Zeroing Out the Moleskine, vol. 49

Cross my fingers, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.  That’s one hell of a guarantee, when you stop to think about it.  If you’re not satisfied, I pledge to pierce one of my eyeballs with a slender rod of steel.  Not even L.L. Bean can match that shit.  Ya know?

Kids don’t get a lot of respect, but that’s impressive.

Our oldest boy has been in Maine all week, with a friend’s family.  They go on vacation there every year, and rent the same beach house.  And this year they allowed their kids to bring one friend each.

Our son generates an amazing amount of noise, and communicates in a teenage boy kind of way (mostly a series of uninterested grunts), but man… I miss him.  He’s been gone since Saturday, and the house feels incredibly empty.  Whenever my phone rings, and it displays his name, I get happy.

I want him home again, mumbling and manufacturing great noise and chaos.  I find myself missing the very things I sometimes grumble about.  Go figure.

At work there’s a highly questionable box of crackers called — get this — Butter Cheese.  Appetizing, huh?  I think it must have come from Big Lots, or maybe Aldi, because the manufacturer is unrecognizable.  The logo features one of those old-fashioned bicycles with a giant wheel on the front.  Yeah, I have no idea…

Nobody knows where these things came from, and they keep getting handed off and passed around, like blame.  For a couple of days they were on top of a filing cabinet outside my cubicle, but last night I saw them way down the hall, on another cabinet.  By the time I return on Sunday, I have no doubt they will have been offloaded to someone else.

A few of us have gotten curious and tested the crackers themselves, and they’re gaggy.  I ate half of one, and couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth for an hour.  I finally had to go to the vending machine and buy some Life Savers knockoffs, to beat the Butter Cheese residue into submission.

How did that crap end up in our office, anyway?  Who would purchase an off-brand box of horrible crackers with an old bicycle in the corner, sneak it into work, then pretend none of it ever happened?  I find this to be curious behavior.

I was listening to George Noory a few days ago, while driving home from work, and a caller blew my mind a little.

He has a theory, you see, as so many of the callers do.  I think a lot of them are shut-ins and mental patients who sit around thinking up various crackpot scenarios.  In any case, this guy believes UFOs, flying saucers, etc. aren’t extraterrestrials at all.  No, he thinks it’s us — humans from earth — time traveling from the future, and observing ancient civilization.  Or as we know it, current times.

Is that cool, or what?  I like that very much, and it had never occurred to me.  I think I’ll adopt his theory, as well.  And I wouldn’t mind shaking the man’s hand, once his shock treatment regimen has been completed.

Have you ever seen a UFO, or anything like that?  I haven’t.  I guess I’m just not good probing material… which is both flattering and unflattering, if you know what I mean.

Do you have any experience with unexplainable things in the sky?  Tell us about it, won’t you?

And are you familiar with a  show called Tosh.0?  My kids are always talking about it, and I caught half an episode with them recently, and it was  friggin’ hilarious.  Now I record it every week, and it’s become one of my favorite programs.

Have you seen it?  I’m right, aren’t I?  Funny, funny stuff.

Everybody’s talking about the JetBlue flight attendant who flipped his lid on a recent flight, told everyone to ram it deep and on a slant, grabbed two beers, and escaped down an inflatable emergency slide.

He’s a hero to us all!  And I was wondering… do you have any stories to tell about people quitting their jobs in a dramatic fashion?  I wrote about Brogan a few days ago, but he didn’t really quit, he got fired.  One guy, at the same store, shoved over a rotating cigarette “tree” on his way out the door.

But that’s all I’ve got.  Do you have anything to contribute on this subject?

And finally (I haven’t really zeroed out the notebook, but I’m tired), I’d like to know what celebrity, or otherwise, you’d like to have do the talking on your GPS.  How about Gilbert Gottfried?  No, that might cause people to drive off cliffs, and straight into brick walls, etc.  Do you have any thoughts on this one?

Please don’t feel compelled to answer all the questions I asked today, just pick and choose as you see fit.  Or answer them all.  Whatever’s cool with me.

And I’ll see you guys next time, probably Sunday.

Have a great weekend!

Now playing in the bunker