You have to keep fighting, every damned minute of every damned day.  That’s what life is, a fight till the death.  You have to scratch, eye-gouge, throw elbows and knees and fight with every dirty trick you know.  Some days its easy, you can do it without thinking, some days it takes every last drop of your spirit to keep from blacking out from the blows.  You will win some brawls, and you’ll be spitting your teeth out like sunflower seeds other times… but you keep.  On.  Fighting.

I’m finally stating to catch up on my pictures a bit.  I’ve added the last four cakes that I’ve created to the Cake Gallery.  Have a look-see.  Don’t forget to check out the video of the bleeding Dismembered cake.

I just want to go and do something entertaining that doesn’t involve me staring at the walls of this quiet, empty apartment.  I just want some company — some laughs, some drinks, maybe a meal — to forget that the only thing keeping the silence at bay is the squawk of the TV.  I don’t want pity, I want camaraderie… preferably somewhere out there, in the wide world.

Sometimes it works out.  Sometimes the world conspires against me to make it fail.  There are even times when I’m in a room full of people and I feel like I’ve surrounded myself with cardboard cutouts of familiar faces… and when I’ve reached that point, nothing is going to help.

Lots happening these days, details not forthcoming.  Not here, not now, maybe not ever.  We shall see.

Regardless, suffice to say there are hard times upon me right now and it’s damned hard to get out of bed in the morning.  Motivators are few and far between, with no rewards in sight.  My only peace of mind comes from the friends that have surrounded me and are lavishing their love upon me.  I appreciate it  more than I can ever put into words, and I can only hope I can repay even a fraction of that kindness in my lifetime.  Their displays of tenderness have left me wanting to be a better person.  Of course, I’ll still be a well-rounded asshole, but I’ll be an asshole with a big heart.

So, wiser men than I have spake — spoke, spook, sploke… aw, hell.  It’s been said that music can help heal that which wounds us.  I’ve been listening to a lot of Cowboy Mouth lately.  I’ve always said that Fred LeBlanc has some voodoo, black magic way of writing songs that look into your heart and strike at the very root of what ails you.  He’s also a hell of a informal spokesperson for the Living Life And Loving It movement… there are some serious “life can suck, so make the most out of it while you can” type songs in the Cowboy Mouth library.  I find that no matter how down and out I get, there are just some songs that can lift me up and make me get on with my life.  Cowboy Mouth is the antibiotic helping to heal my soul right now.  I present to you an example (likely the first of many) of what got my ass moving today:

Glad To Be Alive
(Uno, Dos, Tres)
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
La da da de da da da
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
La da da de da da da

Anybody can be sad
Can’t see the good when it goes bad
Then you end up blue and through
But that’s all right

Got my share of people who love me
Got my share of problems that bug me
Every now and then its hard
But that’s all right

How many times have we been here before?

When you’re walking down the street
Feel the rhythm in your feet
Of a life that’s rushing by
Are you glad to be alive?

Nothing ever goes as planned
Get your head out of your hand
Scream and shout like you were five
Are you glad to be alive?

Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
La da da de da da da

Some times you gotta’ sneak in the back door
You can’t always get what you ask for
But what you need you got inside
And that’s all right

How many times have you been here before?
So pick your sorry ass up off the floor!

When you’re walking down the street
Feel the rhythm in your feet
Of a life that’s rushing by
Are you glad to be alive?

Nothing ever goes as planned
Get your head out of your hand
Scream and shout like you were five
Are you glad to be alive?

Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
La da da de da da da

So that’s my story
Tis sad but true
For those who know me
What else are we to do?

When you’re walking down the street
Feel the rhythm in your feet
Of a life that’s crashing by
Are you glad to be alive?

Nothing ever goes as planned
Get your head out of your hand
Scream and shout like you were five
Are you glad to be alive?

Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
La da da de da da da
(Are you glad to be alive?)

Doo doo n’doo doo doo
(When you’re walking down the street)
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
Doo doo n’doo doo doo
(Feel the rhythm in your feet)
La da da de da da da
(Are you glad to be alive?)

