Mopar Mistake

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard stated, “You must do something, but in as much as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier…you must, with the same… enthusiasm make something harder.”

I thought of this early yesterday morning when upon giving Fuzzy his birthday present, I discovered that I have proven Kierkegaard’s philosophical belief of what’s easy to obtain isn’t worth obtaining. See, I was very excited about my birthday present for my homosex companion partner. I had acquired this gift so easily and cheaply off the interwebs. A Mopar cold air intake for his Dodge Challenger. His 2012 Dodge Challenger.  In case you're wondering what a cold air intake is, I’ve provided an illustration.  It’s a butch air cleaner… it ups your fuel efficiency, but mostly makes you feel superior to other dudes that own the same car. Like wearing a store bought dress to prom, instead of having to sew your own.

The glow of happiness gleamed off the chromium intake nozzle as my mature partner bounced around the kitchen. Happy at his new toy he screeched “I could put it on right now!” He said as he gently stroked the giant “M” on the Mopar box. “Wait! This isn’t right.” My head turned sideways, like a grey hound attempting to understand the Electoral College. “This is for the ’04- ’10 Hemi engines. You know I have a ’12.”

I could not admit that I hadn’t the foggiest idea that they made this particular car accoutrement different for different year cars.Being too busy to actually walk into the Dodge dealership and ask, or even call my bud, Mike, a Chrysler/Dodge mechanic, I just pulled up Mopar.com at work one day and ordered what looked right.

“Anything worth doing, isn't easy, but that is what makes it worth doing.” I mumbled under my breath as I handed the box containing a cold air intake thingy by Mopar over to the lady behind the counter at the UPS store.  The box on its way back for whence it came, and me on my way to the Dodge parts counter.      

Making Mark Love Me

Last night was the first day of class for the spring semester. I pondered why the winter break went by so incredibly fast as I tossed my concrete filled backpack onto a table in the back row of my first class. This semester, all but one of my textbooks are hard covers.

It took me exactly twelve seconds to look over and fall in love with a guy in my history class. He is just adorable; slim frame, messy hair. The way he slouched in his chair and played with his iPhone during the syllabus review…dreamy.   During attendance, I discovered my betrothed name was Mark Jacobson. I immediately started to doodle on the cover of my The America Promise (the irony didn't pass me) textbook. Mrs. Steven Jacobson. Mark and Steve forever. Steve loves Mark.  Around this time of fighting the urge to write a note asking if he liked me, check YES or NO, I had the thought that you don’t hear a lot of kids these days named Mark. Oh, my crush is like eighteen?  I tore the cover from my book and broke up with Mark in a crushing scene. In my head.  I am such a dirty old man. 

Be warned: I am taking a philosophy class and also studying the biographies of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X this semester. Ahead for us lies/lays (God, I should of taken another English class) geeky blog posts in regard to Plato, Dr. King, and how Mark Jacobson doesn’t love me. 

Racist Hunter

When people play the "if you had a time machine..." game, I always find it funny how people answer. It seems i am in utter disgust when anyone answers with some self-indulgent useless foray.

The only correct answer, in my oh so judgmenty opinion, is to go back in time and beat the ever loving shit out of James Earl Ray. Just as he raises his rifle in the inky shadows of that Memphis, Tennessee motel room window. As the crosshairs come into focus, any respectable time traveler would suddenly appear and kick the tempered steel from his hands.

I don't condone violence in my normal life, yet to go all Jason Statham in that motel room, beating the crap out of the man who assassinated Dr. King before he could perpetrate the act would leave me with a clear conscience.

Stevie B, Racist Hunter. I will come for you. Across all of time.

I'll need a costume.

The Down Comfort

On my Christmas list I had several things, the first thing I added was, “a high-end and high-quality down comforter.”  This was not because I thought that my lifetime companion-partner would cheap out and buy an inexpensive down comforter, it was that after seven years, I know how he would feel walking into the bedding department of the local Bed, Bath, and Beyond store. Scratching his head through his Hemi engine themed ball cap he would like to just point to my scribble of “high end” and the salesperson would get the hint.

I desired a new down comforter because the one on the bed was fourteen years old. It had traveled in my move to Dallas, then back again. It saw every life event in the last fourteen years and was now just a shadow of its former self.  In the last year, if you moved it just the wrong way a cannon of feathers would shoot out. A cascade or tickertape parade of down that would cover the dog an anything else the multiple holes were aimed towards. Parts of the ghost comforter where completely empty of down, just sad yellowing cotton held together by my determination.

I was odd how easily the request topped my Christmas list, as the ghost comforter did; at one point; mean the world to me. 

In the fall of 1996 I was planning to set up house for my first, real relationship. We had decided to move in together and were scurrying like happy, gay crabs to collect things for our first home. Both his and my leases happened to end at the same time, until then we would shop for what we would need. Growing up with out the simple knowledge that bedding wasn’t all animal themed acrylic blankets, I loved that our first purchase together was “a high-end and high-quality down comforter.” The future seemed so bright snuggling warmly under that down comforter.

As life sometimes happens, he became ill. We, and life abandoned our plans to live together. Soon his family stepped in to help.

On a sunny day in June, 1998 I wandered through a garage sale. It was on a well-manicured driveway of the sister who stepped in to help six months earlier. The items were nothing exciting, just your average garage sale stuff. The kind owned by single man who had succumb to a non-disclosed disease. Maybe cancer. As I walked through the discarded household items, I could feel the weight of the entire family burn into me. When the sister had organized the clean out of his house, my cries that some of the items belonged to me and somewhere jointly purchased, had fallen on deaf ears.  After filling a bag with my own clothes I picked up a down comforter lying on the cement.  I quietly shelled out $50 borrowed dollars and walked down the drive to my truck. Even though it was June, I wrapped my newly acquired blanked around me and hopped into the cab and drove away. 

