Quote of the Day

"now THAT just made the whole day infinitely better..."

i'm just a whiny bitch. if i didnt whine so much, i 'd probably cease being a whiny bitch. but then i'd be some psycho that wrecks shit. and that doesnt help anyone, now does it. smot poking is frowned upon here, so i'm getting drunk, but i'm not liking it. whats making things worse is that i ran out of whiskey, so i mixed in some godawful polish potato vodka, and i'm starting to feel queasy. i'm probably gonna have a headache tomorrow. this sucks. i'm apparently not great with stress. i read a funny somewhere sometime to the effect of "being depressed is like being pissed off, but without the energy". sometimes i foray into the energy field. i probably straddle the fence most of the time. whatev. the terrible 2's havent even officially begun, and i've already had enough. this is not good. this is not right. my feet stick out of bed all night. thank you dr. seuss.
i cant keep living like this. this needs to change. i need some sorta drugs. legal, illegal, as long as it helps. its not like this all the time. but when it is it seems like it is. and when things are fine, the shit seems so distant. having a family is no walk in the park. for me, at any rate. having kids is hard work. i didnt understand that. speaking of parks - dealer from across "Crackhead Alley" is back after an extended absence. we were hoping he's been put away for a long while. so he's back, and the very next thing i notice is a cruiser with lights flashing and police tape attached to it, blocking off the exit from "Crackhead Alley" towards the park. turned out later that half the park was cordoned off. some old lady said she heard shots at night. funny coincidence with the dude coming back and the shooting.
ok, i'm falling asleep. gotta go.

i guess i should avoid blanket statements like " i hate weekends ", but there's certain things i dont like about weekends. on my 2 days off we still end up getting up early because of the kids. and there's shit to do thats piled up because we keep thinking we're gonna have time to get shit done on the weekend.
this is a post about nothing - so retarded. i'm just fucking grumpy. again. i need prozac. or some good weed. maybe both.
got a Blackberry Pearl as a hand-me-down from a guy whose place i'll sorta be taking at the new job. looks pretty cool so far. see if i can install the software for it without having the comp explode :)

a twist

patty cake, patty cake
got some hemp
lets all get baked as fast as we can
roll it, spark it, pass it 'round and see
how we'll get toasted with this great weed!
:)

havent posted in forever, and now is not the best of times, but whatev. a couple short things:

got a small buzz for half of yesterday from a vitamin B complex pill - weird. more pleasant than the Gingko stone, thats fo' sho'.

turns out outrageous comedian Louis de Funès was born in France, but his parents were from Seville. they just moved to France because their parents were opposed to their marriage.
here's a sample of his genius - the real shit starts ~40 seconds into it.
i first became aware of and intrigued by hallucinogens when i was a young boy, while watching a movie starring de Funès, where at some point de Funès' character ends up in some kinda hospital. while chilling in the hospital garden with many different patients, he somehow gets his meds mixed up with someone else's or something, and ends up dosing himself with some kinda hallucinogen. he doesnt seem to display any symptoms, until, to his utter surprise, he sees all the oranges fall off an orange tree, almost at once. followed by all the oranges jumping back up onto the tree! his jaw drops. all of a sudden he sees all the women in the garden walking around in their bikinis or naked. that's all i remember. i didnt know what was happening until my mom told me the pills he ate made him see that stuff. i was captivated by the idea.


turns out "Naked Lunch" was a bunch of manuscripts boiled down into a book long before it became a movie. they were written by William Burroughs while in Tangiers, and the drug use, homosexuality, writing, etc were all very much part of his life there - he just weirded them up a bit. having read about Burroughs has detracted from my fondness for the movie, which i'm yet to see sober and straight, but does provide some depth i guess. he has been quoted as saying: "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death...". Joan was his wife. the fucked up thing is, he was the one who shot her dead while playing a drunken game of William Tell in Mexico. Burroughs was a really fucked up guy. i was gonna say troubled, but i chose fucked up, because he was.