La da da de da da da
Doo doo n’doo doo doo

It’s a bit of a pop-ish number, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t cut to the heart of things — shit’s gonna go wrong, you get to feel bad about it for a while but don’t let it ruin you… celebrate and enjoy life, make and cherish the good times — the power is inside of you.  That’s what I’m talking about.  That’s what I need right now.  This is a philosophy I can get behind!

Fred kicks Tony Robbin’s ass up and down the block as a motivational figure.

This ought to hold you over until I can get a proper post up.  Some linkage for your delight:

• 50 ways to make this Halloween an unusual departure from past ones.
  "19.) Don’t hand out candy!  Hand out bees!"
• For all of you who like ’em a little big up top. *NSFW*
• Motivational posters for Super-Villains.
• The Ronald McHummer Sign-O-Matic.  Ok, it’s supposed to be a passive-aggressive way to give McDonald’s the finger for selling it’s soul to an eco-destroying auto manufacturer, but damn if it isn’t just as good for me to make up some funny shit like this, this (or this) and this.  In fact, I want to see some of the funny crap y’all come up with.

A pleasant Saturday afternoon and evening found us at an Austin tavern eating and drinking.  With the exception of going to see an aerial ballet performed on the site of a building under construction (all five floors being utilized), we pretty much spent most of the day at Opal Divine’s.

As the evening progressed I started taking pictures using only the ambient light on the patio, which was extensively lit with red and green floodlights.  I also took quite a number of pics of traffic passing in front of the bar, being a sucker for the look of headlight streaks on a still background.  Here are a few of my favorites from the evening.

START-INCLUDE photoblog_opaldivines.php END-INCLUDE

Now, somewhere in the black mountain hills of Dakota there lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon, and one day his woman ran off with another guy… hit young Rocky in the eye.  Rocky didn’t like that.  He said "I’m gonna’ get that boy."

So, one day he walked into town, booked himself a room in the local saloon.  Rocky Raccoon checked into his room only to find Gideon’s bible.  Rocky had come equipped with a gun, to shoot off the legs of his rival.  His rival it seems had broken his dreams… by stealing the girl of his fancy.

Her name was McGill and she called herself "Lil"… but everyone knew her as "Nancy".  Now she and her man who called himself "Dan" were in the next room at the hoedown.  Rocky burst in, and grinning a grin he said "Danny boy, this is a showdown."  But Daniel was hot — he drew fast and shot — and Rocky collapsed in the corner.

Now, the doctor came in stinking of gin and proceeded to lie on the table.  He said "Rocky you met your match."

And Rocky said "Doc it’s only a scratch, and I’ll be better — I’ll be better Doc as soon as I am able."

Now Rocky Raccoon, he fell back in his room only to find Gideon’s bible.  Gideon checked out — and he left it no doubt — to help with good Rocky’s revival.

So, those of you that know me know that I express a preference for colorful language.  And when I say colorful, I mean shit brown, piss yellow, and Linda Blair puke green.

Hello, my name is DmentD, and I like to curse.  Now go fuck yourself silly.

I don’t always use the foul vernacular; it can be a lazy way to get your point across.  One must first know how to speak well and communicate clearly before one can effectively use four-letter words with the proper impact. 

(Side note: how did the term ‘four-letter word’ come about as a generic and pasteurized way to describe profane language… especially when there are such tasty words like asshole, motherfucker, jackoff, snatch, cumdumpster and mooseknuckle, none of which are four letters long?  This is, by the way, is purely rhetorical.  I know the answer, and just felt like working "mooseknuckle" into this post ’cause it cracks me up.  There, I did it twice.)

My finest moments occur while I’m driving.  Again, if you’ve ridden with me you know all too well that I vent at the other drivers on the road, none of whom come close to my world class, platinum perfect vehicular handling skills.  I comment, I quip, I holler and I curse.  Now, if you were interpreting this as road rage you’d be dead wrong.  Road rage would be if I took action on the other drivers, which I don’t.  This is a pure 100% letting off of steam, an acknowledgement to myself that they pissed me off, getting it off my chest and moving on.  This incident and any anger or aggravation is forgotten almost as soon as the words leave my mouth.

