is that a duck?

on my most recent acid trip, this tripped me out for a good long time...



it came from here...

how I ended up there myself is all a blur, but damn...

what a rush...

Destiny is a fickle mistress

The path upon which I stand isn't always clear, nor is it easy. Easier than those some face... but like any other person, I have challenges and obstacles to overcome. Or not overcome, I guess it depends on the situation.

Spectator to the Emperors' spectacles. As a child I looked at superheroes and how they fit in their worlds... and like lots of children dreamed what it would be like to be the hero saving the day, overcoming the challenges, facing the bad guys of the world and triumphing. But of all the superheroes and all the comics and cartoons and stories I read, the one character I could relate to was not a super hero, but someone on the sidelines. There is a character in Marvel's Universe named Uatu, also known as The Watcher, an interesting character that showed up in several different comic storylines.

The Watcher basically watched, it's what his species did, it's what they had chosen to do. But this particular watcher liked to meddle, not a lot, but just a little bit here and there... effectively tampering with what he was watching. Something that his species deemed wrong... I've never been able to decide which side I agree with, I like both arguments. I digress...

I often relate to this character in my interest of just watching as life goes by. In my head I refer to myself as a voyeur of life... I like to watch people live, animals live, plants live, the stars live... life is just so fascinating. I think that if I was to choose my own heaven/afterlife/the great beyond, that I would die and then be given a rocking chair that I could sit in and watch the entire universe as it lives. Something to think about.

The other aspect of The Watcher that appealed to me, was that Marvel had a comic series called What If... that explored parallel realities. This was another spark in defining my personal philosophies on life, existence and universe... I feel that there is no reason why there has to be just one linear existence with no possibility of any other. Also, I completely blame this particular series of comics for my unending use of "..." in everything I ever type, write or pen... I digress again...

Lastly, one of my favourite comics was Marvel Teamup #127. It's too difficult to explain why it affected me so much, I'm not entirely certain myself... but it was a comic that, unlike most, made me think about life, philosophy and what it means to be real. It features Spidey teaming up with Uatu. Neat story, I wish I could find it online, but alas, that is not meant to be... Oddly, I got this comic years before I started collecting comics religiously, and I believe I was destined to find it. I have it kept away with my other comics, gathering dust and gaining in value... but it's monetary value could never compare to what it did for a little boy. It made him think.

Exeunt.

;p

Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding
The cretins cloning and feeding
And I don't even own a TV

Put me in the hospital for nerves and then they had to commit me
You told them all I was crazy
They cut off my legs, now I'm an amputee
God damn you

I'm not sick, but I'm not well
And I'm so hot, cos I'm in hell

- Flagpole Sitter, Harvey Danger

whispers in the dark

every so often her voice whispers to me out of the darkness of night... it's silent for so long I usually don't even recognize the sound, but it always comes back to me... and a sense of hope stirs up, unwanted and pushed away, but nevertheless, always present... hers is a voice of sorrow tinged with joy, of happiness tainted with melancholy, or is it my own clouded vision that sees what I want to see there... impossibility meets incredulity... reason does not always have to win over fantasy... infatuation is an extension of imagination, that so dear to my soul... but her faery voice always brings concern along with it, concern that my age old nemesis returns, I want what I cannot have, I lust for the forbidden... my heart is clouded by lust, or is it clouded by hope, that loneliness and darkness can be driven back and a bright new day of love can shine through... in the end I will be alone with nothing but whispers of an imagined past to haunt me... all I can do is smile at her and act as if nothing is different, which in truth, nothing is... hopes and dreams, whispers and darkness... she'll never know...

"oompa loompa doompa dee dee" well, not anymore...

Forever will Oompa Loompas have a new face in my mind... gone are the green and orange colours and the little grinny faces...

Tim Burton redid Charlie and the Chocolate factory and it blew me away. As something I cherish from my childhood, the original 1971 movie will always be special. But man, this new one is way out there, groovy, fantastic good :) Johnny Depp stars as Wonka, which was predictably great, but the writing behind his character was excellent. The little tidbits that made this one different from the original really stand out and show just how baked and talented Tim Burton really is. Three thumbs up, Johnny was ded shexy afterall!

and then the clouds broke

I was walking down Barrington Street today and saw an old couple holding hands as they crossed the street. They looked to be somewhere in their late 60s, maybe early 70s and I thought it was really sweet. Sortof one of those special things, to see two elderly people that love one another. So many people have trouble finding and staying in love, it's always nice to see someone that it's working for. It was also cute that both the ladies had purses on with rainbows stitched along the straps. It's pride week here in halifax and rainbows are the order of the day, but this was a bit more special for me. Call me an old softy, but what can I say... I was moved. So kudos to you ladies, you had me grinning like a monkey all day long.