not only is the word "NO!" boogie's fave word, but yelling seems to be her favourite form of expression. this morning, i think i said to her something like "we're gonna changer ur diapie (diaper)" and she said "no diapie!" to which i asked "are you a little nazi?" to which she of course replied "no nazi!" ha! now that i think of it, when we were just visiting the inlaws during the weekend, we went to the beach, and boogie's nose was running, and she tried to wipe it with her sand-laden hand, ending up with a little sand moustachio, so i told her she's got a little hitler-moustache, but that it doesnt suit a little girl.
other things that sound funny at the time, but sound absolutely horrible, sick, insane and all that good stuff outside said time? something a friend of mine and i touched upon during a short conversation today - a parent yelling at their kid "when i smack you, your head will fall off with the lungs!" roughly translated, but you might get the picture.
or something like "if you dont stop that, mommy will kill herself." to which the dad adds "if mommy kills herself, then dad will commit suicide too. but first will kill you kids. it'll be a gory murder-suicide. then i'll choke myself with my own guts."
sounded funny at the time :)
ok, its super late, gats ta go

as if all this death wasnt enough...

... Albert Hofmann - the creator/discoverer of LSD died, almost a month ago. but at least I find consolation in that he's had a very full life - he was 102 years old. he was reportedly a great chemist, made big pharma lotsa money in "straight" drugs. in addition to discovering the psycho-active effects of LSD, he was also the first person to synthesize psilocybin - the psychoactive substance naturally found in "magic" psilocybe mushrooms.

an icon of a man. i'd like to try to honour him next "Bicycle Day" and go for a ride with the local heads. weird, this year's "Bicycle Day" was 10 days before his death. i wonder - had his death been slow, if he knew he was dying, would he have opted to go out accompanied by his "Problem Child", like Aldous Huxley ..?

i thought i'd be able to handle death a little better.
guy from work got gunned down outside a local bar. i'd been to that bar a few times before, with him and other guys from the company. i immediately thought of his poor wife, with their baby boy. he's a little older than Lily. i think her family lives in alberta. maybe she'll be moving back.
i just remembered a time he told me about how once, when he was in elementary school, he didnt get on his bus to school but decided to ride his bike to school or something. when he'd gotten to school turned out there'd been a suicide bomber on the bus.

no one knows how the fight started, but it quickly turned into a huge fight between 2 groups of people. i dont think they even know if it was a random shot or specifically for him.

it caught me totally by surprise. i suppose it hit relatively close to home, but i wouldnt have thought that it would have affected me quite this much. i've been stunned half the day - since i found out.

this brought right to the surface this story i heard just the other day, about how a friend of a friend went to a restaurant with his wife, and while they were dining, an asian guy got in this guy's face, so the guy asked if he wants to take it outside. when they went around the corner, followed by the asian guy's friends, the asian guy pulled out a gun... didnt matter how big my friend's friend was anymore - got pistol whipped and the shit kicked out of by the asian guys, and told not to contact the police or they'd kill him. he might have been followed home... he didnt call the police. i dont know what i'd have done. obviously i'd want revenge, and the fuckers confined so they couldnt do it to others. but i'd value the fact that i'm alive, and the safety of my family. but i think i'd still try, just would request help with relocating. what if the police didnt think it to be important enough to warrant that kind of expenditure?

songs with mentions of guns piss me off now.


