The Sporadic Curmudgeon

It was about 10:30 on a sweltering June Friday night in 1988, and I was in the back seat of a crowded car mid-way between Los Angeles and San Diego. One of the strangers in the front seat turned on the radio, and The Plugz’ Hombre Secreto, their inspired cover of the Johnny Rivers classic Secret Agent Man, came blaring out of the speakers. I cheered. It was perfect, for that night we were headed into Mexico.

Had I been completely sober and had a firmer grasp of social niceties, I would not have been on this trip at all. My long-suffering girlfriend at the time, let’s call her Sonya, had been invited to spend the weekend with some of her college friends at a rented villa in Ensenada, a few hours south of Tijuana on the Pacific Coast of the Baja Peninsula.

I was politely asked if I wanted to come along, the safe assumption being that I would refuse. This was because I a.) had just spent a week in the VA hospital vainly trying to fix my crippling back pain, b.) had an abscessed tooth that was driving me mad, and c.) was a notorious stick-in-the-mud that never wanted to do anything but sit home and drink. They figured I would say “No, thanks,” and Sonya would get to spend a guilt-free weekend with her vaguely shady friends whom she’d been spending an awful lot of time with while I was in the hospital. She would be off in a foreign country, and several hundred miles away from her drunken boyfriend.

For some reason known only to Satan himself, I said, “Sure! Why the hell not?” Luckily I was too wasted to be aware of the resentment this caused, a condition that would not change until the following Monday while Sonya was angrily chewing me out for my atrocious behavior.

It wasn’t all my fault, of course. If they’d thought about it a little harder they would have simply come up with a plausible lie instead of being polite. They rolled the dice and they lost. It’s like asking a co-worker how he’s doing and he spends the next thirty minutes vividly describing his impacted colon, complete with arm gestures and sound effects.

We crossed the border and made our way through the sleazy maze of Tijuana. I had never been further into Mexico than that wretched hive of scum and villiany, and once we were past the city limits and headed south on the divided roadway the change was startling.

There were no streetlights. It was unbelievably dark, and quickly became eerie. No one spoke for long periods. After half an hour we drove slowly past a car burning beside the road. There was no one around, and the only illumination came from the guttering abandoned automobile.

A few miles later we passed another one just like it on its side in the ditch between the lanes. We were getting seriously spooked.

I don’t know if it was a planned stop or a desperate attempt to save us, but soon we pulled into a little roadside shrine to the Virgin Mary. There were candles around, and people praying, and even though I’m not very religious I felt quite a bit better about our situation. The mood lightened.

Just outside Ensenada the road joined again, and what had been two lanes per side became two lanes, period. We turned a bend and a carload of kids headed back to the US was in our lane. Our driver, who had been on his toes since we passed the wrecks, was able to avoid a headon collision by running off the road.

We got out. It was cool and windy. We were all pretty shaken. There was no moon, and we still could not see anything. It felt like we were inside a cave. We climbed back in and headed into town.

We found the villa quickly enough. It was a timeshare on the slope of a valley north of town; there were dozens of them. We turned on all the lights, had a few drinks, laughed about our narrow escape, and went to bed.

The next morning we drove out to where we had gone off the road. It was a couple of yards from the edge of a fifty-foot cliff, and there was no guardrail.

Sonya and two of her friends and I explored town. It was a lot like Tijuana without the pickpockets and donkey acts. I liked it. We found a little resaurant and went in for breakfast. I was badly hungover, and decided that I could probably use some heavy-duty food to replenish my system. I ordered steak and eggs.

When it arrived it did not look particularly appetizing, the steak being an odd grey color. I cut off a piece and put it in my mouth. It was tough, and full of gristle. After ten minutes of chewing, I was still unable to determine its species, and was only willing to make the roughest guess as to its phylum. Soon my face was greyer than the meat.

After our repast, we began searching for our real objective: legal prescription painkillers. Sure, I could have taken Tylenol and it would have worked fine, but I had heard that percodan could be purchased over-the-counter in Mexico. After dragging my companions fruitlessly all over town from pharmacy to pharmacy, we finally gave up.

We did, however, find a fireworks store. A regular shop right there in the middle of town. We went inside and looked around. Hundreds of different firecrackers and roman candles and skyrockets lined the shelves. The smell of gunpowder was intoxicating. And then I saw it.

