Christmas Stinks!

 

  Firstly, for everyone actually working this Christmas Day, a sincere tip-o'-the-hat to you.  You guys rock!  This will be the first Christmas Day (by random luck) that I've had off since 2008.  I'm alone for the majority of the day as Becky has to work (we both haven't had a Christmas off together since about 2002).  I can understand what it's like for those that do.  Whether you're in the service industry or military, you're appreciated.  Thank you.

  What peeves me this morning is that some people stink.  Not in some philosophical way but in a physical way, particularly during the winter season.  Why?  Maybe no access to a toothbrush or soap?  I notice this often I get to take a bus halfway to where I work from a portal area.  This doesn't sound like a big deal but I half to walk in the dark, often in the wee-hours about a little over a mile.  It's pitch-black both ways due to my hours I work in the winter and there's no cover to protect against the 50+ mph winds and when it's 10 degrees outside it's like being on another planet.  Like being on some sort of Pitch Black novel, and I'm the main character, or the first victim in a list.  A halfway bus makes it a little safer, but such conditions could kill a person unprotected, or at least induce frostbite within 15 minutes, which is when you lose ears, limbs, and other body parts.  So.. when it's available, I take the bus.  It runs during the weekday and so I'm not tortured all the time as much.  Because of these conditions, several people have left where I work, though the mud-path tread-down has finally been paved with a short 3' walkway (unlit) during the warmer days suspicious bull-snakes and rattlesnakes lazily frequent it, making for a painful bite, and out in that distant field, no one can hear your cries for help.  Fun!

  The bus is a diesel-deal, and it's usually warmed-up about 15 degrees from the outside as diesel vehicles aren't prone for warmth, but it's something and I'm grateful.  What irks me is the others that hop onboard, most of whom don't need to continue-on the extra half-mile from where it drops folks off, stink.  Not the military, mind-you.  They seem to all have some sense of humanity and decency.  Praise them!  It's the others.  It's the contractors.  They're wearing bulky coats and huff fatly onboard after me, reeking of various things.  I'd be probably okay with body-odor.  That'd be fine, almost, though it's the beginning of the day, so really there should be little excuse for that lest they were summoned-in for some greater satellite-cause; it's possible.  No, it's not that.  There's more.  SO much more.

  So the typical non-military contractor will heave onboard and I can't help thinking of Jethro Tull's album Stand Up (1969) and the song "Fat Man". 

  The smells are mind-bogglingly confusing.  Often it's safe enough, bad, low-grade perfumes from toothy, beastly women smelling of baby-powder and cheap hair-products, the stank of thick, unyielding synthetic ambergris lingering like a Barrow Wight from some lost chapter in a Tolkien novel.  The presence of the smell is unpleasant, and I suspect the she-devil used the odor as a lotion instead of a delicately-dabbed, gracefully-proper "hint" on the pulse-zones of the jugular and wrist as a Lady might in discretion only to be noticed by gentlemen suitors within the closest, most intimate proximity, a dainty wiff of something coying?  No.  FAT, stanky, lazy, unthought, rank odor, a violent splashing like a desperate she-orc in a hurry for one last rude hump by a drunk ogre-sailor bellowing a shanty about lost dreams.  This scent is rude and frames the she-beast like a book's blurb on a dust-cover.  It explains her fully: lazy, uncaring, apparently olfactorily-dead, and all but given-up on life.  Stank, inside the soul and out.  "Stay away!", her smell demands, ironically, creating the exact opposite effect.  I've known younger idiot women do this too, reeking of stinky perfume, leaving a room, her presence lingering for hours afterwards like a thick cloud from an evil green dragon.  Not good.  Retarded.  No one wants this, ever.  What are you trying to do, miss?  You can't disguise.  Your very core reeks.

  Other smells are that of bad coffee seething-up from the bellies of fatties like cauldrons of boiling acid and poor-grade, peasant-class coffee, often mixed with pesticides and insect parts microscopic.  Starbucks is a horrible coffee shop and hides its failings with corn-syrup and burnt beans and chemical sprays.  Definitely the most poisonous and unhealthy of "coffee shops" frequented only by women and liberal-idealists in denial.  The vapor of death makes its way up the mouth-breathers that hope the caffeine will start their sluggish, empty hearts. 