a few weeks ago i saw a guy i havent seen in a couple years. he told me another story that shocked me. we kinda knew this guy named Al - he was maybe in his late 50's, very calm, quiet but pleasant, and he was the safety guy on a couple sites. on one of them, his then maybe 30 year old son was cutting something with a hand-held grinder, the sleeve of his shirt caught in it, and having the trigger blocked, it chewed up his arm pretty good. he could sometimes be a bit of a jerk, but when i heard about that, i kinda felt bad for him. but maybe 2 years later he was recovering well, working again, and somehow managed to adopt a more friendly disposition. a few years later, he got attacked on the street somewhere by a group of guys, and they beat him into a coma. and this is where a piece of fact is missing - the reason why police showed up on the doorstep of the comatose guy's dad's. maybe he tried to go after the fuckers that beat his son, maybe somebody complained. but the guy's dad told the cops that he's going to hurt himself if they dont leave. they left. apparently only then digging up information that he was the registered owner of several fire arms. apparently then they werent so keen on walking back in there, so they set up a goddam stand-off, calling him out through bull horns. he wasnt coming out. they wanted to wait him out. in the middle of the night they heard a gunshot. when they finally went inside in the morning they found he'd killed himself.
a few weeks later his son came out of his coma.

i talked to a friend today with whom i was hanging out last night - he said his sister's friend just died - she'd thought it'd be a good idea to try and run from the cops with 2 of her roommates, one of whom the police were actually coming up after, and do it by jumping from balcony to balcony - they were on the 5th floor. she slipped. the fall split her head in half, shattered her spine, but the doctors managed to keep her from dying. still, after evaluating the situation, they told the parents that there's no way she's gonna recover from that, and recommended pulling the plug. they will never forget that nod.

i just realised that i only found out about compay segundo because of a haunting melody i'd heard a couple times in a cuba commercial. i wanted to hear what the rest of this amazing snippet of acoustic guitar music sounded like. after many searches on winMX (waaaaay back, eh? :)) off and on for months and months, i finally found it by chance, downloading anything that said "cuba" in the title. The actual title was "Pobre Corazon"...
"Cubano Chant" turned out pretty cool too, even though obviously a very western, white-washed style - but its good music - i love how each instrument does its own version of the song, in turn. i think.

while walking thru walmart today, i noticed ash-trays for sale, and i wondered - if pot was legal here, or maybe "when" its legal here, will they sell cheap bongs and grinders from china and stuff? probably. i mean, they used to sell opium in the sears catalogue.

buddy came around with his elise today - nice :)
phx says she saw ppl rubber-necking as they passed. he asked me if i wanted to take it for a drive, but somehow i didnt feel like it was the right time or something, so i turned the offer down. hope it comes around again - preferably when "the time is right" :)

buddy bought a lotus elise today. just called to yell "yeeeee-haaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
cool :)
god speed montoyo! :D

Created by OnePlusYou

another one gone...

Just sold my Talon. always feels weird when they take away your car. but it had to go. it was getting on in years, and more and more things started getting buggered up in it. i was getting into deeper and deeper mechanics territory, and while every time it was a learning experience, every time was also a bit of an ordeal - not knowing, needing to read up and look at websites and forums, buying parts, buying tools i didnt know existed, and it always took sooooo looooooong. these 2 guys put a new arm in right there on the spot in like 15 minutes. it took me hours and hours to get all the shit off. mind you, it always seems harder to take shit apart in a car - shit is seized up, cant see a screw or bolt thats still holding it all together...
that was the first "good" car i bought with my own money. actually, it was the first one i bought with my own money, period. the previous one was bought with student loan money.
this car went with me to San Francisco, then almost to LA, then to Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, back home, then to Toronto... and then back again :) well, there were little excursions to Niagara Falls, Windsor, Detroit. got quite a few speeding tickets with it, including one that might still make me wanted in California :)
when i bought it in 2001, it had about 60K on it. 7 years later - it has 235K

fastest i've ever gone in it was 215 kms/hr (133 mi/hr for you 'mericans) - 215 was also its nominal horsepower.

...

i wrote the above like a month or 2 ago, then just saved it - to be edited and added to later. well, that never happened, and i'm not sure what i was thinking of adding to it, so here it goes.

