Quotations

"All the wise quotations in the world, pithy or not, don't make life move in sensible directions. Life is chaos, and pain, and suffering, and joy, and thrill, and not a goddamn bit of it makes sense. Worth it or not, love is an open door to all of that. Love is trouble on a grand scale, the grandest there is. To think of it otherwise is to walk through that door with your eyes closed; even if you don't hit your head on a branch because of it, you'll not get to see the trees."

-Bill Dubert

In Vino Veritas

So, it turns out that drinking most of a bottle of wine and walking in slippery shoes out to the end of the windward outer dock in a powerful, apocalyptic windstorm probably wasn't my finest plan yet. However, that's when the ideas come.

'Murca

America is like an orgy of the blind gone horribly wrong. Everyone knows that they're getting fucked and don't like it, but all they can do is argue about whose dick it is.

I'm Not Too Fond of Nazis

Watching the movie Valkyrie (which was excellent), I couldn't help but be made physically uncomfortable by the extensive Nazi regalia. Even in that context, a Swastika is a revolting thing and I find it hard not to flinch. Odd that it would be so deeply ingrained. A while back I was at a party and some dude showed up (who many people there knew and were friendly with) who had a Swastika tattoo on his wrist. I don't know the story of this, but there were several of us who just didn't know how to deal with this, how to process such a thing in that context.

Debt

So, I just overheard my father on a business call, which is not unusual. He said a thing, though, that I think kind of epitomizes why he's the right kind of management in a business, something that you won't hear very often. He was discussing an employee with whom there had been some problems, and said, "No, put her back on the schedule. We owe her that much." The idea of a business having loyalty to its employees, debt beyond the fiscal to them, is a concept that has been mostly lost in business. I think that this is to the detriment of America in a very, very big way.

I admire my father a very great deal.

All These Well-Armed Strangers

I find it strange that more people aren't afraid of riding in cars. It's a huge, powerful, deadly machine moving at incredible speeds and being controlled by humans who have not evolved to have anything like the reflexes necessary to really control these machines and who aren't even paying much attention to what they're doing.

Pretty much every day, I trust my life in the hands of dozens, even hundreds of total strangers. That's insane. I don't even trust my good friends with rubber bands or forks. It's astonishing how few people are killed by cars each year, really. Try not to think too hard about it.

Match Game

Sometimes, when sitting in a coffee shop (if that's the right term for Starbucks), I like to try to fit the people together with the cars in the parking lot.

I dearly hope that I'm right and the skinny kid with the mohawk and mismatched chucks reading on the iPad belongs to the brand new gleaming candy red Porche Carrera S Cabriolet in the lot. He seems like a nice kid.

Loyalty

So, I don't have much by way of internet on the sailboat (on which I now live), so I've been spending a lot of time in Starbucks to use theirs. This in mind, I signed up for their loyalty program. It's really neat, you basically do it through a gift card that you reload online, and every time you use it to pay you get a point, with various rewards depending on how many points you have. This is kind of genius. Not only is it a solid loyalty program requiring an investment without loss, it makes you spend money there that you no longer feel is real money. That's a big psychological win for them. Even better, though, it has to save them HUGE amounts on credit card processing fees. The way that CC fees work, smaller purchases in the 1-4 dollar range absolutely eat you alive, and that's Starbucks' bread and butter. They almost certainly have a pretty sweet negotiated rate, but it still has to bite into their profits significantly. Getting everyone to use a gift card means that they're paying much smaller fees on transactions in the 15-50 dollar range without having to actually upsell. Plus, they get to take Paypal easily, something that most brick-and-mortars can't manage.

Hiring

I'm in the process of hiring graphic designers. Normally in the past I've used designers that I know, which is both better and worse. Now, though, I'm looking for freelance designers for project work. I've got a bunch of resumes and portfolios emailed to me, and I'm going through them. I'm judging their work at a task that I know I cannot do. I'm judging their emails and resumes and language to try to decide if they're reliable and if they're someone I want to work with. I'm sitting here simplifying a list of people, of human beings desperate for work, down to summations a sentence or two long. Many of them I'm outright deleting from my list. Just deleting entire people with the tap of a key.

