First and foremost, I’d like to publicly congratulate/brag about my brother, who was just upgraded to Captain over at his place of employment. Those of you currently in the aviation industry know the kind of superhuman willpower it can take just to keep from saying “Fuckit. I’m going to find another way to make $17 an hour”, and although younger brothers are traditionally meant only for punching and as the butt of practical jokes, I can say I admire mine and have done so for many years now. He has spent the last few years flying on a crazy schedule in sometimes less than optimal weather and circumstances, dumping the aircraft shitter in rain and snow, taking absurd requests with a smile from customers and coworkers, and doing it all for the simple fact that he loves to fly. Knowing my brother as well as I do, I know he has done it with a grace, confidence, and good humor that everyone who meets him comes to envy. Especially those of us who cannot control the sarcastic response lobe of our brain.

I know he’s too cool to take the time to honk his own horn about his accomplishment. In fact, he’s always been the one that has kept me from reaching escape douchelocity – quietly reminding me that if I ever make Captain I probably shouldn’t have four bars embroidered on the shoulders of every shirt I own… And yes, in the macro scale of things (if you are captain of the space shuttle or whatever) you might see his first upgrade as minor, but I know how many thousands of hours of studying, frustration, nervous checkrides, “holy shit what was that?” moments, and tiny paychecks it has taken for me just to reach my pathetic place in flydom. Trust me, it is no small feat to stick with it as long as he has, and I’m proud of him.

So way to go to the latest in a line of Captain Scotts. I’m looking forward to being your FO sometime.

Second, I want to thank everybody who listened and participated in the radio show last week. The turnout was impressive (to me). It seems that (too) many people have a story like my neighbor does, and I’ll see if he wants to come on the show again as the situation develops so we can all dig into his personal life…wow. I wonder if he knew what he was getting into when we met and eventually figured out, “Oh yeah – a friend of mine sent me your blog about three years ago. That’s funny stuff.”

On with the story at hand.

I pretty much can’t/don’t want to do anything unless it is making me money or making me laugh. The lawnmower and I need to have a conversation about its sense of humor, because no one around here is paying me for shit.

I also have a condo I used to live in and have been renting it out for the past few years. It doesn’t make me money. It doesn’t cost me money, but it also doesn’t make me laugh. Especially when I go to fix something (something difficult, like changing the filter on the HVAC) and find that the occupants have a damn dog. That’s why I keep antifreeze in my trunk. Kidney failure – now that is hilarious. Most of the renters have been awesome, though. The latest ones have a dog (one that they told me about in advance and I agreed to), and I found two things out – Rats live everywhere, and their favorite food is dog food.

God bless the tenants for their handling of the situation, though. They didn’t get all demandy and threaten to sue me for unlivable conditions as I have read horror stories about. They just said “We’re staying at my parents’ house for the weekend. Is there any way you can get in there and take care of it”

Reasonable, calm requests are met with very timely responses. A freakout and threatened lawsuit may have been met with more rats. Lab rats with no hair and human body parts growing out of their backs.

I was there within the hour doing a preemptive strike with traps, expandable foam, a saw, and a bunch of scrap hardwood. I patched everything I could find, beat the shit out of a few with pieces of wood, and scheduled an exterminator to come the next day. Exterminators are weird and they have to carry guns by law. This one showed me where they were getting in and put some kind of super foam in the hole. He said the stuff I was putting in there is like candy to them and his stuff dried super hard and tasted bad to the rats. Then he told me a story about treating a girl’s house and having a big dildo fall out of the suspended ceiling and land on his head.

He also put these bait traps around that rats love. I asked him roughly how many dead rats I would be exhuming from the interior walls of my condo before this fun game was over. Here’s where it gets awesome. The bait dehydrates the rats and they go looking for a water source. Then they die outside 99% of the time. Yay for animal cruelty.

No, I don’t feel sorry for the fucking rats. I don’t go into their house and leave little plague-ridden turds and muddy footprints all over the joint. If I did, I’d expect to die of thirst.

Two weeks later at the follow up visit, the rats had chewed right through his nasty black foam and were happily chowing down on Alpo. So we put wire mesh
over the hole and the place has been rat free for over a month.

What did I learn? No dogs in the condo. It is now quite clear in the craigslist ad. The place is available in August. Rent it.*

Speaking of Craigslist, Sara and I are trying to get rid of a bunch of stuff. The only way I can motivate myself to post ads is to write interesting (if untrue) stories about my items. To date I have sold a Television that once belonged to Jesus’s brother Steve Christ, a bunch of watercolor supplies and paint colors that included Ox ass orange, arson brown, and Ghanarrhea (named for the country, not the disease). A couple of years ago I sold two bar stools under the premise that one of them was haunted by the spirit of a fish I had that jumped out of its little tank and expired on the leg of the bar stool. It must suck being an animal that can just stick to any surface it touches and eventually glue itself there. Being unable to scream for help is just another kick in the guppy nuts from God.

