and i thought my problems were bad--until i read marley's blog:

"i put to much ketchup on ym plate for my chicken fingers and now i have this extra ketchup and i don't really want to put it back in the bottle, nor eat more food using it up or washing it down the drain. what a dilema. and my beers empty."

great grammar and spelling, mars. i hope you have enough ketchup. and beer.

alex--i bet you weren't expecting to see THAT drawing on here =)

NEW YORK STATE TROOPERS: POLICE ACADEMY, DAY ONE: June 28th.

after arriving yesterday and getting settled in with two other roommates, all cadets were awakened at 6:00am for a morning run, sit ups and pushups. being a two hour session, it was no doubt the first step at weeding out the weak. no problem!

8:00am: breakfast. surly lunch ladies and so-so food. just like high school. introductions, practical jokes, and grabass ensue.

9:00-12:00: the first of many intro classes. orientation. administrative BS. intro to criminal justice. fun and stressful at the same time.

12:00: lunch. intial tension and "first day of school" feeling begins to subside.

1:00-5:00pm: more of the same intro stuff. course outlines. expectations. assignments.

6:00: dinner. out on the town with the new friends. great time!

7:00: day one of the academy complete. super-sore and beat. looking forward to laws, guns, cop cars, and ass kicking! only 179 more days to go.

*POOF*

--shit.

that was all a dream. that was probably what happened in albany today. i wouldn't know.

a dream, because i didn't make it in: "It is most unfortunate that (your hearing problem) precludes you from acceptance for employment as a Trooper. Truly yours, Blah Blah.."

*sigh*

onward to other options. i will now stop beating this dead horse.

stay tuned for more news as it happens.

john kerry: "today we are one step closer to the end of the bush administration" *

yep. i just saw it.

i broke my "i'll never go to the movies alone" rule by going to see Fahrenheit 9/11--by myself. but i was pleasantly surprised to see that i would not be alone--upon arrival, i joined an ever-growing line reaching nearly a block down the street outside of the westcott cinema in syracuse. shit, even channel 9 and chuck plumpton from channel 5 were there--must be big news!

this rickety old theater hadn't seen ass like this in who knows how long. how they got a copy of this movie i'll never know--of 868 theaters in the country showing the film, this little 500-seat, one screen movie house in residential syracuse got their hands on a copy and i happen to live a mere 3 or 4 streets away. (to a kid that grew up in jefferson county NY with the closest theater being 20 miles from the farm, this is virtually next door.) waiting in line, i almost felt like i was back in ithaca NY--so many politics-savvy, educated, opinionated people--they have a certain look about them. oh, i know what it is--they CARE about the WORLD AROUND THEM. unlike most people.

i digress.

watching michael moore's bowling for columbine at home on DVD had a huge effect on me. imagine how jazzed i got watching this one--in a sweaty, jam packed theater with 300 other anti-bush whackos. (did i mention that i am a republican? probably the only one in the house?) there laffs, tears, applause, and the crazies who think they can channel directly to michael moore by talking to the screen. it was a good time and a good film.

good. but not great. but good enough to stir the pot. sure, lots of things are taken out of context. some things are not accurate. but it does show how seemingly simple decisions by our government are incredibly complicated by circumstance and politics. and it most certainly shows our bumbling president doing what he does best--looking foolish. it doesn't take a movie to show that. just look at his interviews, speeches, and candid quips. the guy sucks.

-------

one of my coworkers tried to tell me today that a movie like this is disrespectful to the president.

disrespectful?

it's disrespectful to burn a flag. it's disrespectful to boo at your troops overseas. it's disrespectful to piss on the white house lawn. but an attempt to influence others to vote out a president by making a movie with 100% REAL IDIOT footage--slanted as it may be--is your freedom of speech and democracy in action, baby! if you think it's disrespectful to voice your opinion, then go to a country that doesn't allow opinions. there's plenty of them.

unfortunately, the people watching the movie are the choir. bush lovers are not going to be converted, because they AIN'T gonna go see this. but for you diehard bush voters, at least think of it this way: this movie is already hugely popular, and for good reason. when was the last time there was a movie that was a blatant attack on a SITTING president? how bad must the current state of affairs be to warrant that? oh, and let's not forget the unsavory portrayal of bush in bowling for columbine. he didn't look to good in that, either.

moxie, i hope you're reading this! :)

*john kerry's comment had nothing to do with the release of this movie. too bad, cuz it sounded good.