However…

It does make for some fine, extemporaneous swearing.  It’s like being a free-form jazz musician.  I’m Miles Davis mixed with Lenny Bruce, with just a dash of that retarded kid that lives down the block from you (you know, the one that wears the Hello Kitty bike helmet (helmet size ‘extra pre-pubescent’, head size ’15lb H2O’) and the "Honk if you’re a honkey!" t-shirt — answers to the names Carl and "get off my lawn").

I also have many opportunities to laugh at my own ridiculousness.  For example, I was driving down the road, all the windows down (sunroof and rear hatch windows open too) and enjoying the sunny weather, singing along with the Beatles, which I had cranked up on the ol’ Victrola.  I was in a spectacularly good mood.  The particular street I was on has a center turn lane that allows folks making a left turn to get the hell out of everyone else’s way and not bind up traffic.  The considerate fellow in front of me starts braking ever so slowly, forcing me to decelerate to a near stop, before he eventually gets into that center turn lane to make the left.  Of course, I can’t let this go without comment.  Here is what the casual pedestrian on the sidewalk would have heard:

"Love, love me do jumping jesus christ on a pogo stick!"
"You know I love you oh come the fuck on!"
"I’ll always be true that’s why there’s a motherfucking turn lane!"
"So please, love me do so motherfuckers like you can turn!"
"Oh, love me do well it’s about time, douchebag!"

I wish I had a recording of that… I’d play it at parties.

I am a profane lexicon.  I am a sponge and an originator.  I am an idiot savant (ok, just an idiot).  I am Jack’s ruptured bowel duct.

I agree with Louis Black when he says: "I realize I use the word ‘fuck’ a lot, and I’d apologize, but, well, I don’t give a shit.  I’ve lived in New York City for so long that ‘fuck’ isn’t even a word… it’s a comma.”  Except that I don’t live in New York and… well, you get my point.

Here’s a homework assignment.  Try reading, to yourself, down this list in a crowded room, preferably at work, without snorting out loud because you were trying not to laugh yourself into an embarrassing explanation.  You are disqualified if you read it in the privacy of your own home or other quiet location.  Bonus points if you can keep your shit together when you read the definition of dirty sanchez.

Updates to the Cake Gallery.

So, you may have noticed the cute little icons now positioned squarely above my ranting space here.  They are there to keep score of the number of rats that have been dispatched in my apartment.  More specifically, my pantry.  On the third shelf up.

We’ve enjoyed a quiet, yet slightly strained peace with the varmint that had apparently made a home somewhere in the great mysterious places that they do such things.  We were content to completely ignore him as long as he left our food and such alone, and he seemed content to remind us that we should never, ever leave a bag of garbage on the floor — we, being too lazy to bring it out to the dumpster after yanking it from the can and putting a fresh bag in it’s place — by eating a hole in the side and dragging a few pieces of said trash out to nibble on.

When it first happened, I made a complaint to the apartment powers that be.  In their infinite, unquestionable wisdom, they rapidly dispatched a crack squad of Death Mexicans to promptly squirt liquid foam in a few of the holes they half-heartedly looked for.  And when I say that they looked for them, I mean they really got busy opening the two doors under the sink and calling it a day.  I slept better that night, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that our apartment was now locked up tighter than a hummingbird’s tweet… a real Fort Knox constructed entirely of Jell-O, proof against even the mightiest of rodents.  If it was really, really tired.  Or dead.  Maybe.

So, we turned a blind eye and hoped for the best, even seeing our little houseguest as a cute little feller that would scurry under the dishwasher when we wandered into the kitchen.  Until, that is, we found that several baggies and boxes of food in the pantry had been chewed into and panty-raided in the night by that furry rapscallion.  This, as they say in the industry, was war.