  Unwashed teeth stink of garlic from the Asians (sorry, stereotype-haters) that thought it'd be a nice, good idea to reek of the cloves for the entire day and into tomorrow for everyone to unjoy.  Worse still, folks with scummy teeth mouth-breathing like stupid, freak-thumbed Megan Fox, the bacteria taking flight, evolving to a 1903 Orville Wright civilization, finding new worlds in the frigid air, the thick layers of yellow muck on the tooth enamel celebrating a new era for their race for me to smell.  Please, use a twig if you can't find a toothbrush.  Even rednecks will use Trident, and it kind of works for them at least.  Ugh.  Brush your teeth once a week.  Please?  I'll buy.

  There's something worse.  Sometimes a smell of decay and death you can only smell from dank sewers in ancient places, wafting up.  Something evil before the creation of the universe.  Before the big-bang.  From a place the Shadow People come from.  Before Light.  Some smell of a pure decay not unlike wheat and filth like 3-week-old dead bodies left to rot lest poppies grow from their ichor as in the Battle at Passchendaele in World War I.  Something fungal and foul from the deep reaches of sinister distortion.  The Apocalyptic Rider "Pestilence's" best weapon.  He keeps it for last, and now it's here.  The final decay unknown except for the unfound regions of the Fungus Kingdom, out their faces, projected through lung diaphragms and into my way for me to suffer.  How is this person walking?  Some cruel joke by the devil no-doubt.  Even the undead would back-off in reverence, and bow. 

  How can people stink so badly?  Why can they not know how bad they stink?  This is everywhere, not just this mad bus of despair.  This happens in places all around!  They should be culled!

Or.. I guess I could just walk. 

Merry Christmas!











What?  It's just a guy eating a candy cane.. right?  Least his breath is likely peppermint-y.. or.. 

Time Stand Still

 One of the rather interesting things in life is the perception of time, especially on this, the shortest day of the year (for the northern hemisphere).  When I was say, 10 years old, often time dragged-on.  I remember hearing parents talk about how time flies faster, grandparents admitting even further still time was very fleeting.  Interestingly, their perception of time was faster. 

  When I watched Star Wars in 1978 (I was a Johnny-come-lately at age 8) I remember how Luke was fussing about how he had to stay on-station with his uncle for another season instead of going off to the Academy or what-not and they had an argument such that Luke was horrified he'd have to wait another year and Uncle Owen admitted, "Well, yeah.. just another year."  From my point-of-view at-the-time, a year seemed ludicrous an amount of time, but now that I'm older, a year doesn't seem all that painful and actually a wiser choice.

  When I was 4, I remember wanting to get into kindergarten in 1975.  I wouldn't turn 5 until September 12th, a few days after the start of the class, and the school system was trying to keep me from going, but I was impatient and wanted to start and my mother got me in.  Most of the other kids were nearly 6 by that time, however, and so throughout the entire 12 years of school I was a bit of a runt, and that matters.  That changes things, and one's perspectives.. on everything.  You see, you grow pretty significantly each year, at least a few inches during grade school through high-school.  I was always about 3 inches too short throughout.  This puts you on the defensive, and you learn to watch your back from treachery, sniped by taller bullies in the shadows.  Anything in those days to one-up a fellow student.  Anything to get a leg-up.  Being a nerd back then got you a black-eye or worse in the early 1970s and 1980s.  The only thing that kept me from going nuts was a Kung-Fu class known as Bob Meserve's Health and Self-Defense.  I was pressed to go at age 10.  By high-school I had little to worry about lest I be ganged-up on by more that 5 or 6, though that happened occasionally.  What got me back then was the actual feelings of confusion of being ostracized for no reason rather than any physical damage.  That I could generally ward-off quickly enough and easily, it was the psychological that brought me down sometimes.  Still, I grew quick enough and held my own, and a little roughing-up in school teaches you a lot more things in life, how to defend the weak, understand honor, know oppression and how to defeat the evil later in the world and champion those who need it.  Made me to be a very decent sergeant later-on I'd like to think, and to handle great stress and pressure when lives were at stake.  At least I can say that I did.  I know many military that have it pretty easy and never faced such things.  A harder life makes one more resilient and with a richer soul.  I know almost none who can match my own depth, though it makes me sad that the emptiness and dull-headed, unthinking, un-wondering, stubbornness surrounds me.