One interested buyer asked if I could confirm it was haunted, and how. I told her that with no moving parts or creepy areas, a bar stool is completely unable to manifest its hauntedness. She wrote back and asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner with her.

“I’d love to go to dinner with you, but my girlfriend [Sara] isn’t too fond of the idea. She says I can still sell you the bar stools, though.”

Who the hell is Ocho Cinco? I just heard the name on TV and I have to say that is the worst nickname in history. Eight Five? That’s your nickname? I’m assuming he’s an athlete, as they tend to be narcissistic enough to coin their own nicknames while at the same time not being super bright in a creative sense.
Another thing I can’t quite grasp is the prices on craigslist. The only place you can get shit cheaper is a garage sale. But it still seems like everybody wants to save a dollar. And I mean literally a single dollar.

Maybe it’s me who is wrong about this. I see the value in refinancing your house to save $50 or $200 a month. I see the value in buying 40 chicken breasts at a time to save $15. For some reason I just think if I am buying some guy’s old vacuum for $20, I don’t see the point in asking for a discount. I think it is because in my lifetime I have bought 2 vacuums and I may buy 1 more before Obama makes everything perfect and no one even has to do their own housework anymore.
So a lifetime savings of $12 is not worth the calories burned.

A couple of years ago I stood and watched a lady at a garage sale doing her damnedest to get the very best deal possible on a Sony Walkman. The old yellow ones that are about the size and weight of a bible, play cassette tapes AND have an FM radio. It was marked at $3, which falls squarely in the realm of “Free”.

The lady said, “what is the very very cheapest price I can possibly get on this?” My instinct was to shake her by the shoulders and scream “THREE DOLLARS” in her face, but it wasn’t my sale.

The seller says “are you the one who wrote me the email about it?”

I’ll give you a minute to think about that one.

I’ve said before that most of the people who constantly find themselves strapped are that way because they don’t value their time. Driving to nine different gas stations to save 7 cents a gallon is not a sound decision. This lady sat down at a computer and wrote an email, and then drove from point a to point b. Even if she didn’t have a job, her time has to be worth a few bucks an hour.

Yeah, I know, I’m a dick because I don’t understand that some people are poor (although you’d be shocked to know how well I do understand that). “Maybe she really can’t afford $3, you jerk.” I’d agree with you if she was bartering over food, medicine, or something else that is not a portable music device.
So as my cragslistery matures and grows, this is the latest – and ad for three chairs we are trying to sell. Please buy them.

3 awesome coffee table chairs – $61

I know the word awesome is tossed around these days like a penguin in a whale pod, but these chairs are awesome. I have had more than one friend come over and remark to me “Where did you get those chairs? Those are awesome.” My friends don’t lie. That’s basically the way I can say that without feeling dishonest.

To answer the question, we got them at Target for $90 each. We used to live in a swank-ass loft condo in a high-rise, and these chairs really looked sweet as a bucket of kittens there, but now we live in a craftsman style house, and I haven’t discussed it with them, but I’m pretty sure they feel as out of place as they look. I’d never say anything because you know how sensitive furniture is; I’d just feel better if they were somewhere else.

SPECS: The chairs are black pleather, which is a fancy word for vinyl. They also spin around if you push with your feet. My record is 12 revolutions followed by a relay race to the other end of the living room with an egg balanced on a spoon. My wife says that throwing up disqualified me, but I didn’t get any on the chairs. We also don’t have any kids or dogs, so they don’t have that weird sticky texture that everything has when you have kids or that stale urine smell that everything has if you have dogs (or kids). They are in like new condition. The size is 27″ diameter and 27″ high. The seat cushion is 16″ high. 16″ happens to be the perfect height if you like to be comfortable and look really cool with a martini in your hand. I know this because I took lots of classes in college about human measure and anthropometrics. Plus I have a picture of me sitting in it with a martini and I do look cool. I can’t post it here because they have decency guidelines.

So for 2/3 the price of what we paid for one of these chairs, you can have three of them. And don’t ask if you can get them for $55. If $6.00 is the difference between having awesome black spinny chairs and not having awesome black spinny chairs, you need to take a good long look in the mirror. I’m also not going to sell you one or two of them. They have been through a lot together and it’s not right to separate them. Nor am I going to deliver them – not because I’m being difficult, either – most of the time when someone asks me to deliver something they live somewhere like Conyers or Woodstock or Fargo, and those places are really far away. Plus the chairs won’t fit in my Honda.