Łukasz

you were born on january 27 - a month premature. i knew that a month early, especially these days, is not bad at all, but watching you suffer like that right from the get-go felt really shitty. they plopped you down on the scale, all naked and cold and screaming, then put you on some examining table, squirting antibiotic cream in between your puffy eyelids, repeatedly vaccuuming your nose, mouth, throat and lungs with this tube, to clear out as much fluid as possible, injecting you with all kinds of shit to help with this and that, hooking up the intravenous, cutting your heel and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing to get way too much of your very thick blood for tests. other babies get to rest a lot with their moms after they're born. not you, little guy. your mom was in the recovery room, drugged and vomiting and being pumped with other drugs that were supposed to help but only exacerbated it. finally they ran out of things to inject her with, and she stabilized.
what did it do to you, baby - being born to pain for hours, and then subsistence for weeks - almost no comfort of human contact, just machines: checking your heart-beat, your breathing, your blood oxygen saturation, keeping an elevated air pressure to your nose with extra blows of air when you're supposed to be breathing, machines dosing intravenous fluid with an added fat solution and electrolytes, and a tube taped to your little chin and going down into your tummy to make sure air bubbles come out easily. and a UV lamp on for 2 days straight to help get rid of your jaundice. people would come around every now and then, to stick an IV in a different hand, foot, thigh, both sides of your head, and all you got to show for it is a crappy mohawk and tracks and bruises everywhere.
the nurses said that you were doing pretty good for a premie, but there wasnt much to be rejoicing about. i felt fucked up, and all i did was look.
but sounds like you've been doing better and better - too bad we havent even been able to visit with you more often, but we've been sick, and we dont want to risk getting you sick. wonder if the nurses think we're shitty parents. fuck'em if they do - i think this is unfortunately the best course of action. maybe they know and understand. here at home we've all been going through a stomach flu, a cold, boogie's teething, and trying to let mommy heal from the c-section. your babcia has been helping with your sister, so that's been great. times like this you feel the value of being part of a community, a family, having someone to help you when you need it - its survival of the group, not survival of the fittest.

i was on some web page when i noticed a link that said something like "video of heath ledger snorting coke". huh??? they're actually showing this?? after clicking on the link, i found myself on one of those celebrity-following websites, and an article talking ABOUT the video having been bought, but not released, yadda, yadda... so, disillusionedly reading down the short blurb i happened upon this line:
"Referring to his love of cannabis - an illegal drug often smoked in cigarette form - Heath added: "I used to smoke five joints a day.""

umm, where do you begin....
do most people not know what cannabis is? certainly people who read about these celebrity "indiscretions". though, granted, people who follow the lives of celebrities are much more likely to learn a thing or 2 about coke than pot. but calling pot "an illegal drug often smoked in cigarette form"? i guess it sounds more sensationalistic than an "illegal plant". and describing it as such might focus undue attention on the ludicrousness of the concept of an illegal plant.
smoking 5 jays a day may be a bit much. the guy probably had either problems that he should have been dealing with, or too much time on his hands and nothing to do with it. still, i would say let him do whatever he wants if it doesnt hurt anybody. unless it does, then thats a different story.
i can see how idiots might right away point and say"gateway drug!" i would love to pound their stupid heads with the bottles of booze he'd drunk before he ever touched a joint. i'm such an angry little boy :)
lots of people go thru life snorting coke and having jobs, raising families, and not becoming junkies. lots of people go thru life like everybody else, while smoking pot and not touching other illegal substances. lots never touch anything illegal, and just booze it up. some never even drink. "drugs" are not as straightforward as misinformed or misinforming loudmouths would have us believe. we need truth and education - not sensationalism.

here's a fucking positive post of the day - i fucking hate how life keeps throwing me curve-balls, shit i'm not ready to deal with, dont know how to deal with, dont wanna deal with. life is a story of just barely good enough to procreate the species, processes out of control, but maybe just good enough for the moment. maybe i was right in believing once that bringing a child into this world is cruel - if i'm suffering thru it, then why the fuck bring another being into it too? its the fucking blind, mechanistic instincts - liking sex, finding babies cute, caring for those close to you. shit like that.
i find life to be a nearly constant hassle. maybe i shouldnt have procreated - then i wouldnt have passed-on the fucked-up genes that make me feel this way. people for whom life is great should procreate - chances are their offspring will perceive life in a similar way.
i dont want fucking hassles, i just want to be happy.