It was on a shelf all by itself. I can still picture it in my mind’s eye, laying on its silken pillow, surrounded by a sparkling golden aura while heavenly choruses filled the air and cherubs fluttered above. It looked like… No, it couldn’t be. Could it? It was red, and was the right diameter. It had the fuse coming out of the middle. It had the paper endcaps. Yes!! It was!!!

I was looking at a genuine M-80. It was for sale. And I had enough money in my pocket to buy it.

Percodan, schmercodan. This was a goddamned M-80!

For those of you who have led an overly sheltered life, the M-80 is a, no, let me rephrase that, THE firecracker. It was developed by the US military for wargame simulations. It had been illegal in the United States for decades, and with good reason. A significant chunk of the generation preceding mine were missing fingers and hands because of it. It has, no joke, about sixty times more powder than the biggest firecracker you can legally buy in the US. The M-80 is the H-bomb of firecrackers.

Be honest with yourself. Would YOU have been able to resist? I bought it with trembling fingers. Which I am damned lucky to still possess, as you shall see.

We went home. It was one o’clock. A barbecue was planned for later that evening. I figured it was time for happy hour.

I’m still not entirely sure what happened that afternoon; there was a polaroid I took of Sonya flashing her tits, but she’s got a sour look on her face and definitely didn’t think it was sexy. I must have gone back into the villa and passed out. I woke up in a bedroom at seven-thirty, after the barbecue was long finished. There was none left for me, and I was upset that no one had woken me up to eat.

Later some locals showed up for a poker party. They brought some visiting friends from El Salvador and Guatemala. I played like shit, and they loved me. We were drinking Mescal, and I didn’t just swallow the worm, I chewed on it. I was hungry, after all, and it tasted way better than the donkey/monkey steak I’d had for breakfast. Sonya and the others went to bed.

We had a great time bitching about Ronald Reagan. I drank too much too fast, and went to the bathroom to be sick. When I came back they had another shot and a fresh hand waiting for me. Either they really liked me, or they were trying to kill my by alcohol poisoning.

At three in the morning I had The Idea. I explained blearily to my new Central American friends that I had an insane, gigantic monster firecracker in my actual possession. One of my amigos pointed out that he did, in fact, have a lighter on him. I got the firecracker of which dreams are made out of my bags and we staggered out through the sliding glass doors to the patio.

I placed it on a low stone wall about thirty feet from the house. We stood in front of it, reverently bowing our heads. Some people have their shrines, and I have mine. I was handed the lighter while my accomplices prudently retreated. “Do Not Hold In Hands” was printed in stern letters on the casing. I thought to myself, “No shit,” and lit the fuse.

I ran as fast as I could back toward the villa. As the fuse quickly burned away toward Armageddon, I suddenly realized what I had just done. We were standing in front of a big sheet of glass and were only slightly more than the length of a city bus away from an explosive device the US Army had designed to teach soldiers what being under a mortar attack feels like. I brought my arm up to my face just microseconds before it went off.

The blast was far bigger than I had imagined. The glass behind us rattled, but thankfully did not shatter. A chunk of rock hit my forearm, the same one I had thrown over my eyes. It drew blood. We felt the shock and heat of it, and a massive boom rolled across the landscape.

Our ears were ringing. Lights were going on all over the the neighborhood. From far across the vally we could just hear an American voice screaming “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MINDS!?!” We looked at each other, and busted up in helpless laughter.

We walked over to look at the wall. There was a shallow crater the size of a dinner plate blown out of it. I knew I was going to remember this trip for the rest of my life.

I was awakened the next morning by a bunch of obnoxious frat boys from USC who had rented the place next. I was face-down on the couch, and just beginning to feel the leading edge of the worst hangover I’d ever had. My mouth seemed to be filled with dust and dead spiders.

One of the frat boys was standing about three feet from my head, wearing fluorescent lime-green swimming trunks. I snarled that if he didn’t get those fucking green shorts out of my face I was going to rip his face off and stuff it down his throat with his own foot. He moved away.

I remember nothing of the trip back other than nobody making eye contact with me. That’s probably all for the best. Sonya didn’t ever completely forgive me, and we broke up not too long afterwards.

The weekend had been full of sullen companions, agonizing pain, unforgivable drunken misbehavior, multiple cases of almost-getting-killed, and what could very well qualify as an international incident.

But good God, it was glorious.

