Me And Mr. Zip: It's A Scream

A few weeks ago, I forgot to take a customer's mail out to them when they came back from vacation. The supervisor said that they'd come in for it, and I should try and remember to check my holds every day. I was embarrassed, because I have a system for remembering that, and I was surprised I'd missed it. And also embarrassed because, I'm a mailman. They didn't ask me to remove their mail from their gall bladder, or write a brief. It was a simple thing; it was de minimis I could do (or not, depending on what de minimis might actually mean).
Today,  when I saw outgoing mail at a house, I thought, "Oh, they came back early." I looked at my notes, and realized, "Oh no, they were supposed to get their mail yesterday."
I have always complained that the post office treats their employees like we're too dumb to dress ourselves. This job is going to be so much harder now that I'll have to keep checking to see if my pants are zipped.

Mismanagement And Grief: We Must Suffer Them All Again. -W.H. Auden

Life is like a badly designed video game. It needs an "Undo" button, but instead you get trapped on the same level forever. A level that, in my case, includes a still dripping water heater and arguing with my credit union about fraudulent charges on my card. They did credit my account last month, but the merchant claims it was a real charge, and so here we go again. The letter from the credit union included the documentation the eBay seller included to support their claim of authenticity. Apparently they think
I'm a Chinese man living in Milwaukee buying an iPad mini using an eBay ID that I don't have access to. I'm arguing that I'm not any of those things, but I guess that's just what I would say.

No wonder the zombie movie has made a come back; like rough beasts, so we shamble on against the current, lost in a haunted wood, warming the frozen swamp as best we can with the slow smokeless burning of decay.

Sources misused, then mangled, in the production of this post, available upon request.

Very Funny

My dad was so cool. He had the first convertible Mustang in Alaska, and that wasn't his first or his last convertible. He got us a Wurlitzer juke box, and towed my sister and me, and all our friends on water skis, at his cabin on Big Lake, the cool people's lake. He knew what a GTO was, and how to build a dock or a rocking chair and how to measure a hypotenuse with a stick instead of a theorem, but he knew the theorem, too.
So, I always assumed I was the cool dad, too. Even though, except for a bitter, hurtful sense of humor, we had almost nothing in common. And I still thought I was the cool dad, whatever that might mean now that my children are both in their fourth decade. But last night, I recorded a show on TNT, so I could watch the show I recorded on TBS. How cool is that?

Shameless Update

Lately, the weather report has included the phrase, "hottest temperature ever," so often that it's starting to sound like a broken record.

The Sun Also Rises, Hemmingway Said, But This Time Of Year, It Never SETS!

We had the longest winter on record followed now by the hottest summer on record. We don't live in Alaska because we like the heat, on the contrary, we live here because the cold is what we like to complain about. How hot is it? It's so hot there's a doorman at the Costco cooler. 

By the way, I don't have really strong feelings about gun control since there are already more guns than people here, but as a bicyclist, I can tell you, Americans cannot be trusted with glass bottles. 

The Apocalypse; Just Another Buddy Movie

I listened to an interview today with Annalee Newitz about her new book, Scatter, Adapt and Remember.  She said that in our planet's history, there have been six mass extinctions. Most appear to have been triggered by climate change, and that we may be in the beginnings of one right now. No need to be alarmed, these things only seem sudden on geologic time scales.  Even the mass extinction caused by an asteroid impact sixty five million years ago played out over the next few hundred thousand years or so. So, you can probably keep driving your SUV for now, especially if you're an unfeeling jerk.
Anyway, these things have winners and losers. It wasn't a great time to be a dinosaur, but cheeky little mammals did okay. She says that we are positioned to survive because, "we're really good at adapting to live anywhere, and we're really good at eating a wide variety of foods."Who else does that describe?Our constant companion, side by side, the cockroach.

Through all kinds of weather 
What if the sky should fall? 
Just so long as we're together
It doesn't matter at all

In other news, I'm toying with going for a rando this weekend. By this point in training for such a thing, it's time to start tapering. Sadly, though, the only way I could put less effort into training would involve self-gavage.

People Are Buzzing

Since my last post, I took the CPAP machine back. I had to sign a form that said I was acting against medical advice. A little annoying that giving back a machine that kept me awake requires signing an AMA form, but I could walk across the street to Burger King and order a side order of lard, no questions asked. Except for maybe, "Up-size that for you?

Here's a tip after watching an argument at work: poking a piñata with a stick is fun, doing the same thing to a hornets' nest isn't.

Also today, on the news, I heard a woman from Alabama say, "I’m not begging my lords for mercy. I’m a born free American woman." This was in response to a delay in processing her application for tax exempt status for her tea party activism. Not that she couldn't say all her tea party stuff, or that she had to pay extra taxes, just whether or not her tea party activities were political, which is not tax exempt or charitable which is. Anyway, her suffering sure puts this guys political stand (24 years ago today) in perspective:

I know, a little too on the nose. Looking at that picture reminds me of the horrors taking place now in Syria. We're going to have to choose if we want to support the Al-Qaeda backed terrorists or the Iranian backed terrorists. Apparently, the idea of not getting involved as people we don't like fight each other isn't an option.