BLOOP BLOOP

I'm not much of an impulse buyer, but I saw this today and read the description and it made me laugh... thus I decided I had to have it.







The description is:

Infinite Protection in a Track Jacket

Wouldn't life be a hell of a lot easier if it were a video game? Concrete goals like "Save the Princess" would make worries like "What college do I attend?" completely obsolete. No more confusion about who your enemies are... just steer clear of any spiky shells or strange turtle dragon hybrids.

Of course the 1up Mushroom would be there to help. Many times in life we avoid taking a risk because of the dire consequences (death, dismemberment) involved. Collect a 1up mushroom and you would have card blanche to try pretty much anything with no permanent repercussions. So go ahead... stick that plasma mug in the microwave for 30 minutes. When your house turns into a nuclear waste site simply use your 1up Mushroom to re-spawn at the beginning of the level. No muss... no fuss... we would.

I can't wait to be able to walk around the city jumping on things to squish them and jumping over spiny critters. I might even accidentally impale myself now and then... the 1up will fix all. Hehe!

crunch

life is just weird sometimes, I went to work yesterday morning and felt odd, the training session went well and the clients were really interested in what I was doing, but I was off my game a bit... I felt good leaving though, they were into what I was showing them and appreciated the ways the machine could help them be more productive... I got in the car and started driving home, and took a road I hadn't been on in some time... but I have driven this road countless times in the past and it was refreshing to go down it once again... I had a sense of freshness and nostalgia and felt really alive for a while and took in the sights, like what's new, what's changed, what's gone... I was feeling great and then a few minutes before I got back to the house I had a weird feeling come over me and felt like I was being squished into a hole and everything was piling up on top of me, crushing me into the ground... talk about a roller coaster of emotions drive.. then I got home and had a severe onset of allergy symptoms that sent me to bed for the rest of the day after dosing myself with enough anti-histamines to knock out a horse... I slept for 6 hours and woke up fine... the whole day felt like I'd been through a blender... how weird...

wet, muddy lust

Oh fickle weekend of adventure and misadventure.

Thursday evening, early Friday morning.
Cat and dog decide they aren't in the mood for sleep, so I am woken at 2:30am, 4:00am and again at 5:00am after only getting to bed sometime after 1:00am. Crankiness ensues and cat and dog are banished from the room.

Friday mid-morning.
Lack of sleep causes the inevitable: sleeping in. Wake up half hour late, have to rush to get ready for work. Get to work on time, but still sleepy and more cranky. Client is bothersome and tries to push my buttons. Finish training, leave pesky client and go the hell home.

Friday afternoon.
Get membership to Mountain Equipment Co-Op and get some gear for the trip. Go to Sobeys and get groceries and foodstuffs and ice for cooler. Go to NSLC and get beer for said cooler. Get home and pack said things and other things and run around trying to finalize the organization of an overnight trip which seems needlessly complicated by my own lack of organization. Realize I'm half an hour late and start pulling hair out. Get call from friends saying they will be leaving late so the need to rush goes out the window. Sit down, eat, watch TV and veg out until they call to let me know they're an hour from the site.

Friday evening.
Friends call from New Glasgow, hop in car and boogey down the 102. Drive to Exit 10 and park the car. Meet up with a few interesting folks who are the other half of our camping contingent. Get the call that my two friends are lost on the highway to New Brunswick, the wrong direction for them to be. Settle the directions issue and split up with the folks currently at Exit 10: I'll guard the exit and wait for the lost folks, the rest will go ahead and secure the campsite. POS car decides to overheat just for my amusement. Friends arrive and we proceed to the campsite, setup tent and proceed with the beer and lawn libations.

Friday late night.
Enjoy the stars and fireflies and a wonderfully built campfire. Get all loaded up on Rickard's Red and eat an entire bag of honey nut Cheerio party mix. Ugh. Watch as seemingly normal city folk become lumberjacks. Sight the legendary sasquatch running with a giant club. Walk into the back wall of the invisible mystery hut while trying to find a good shrubbery to pee on. laugh my ass off at the antics of a bunch of drunk capers. Sleep in a tent 8 feet wide but only 28 inches off the ground. Zzzz.