I went out and bought a trap… but not just any trap mind you.  I’m a technical boy living in a digital world, and frankly I love gadgets.  I stood there in the Isle Of Doom at the local Home Depot, staring at all the medieval devices used to dispatch creatures great and small (where was all this when I was bitching about my neighbor playing his stereo too loud while I was trying to sleep?).  I was wondering if I could deal with the nastiness of a spring trap that may not kill the thing outright — or worse snap a piece of it off, making a hell of a mess.  How about the squeal of a rodent caught in a glue trap, slowing starving to death.  Poisons aren’t really all that effective in the strength you can buy from home improvement stores (oh, how I miss Barber Labs in NOLA!), and if they do work, you end up with a dead rat in the walls making a stink.

Then I saw it, and I swear there was a shaft of light shining down upon what I had been searching for without even knowing it.  The Victor Electronic Rat Trap.  Now, I wasn’t sure at this point if we had a rat or a mouse, but my roomies had described it as being about three-ish inches long.  Big enough for this baby.  It was a bit pricy at $39, but what the hell, I had to have it.  No sir, no analog traps for me.

Now this trap is, for all practical purposes, a taser in a rat-sized housing.  When you turn it on there is about a five second hum… that would be the capacitors charging up from the four C batteries it uses.  There are three metal plates in the floor of it, and when the critter stands on two of them he becomes the last part of the circuit and ZAP! he gets the full charge and his heart and brain stop working so well.  He is instantly killed, in what is billed as the most humane method on the market today.  No slow death from poison or a poorly snapped trap and no tortuous starvation in a glue trap.  No muss, no fuss, and the trap is infinitely reusable.  My only concern was if I was going to be able to convince a rat to climb in this sucker, regardless of the bait I used.

The bait of recommended choice from Victor is peanut butter.  A small dab of it in the back of the trap should be enough.  We also found that the varmints are crazy-go-nuts for sunflower seeds — removed from the shell, of course — owing to the fact that the bag in the pantry was chewed into, and there were remnants of the seeds everywhere.  I had initially placed the trap on the floor along the baseboard leading to the panty, but GonzO had the genius to put it on the shelf in the pantry, at the scene of the crime.  I added a couple of seeds just outside the trap opening, a couple of seeds in the peanut butter, and a seed or two in the middle of the trap.

This my friends was the magic combination, and we had our first victim that night as we slept.  Deader than Jimmy Hoffa, we found a rat (not a cute little mouse, oh no) in our contraption… clean and exterminated.  We re-set the bait and trap thinking that maybe, just maybe, there may be another one creeping about — an accomplice as GonzO put it.  We were not disappointed.  Not one, but two rats died at our hands the next night; GonzO happened into the kitchen on the way outside for one final smoke and noticed the corpse in the trap, cleaned it and re-set the trap, and another had bit the dust by the time we woke the next morning.

Let me tell you, this was the best forty bones I’ve ever spent on pest control.  I heartily recommend it to all you faithful readers out there.  It’s the best entertainment money can buy.

So, now I need to go and file another complaint with the apartment folks.  This time, however, I’m going armed with (as of this writing) two dead rats in zip-loc baggies.  I decided that after the second rat, any more that I collected would be disposed of in the manager’s office.  If I was going to be disgusted by this, they were going to feel my pain and at least be disgusted by it too.  I have been discouraged by my loverly wife against walking into the office and tossing the baggies onto the manager’s desk from a distance of a few feet, making a satisfying thud.  She says I should save the real drama for later, if need be.  I am also inclined (but will not… rest easy my dear) to ask for a refund on my rent to the tune of the cost of having an exterminator come out, since I’m doing that job already, and more effeciently at that.

If my camera was with me, I’d catalogue the kills as I go — alas, it is not.  Maybe I can convince GonzO to take pictures of them as they make it to the morgue.  At any rate, keep an eye on the Rat-O-Meter up top as I keep score.

Sleep well, gentle readers.  Try to ignore that little pitter-patter in the night… if it’s not followed up by an electrical snap, it’s no fun at all.