THIS JUST IN: BRITNEY AND BEN: THREE DEGREES OF SEPARATION.

the rumor you heard is correct. there are now just THREE degrees of separation between yours truly and Miss Britney Spears. wedding plans have not yet been announced.

insiders say this week ben sold a ford focus to the mother of the guitar player (also named ben) of britney's road band. the connection was confirmed this morning upon delivery of new license plates and vehicle registration to the guitarist's mother.

IN RELATED NEWS: there are also confirmed reports of a mere four degrees of separation between ben and Nicole Ritchie. the link is similar--the guitar player in question also played for Lionel Ritchie. significance of this connection has been greatly overshadowed by the Britney link. when questioned about ritchie, Ben was quoted as saying, "(ritchie) is a skanky ditz. or is that paris hilton?" this accusation is widely accepted as truth, and pop-skank star christina aguilera also falls into this category.

--back to your regularly scheduled blarf post.

------------------



for the last couple of weeks i've been plummeting downward in a "i-hate-the-world-cuz-i-didn't-get-into-the-police-academy-and-now-my-life-is-completely-aimless" spiral. it culminated yesterday as i was leaving my crappy job for home. i was subconsciously hating the world and it's injustices while i furtively tried to tear the rubber off the steering wheel. how is it that another guy (who will remain nameless)--who has a criminal history, owns a radar detector (a big trooper no-no), and can hardly do pushups (pluEEZE!)--can get into the academy and i can't? why, because his hearing is better than mine. even though my hearing is quite acceptable when both ears are averaged together, my right ear is not good enough on it's own.

lately, these are the things that absorb all of my thoughts while driving. on this trip i made a dogleg to the new Bass Pro Shop in the fingerlakes mall in auburn. it was very cool, especially the zillion-gallon fish tank filled with bass, salmon, pike, and the like. but it was hard to enjoy the splendor of Bass Pro when you're walking around with clenched fists and staring at the floor cuz you're so pissed that you are an ivy leaguer who works 50 hours a week for less than minimum wage and the only thing in your life that goes up is credit card bills. gawd, i would LOVE to buy a tank of gas or a bag of groceries with CASH. i can't remember the last time i did that. just driving to work puts me behind the eight ball--gas bills have been eating up about 2/3rds of my paycheck lately. it's pointless to even leave the driveway.



to add more fuel to the fire, i recently learned that my supervisor from my last job is leaving the company, and if i had not followed thru with all of this state trooper stuff and gotten demoted (for looking at other jobs) and quit, i'd be moving from senior manager to supervisor and be making like SIXTY GRAND A YEAR and the shop would be MINE. i guess it doesn't matter though, cuz even if i could walk back in there and take that job, i would probably hate it all over again in 5 minutes and i'd be wondering "What if?" about the academy.

ironically, i also ran into the manager that will be taking that supervisor position--the guy who used to work beneath me. i ran into him at a bar downtown last night. he wants me to come back to the company. the location supervisor is not as thrilled with that idea as he, because he knows, and i will be the first to admit, i ran the shop the right way, as opposed to the profitable-and-piss-poor-quality way. instead of paying mere lip service to the company goals of quality, i actually did it, and therefore i did not fit in.



at any rate, he did get me thinking. money is money is money. but i am not going back unless the general managers contact ME. they can suck MY wang for once. otherwise, there's no way in hell i'd go back. but i don't think they want to do any sucking.

i'm getting ahead of myself. my plan for last night was to come home and try to accomplish something worthwhile, like clean my craphole apartment. and wallow in my self-pity. but one of my coworkers (dave) called me up & invited me to st. sophia's greek fest at the church up the street. this place is literally a tenth of a mile away and didn't go last year cuz i'm not much for church functions, but according to dave, this is a rockin', drunken party. so i went.

it was set up in the parking lot and also included the church gym. apparently this church doesn't mind people drinking their asses off, even in the building itself. i was hoping we wouldn't be struck by lightning or plagued by locusts for imbibing alcohol on the church grounds. there were no less than a thousand freaking people, a band, shitloads of greek food, and NO CELLULITE ON THE PREMISES. not one fat chick. not one lard ass. what planet had i gone to? are greeks all thin? these people can't all be greek, though! or did i miss the sign that said "no fatties allowed"? at any rate, we were struck by the lack of fuglyness of the attendees. it was truly aMAZing.* the beer led me to introduce myself to the most beautiful woman i've ever seen, who just so happened to have a boyfriend. dammit. those girls always do.

we stayed until 9, the official shut-down time (hey, this is a church, after all!) this was the first time in nearly two years that i walked to a social event from my apartment, which might not sound cool but it was cuz i'm smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood. very cool.



i was then escorted to armory square by my volleyball teammate for the rest of the evening. now, you may know that there is no attraction whatsoever between myself and armory square, since i think drinking in bars is a total waste of time and money, but tonight it was cool, especially cuz i wasn't driving. and THAT was where i ran into the manager from my old job, blah blah blah and it was fun and then i came home the end. the evening was a nice reprieve from my life of hell. tune in again soon. i'm on my way to greek fest, day two.