For the next fourteen years that cotton bag of goose down was my remembrance of what had been and what could have been. It was a memory filled and my prized possession. As life sometimes happens, the cotton turned yellow as it aged, and holes tore in the fabric and my memory.  Holding on like a gay Miss Havisham I clung to the comforter as if it actually held the memories of my long dead relationship.

Material items cannot possess another’s memory. If you fall prey to this fallacy you create your own Great Expectations. I will always have my first love whether I cling onto an old blanket, or have the possibility to make new memories cuddled up in bed with my new down comforter, with someone I love.  

The Freude of it All

I am required today to write performance reviews for two of my new employees. Instead of that, I’m suddenly compelled to blog and to watch YouTube videos.  It’s not like writing performance reviews are difficult; the hard part is completing the review in positive terms and steering away from any schadenfreude involved in the process of grading someone’s performance. It almost seems if we didn’t have schadenfreude, we wouldn’t have any freude at all.

At one point I narrated that one of my subordinates had overly tweezed eyebrows. Well, first I said “plucked” then I remembered a drag queen telling me once, “You pluck a chicken. You tweeze an eyebrow.” So I thought that my revision was actually helpful.

Maybe instead of writing reviews I could just perform them utilizing sock puppets. I could set up a little stage and glue googly eyes onto some socks… But then I’d have to buy felt and make little hats… And by the time I re-wrote the script I could of just completed the writing portion of the review.

Sometimes being an adult is hard.  

I Tumblr For Ya

Have you checked out my Tumblr page lately? The link is nicely kept in the link bar-------->

Lately, I've been obsessed with lumberjack shirts...


http://ntssb.tumblr.com

Gymuary

Oh, Gymuary. It seems that every year I blog about this amazing phenomenon.  For six months, you can toss a dumbbell down the middle of the weight section and not hit a soul. Suddenly, on January 1st there is a warren of gym bunnies hopping around the place. This year; however, I am one of the unkempt masses wandering around a new gym.

I was really excited about by new employment being so close to the 24Hour fitness in Boulder. I reminded me of living in Dallas when I could walk to my gym. As I excitedly walked into my new home-away-from-home it quickly dawned on me, I was attending this new congregation on the first week of January. Just like everyone else.

It is easy to spot the “newbies” in three ways; the easiest is by their plumage. Sweatpants that are a little too tight, since it hasn’t been asked to stretch over the newly expanded frame. The “I just bought new workout gear and it all goes together” guy that’s sporting an all aqua and chartreuse Nike ensemble. Not a single natural fiber on his body, bless.  And my particular favorite way is the “I read a massive amount of information in regard to how to workout in a gym” guy.

And this is were by petty bitchyness kicks in, because with all the information out there on “how’ to lift weights, and all the YouTube videos on pushing plates, there isn’t any information on how to be a considerate gym mate. A lot of YouTube videos will demonstrate how to super-set your routine, yet fails to mention that setting up five stations of weights around benches and stacking bars full of plates may help you, yet pisses off every bro that is forced to work around your inconsiderateness.  Just because you place a towel on a bench does not mean the bench is now your solvent territory. A terrycloth is not a British flag; the weight benches are not India.

Soon Gymuary will over and the routine will become just that, a routine. The dudes that need to utilize their phones to “check-in” with the office from the luxury of the incline bench will either fizzle out, or get tired of taking work calls with me in the background spurting, “Guurl, not a natural fiber on her! Sad.”  Like every year, February has us all back to being good, friendly gym mates.  

Boulder, My Boulder

My career path has taken me to a new position in scenic and perplexing Boulder, Colorado. Right at the base of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, it is the home to the University of Colorado, the JonBenet Ramsey murder house, and where Mindy McConnell harbored an illegal alien for five years, I admit this city has me scratching my head.

Now as college towns go, Boulder is pretty much the same as Austin, Texas. Sans the humidity, and the self-righteous inclination of being Texan that all Texas cities embrace.  Boulder possesses the same left-leaning green, outdoorsy, dare I say it “hippy” sensibilities. This is mixed with the extreme wealth of massive corporate headquarters, and the university with it’s drunk kids (wearing pajama pants at one in the afternoon) sprinkled with Prius driving university professors. This makes me want to experience the Prius section of the local Toyota showroom. A sea of tweed jackets adorned with elbow patches. “I’m sorry sir, city law mandates that all cars must be sold with bike racks, it’s what they come with.” The haggard salesperson would say. “Well. I see.” Says the tweed jacket. “I am from a place where this isn’t a requirement and we don’t end our sentences in prepositions.”

I will come right out and say that I love Austin, Texas. With my past interactions with Boulder, I am pretty much the right candidate for its unique quirkiness. The most expensive item of clothing I own are my Solomon trail running shoes, at any point in my life I’d rather be on my mountain bike, and I too spend my days wandering around the town in a red hunting hat.

What I’m scratching my head about this week is the empowered bicyclists and perderites. Sorry, not empowered. Jerkish. As a bicyclist and pedestrian myself, I love the separated bike lanes and protected lights to help keep everyone safe, yet there seems to be a level of dogmatic hatred of cars that is embraced in this environment. Maybe it's due to the sadness of having to finally cut off their yellow wristband? I have not received so many dirty looks, fist shakes, or “fuck you’s” since my days in the Mormon Church. Bicyclists hate cars in Boulder. I just smile and nod, knowing that my Solomon trail running shoes are way more expensive then theirs, and I'll never have to cut off a cheap symbolic wristband of a fallen idol.