  Ah, but again I digress a tad.  During days in school, minutes seemed like months, but today, I've been up nearly 12 hours and it seems like only 1 or 2 have gone by.  The amount of time that has spent from Thanksgiving to Christmas seems a mere blink.  I can remember at age 8 that distance was quite farther.  Quite. 

  Time is measured in a relative way based on the observer.  Time is different for satellites as they are distant from the Earth's gravity and atomic clocks onboard need to be slightly calibrated for "clock drift".  Standard space-stuff (though I know a few space guys that are clueless on this and will likely end-up working at some retail store as they don't seek knowledge as passionately as myself, though I must admit a lot of pop-culture knowledge hasn't been too useful, as well as all that union-method stuff from Calculus 3 back in 1989). 

  I knew back when I was in my single-digits that there would be a paradigm-shift sometime, as I believed my elders when they said time would run at a different rate, that my boredom would cease and I'd never have enough time.  I didn't know exactly when this would happen though, or whether it would be gradual or sudden.  I found it is indeed happening now that I'm a surprising 44 years old already.  I noticed a change around age 32 where it was picking-up, that time would fly faster, seemingly.  Now, at 44, days fly-by like hours.  I suspect it may increase to weeks flying-by like hours.  Why is this?

  I have to be cognizant of these temporal adjustments and consider them duly. I sit and consider these things at-length.  Could it be that the influx of media thrown at us with angry colors and sound make the brain change?  There was little by way of input in the 1970s except for turntable vinyl and the potentiality of experimental drug-use and the occasional TV channel.  Back then, guys would sit around and philosophize of UFOs and existentialism while listening to Led Zeppelin, trying to find the deeper meanings of Stairway to Heaven.  Back then, albums had hidden meanings.  Album art had clues you could discover.  Back-masking audio bytes with sinister secrets.  The world had a lot of hidden secrets if you spent the time to look and listen and research.  Knowledge was only found in back-reaches of dusky libraries and rare TV documentaries about the Loch Ness Monster and such.  Interesting times requiring slow, methodical research, seminars to attend, mysteries to be explored, all time-consuming, yet time was not fleeting, it was full.

  Those days are all but gone.  I don't think anyone gets together and plays an album on vinyl now, discussing album art, hidden meanings in lyrics, etc.  Rap music sort of destroyed that, it's nursery-rhyme profanity in a 2-year-old splash of malignant narcissism to me is the death of Civilization.  Not all of it was junk, some was cerebral, almost.  Almost.  There are probably a few pockets of stand-outs somewhere who consider depth of things in music and art, but I find it hard-pressed to gleen any goodness out of current offerings.  There hasn't been a truly deep album since probably the late '80s or early '90s.  Kids don't have the brainpower or patience for it.  Good luck releasing Genesis' , Watcher of the Skies, Emerson, Lake & Palmer's, Tarkus, or Rush's, Fountain of Lamneth these days.  I can appreciate non-progressive rock, but honestly, the depth of even Iron Butterfly's Inagadadavida still is light-years ahead of anything this Generation Zero can even fathom.  Sigh.

The Beatles' Abbey Road has several clues of Paul McCartney's Death.

  I watch the clock jump hour-to-hour, even as I write this post and consider adding imagery to it for the non-readers who like to "look at da pic-shuz" but in this post, I think I'll avoid it to make a point.  (Actually, I couldn't resist.  I put some anyway.  Dork that I am.)   I can't understand why time flies faster as one ages.  I suspect a 6 year-old is annoyed this dragging Sunday afternoon won't end.  It's very cold outside and no snow to play in and everything is borrrring, lying upside-down on the couch.  Or maybe not.  Maybe there's so much online distraction to keep his frazzy little brain distracted enough he won't notice the passage of time.  Maybe the idea is that we weren't distracted enough as kids?  Not enough input?  I'd say now it's too much, perhaps.  Still, I was unemployed for a few weeks back in 2008 and time didn't go slowly by, it was still quick-stepped, so my consideration that media is affecting things might not be a good case for it.  Yet I kept myself entertained with YouTube and Playstation games, so.. maybe.. if I did nothing... I motorcycled around a bit but it was cold in January in Colorado so not as much as I'd like.