The entire exercise does not feel good.

I am the Douchelord

I regularly find myself with the urge to write really pseudointellectual dross. OK, I constantly feel that urge. I have these ideas that seem really interesting to me, like interpreting Jonathan Coulton's song structure through the Monomyth, that would appeal to exactly nobody else. OK, not nobody else. The internet exists to make sure that there's someone else who would read your ramblings. that doesn't make it OK. Hopefully you will not read my upcoming piece: Joseph Campbell and Skullcrusher Mountain. Hopefully I'll know better.

(For the record, it was actually The Future Soon that inspired this. I just felt very strongly that Skullcrusher Mountain made for a funnier theoretical book. The Future Soon is a great example of storytelling in songwriting in a really interesting frame and NO BILL STOP IT YOU DAMNED DEIRTY NERD.)

Important Information About Bill Dubert

Bill Dubert is a man of the people, whatever his detractors say. He believes in equality, and freedom, and the American Way. He always does what is right for the people of this great country and the world. So what if he demands that a virgin be sacrificed to him from time to time? Be realistic; he's a leader of men, not a saint. Oh, yeah, and a HellGod. He's that, too. Nevertheless, a Man of the People.

Opulence to the Point of Bleeding

Pretty much any time you realize, "Hey, you know what I haven't done in a while? Drink wine in the shower." It's going to be awesome. So, after a nice long walk, unwinding in the shower with a glass or three of red wine is just spectacular.

Treating yourself to a wet shave while drinking wine is not the easiest task to master, but it is a skill worth learning, I think. It's just absurdly opulent to lather up quality sandlewood cream on thy upper lip and drink red. It does not, I hasten to add, guarantee the most bloodless of shaves ever.

Layers and Layers

• People are like onions: you have to cut off the flaky outer layer before you can use them properly.
• People are like onions: generally, it's the part of them that's at the very core that sucks the most.
• People are like onions: sometimes it makes me cry a little when I cut them up into little pieces, but that doesn't mean I'm sad.
• People are like onions: it takes a while to get used to the weird texture.
• People are like onions: mostly used for weird sex stuff.
• People are like onions: the ones from Georgia are fucking pointless.
• People are like onions: I always get too many and they end up taking up refrigerator space that could be used for cookie dough.
• People are like onions: they have lots of layers, but they're all the same.
• People are like onions: I blame them for my wife's death, and will not stop until every single one is dead.
• People are like onions: I know a guy who likes to put his wiener in them.
• People are like onions: they're the reason why I garden.
• People are like onions: they're all just part of the vast conspiracy to make the History channel suck more and more every year.
• People are like onions: they smell funny, but that just makes me kinda horny.
• People are like onions: I hate it when people throw them at me.
• People are like onions: given a chance, raccoons love to eat them.
• People are like onions: they have no business being in an aquarium.
• People are like onions: lots and lots and lots of them have been inside your mom.

Fun Fact

An egg, left in the freezer for weeks, is a very, very hard thing.

Something's Coming.

When I get a text message on my new phone, it vibrates for about a half a second before the ringtone sounds. When my phone is sitting on my desk, it vibrates the whole desk, of course, and I feel it in my arms. This gives me a moment of weird, Jurassic-Park-ripples-in-the-water-glass-esque panic. Vibrate: Something's Coming! This would be just a bit amusing if it weren't for two things: first, I'm really paranoid, so I'm already on the verge of taking the loony train to crazytown, and these sorts of things never help. Second, it's just quick enough that it doesn't register and make it all the way to the thinking parts of my brain, just to the reactive, let's-throw-some-chemicals parts. So I have this panicked Something's Coming! moment, then my text message sounds. So, since I'm not consciously aware of what caused that feeling, I think that I just knew that a text was coming, and I assume, since I'm feeling a tiny bit panicky for no reason, that it must be terrible news.