It's Thanksgiving, folks.

Today, my life was a Mr. Bean gag reel.

After an unproductive morning, I got it into my head to donate blood. I posted a Facebook status to encourage everyone to do the same, and I hopped into my car. Fifteen minutes later, I realized I was on the wrong street, and I’d overshot directly into the heart of Mountain View traffic. Ten minutes, a u-turn, and just fifty feet later, I got stuck in a right turn lane.

Which funneled me into a grocery store parking lot. At 2:30 p.m. The day before Thanksgiving.

And when I got to the blood center, I found out that I’d left my photo I.D. at home; not only did that mean I couldn’t give blood, but I was driving without a license, and I passed a cop on my way out of the parking lot.

Thankfully, the cop wasn’t psychic, but the mission was a horrible failure.

I’d like to take a moment to give thanks that my vicious cycle is a comedy, and that my definition of a horrible failure is that blood stays inside my body.

And now for something completely different.

I got the urge to write a poem, so here it is. I’ll probably describe the thought process behind it some other time, because I feel like explaining it now would ruin it.

Quick note: “field” is one syllable.

They March

I sit at the window and watch them march past

Their ranks and their columns in field gray and black.

They scorn the mundane as potential denied:

Betrayal of passion, it's Man gentrified;

A man without struggle’s awash in the tide,

So join in the cause — my brother, decide.

We called them salvation and begged them for more;

Who gave them the right? We opened the door.

Our brothers in arms would have hero’s reward;

What blinded our sight? Our honor restored.

I sit by the window and force myself back

From cheering their columns in field gray and black.

The Saga of the MattressMobile

I wrote this for an email to convince a house of 20-somethings to let me live with them, but I got carried away and it turned into blog post-fodder. Yes, this is totally true; I do this kind of ridiculous stuff.

June, 2009. I stayed in San Diego after school finished because I wanted to find a job there, and while most of my friends had gone back up north, I was still closer to my San Diego friends than my hometown friends. I budgeted a week and a half to find a job and a room; by the end of that, still with no job, I called it quits and got ready to fly up north. Before that, I had to get everything to storage.

When everyone else moved out, we had a jeep and a van to haul mattresses. The jeep was gone, and I assumed I could borrow the van. Assumptions aren't a good idea, and the day before I was supposed to fly out, I had nothing to move with.

Cue my brilliant insight: the mattress frame had wheels.

A Musical Counter-Point, re:Nerd Rock

Last night, I was procrastinating going to bed – checking comics, flipping through blogs, checking comics, nuking a bowl of Rice-a-Roni, checking comics – and came across a link to this, by Something Awful user Daryl Hall. I was going to do my standard shrug, I think you’re wrong but it’s whatever, kinda thing — but I changed my mind; I wasn’t just going to accept this.

First off, because I believe in disclaimers: It might be that we’ve listened to entirely different bands and have different ideas of what constitutes nerd rock; I follow BrentalFloss religiously, but because it isn’t aimed to be music, I don’t count it in the genre. That being said, I’ve listened extensively to the only band that he name-drops (The Protomen), so I think we’re on roughly the same page.

Second, because I believe in theses: Nerdcore is not as one-dimensional or lazy as Mr. Hall portrays it.

Marvel's Civil War began when I was just out of high school. It didn't age well.

Thought-Provoking Comics Comments!

I’ve been out of the loop with the Marvel Universe since Civil War, and it’s been a while since I revisited that. I’ve read enough to hate Brand New Day, but my Bay Area libraries didn’t stock much more than that. Up here, though, I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Civil War, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign – the whole shebang, and it’s reminded me what I love and hate about Marvel.

Entry: Janc Limm.

Something a little different today. It owes a debt to Eclipse Phase; I went to the library today, but couldn't find any transhuman sci-fi. Instead, here's this, formatted as a Wikipedia-style article, a bit of an experiment.

Janc Limm

(Jack Lamark redirects here)

(The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.)

Janc Limm (born Jack Lamark January 23, 2258, third-generation sentient) was an actor on the vidcast Prospect. One of the first Uplifted octopi to become a celebrity, he was seen as a vanguard of a growing Uplifted subculture. He quit the show abruptly in 2269, becoming a radical spokesman for the creation of octopus societies separate from humanity.

Limm is currently awaiting trial for the 2271 murder of human Chris Johnson.

Almost six months after mourning.

This spring, my high-school drama teacher, a surrogate father for some of his students and a friend and inspiration to me, died of a heart attack. We’ll call him Tim, because if I called him Timothy Marie, you wouldn’t get the joke.

Last week, I was visited by Tim.

Disclaimer: I’m not a superstitious man; I don’t believe this was a visitation by anything but my subconscious. Nevertheless…

I’d been having trouble sleeping, despite trying to wake up by 8 each morning. This was around when I posted the Chinese Democracy post, which I finished at 6:30 a.m. after pulling myself out of bed at 3 a.m., never having actually slept. Other nights were much the same, with me hopping into bed early and hopping back out an hour later. This was also when I was reaching crunch time for finding a job — two weeks until the end of the month, probably two weeks before I could get paid, and judging by the lack of replies, Safeway was prominent in my future. This night, I think I’d been drifting between exhaustion, hyperactivity, and self-loathing in my bed for an hour.

For some reason, I thought of Tim, and I heard his voice in my head.

I’d spent enough time around Tim that I could imagine him saying about anything — most of my friends and I spent lunch in the drama room — so I assumed I was just putting words into his mouth. But I was curious, so I tried to turn off my brain.

His voice started to sound echoed, with only a moment’s delay; the source was distant and indistinct, and the echo was like a subtitle. The subtitles were perfectly clear, and my conscious brain — the part that was trying to find patterns or make sense of this — was only involved in the subtitles. The original was coming from somewhere else.

I don’t remember what Tim said, and it’s possible that I’m jumbling up even the pieces that stuck in my head. I remember the word “job”; I remember that he was stern; I remember feeling supported.

My best guess is that my conscious brain was drowsy and silent, letting my subconscious through, so there wasn’t any supernatural significance to this. I don’t know if this was the night before I woke up at 8 a.m. and got myself a job, so there’s dubious fiscal significance.

No matter what, for a little while, Tim was the voice of my conscience; I can’t decide whether I’ve been honored or if I was honoring him.