  So I wonder if it's the computer media that's affecting time?  Well, the older crowd back in 1978 when I asked them didn't have such distractions, and from 1950 to 1978 there wasn't too much change with media.  They still had TV and radio and newspapers.  It was mostly still the same.  The same album releases, though the 1950s had some pretty empty lyrics.  I'm not sure if there was anything "progressive" back then aside from jazz and some beatnik poetry readings. 

  I think I might have control over it.  It's my own perspective.  Currently, my body has began to decide that the production of melanocytes has decreased to instead work on keeping me alive.  Yep, I'm going gray, and not by lack of vitamin B.  I drink enough of that (as most do now) by way of RedBull and the like.  I get 100% every day.  No gout for me!  Maybe if I focus on time.  Work with it?  I'm not sure.  Such is the mystery of life.

         

Media Minute

Generation Zero is forever bored.

 Media is ever-changing.  It's format, content, and quality ebbs and flows like unpredictable molten gumdrops in a river of chaotic flux, colorful, sweet, sometimes tasty, and often sticky, and it sticks with you, for how long depends on the victim.

  In my case, I focus on music.  I have a few covers out, engineered fairly poorly, with mixed reviews, but most of it was by myself, every instrument, and I think that counts for something, maybe... shrug.  It's a hobby, and it's fun, and I don't get too many tomatoes thrown at me, just a few, and maybe a head of cabbage.  Now if I can only get some croutons. 

  What's interesting is that I believe the actual music "album" is dead.  In a way, it always has been dead by my reckoning.  Most bands come out with an album of which aside from the "hit" or "single" the rest of it is fluff.  Now, I myself am an album-centric rock fan.  I like the whole album as a multi-course meal.  I'll digest it all and see what the artist is trying to convey.  Sometimes there's a few fillers, a few songs that were forced to add content. 

  I wouldn't say "throw away" songs, but sort of like if a cat (or person) has a litter of 12, one of those is gonna be called, "Stinky Pete" and like Dopey from Snow White is going to walk a little crooked.  Sure, the mother-cat is going to love them all, but, well... Petee ain't goin' to be an astronaut any time soon.  Sometimes the artist is delightfully surprised when a song does well that's a filler, in the case with my band Rush, the song New World Man was known as "Project 341" where they had to make a song that was 3:41 to fill the second half of the LP (back in 1982 vinyl days when that mattered).  They wrote it on one day and recorded it the next, yet it made Billboard Top 40 across the world.  For your amusement:

  Still, the patience of today's society is short; shorter than any time I can remember historically.  Kids these days want things fast and now, a microwave oven is dreadfully too slow for 'em.  Folks want it pre-cooked and ready-to-go.. now.  I'm afraid the art of cooking is almost dead.  Gordon Ramsay has brought up this fact in one of his offshoot series.  He laments the average UK woman buys pre-made microwave foods for the kids not occasionally but all the time.  At least the TV-dinner generation of the late '50s and '60s had to wait 40 minutes to heat in the oven, and that was considered quick.  Now, ten minutes to cook a whole meal is considered a lifetime for a family.  I won't even start on the "everybody eats at the table" concept that I think died-out in 1988, some renaissance traditionalists still gripping to that wholesomeness of Americana to my heart's warmth.

  My point of all of this is that releasing a 12-song album, even a concept album is a waste of time.  Instead, there should be only singles.  If a band is making a rare concept album, they should release it like Steven King's The Green Mile in small parts of 2-chapter, dime-store novellas.  Each band should release a 2-song single every month.  Sure, they can record it all at once if they like, but only piece-meal it out.  This would give greater effort towards Billboard presence.  After a year, you can consider releasing a "box set" of all the recordings at-once for further profit, maybe after a few years to re-invigorate the market.  Not too soon so that people will just "wait" for the final album release.  Wait till the fire's fizzled-out completely and the tour is over, then a year after that, release the full "album" as an afterthought box-set deal to re-spark sales and interest now that it's dead.  Rush has re-mastered Vapor Trails from 2002 and it actually charted on the Billboard 200 again at #35!  That's a Top 40 album from 12 years ago!!!  Amazing.

