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Go to My Adventures Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6
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Anyway. It was a nice, two story place with hardwood floors. This place was just a block away from a cool bar called "Parlay's," a nice grocery store, a neat little coffee shop with good breakfast, and a convenient gas station. We were just a quick hop off of the Interstate, and it was a reasonably quick jaunt over to the Quarter or Metairie. It was a bit expensive though, so after a couple of years I decided to get a cheaper place in Metairie. Well, I also decided to move out because my girlfriend left me (and her sister, who was living with us), and I was now in this huge place by myself. It took a few weeks to pack up all of my stuff since I am a bit of a pack rat. I had a bunch of stuff in the attic, and I put that off for last because I just hate crawling around in the heat and insulation. A couple of days before moving day I decided I finally had to go up there. I had never actually crawled up there, as I had just sort of scooted all of the boxes up there from the ladder. Unfortunately a bunch of them had been scooted pretty far back, so I had to climb up there to get them. I was really surprised by how roomy the attic was. It really seemed much larger than the room below it. I tend to be a pretty bad judge of relative scale, so I just blew it off. I started hauling boxes down the ladder, one at a time. As I got to the last few boxes waaaay back in the back, I became confused. They were really far back there, and I didn't remember putting anything that far back. I opened one of the boxes and realized that none of the stuff was mine. "Wow!" I thought, "The previous renters must have left this box here. There was a ton of cool loot in this box. There were nice rock glasses, some wine bottle openers, and a really really nice flask. I stuck the flask in my back pocket and dug through the box a little more. The light in the attic was extremely dim, and my body was casting a shadow over the box, making it difficult to see the contents. I shifted my body and moved my leg to take my shadow off of the box. My foot punctured a hole in the thin floor/ceiling between the boards, and my leg slipped into the hole. My entire body lurched over, and my leg fell through the hole all the way to my groin. I shouted in pain. A woman below me screamed in terror. I was in agony and totally confused. My girlfriend and her sister had moved out weeks ago. I was alone in the apartment. How was there a woman below me screaming? She kept screaming. I adjusted my weight, and my thigh tore a bigger hole in the ceiling. I was able to see below me. This wasn't my apartment. I was looking into my neighbors apartment. I experienced another few seconds of confusion while my neighbor screamed. Then it dawned on me. Our duplex shared an attic. I had inadvertently crossed over into her attic, rummaged through her shit, stolen her flask, and shoved my leg through her ceiling. No wonder she was screaming. "Holy shit," I said, "I'm sorry...I'll pay for the hole. I didn't know I was in your attic." I pulled my leg out of the hole just as her husband came in -- ready to kill someone. "It's me, John, from next door," I said as I pulled my leg up and surreptitiously snuck the flask out of my pocket and back into their box. Permalink to this post. |
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Jennifer Gomez and I used to live in Lakeview in the bottom half of a house apartment. Our bed was in the living room, and the television was about 3 feet to the left of the bed. While it wasn't very classy, it was pretty convenient and we used to lay in bed and watch movies all of the time. One night we were watching Leaving Las Vegas. We were both laying on our right sides facing the television, and she was curled up in front of me. Our television was about 40 inches or so and had a somewhat crappy picture. There is this one scene where Nicolas cage is laying on the bed suffering from severe alcohol-related difficulties (narrows it down, I know) The camera starts off about 10 feet from his face, and his face was at the center of the screen. "Wow," I thought, "With this crappy picture and at this distance, his face looks sort of horrific. Kind of demonic." The camera grew closer, and rather than fading the effect in fact increased. As the camera drew closer his face became even more horrible and frightening. I knew my imagination was playing tricks on me. But it got worse. This was a long and drawn out scene. The camera lazily crept towards his face. And with each second the face became more hideous and terrible. It wasn't exactly demonic, or like anything I had ever seen. The face was a distorted mask of humanity. It evoked the same reaction that one experiences when viewing horrific genetic deformities in children. But it also seemed to exude malevolence. I couldn't lie to myself any longer. I was getting frightened. My