Jeff's Spleen

The People United Will Never Be Defeated

but if the people protesting outside my office building don't shut the hell up anytime soon, I am going to have a gigantic spaz attack and may even cry. I have a big cover story to write, and I can't get it done with all this frickin' noise about "worker's rights" or whatever. Yeah you have rights--the right to move to Cuba!

Oh yeah, and while you're at it? Get off my lawn!

Back from E3, thank jeebus.

Well, I am back from the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, and not a moment too soon. I don't hate L.A. the way that people in the Bay Area traditionally do---that is, based on jealousy and ignorance---but simply in the way that one who grew up there has a right to hate it. All those horrid childhood memories. As a city, however, if you can get past the traffic (and the air, and the fact that the populace was all produced from a higher gene pool than the rest of us), there are just a ton of cool places, neighborhoods to explore. And unlike my adopted home of Berkeley, you can get great food all night long.

But I am glad to be back. The E3 convention is exhausting and annoying. It's also lots of fun at times, but I've been to seven of them now, and I'm also 42 freakin' years old, so, ya know, just give me my couch back.

On the plus side, I did get to take a photo with Spongebob Squarepants. Another life goal, achieved!

Subjects for Further Research

Within minutes (minutes!) I will be leaving on a jet plane for fabulous Los Angeles, for the equally fabulous E3 convention, the weeklong gaming industry hype-fest that I have attended for seven straight years now. What will be accomplished there? Not a lot. My only real goal: breakfast every morning at The Pantry, a legendary L.A. greasy spoon with, according to one review I just Googled, "artery-clogging breakfasts." Yay!

In the meantime, this blog will sadly remain silent, I would think, as I am bringing no laptop to the show this year. Which sucks. However, I am afraid that somewhere around the sixth or seventh time that I dropped the laptop, I apparently did some damage to it. I don't get it, frankly.

Anyway, here are things I would blog about if I was around this year. Hopefully we'll get to it soon. I know you must be excited about that--I know I am.

1. Why am I suddenly getting fat? 40 years of being skinny, now a sad memory.
2. My obsession with the German band Kraftwerk, even though Germans scare me.
3. Airplane food--what's up with that? (Comedy jokes, folks. Comedy jokes.)
4. I forget.
5. My increasing desire to get on my motorcycle, leave the U.S., and never come back. Except then I'd miss In n' Out Burger too much. (See #1.)
6. Angelina Jolie--why she must be my second wife. A treatise.
7. Who loves cake? I do!

Okay, I gotta get on the plane. Let's, you know, roll.

Coolio Maximo!

My daughter is 10 years old now. That means I'm rapidly moving out of the phase of being adored and even more rapidly moving into the phase of being A Total And Complete Embarrassment. Especially when around her friends. No, I suppose it doesn't help that I am often singing loudly, off-pitch, in a falsetto, to Bachman-Turner Overdrive songs. But still.

This morning, when her carpool came to pick her up for school, she said, rather pointedly, "BYE, Dad," before we had even walked all the way down the driveway, making it clear that I was not to go all the way to the car with her, where I might say something embarrassing in front of her friends, something like, "Did you remember to wipe your butt this morning, honey?" Which is what my mom did to me for my first 20 years, which is why I'm still in therapy three times a week.

Anyway, lately she's been coming home from school with all sorts of new expressions. Thankfully, those expressions are not yet things like "fuck you", but are more like the title of today's blog entry. The opposite of "coolio maximo", by the way, is "coolio minimo", for something only sort of cool. For example, me buying her the School of Rock DVD yesterday was "coolio maximo." I'm actually not sure what qualifies as "coolio minimo." Me not letting her watch the whole DVD after dinner was not "coolio minimo." It was more like "fucked up Nazi bullshit." Nah, just kidding. She didn't really say that. At least not to my face.

Dang it!

My apologies to the good people at artsflow and everyone else who got pinged for the rather public display of self-loathing I just broadcast to the world with my first blog post in a year. Good lord, I am a doofus. The only way I could further my humiliation this afternoon, on this glorious return to blogdom, would be to dive face first into a bucket full of human waste.

Stay tuned!

A ghost from the past

Good lord, do I suck. What's it been since my last entry--a year? This reminds me of all my aborted attempts over the years to keep a "journal." The greatest thing about my collection of journals is how every single one starts with "this time I'm really gonna do it." Then I have about four or five entries, and then another 5 years go by.

I suppose it would help if I wasn't so lazy and unambitious. I mean, in my head, I have lots of great plans. But once I actually wake up in the morning, forget it. Go jogging every morning at 5 a.m? No. Write for an hour and then go jogging? No. Go into work early and catch up on all that email? No. How about lay in bed until the last possible second, drooling on the pillow, wondering what I'm gonna watch on TV that night? Yeah, way more likely.

Goddamn me! I hate me! This is why I decided to post after all these months. Not to promise to write to this blog more often. I know better now. I suck. That's all I wanted to say. I suck.

That is all.