  Further still, I recommend shorter songs.  I know this is getting George Orwellian here, but the average attention-span of a YouTube viewer is about a minute.  Instead of the standard song setup: Intro Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge Solo Chorus Verse Chorus Outro (there are other methods) Just perform: Intro Verse Chorus Solo Outro.  I call this the "Cronis Method".  I'll put it as one of my songs in the Alignments somewhere, and I'll use this method from that album onward.  More concise and keeps the attention.

  I myself am guilty of "skipping" through hearing a new song that someone recommends to get the feel and gist of it.  Music producers do it as they can get a feel of the pulse versus masses in seconds.  I think with this Digital Age of Generation Zero there's no patience for anything more than a full minute.  One minute is the current maximum attention-span.  I will adjust to fit like some audio Twitter-feed.  God save us those that love the concept that music is the space between the notes, but this scatter-brained impatient bunch we call Generation Zero will not tolerate anything less.  God save us all, and bring me my Ibanez against these daft zombies!  Gabba-gabba hey, indeed, Johnny Ramone.

CGI is Frosting

 

  By now, most people have seen the trailer for the upcoming Spiderman 2 film, though really it should be Spiderman 5 (or 7 if you count the '70s films).  A lot of under-30 crowd-members seem to laud it's potential and action, but these people "liked" the new Star Trek franchise which made me sad and should have been renamed "Buck Rogers versus the Sinister Nazi Experiment" (think about it... think about it... no, seriously, think about it.)  I take these movies personally, because I'm all about them.  In my heart, they were made for me... then someone sh*ts Technicolor ridiculousness all over it, and it's ruined.

  Directors and producers these days often create exceptionally bad movies and then cover it up with a ton of current-grade CGI in the same way a horrendous baker might cover mistakes on a cake with more and more frosting.  Many movies these days are all-frosting.  When you remove this frosting-CGI, you're left with a rather bad cake.  Sometimes the frosting and cake go together harmoniously, as in the case of the film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) but a lot of nerds that had just learned about BitTorrent pre-downloaded a leaked copy with incomplete "frosting CGI" and there were some disgruntled snickers here and there, and many just didn't bother with the film which would have done a lot better in the box-office (it tripled its money which is still pretty good).  Case-in-point I heard of folks annoyed the "claws" of the character were either not there or there was green-screen scenes that didn't make sense here and there.  Well of course it's not going to make sense when you have a work-print!  Also, way-to-go figuring out BitTorrent 10 years after it's been around.  Pathetic fledgling hackers.  By 1998 I was done with mp3 files and players.  Ah, computers for the unthinking-class.  All praise Apple for that with the line I hear so much, "I don't want to understand it, I just want it to work."  And there's your problem.  Stupidity.  Enjoy your life with a name-tag on your shirt, oh, barista.  Derp.  All these kids taking college.. take a class that matters.

 Anyway, the film industry has determined that the height of acting should not exceed the level of pornographic actors such as Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge or any Xena, Warrior Princess episode.  Why?  Because they're gonna smear it all over with frosting!  Kids don't know!  The industry treats us like 8-year-old kids who's parents bought store-brand "cola" instead of Pepsi or Coke and we're not supposed to know the difference because we're kids and they saved 10 cents!  Really, then?  When I was 8, I so knew the difference.  I didn't give my parents much of a hard time about it though, and I eventually had my own money to buy what I liked over the years.  Today's kids are retarded.  Today's kids are so brainwashed to be afraid of health, "Don't eat fast food!  Don't smoke cigarettes!"  Uh huh.  So.. I knew guys that lived well into their 80s and 90s that ate fast-food their whole lives and I've known chain-smokers from age 8 who died in their late 70s and 80s.  You know why they eventually died?  Because docs told them to stop what they were doing, and the change killed them.  My grandmother drank a 2-liter of Coke Classic every day for 20 years.  The docs cut-out caffeine from her diet and she died a year later.  One could argue that she would have died 3 months later instead, that the docs gave her a lease on life for 9 months, but I doubt it seriously.  Kids are told to "eat healthy" and have miserable lives scrounging un-tasty twigs and cardboard and to "run" and it turns out those things kill people earlier-on.  Me, I'm not going to be a sheeple and do what I'm told.  It's done me well so far, I just hope Obamacare doesn't institutionalize the whole gambit and I'm forced to do what the docs say like the grandma at the end of Requiem for a Dream.  Be smart enough to research the information yourself, not just "trust" people all the time.  A lot of times, they're right.. A lot of times, they're wrong.  Egg yolks were considered the only healthy part of an egg in the 1980s, then whites in the 1970s, then yolks again in the 1960s.  I'm old enough to remember this.  Don't be a sheeple.