heart began to pound in my chest. And still the camera pulled closer. At this point the crappy picture on my television could not be blamed for any sort of illusion. This mask, this horror of Nicolas Cage filled the entire screen and there was no room for interpretation. I was looking into the face of -- something. I don't know what. It is one of the most frightening things I have ever seen. My heart felt like it was going to burst. I was paralyzed. Was I going insane? That was the only thing that made sense. I had to be hallucinating. I must be lying in a position that was causing some weird pooling of blood into a visual center or something. Realizing that my mind was just filling in the blanks, and that there were just dots of light on the screen made me feel better. My brain was just being creative is all. My heart slowed marginally. "Jawn?" Jennifer asked. She had a thick Puerto Rican accent and "John" sounded like "Jawn." "Hmm?" I asked. I couldn't really speak without my voice cracking, so I figured I'd just grunt until I got my breath back. "Do you see that?" she asked. My heart pounded and sped up. My throat constricted. "It's horrible," she said. And that is one of the most frightening things that has ever happened to me. I have seen this movie several times since then, and while I can see wispy hints of the face from before, I have never seen anything quite as horrible as I saw that night. In fact, a shot from the exact scene is attached to this post (on the first page of a Google Image Search for "Nicolas Cage Leaving Las Vegas) Permalink to this post. |
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One of my biggest projects while I was there was writing software for the Mars oil platform. At the time, Mars was the biggest platform out there. Ursa was under construction, but Mars was still top dog. The months I spent out there were jam packed full of adventure. The kitchen was open 24/7, and they had an ice cream machine, chips and junk for miles, and fruit which I never touched because i was fat. Aside from the odd, constant, figure-eight swaying motion of the platform, the only real down side was having to share a room with other dudes. You had to get used to their farts and snoring and general dude-ness if you were to get any sleep at all. There was also a bit of "class" tension, as I was a computer programmer out there to do geek work, and a lot of these guys prided themselves on being rugged offshore dudes. I looked quite out of place with a hard hat and protective goggles working at a computer terminal. Another type of tension was racial. Unfortunately, this story isn't funny without a bit of racial tension, so I have to broach the subject and be honest here. I have worked alongside African Americans (and I hate that term because it is such a trite mouthful, couldn't we have a one or two syllable PC term?) quite a bit in my career, and have never had an issue doing so. I have found my experiences with black coworkers (I'm not repeating African American 10 times) to be pretty much the same as coworkers of any other race, running the gamut from good to bad to horrible to excellent. It just depends on the person. But I'd be lying if I said I was a Zen little Buddha and the idea of race never enters my mind. I try to be careful about my behavior, terminology, and politics around people of another race. I think that most white people of my generation know what I'm talking about here. We were raised to be nervous about this stuff. Small verbal gaffes have cost people their jobs, so I don't think this tension is unfounded. So, late one night after a 12 hour shift I find myself in a bunk across from the sort of tough-as-nails African American worker you tend to find in the Gulf of Mexico. He was about 6'4 and looked about 230 pounds or so. He was polite, but stoic. These rooms weren't exactly cramped, but they weren't roomy either. It was impossible to go about your business without being somewhat in the other guy's space. There was definitely a little bit of general tension in the room. I don't like people in my space. I hate showering around other guys, I hate sleeping next to other guys, and in general I am just not cut out for communal living. And the racial tension? Of all the shows my roommate could have picked to watch, he chose Oz. Now, I don't know if you have ever seen Oz on HBO, but I can tell you that this is not a good show to watch if you're trying to avoid racial tension. The "N" word was thrown around quite a bit, and I'm not talking about the one I linked to earlier. To make matters worse, the episode we were watching was specifically about racial violence in the prison. It was episode where the son of the mob guy was trying to kill Adebisi (pictured above), and a lot of the surrounding violence was racially charged. So, through all of this, the tension was definitely increasing. I felt very uncomfortable hearing the torrent of racial slurs next to a black man that I didn't know. Every once in a while I'd