I may have discovered some previously unknown Roman structures buried under a field in central Italy. Of course, it could just be agricultural artifacts, or ruins from any time in the region’s immensely long history, but this area was definitely inhabited in Roman times (and long before).

A small Roman colony named Vicus Elbii was in this vicinity, possibly under present-day Viterbo 6½ miles to the east, possibly not. No one knows for sure because Vicus Elbii vanished long ago. Viterbo is the most likely candidate.

Could this actually be the site of Vicus Elbii? Probably not; if it’s Roman I suspect it’s just a farm villa. On the other hand, to the northeast of the “villa” is what may be a colonnaded building. I’m going to send this information to an archaeologist in Viterbo, since it’s definitely worth checking out. That would be so freaking cool if I found a lost Roman colony!

View Possible Roman Archaeological Site In Italy in a larger map

I hereby claim four neologisms, all related to the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics (of which I am an adherent; screw Bohr et al):

Everywhat

Describes something that exists in all possible universes.

Otherwhat

Describes something that may have happened in another universe, but did not happen in ours. (Synonymous with “alternate history”.)

Neverwhat

Describes something that cannot exist in any possible universe.

Anywhat

Describes something that could exist in any possible universe.

I breathlessly await the Nobel Committee’s call.

middle of the night
not best time to write the first
blog post in a month

I don’t know if I’m going to keep writing this blog much longer; my initial purposes were to make people laugh, and tell the truth about the Bush abominations while the rest of you seemed to be looking the other direction, whistling nonchalantly.

Well, Bush is gone, although, unfortunately, Cheney, Limbaugh, and Rove continue to lurch around hideously until someone finally puts a stake through their undead, shriveled hearts.

And I don’t feel like I’m able to make people laugh anymore, mainly because I don’t do much laughing myself. Essentially, real life just got too goddamned nasty for me to find much humor in it. A story about some idiot jerking off while driving through Starbuck’s just doesn’t seem funny in a world where Bush played guitar at a party while doctors were euthanizing terminal patients in New Orleans hospitals because the US Government was doing nothing and it was more merciful than letting them simply die of thirst. (And then were prosecuted for sparing the patients that agony.)

Plus, my health is failing, I cannot afford the medications to keep my wife and I functioning (the fact that I’m currently taking 1/6 my normal antidepressants probably has a lot to do with this post), my job pays roughly half what we need to get by, I’m too old to change careers, I’m nowhere near as talented as I used to be, and the only thing keeping me going at all is an adamant refusal to expose my daughter to the horrors of suicide that I myself had to face as a child. A yuck-fest this ain’t, folks.

And frankly, my inability to write lately has made the site an ever-present reproach.

So, whither Atomic Deathray? My intention is to write up the entire story of my life, without prettying it up, if I’ve got the guts to do it. I’ll keep it online as long as I can afford to. Maybe somebody sometime can make sense of the damned thing. God knows I can’t.

This may all change if things get better, but for now, this is what’s on the table. The show’s canceled, and there’s only a few episodes left to go. Come to think of it, we’re all in that boat, aren’t we?

Today I had a rare opportunity at work to do some nice, old-fashioned non-brain-bending HTML formatting for a client. It was a “Terms and Conditions” page for a limousine service, and the copy arrived as a Word file, the format most dreaded by web developers.

The reason is that you can’t just copy and paste Word docs onto a web page; you must first strip out all of the the illegal garbage characters Microsoft products always insert into their documents whether you want them to or not. That’s why you see so many web pages with the apostrophes replaced with little boxes — they put a “fancy” curved apostrophe in, even though you actually typed the straight one on your keyboard. It’s the same deal with quotation marks. Thus, you must pay far more attention to the content than usual when preparing it for the internet.

It turns out there was, get this, a Regurgitation Clause in the contract! I’ve seen a lot of Terms and Conditions contracts over the years, but this was a new one on me. It makes perfect sense: if you hire a limo and you get drunk and puke all over the seats, you have to pay an extra $200 even if you tried to clean it up yourself. This seems reasonable; it takes a lot of work to get the memorable perfume of an epic technicolor yawn out of the upholstery.

I don’t know why, but the existence of a Regurgitation Clause made me inordinately happy.

I have decided that from now on, all legal contracts should have Regurgitation Clauses. It just feels right, deep down in my gut.