  Well guess what, Film Industry, I don't like it.  I remember when an explosion was an explosion!  It required demolition experts and it was quite an impressive spectacle and you cared for the hero to survive it because he wasn't "added-in later".  No, it was live and real.  The profession of the "Stunt Man" was a big deal.  Car chases were legit, such as in the film Bullitt.  Stuntmen risked their lives as portrayed in the film, Hooper.  Both fine films.  In the film, Sharkey's Machine, the world's highest free-fall was accomplished.  Jackie Chan is not hyper-praised for his suffering whereas Jet Li who fakes almost everything is.  It boggles the mind.  Apparently, this Generation Zero likes sh*t.. possibly because they're made of it?.. 

Actual stunt from Sharkey's Machine. You can see the pad at the bottom right.  Rope was cut after this scene.  220 feet.  No safety.

 

 When I watched Star Wars Episode 1,2,3 and Clone Wars in the theater, the later was a painful cinematic disappointment, I was not worried for any of the space-battles as they all looked like they were rendered on a PlayStation 2.  I had no concerns for the video-game-like battle scenes because I was divorced from concern, "Oh, it's just not real.  I'm not concerned at all.  Just a game."   I'm sure it cost a lot; probably way too much and George Lucas got suckered into paying it, case-in-point the embarrassing Jabba-the-Hutt in the digitally remade Star Wars Episode 4.  The freshness date of these inclusions or CGI experiments is very short.  Go back and watch The Matrix and it can't even hold-up to anything by today's standards.  It's a parody of itself, now.  Watch the remake of The Thing (1982) by John Carpenter, it's still awesome. The recent, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug film had a few CGI overkill moments as well.  Remember that barrel scene from the chapter, "Barrels Out of Bond"?  I do.  There were no orcs in the book.  No orcs.  No ORCS!  There was also not a chase.  The wood-elves weren't stupid and would have devastated the attempt.  In the story, they escaped quietly.  More excuse for CGI for the retards.  Spiderman 2 with Dr. Octopus was pretty bad when it came out, the physics were all wrong in some scenes, particularly with his capturing May Parker and climbing the building.  Ugh.  Now it's so painful you want to hunt it down like a Frankenstein's monster.

Decland Mulholland as "Jabba" in Star Wars. Oh, wow!  He looks so real!  I saw this version in Maine in 1979.

   A ray of hope: I was told by some insider information the new Star Wars franchise will focus almost entirely on models and non-CGI work.  This, to me, is amazing, and I bet it will do well despite JJ.Abrams getting his eye-burning lens-flare "technique" all over it.  Maybe someone will not let him do that and allow some actual meaningful dialog, less Alec Guinness come back from the dead and smack him on the back of his head.

  So when you watch a film, and there's a ton of CGI, and you LIKE it, remember, you're retarded.  Don't have kids, because they'll take up the handicapped parking spaces that you should be in.  CGI-tards.  Now go watch 12 Angry Men (1957) to redeem yourself as penance, the exact opposite of CGI, filmed intentionally in black-and-white with only one set.  Now that's acting.  Boo hoo?!  I don't like slow movies?  I like CGI and my cell-phone and instant gratification and Whole Foods?  Screw yourself, you stupid, non-contributing, cellphone sucking, media-sponge-tard.

Bye bye! ;D

Spiderman 2 (1977) better than Spiderman 2 (2004) and Spiderman 2 (2014)

Oh, and I got a haircut.
 

 

Subway's, "Eat Fresh?"

 

The two Subway's fast-food sub-shops by my house are open 24-hours.  When I work mid-shifts, during the couple of off-days I stay awake during the night.  I like the night hours.  It's quiet, and the city generally sleeps here in Colorado.  The winter deep-freeze makes it surreal, and it's a good time to think, play guitar through my rig into high-quality headphones and compose, or to catch-up on several dozen seasons of a show's series.  By this method I just finished the most-popular Japanese anime, One Piece, all 625 episodes.  That's 313 hours of viewing-time.  I really like Usopp's bravery in a fake-character based on a '70s cartoon, SogeKing.  I'm a bit compulsive.