sneak a peak at his reactions, and a couple of times I could see that he was just as uncomfortable as I was about all of this. But somehow we both knew that to change the channel would make it worse. We were forced to ride this train wherever it took us. I'll tell you where it took us. It took us to the climax of this episode of Oz -- and to one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life. At the end of the episode, the white kid sneaks up on Adebisi with the intention of killing him. Adebisi spins around, hits the kid in the face with a commercial can opener, and proceeds to anally rape him. So, while this is going on, the tension in the air was horrid. This scene seemed to last forever. After it was finally over, my roommate looked over at me, and there was a moment where neither of us said anything. That moment lasted about 4 years. Finally, he said, "Now THAT was a SHOW!" And he and I broke down into hysterical laughter, and the tension was gone. Permalink to this post. |
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This is why I didn't make a bazillion dollars during the dot-com boom. The proper answer to this question is YES. The proper answer to anything is yes. Can you fly to the moon using only your flatulence? YES. Can you bend time and space? YES. If ever there were a time to lie and make your money, it was the late 90s. But, being me, I couldn't just say yes. I knew that his question was complete nonsense. He wasn't actually asking me if I knew how to operate a CD Burner. What he was doing was using his hazy understanding of computing to formulate an amorphous question. He knew that multimedia companies produced cool things, and that these things came on CDs, so he wanted to know if I could "make a CD". I, being a shitty salesman, explained to him that his question could not be answered. I explained that anything from a picture of Pamela Anderson to an installer for antivirus software could be on a CD. The question wasn't whether I could make a CD, but rather could I produce whatever it is he wanted put on this CD. Maybe it was a bunch of recipes, maybe it was software to crack into the pentagon. I didn't know because he wasn't being clear. Even after an hour or so of questioning, I still couldn't cut through the businessguy-speak enough to understand what he wanted on this CD. But, in a rare moment of capitalism befitting a dot-com era salesman, I took a check anyway. At the time this seemed like a big victory. Five hundred whole dollars and I hadn't even done anything! It was amazing, it was fantastic. I felt like the greatest salesman in the world. Pathetic, I know. As it turns out, his company was a proxy ISP for Bellsouth. Back before the federal government entered its Bush-Era fellating of monopolies, companies that were declared monopolies actually had to adhere to certain restrictions placed upon them. In this case, Bellsouth was forced to allow smaller start-up companies to piggy back onto its pipes and provide a competing service. This company provided a month-to-month phone service targeted towards those who could not otherwise get it because their credit was shot from neglecting to pay Bellsouth in the past. Usually repeatedly. I'll let the sociologists amongst you bicker as to why, but I can tell you that their clientele was about 90% black. This is significant because it led to the eventual hiring of New Orleans' own quasi-talent Master P as their spokesman. I got this gig because Brent's brother Feasty worked there, and Feasty treated me to many an amusing anecdote about the old P. Not only did Captain P have TV sets in the headrests of his front seats, but he also had TV sets installed in the headrests of his back seats. i.e. they existed just so people driving behind him could know how fucking money he was. This, my friends, is the kind of crap that got M.C. Hammer on VH1s "Where are they Now?" As the days went on, it became apparent that this "CD" was quite the project indeed. You see, this needed to be a full featured ISP installation CD. The details are hazy in my memory, but I'll see if I can remember what it did: 1)Upon inserting the CD, the user would be prompted to enter their access key and area code. This key would have been given to them previously when they pre-paid for their internet access. The system would then dial out to a 1-800 number to verify this key. 2) A Linux server program that I wrote answered the modem at the home office and received the access key. It then connected over a network (using Easysoft's ODBC bridge) to an access .mdb file and verified that the access key was valid, and retrieved the user information from it. Finally, it sent the appropriate RADIUS login information as well as dial-up access numbers local to the client machine. 