*i really try not to look down on overwieght people. i really don't. but it's my opinion that people are fat: 50% due to genetics, 50% due to lazyness, ignorance, and plain old stupidity. yes, there are some people out there that just can't beat obesity, and to those people, i sympathize. but i'm not dating a big chick, sorry. it's another one of those 50/50 rules--50% looks, 50% personality that draws me to someone. if that's not fair, then i don't know what is. i just don't want people thinking i'm a fatty-hater.

pleasant surprise of the day: the box speakers in my jeep have sounded like crap for quite some time. i assumed it was the result of being wet too many times and just plain old age. they've done a good job over the last 7 years, but maybe it was time to upgrade. too bad i can't afford it.

it wasn't til i was sitting in the applebee's parking lot tonight listening to the intro of 'heavy' by collective soul that i realized only one channel was working. after reconnecting the wire to the right side, the bass and treble came alive and all the sudden my system sounded like that high-class optimus* system that i know and love. yay.

*optimus is the dubious (and discontinued) line of stereo equipment from radio shack. draw your own conclusions. it was good for the money paid. (read: it kindof sucks to begin with but gets the job done.)



rant of the day: while watching the nascar race on sunday, i saw an ad for the FX tv movie, 'meltdown'. looks kinda cool. but in the middle of the 30 second spot, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the race, no doubt with many impressionable young people watching, they showed not one, but TWO blood curdling, graphic, bloody machine-gun murders. one victim was even identified as a hostage--as if the shooting needed to be even more shocking. and this was just the commercial!

ok.

in a post-columbine, post-9/11 world, do we need to see bloody, bullet-riddled bodies falling to the ground during a family-oriented sporting event? NO. sure, we've all seen a million deaths on the movies and late night tv. but doesn't the FCC have rules about this kind of stuff?

oh yeah, they do. during primetime: 1. no swearing. 2. no sex. 3. no drinking alcohol. 4. no nudity.



swearing, sex, alcohol, bare ass, murder--of these five things, only one is a crime. only one is something you and i will never do. only one is the most heinous thing a person can do to another person. it's also the only one that can be seen on network tv in the middle of the goddamn afternoon. what the hell is up with that?

we can watch half of the nicholas berg beheading video on the cnn, but if dan rather ever dropped the f-bomb during the evening news, he'd get his ass kicked into early retirement and every cbs station in the country would be fined for airing it. in fact, he wouldn't even be able to say the term "f-word" without the producers saying "um, dan, you can't make a reference to the f-word during the broadcast..." BUT we can see a human being's terrified last moments before some piece of shit terrorist hacks off his head with a machete. oh wait, we didn't see his head get cut off--but we knew what was coming. just like if dan implied that he was gonna say the f-word. though, somehow it's different.

now i'm not saying we should be able to see and hear drunken sex, boobs, and the f-word on network tv (even though in europe it's standard fare and they're all just fine) but damn, how does this make any sense? is this a result of america becoming desensitized to violence, or the cause of it?



when i see my 4 and 5 year old nephews pretending to shoot and kill each other i wonder where the hell the pick this stuff up, cuz it sure isn't from their berenstain bear books. yeah, i know--when i was a kid, i did that stuff too, and i've never even been in a fight, let alone killed anyone--and neither will my nephews. but let's also consider that not every person out there is smart enough to accept entertainment as entertainment only. desensitizing people to murder (as opposed to say, sex, which is a normal human function) is just plain wrong. families don't cry at funerals when someone flops a tit at a party. people don't go to jail for 15 to 25 when they drink alcohol. children don't grow up without brothers, sisters or parents when someone says "hey asshole!"--people do that stuff when someone pops a cap in someone else's ass and and someone dies.



so i guess it's ok to kill someone on tv, as long as it's done fully clothed, clean mouthed, and with no open containers of alcohol in sight. goddamn, i love my american freedom! only in this country does that make sense.

if you haven't seen it, go watch 'bowling for columbine'. hell, you might just vote for john kerry if you do, which is a good freakin' idea. but that's a whole nuther story. gotta tie my dad to his recliner on election day so he can't vote for that numb nut bush again. for christ's sake, bush has fumbled almost as many speeches as he's dropped bombs on foreign countries, and that's a lot. but as i said, that's a whole nuther story.