  Anyway, I digress.  Very few restaurants are open in the wee-hours here in Fountain, let alone Colorado Springs.  You could probably hit-up a Denny's or a McDonald's, and on the weekends, a voyage to the rather overrated King's Chef Diner is a possibility for a greasy-spoon feel, though lately over-lit and blaring unnecessary techno keeping me away at least.  Subway's seemed quick enough, the competing Jersey Mike's Subs across the parking lot arrogantly avoiding evening customers closing at 9pm is hit-or-miss, an east-coast style sub-shop homogenized for the masses tries its best and sometimes comes close.

  Subway's meats are almost all turkey-based.  There are a few outliners, the tuna is likely actually tuna, and the "cheese-steak" meat is something probably beef-ish gristle-fail, pre-cooked and microwaved to make a culinary Pearl Harbor.  There's some bold argument that the "Black Forest Ham" is actually "ham" though it is on none of their sandwiches except the "Black Forest Ham" sandwich.  The famous "BMT" (which stands for "bigger, meatier, tastier") has a turkey-based ham, lest they lose money on that precious, rare, actual ham.  The "BMT" should rename itself to "Turkey Sub".  Actually, all the other sandwiches should just say freakin' "Turkey Sub".  The "chicken breast" there is actually "mechanically separated chicken" aka "pink slime" so pretty much a McDonald's Chicken McNugget minus the batter, so quite dangerous to eat for the health-conscious as there's bits of feather and beak and talon in there too.. and eyeball...  Yep...  Treat!  (note* overuse of ellipses there for dramatic effect, read "dot... dot... dot...".  Oooo!  So, wait, is that "Dot [dot dot dot] Dot [dot dot dot] Dot [dot dot dot].. Oh, wait is that now...).



  I order the "Spicy Italian" for hope of taste served east-coast-style (by my reckoning) with oil and vinegar (the oil is canola with 10% olive to fool you), oregano (or sawdust with oregano oil flavouring) and a few scant veggies (lettuce, tomato, pickle, green-pepper) and provolone.  The provolone was so empty and soul-less, probably turkey-based and had no taste whatsoever.  Calories?  Sure.  Taste?  Hah! 


  I got this footlong home (no longer $5 despite the song) and toasted it myself quickly in my half-oven at 400 for 10 minutes, though using man-logic I could have toasted it for 1 minute at 4000 degrees [smirk, sorry Jay Leno, I stole your joke from 1992] and went to munching. 

  Ugh.

  (Ugh deserved its own paragraph).  All I tasted was cardboard.  I got 1/3rd of the way in.. still cardboard.  Perhaps I'm dying?  Nope.  I tried another food-item from my fridge and it was good and flavorful.  Eggshells would have more taste.  Miserable.

  I get mad at people ahead of me at a Subway's.  They order a bunch of circus bullshit on a nominal sub.  A meatball sub, when ordered and asked what else you'd like on that should not include more than salt, pepper, oregano, parmesan or provolone cheese.  I see these Bozo-tards ordering lettuce, mustard, chipotle sauce, gummy-bears, butterscotch, hot-fudge, wintergreen Tic-Tacs, plastic-forks, ice, californium, squid, canned-owl, hyperspace, Britain, Hot-Wheels, sawdust, R.Kelly, napkins, Alpha Centauri, metal filings, monkey paw with 3 wishes left, C-batteries, tinfoil, anvils, an ape, crayons, parking meters, ghost reduction, djinn, miniature-animated-Donkey-Kong flaming-barrels, tape (both kinds, masking and duct), Coke Zero, baby squirrels, Darth Vader action figures, shoelaces, Nazi gold, gelfilte fish, quarks, spicy mustard, math, and Catholic communion-wafers.  What the hell?!!  I blame marijuana.  I want to slap these folks in the mouth-face.  Who taught you that this was acceptable on this planet?  It is not.  It is NOT!  STOP IT. 

  Actually, all of those items would have helped my "Spicy Italian" disaster.  I guess I should have told them to "hold the cardboard".  Maybe I should have followed suit?  When in Rome perhaps?

  I threw the sandwich away in misery.  Subways?  Fail-ways.  Always.  That's how Jarred lost his weight.  He gave up eating, for good.