got phx' car maintenance taken care of = changed rear brake pads and rotors, changed the oil and filter, and even topped up the windshield wiper fluid = purdy sweet :)

phew - almost forgot to make my positive entry of the day - well, it is the next day but i havent gone to sleep yet, so that should be ok.
there's several i can think of - the morning started with remembering that its friday - so that was cool - and i'd slept-in like a mofo - so that was cool too. listening to the dopecast - sans dope - that was chill. bla bla, work crap - then sampling some "juicy fruit" was cool, brought back a taste i havent had in years. realizing that a lot of work stuff was done already was cool.
getting everything together to work on the jetta was a relief in itself - before even starting any work. hearing that a friend is pursuing happiness over the mammon was cool, even if it does mean that i wont be really working for him for any length of time like we thought - but it might not even turn out that way. and now the crimpins tree is sitting neatly in 4 boxes, ready to be shipped off to my 'rents' garage - so thats a win. ok - my's ready to hit the hays :)

the time leading up to the holidays was dreadful, the holidays themselves werent much better, and i'm back to the grind. hitting another low point on new year's day, i was thinking about a fellow blogger's advice to just force myself into a positive mindset, think happy thoughts, *make* it happen. but i just couldnt/wouldnt - didnt happen, i wondered if i was simply more comfortable because more familiar with the depressed metal state or something. but i'm not really depressed most of the time, i dont think... either way, fast-forward to to my shower today, and i suddenly felt that i wasnt really down, and felt almost... positive or something. and then i remembered trying to feel happier when i wasnt, and thought that its so much easier to do when ur not totally down. and then i remembered my ex's "therapy" as advised by her doctor once - put little red stickers at various places around the house and places you look, and every time you see one of those - think a happy thought - a way to get the mind in the habit of thinking and feeling happy. so i decided to finally try it too - i put one little penguin sticker on the coffee maker, and one above the comp screen - that way my earliest moments of the day should get the positive vibe going. and i thought to make a new years' resolution - even though a few days late - i'm going to try to post at least one positive thought on the blog every day.
so - ...
man, my happiness kinda fizzled there. think happy, or positive. its friday tomorrow! thats kinda good. hmm.
this is depressing - i get brought down so easily. i get to smoke up and listen to the dopecast's 100th episode tomorrow morning..? well, that, the fact that its friday, and the fact i made this resolution should count for something. we'll see tomorrow.

huge bust in my city - 100 perps arrested, literally tonnes of drugs and drug-making materials and $2 million seized, along with ... 17 guns - this must be canada :D
but... another bust will not solve anything. a void was created in the supply side of the drug market, and it will be quickly and eagerly filled. prohibition didn't work with alcohol, neither will it work with drugs of any sort. the only viable course of action i see is the legalization and government regulation of all products people want to buy - including drugs. the population needs to be educated and reminded of the effects of all consumer products, whether they cause cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, asthma, or what have you. the government should regulate drugs like they do all legal drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, and in addition taxed accordingly to offset their cost to society - like projected costs to the healthcare system, and services that help cope with addiction (already in place in the gambling industry.)
its not the addicts who are the real victims here, either - nobody forced them to get hooked on anything - they're just a product of bad circumstances, lousy character and "unfortunate" genetic makeup. the real victims are their families, friends and every one of us who's ever had to suffer our cars and homes being broken into, our things and money stolen, all who've ever been assaulted for money, and every one of us who gets constantly harassed for "spare change".
i dont pity the bums - i fucking hate them. they're vermin. a lot of the dealers are scumbags too - thats why regulation is needed - the substances would be pure, the quality would be standardized, the prices of drugs lower, and... no more shady dealers.