For a few years now I’ve been corresponding off-and-on with the editor of The Devil’s Dictionary X, a hilarious and worthy sequel to Ambrose Bierce’s classic work, The Devil’s Dictionary, and we have become long-distance friends.

Eventually I began sending him definitions of my own, some of which made their way in and some of which didn’t. Therefore I’m going to inflict them on you.

Birthday

An annual 24-hour chink in one’s cynicism, during which a few quick jabs of disappointment can inflict wounds that fester for a lifetime.

See also Anniversary, Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.

Demoticon

To add spaces between letters and/or punctuation to keep your text-messaging client from turning them into an annoying little image.

Example usage: “I demoticoned that last sentence because for some damned reason the ‘(x)’ kept turning into a tiny picture of a woman.”

(I coined this word.)

Environmentionalist

Someone who talks green but walks magenta.

(Another word I came up with.)

Feng Shui

1. Expensive Chinese fertilizer.

2. Mandarin for “Sinophilic pansy.”

Inflated Self-Worth

Washing your hands before, not after, you pee.

Late Middle Age

The time of life when the number of people who would like to see you naked dwindles to the readership of that one really weird website.

Living

The process of attaching unpleasant memories to geographic coordinates.

Misunderestimate

To inadequately assess the popularity of corruption and stupidity.

Neolojism

A newly-coined sex word.

(Another word I invented, and thus a rare example of a recursive definition.)

Prostitution

1. A democratic institution hated by wealthy males, who consider mercenary women their private game preserve.

2. A policeman’s cudgel used to beat the ugly.

Rectify

To correct. From the Latin for become an asshole.

Torture

The application of extreme physical discomfort so as to extract a pretext.

About five years ago I published a post entitled For the Love of God, Can’t Someone Save Dino?. Some practical jokers had glued a little vinyl figure of Dino, the family pet of The Flintstones, in front of a live webcam monitoring an active volcano in New Zealand.

It was expected that the corrosive atmosphere inside the caldera would make short work of the beloved plastic saurian.

On a whim, I decided to see if the link to the webcam still worked, fully expecting the poor little critter to be a puddle of purple goop. Au contraire mon frère! As you can see from the image above, Dino is made of sterner stuff. He’s aged less in the last five years than I have. (To be fair to myself, the atmosphere I live in is far more poisonous than the mere sulfurous belchings of a big magma zit.)

So my hat’s off to you, Dino, and the refreshingly whimsical scientists that let you stay where you are.

Sometimes a story comes along that sums up all that’s right with humanity. I’m not going to spoil it for you: just go read it.

If the link ever goes dead I’ll do an update and tell the story. It’s one that needs to be remembered.

I may have just accidentally solved the problem of blog spam comments. Almost 3 weeks ago, while enduring one of my frequent middle-of-the-workweek bouts of insomnia, and in an absolute funk, I posted a somewhat blasphemous question suggesting that God enjoys killing people. Not an especially original thought, and certainly a minor milestone on the long road to perdition, but still not the sort of musing one is likely to hear being discussed amongst the faithful.

Soon after, I appended a comment wondering what sort of effect the post would have on the massive volume of comment spam my site gets (usually 20 or so a day). Five days later, I checked my comment logs, and found to my astonishment that I had received only two spams! Hey, I thought, I may be on to something. I left another comment joking that I should write a program that automatically creates blasphemous blog posts in order to scare away spammers.

Well, it’s been two weeks since that comment. Guess what? Other than those first two spam comments, there has not been a single one posted on my site. (No other comments either, but that’s not especially unusual.) Being a man of science, I checked my usage statistics, and while there’s been a slight falloff of about six hundred visitors, this is insignificant compared to my normal volume.

This is unprecedented. I have not had a day go by since I started allowing comments on the site in which I have received no spam whatsoever.

In other words, I believe I have actually found a way to eliminate the scourge of blog spam. It will need to be independently verified by my peers, of course. If you’re not afraid of divine retribution, go ahead and post a polite, solid question about God’s motives for all the shit we have to put up with, and then see what happens to your spam problem. We may be onto something important here.

Why did it happen? I have a couple of observations. First, it means that spammers are a superstitious, cowardly lot afraid of being associated with the kind of person willing to risk a random lightning strike from a clear blue sky. Second, and far more interesting, is the theological implication that God hates spammers a lot more than he hates honest people asking valid questions about what is at best divine indifference to suffering and at worst sadistic cruelty.

Which I guess is a point in the Big Guy’s favor.