus is that his charm and smile and laugh make me want to read Civil War For Dummies too so I can bounce back dates and names and shit.

Our pal Jim rounds out the closet-geek group and once interrupted a conversation about, I don’t know… casseroles with, “Does anyone know how to get a Unix command line?” [In context, that was when Troy was having network problems with his OSX mac -jim] Also, just tonight, he has started pacing the tiles of the kitchen floor in some non-random, circular way. Marcus and I discussed the possible corrolation to prime numbers. Jim says he’s always done this. Marcus thinks he’s just trying not to break his mother’s back.

Jim also taught me tonight what a binary number 4 looks like when counted on one hand. Can you guess which finger it is? It ain’t the fourth, from either direction.

Hope you’re all having a lovely October. It’s my favorite time of the year. The weather in ATL has been gorgeous over the last month. Ahhh. It makes me happy.

So, ahm… live long and prosper, and never forget that four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Jim, if you could put some unix end commands here, that would be snazzy! Thanks! ;)

[rm -rf mellie.html -jim]

This weekend I visited the Atlanta botanical gardens. It’s a lot smaller than I thought it would be, but that much real estate in Midtown is probably fairly pricey, so I guess they do what they can. It’s really nice there, and there’s a lot of cool stuff. I’m not really a plant afficionado or anything, so the finer points escape me.

They do have a lot of quiet little nooks where one can sit and read a book if one were so inclined, but at $10 a head to get in, I’ll do my reading at home on the can like the scholar that I am.

I was taken aback by the number of families that were there. I guess a nice sunny saturday is probably not the best time to go if you dislike kids, but I didn’t think it would be a big kid place. I was mistaken. They even had a whole section for kids which my lady friend The K and I walked through. It was stuffed with kids stomping all over the place and dads standing around in ray bans and khakis talking about baseball.

I was also unaware that there was such a thing as a Barfing Gnome, let alone that the last great Barfing Gnome Preserve is right here in Atlanta, but it is. Not only that, I was able to get photos of the gnomes mid-barf. Take a look at these photos:

Now ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why are they barfing?
2. Why are they gnomes?
3. Why in the kids section of a garden?
4. Why are they barfing?

If any employees of the Atlanta Botanical Gardens are reading, please get back to me with some answers on this.

This friday I was chatting a bit with my evil work counterpart. His name is Chad and he works the night shift at work on the days I don’t work it. We alternate on Wednesdays, so one of us works 3 days and the other works 4, and the next week it reverses.

The alternating wednesday is about the only thing that makes the shift tolerable, but since corporations hate most of all a happy employee, my boss has elected to do away with this idea. I got the following email on Friday:

From: Your Boss
Sent: Fri 10/17/2003 7:40 AM
To: Chad Clark; Jim Hodgson
Cc:
Subject: Shift Changes

Jim
Sun – Wed 8pm – 6am

Now, that pisses me off pretty good. Right now I work 8p-6a every day, so on my short weeks I only work 30 hours and on my long weeks I work 40. It’s kind of like a bonus for covering the night shift. Besides which, working after 6am is a horrendous pain in the ass, because trying to drive anywhere in Atlanta between 7 and 10am is slightly less painful than having your anus dilated with a regulation size football.

So, I sent the following email back:

Boss, I am extremely displeased with the new schedule.

Feel free to contact me at any time.

So, we’ll see what happens. I’m supposed to meet with him in a few minutes, and I’m going to have to explain to him that I’m not going to work that shift. ANother thing that’s been pissing me off is that I asked for some vacation time back in August for next week and they still haven’t told me one way or another if I can have it.

So, today should be fairly interesting.

UPDATE:
I had a meeting with the boss this morning where I basically informed him that my pimp hand is way strong and he needs to get up offa deez before I raise up like a mighty cobra. Needless to say, he relented. My schedule stays the same.

Hell yeah, beotch.

Stay tuned for further updates on the curative/destructive powers of my pimp hand.

There’s a little cafe type of place near my house that I call The Exhaust Pipe. That’s not the name, but I tend to prefer not to use the real names of people or businesses for various reasons. Anyway, its close proximity to my house and acceptible selection of tasty salads results in my fairly-regular patronage. Lately, however, things have been getting wierd.

Dennis, the afternoon bartender, has been hitting on me lately. Now, I don’t get affended when gay guys hit on me. I consider it a complement, but it still catches me a big off guard when Dennis tries to get me to kiss him. It cracks me up.

A few weeks ago he pointed to his cheek and said “Give me a kiss, come on.”

“No, dude.” I said.

He seemed sad.

Today he was telling me how great it is to be gay.

“Gay guys can get away with anything,” he said, indicating a nearby waittress. “I could grab her tits and stick them in my face if I had the stomach for it.”

I found that pretty funny. He’s kind of right, though. Gay guys do have greater political license it seems. If I grabbed her tits and stuck them in my face I’d get slapped at best and maybe jailed, and I don’t have the stomach for jail.

Even my dad tries to get me to date boys. He slips in the occasional comment about how he gave up on women all together and it was the best thing he ever did. He’s much happier now that he’s out, anyone can see that, but I’m plenty happy as it is, and I really appreciate a naked girl.

When I was younger I strugged with the whole gay dad thing a good bit. It sort of boiled down to being afraid I would turn gay, but I eventually figured out that I didn’t have to be gay if I didn’t want to, even if my dad is.

So, as much as I’d like to make my father proud, I’m going to have to stick to the girls for the forseeable future, much to the chagrin of my friend Dennis. I’m not 100% sure if he really wants to hit on me or he just likes making fun of me and my antiquated hetero sexuality, but either way, it’s funny.

“Now what do you want to eat? How about a hot dog?” he asked.

“No… too much, um, hot dog”

“I’ll show you too much hot dog” he winked.

I’d like to now let you guys in on a short play that I’ve just written. It’s about a little database called Oracle and a stupid database administrator called me.

The part of Oracle will be played by a 13 year old AOL user from the chat room Horse Chat 15, and the part of me will be played by Charleton Heston.

ACT ONE, SCENE ONE, INT, DAY. The unix command line on a Solaris 8 unix server somewhere in a data center in upstate New York.

HESTON:

Okay there customer database, I’m now going to back you up using my friend the tar command!

ORACLE:

a/s/l? u like horses? i love them omg lol!

HESTON:

Let’s see here… tar -cvf /oradata/db/* /var/tmp/dbbackup.tar…

ORACLE:

u talk funny lol!

HESTON:

Oh my great sheep mother of cock, I’ve written the tar archive into your .dbf files and blown you up!

ORACLE:

OMG OMG now I can’t start up! u are mean! omg lollololol horses!

FADE TO BLACK

So, that’s it. I blew up oracle by over writing a .dbf file with a tar archive of itself, and I’ve only been using the tar command for 10 years now. Haha, I’m a moron. Next week’s short play: The Unemployment Line.