Okay. If you live really close by and you need me to take them to you because you’d feel weird lugging them onto the MARTA train, we’ll work something out.
Nevermind. In the time it took me to copy and paste that, they sold. Boom. $60. I gave her a dollar off for following instructions and not bartering or asking me to deliver them. She and her husband are also now looking at a house down the street because they like me and want to be my neighbor (or maybe they just like the neighborhood and the pretty houses – but we’re splitting hairs here); I feel entitled to a piece of that sale as well…

My condo is for rent on craigslist as well. I love how they always publish “Don’t be a racist” crap all over the place when you post. Apparently at the risk of $99 kabazillionty per offense you are not allowed to post such hateful things as “Christian neighborhood”, “Black owned”, “mostly young professionals”, or “all you damn Eskimos stay the hell up out my house”. Raise your hand if you would be offended by any of those statements (except the Eskimo one). If your hand is raised…yes, that’s right… I’m going to need you to shit in it and punch yourself in the face.

I have to ask who this is helping, exactly. I have had it hammered into my skull by my liberal friends that humans are inherently evil and without the government there to stop us, we would be eating our young and killing one another based on ethnicity within the hour. Somehow I just don’t buy it. In fact, if I thought everyone was a murderous asshole and I just happened to be part of the only group evolved (arrogant) enough to understand that, I’d probably kill myself. Just a suggestion…

If I was looking at a place to rent, and the guy wrote “I hate every last iota of a cracker” on his ad, (quote taken from one of our enlightened black panther friends on the news), I would know that he is a landlord I do not want. By making it illegal for him to post that, it endangers me and my whole cracker family when we move in unaware that he wants to “kill some of our babies” (another quote from the same guy). Yay free speech! You help us identify and avoid crazy people!

And even as a honky if I saw an ad that said “whites only” and it was perfectly legal to post said ad, I would never respond except maybe to pose as a black guy who is “really good at acting white” just for the entertainment. No one would ever rent from that guy BECAUSE CONTRARY TO WHAT WE ARE TOLD, PEOPLE DO HAVE COMON SENSE.

So what if someone did rent from that guy because they shared his views? At least all of the stupid people would eventually end up in one place and we’d know where to experiment with new pesticides.

All of the racism guidelines are a moot point anyway; you can tell more about a person from their email address than by looking at them. I know, we cannot judge. We are physically unable to judge. We all had our judgment glands removed at birth. Whatever helps you sleep at night. Just for the hell of it, let’s see what you would say if hypodermically I had a needle full of drano pointed at your taint and showed you the following email addresses (all were found in my gmail account and I have received emails from every one of them), what race/gender/sexual orientation/etc would you say they were? If you get it right, you don’t get dranotaint.

Srfrgirl
Discoboi69
Thuglyfe
Drkcocoa
Juanpedro
SupaVIP
Daddyzgrl
Donlovesjulie
Nopi4life
Xhengxi
Hugefuckingtranny
Rabbijoe

If you answered, in the following order –
Dipshit blond hippie chick
High maintenance gay guy with a sense of “style” that no one understands
African American male lookin’ like a fool with his pants on the ground
Sassy, powerful woman of color
Mexican dude named Juan Pedro
“singer/songwriter” who thinks that by acting famous they will become famous
Spoiled white bitch with a convertible BMW 3 series
Guy who secretly hates his wife
Douchebag (knows no racial bounds)
Engineering student
Nightmare from Blackskyradio.com
And a rabbi named Joe,

Your taint would remain safe and supple for others to enjoy.

I also love that if you have an email address like rabbijoe but you are actually a Japanese Buddhist, it is still okay for people to say upon meeting you “oh, you aren’t Jewish? Your email address…”, which, if you think about it in the retarded way that society insists we think about things, is no different than saying “Oh, but you left a crappy tip. I just assumed you were Mormon.” I mean…it’s as if people are (gasp) using the information in front of them to arrive at conclusions.

I guess we need another useless public service announcement for this. They’re probably busy warning us of the dangers of raisin allergies or turbulence on airplanes, so I’ll write one for them.

“Hi, this is Tiffany Amber Theissen from Saved by the Bell. Reminding you that @judice is wrong. You may think someone is fat because their email address is hugefattyfatsomcfattington@fatmail.fat, it does not mean they are. Beauty comes from the inside. Even if you see a fat person, they may not be fat on the inside. Nothing is as a lifetime of experiences has taught you. A mean dog won’t necessarily bite you, something that is glowing red and smoking may not be hot, and Juan Pedro may be the name of a Caucasian Muslim whose parents simply embrace the rich, deep cultural heritage of our neighbors to the south. As a former celebrity with a DUI**, my job is to say stuff that everyone knows is absolute horseshit and pretend everyone should believe it. Thank you.

*Forget I said that. It’s rented now.

**I do not know if she has a DUI, nor do I care. I just assume they do PSA’s as community service for some infraction.