Saturday morning.
Wake to a cold and grey morning, shivering, but with not even a slight sign of a hangover, proof that there is a god. Discover that it was cold enough to keep most of the ice in the cooler frozen and that my breakfast of sandwiches and apple juice is cool, crisp and tasty. Mmm. Get changed and prepared to go Tidal Bore Rafting at a place down the road from the campsite. See the sun come out and weather get nice as we gather at the lodge and prepare for our adventure. Learn flip-flops are not acceptible footwear (they fall off and pollute the river) so have to wear (yes, must have footwear), have to wear shoes off the used-by-eighteen-million-people-with-who-knows-what-gross-things-growing-on-feet rack. Shudder. Suck it up, put em on, say a swift prayer to the river gods and make a mental note to buy Javex on the way home to scour the bugs off feet.

Saturday mid-afternoon.
Hop on a zodiac and head out onto a calm and relaxing river, ride down towards the Bay of Fundy. Tidal bore arrives and engine in the boat decides to die. Boat operator smiles, apologizes and tries his best to get it going, but the look in his eye suggests he'd like to take a baseball bat to the outboard. We eventually drift and putter and finally get going fast enough to meet the rest of the boats up the river and find ourselves a new boat. Two hours of riding the rapids and getting soaked ensued. To finish up, a trip to the mudslide area for some slipping, sliding and plain ol' jumpin' in the mud fun. A quick swim to de-mud and back to the lodge for the BBQ and trip home. Scalded to the point I was red like a lobster and then summarily frozen in the shower to find out my clean (re: mud-free) shirt is back at the campsite.

Saturday evening.
Dried and re-clothed, head back to the city to let the dog poop and get a real shower and a real bed under my bottom. The car makes a really bad noise about 15 minutes from home and continues it until I turn it off in the driveway. Check the oil and it's lower than it's ever been, even though I had an oil change only two weeks ago. Learn never to trust Walmart to service the car. Clean up, re-de-mud myself, have beer and watch TV until the cows come home.

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

The whole weekend was shitloads of fun, but for every single thing that went right, it seemed something else went wrong. My poor nerves were frazzled from Thursday night on. The lusty part of the whole adventure was that some of the boat operators and a few of the passengers were pretty damn hot and decked out in wet swimwear or wet T-shirts. Yum. Our boat operator was a good looking young man in his mid twenties, in shape and fairly well toned. The entire trip down the river I was sitting right beside him and he had on a pair of very thin shorts over a pair of very thin undies, both of which were hanging down about two inches lower than they technically should have been. I was at eye level with the crack of his ass and it was like looking at a Monet. A perfect little V just showing a little bit of cheek and the sun was making the little hair patch there shine all golden (you know the one, it forms a little arrow pointing downwards *grin*). So I spent the entire trip a foot away from this and staring back and forth from scenery to sexy ass crack. Needless to say, my dreams that evening were not of the eagles that were flying overhead or the rapids or the mudslide or the BBQ steak. Life is good.

trip the light fantastic

There's a wonderful little spot on the net that amuses me to no end... it's the archives of the Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch. They crack me up :)

Here's a few samples of his work, I think he's brilliant. The archives have lots of other great strips, well worth a visit.

Just because I can.

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of people called Trids. The Trids lived in a little village at the bottom of a hill. They could never climb the hill because at the top there lived a troll that would kick them back down. One day a Rabbi was passing through the village and started climbing up the hill. The Trids stopped him and told him about the troll. The Rabbi decided to try anyway and climbed up to the top. The troll didn't do anything, so the Rabbi asked, "Why aren't you kicking me back down?" The troll replied, "Silly Rabbi, kicks are for Trids."

fuck it, it's just a box...

I gave up, the damn layout has an error that is beyond my control, so fuck it... I'll put the damn box on the left hand side... whatever, it's just a fucking box...

Canada Day was wet and rainy, and they decided to postpone the fireworks. I saw War of the Worlds instead. I loved it, but the two guys that I was with didn't like it much. But I knew the story going in, they did not. Funny enough, it was better than I was expecting it to be, while they were both let down. It's a cruel world. :-)