3) My software on the client machine, armed with the new information, would then set up a dial-up networking connection with the username/password and local access number sent by the server. Anyone who has done even a little programming, or even just manually set up Dial-Up Networking in Windows, knows that writing this system was no mean feat. Amazingly enough, I actually got this damn thing working, so I proudly went over to C2K to show them what I had written, and...the guy just didn't get it. I had done everything needed, written a full fledged ISP installation CD, but the guy didn't understand what I had done. I showed him the entire process, it working, but he still didn't think it was done. He couldn't explain what it was that he wanted, but he felt that this wasn't it and he wasn't going to pay me for it. The ISP CD didn't really matter to him that much because, as it turns out, his entire company was just one big scam to line his pockets and supply him with a steady stream of cocaine. It didn't really matter if the ISP service was up and running as long as he could show that he was working on it. I was just there to be a computer-y guy in there bustling around and looking smart. He could point at all of the activity and say all he needed was just a little more venture capital and he'd be able to take it to the next level, so fork it over angels. Somebody knew how to play the dot com game, and it wasn't me. I never got paid for that work other than the 500 shitty bucks in the beginning. When I had my own business, the first year was pretty much 10 different versions of this same story. After a while I got the hang of it, and actually learned how to make money, but it took me a long time to figure it out. I was stunned - stunned I tell you - that people would agree to pay you for something and then fuck you. Well, for all of you aspiring business people out there, take a little lesson from me. People will try to fuck you out of every dime they can. The best way to make money, sadly, is to make sure that they have to pay you if they want their business to function. And it is for this reason that I prefer being an employee to being a business owner in my field. Permalink to this post. |
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This made me think of the Abstract Cafe. I don't know if the Abstract still exists...I don't think so, but even if it does it cannot possibly compare to its heydey over 10 years ago. Christ I'm old. The Abstract was one of the few places in New Orleans that had all ages shows. I remember that the "big kids" often hung out down the street at RC Bridge Lounge, while us kids only had the Abstract to haunt. But what a place it was. Everyone was a grungy hippy. Everyone was pissed at the government. We didn't know shit from shinola, but we knew we were right and Bush (Sr.) was evil. Of course, in a few years MTV would tell us that Clinton was cool, and we no longer needed to hate the president, but that was for a later time. The Abstract Cafe was a huge old decrepit building on Magazine street right before you got to downtown New Orleans. It was just before the split. I have always been a bad navigator, and I got lost on the way to the Abstract hundreds of times. The bad part of this is that the Abstract existed as a tiny sliver of civilization in the middle of the ghetto. I had many a scary close call in that neighborhood when I strayed too far from the Abstract's hallowed halls. When you entered the Abstract's front doors, you were confronted with several grungy rooms full of radical political books and new-age spiritual nonsense. Of course, at the time I thought it was the coolest literature on earth. Throughout these rooms milled many mid-teen kids. Long haired, plaid wearing boys and hot hippie chicks. Oh yeah, and crusty, scary looking older dudes. Aside from being a bookstore and all ages music venue, the Abstract Cafe was also apparently a halfway house for psychotic criminals. There was always quite a bit of disagreement regarding exactly what the legal status of this place was, but one thing was certain: There were a lot of creepy old dudes hanging around. The Abstract was a music scene unlike any other I have seen before or since. There was no booze, obviously, and there was rarely much of anything to consume. On occasion one of the crazy codgers would man the concessions, but more often than not it was just a place to go see a show - and that was it. The bands played on a medium sized stage in a warehouse-like room. The kids packed in there, and when no more could fit on the floor they would climb onto the rafters and onto flimsy wooden overhangs. I can remember sitting in the packed heat and listening to the music and trying to find a hippie girl to fall in love with. That scene was my whole life. The Fiddlehead, Dr. La La, Dang Brah Y?, The Nipples, The Sexy Green Things (my band), and the like. Nowadays, all-ages venues are completely off of my radar. Are there warehouses full of 15 year old kids playing rock and roll any more? Somewhere out there, are there kids who do this? Or is rock music something reserved for us old farts who wistfully look at days past? Permalink to this post. |
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