Ray Charles, 1930-2004

missed more than Reagan?? for a musical sort such as myself, yes.

Reagan + Gorbechev + Scrambler = Cool.

all ye faithful readers,

you will notice the blarf is looking much different. we at www.cj8.blogspot.com had a real scare yesterday--the blarf had a near-fatal aneurism in the sublateral template area while some routine link additions were being completed (by yours truly.) being unable to bring her back to life on my own, i immediately summoned mark in boston for an emergency lobotomy (to which his response was something like, "i f**king hate doing this shit for you...") he deftly sliced and diced the template which allowed us to take the blarf off of the respirator and get her breathing on her own again. (and it made him late for work, for christ's sake!)

unfortunately in the process, as in most labotomies, some things were lost (such as the ability to speak, or reliable bowel control, for example.) the wonderful blue hues we have come to love are now gone; lost in cyberspace forever. over the coming weeks, we will be slowly but surely be sexying up (is that a word?) the blarf once again. kinda like that episode of knight rider when kitt ends up in the pit of toxic waste and has to be rebuilt. yeah, like that.

anyway, i hope you enjoy the new look to the blarf.

your faithful contributor and editor,

Ben

with the rumble of the moving truck, my neighbors from across the breezeway were gone.

and i didn't help them move, either. whoop de do.

i didn't even open the damn door--the voyeur in me was satisfied with the peephole view. fact is, i don't even remember their names, even though they lived 6 feet away from me for the 20 months that i've been here. the only reason i would have opened the door while they were moving out would have been to see the inside of their apartment, which is an exact mirror image of mine and for some reason i wanted to see what the exact same thing, in reverse, would look like. other than that, what the hell did i care?

not to say i didn't want to know them--hell, i tried. but they were just weird. (by "they" i mean this old husband and wife who are both foreign language professors at one of the local universities.) for every encounter in the stairwell or parking lot, my cheery hellos got either a meager, curt "hi" or simply nothing at all. for a long time i wondered if they didn't like me because i was a young whippersnapper who was gonna upset their quiet 3rd floor, but that didn't make any sense because they work with whippersnappers like me every day at their jobs, so they must like 20-somethings. eventually i just said to hell with it and accepted the fact that i would never have them over for dinner, or never be invited over for shits and giggles and coffee and shnackies, or never water their plants while they were on vacation (nor would they feed my fish), or never have the wife translate english to italian for me (for my hot italian penpal), or even learn their frikkin' names, other than the last name on the mailbox and what the guy downstairs told me (and he told me everything i knew about them.)

but i don't think i was, or will be, missing much.

for instance, i won't miss seeing their f*cking cars parked right by the apartment door for THREE MONTHS while they go back to the "old country" for the summer. wouldn't it be considerate to park your cars off to the side and let the poor assholes who are STILL HERE EVERY DAY park in those spots? while their cars were sinking into the asphalt, covered with an inch of dirt, leaves, bird shit, and tree limbs and sitting on dry rotting, flat-ass tires, i had to park in the dark, scuzzy corner of the lot and walk by their cars several times a day. and on the rare occasion that i got a spot next to theirs, do you think i cared if i accidentally bonked my rusted pickup truck door into the door of thier little hondas? HELL NO.

and i won't miss seeing her hooting like a ghost and waving her dirty socks and grandma panties at me as i walk into the laundry room because she wanted me to know she was in there "so i wasn't frightened." wtf??? (yes, that did happen. it was then that i withdrew contact and cut off all diplomatic relations.)

--weirdos. goodbye, good riddence.

it's all too common not to know your neighbors while living in the city. i've always been surprised at how quiet this complex is and how unusual it is to run into people outdoors. when i moved in, i was hoping there would eventually be some kind of apartment complex BBQ or mixer party or something, but there never has been. i could suggest it, but it probably wouldn't be popular. besides, who am i to be the one to break the silence? heaven forbid someone do something to create a sense of community around here.

*sigh*

hopefully some sorority girls will move in next. they can wave thier socks and panties at me all they want.