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Plumbing

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Plumbing

jimmy

December 1, 2020

Saturday night I was filling up my Brita water dispenser — as I do every night before I go to bed — and noticed water pooling up on the floor. I know I can be a little sloppy while doing the dishes, but I’m not THAT sloppy. After a little sleuthing I discover that my garbage disposal is leaking. Fortunately I’m not a hoarder so what little I had underneath the sink was easily moved elsewhere.

Of course the fear sets in. — How long will this take to get fixed? — How badly did I fuck things up? So Sunday morning I put in a ticket with my building’s maintenance team and let the fates take over from there.

Now will you believe me that in three hours someone came to attempt to fix it? Indeed that happened. Unfortunately they needed to replace my garbage disposal and said they were expecting a shipment in on Tuesday. That’s fine. I can deal with doing dishes in my bathtub for a couple of days. But really, I was thinking that they would forget about it and I would have to follow up later this week and that this would drag on and on until I just deliberately broke my lease and moved to like Palmdale just to be as far away as possible.

Well, will you believe me if I told you they came in this morning and replaced the motherfucker and that it works? No drippy, no stress, no anxiety. All fixed!

With the exception of the lack of closet space, this place ain’t bad.

Can You Hear Me Now?

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Monday Blues

jimmy

November 30, 2020

Fuck me.

I forgot to set my alarm last night and woke up late. Then I remembered that I’m still earlier than most of my coworkers, and no one really gives a fuck. But I do. So I run to my office area without my glasses or clothes and turn my computer on.

For the first hour I was a mess. Nothing made sense. But as I was simultaneously working and getting myself washed up and ready and caffeinated, things were getting clearer.

That’s ok. Nothing still makes sense.

This weekend some people in the disabled community were up in arms because people were making fun of the president by calling him “Diaper Don.” My reading on this was his temper tantrum about losing the election and shit and acting like a baby. But some folks thought it was a dig at disabled people. I thought that was the stupidest thing, so I texted my cousin Gina whom, some of you might know, is a paraplegic. Her reaction to the uproar,

That’s dumb. I think they’re just overly sensitive. When you’re a disabled person you have to learn not to take everything seriously otherwise they can’t survive in this world.

I would have interpreted it as making fun of a baby, not a disabled person.

Then again, she is, as my friend Jess would put it, as sensitive as a brick.

Whatever. We know babies are stupid as fuck, anyways.

So I turned off my social media. Fuck you all. I don’t think I missed anything.

The Grandmother

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Still Dreaming after Four Years

jimmy

November 29, 2020

It’s been a little over four years since the Grandmother died, and I had a strange dream about her last night.

For some reason my mom still lived at the old apartment but was getting ready to move out. I was walking around and out of the corner of my eye saw someone who looked like The Grandmother sitting on a bench and talking to random people. I do a double-take and start bawling. I’m still confused as to whether that lady was the Grandmother, but my part of my brain that controls my emotions just unleashed this torrent of tears.

I eventually make my way to the old apartment, and I see my mom is also affected by this doppleganger but says nothing. I look in the hallway and see The Grandmother walking out. What the fuck? I’m still not understanding any of this, so I just sit down to try and think through all of this logically.

I ask the Grandmother how she could be there, that I saw her dead, and I was the only person who saw her face right after she died. But she doesn’t say anything. She just sits down in the living room and watches Korean television.

My mom and I go into the kitchen and decide that we will keep the apartment for another couple months until we figure out what is going on. I also decide to keep taking her to her acupuncture and doctor schedules and spend the next couple of nights in the apartment.

The next morning, the Grandmother goes into the master bedroom closet and disappears. It’s strange, but I decide to go back to my current apartment to pick up some clothes and supplies. When I get back to the old apartment, my mom is asking where The Grandmother is. I tell her the last I saw her she was in the main bedroom. We’re looking around, and there is no sign of her. She had vanished.

So I’m wondering if she is really dead or is alive in an alternate universe.

End dream.

I don’t know what the fuck is going on with my psyche, but I woke up emotionally spent. I don’t know if I have some lingering guilt about her death since I was her caretaker. I mean shit, it’s been four years.

May Our Chambers Be Full

Blog 1 comment emma ruth rundle, may our chambers be full, music, thou

Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou – May Our Chambers Be Full

jimmy

November 27, 2020

Where the fuck have I been? I don’t know what blanket of depression I’ve been living under, but I’ve been ignoring music for far too long. Sure, I’ve listened to what pops up on Spotify or just some glancing items that I see on Facebook. Somehow, someway, I saw this album pop up, and after 53 seconds of ambient noise and feedback, a burst of music pumped out of the speaker ushering in a wave of pleasure, regret and mourning right over me.

I had no idea who Emma or Thou were, whether I should have known who they were or anything like that. What I heard is music that is a harder version of Seaweed with the folksy haunting voice of Emma accompanied at times with the demonic screaming of Thou. It’s the dirtiest of early 90’s Seattle regurgitated into the swamps outside of Baton Rouge near the Comite River and emerging in a sweaty Frankensteinian mess that reaks terror.

I eventually figured that Emma Ruth Rundle is a singer-songwriter from Louisville and Thou are a sludge metal band from, appropriately enough, Baton Rouge who made a Nirvana cover album earlier this year and had somehow been featured on NPR. But all of this I found out after a couple of listens to this.

I don’t know if the nostalgia of the sound hit me, or if was how gorgeous the juxtaposition of Emma’s voice was to the music that threatened to drown her out but never managed to. But I just thought about how I could have missed out on this and how my stupid depression just kept be in a haze that allowed me to ignore everything and stay in a cocoon by myself. And that I must wake up and emerge into whatever world this is.

Sure, this world they paint through these seven songs and 36 minutes is scary and ugly. In “Ancestral Recall,” “I’m not of this world, this decaying existence / I’m not shackled to their cold, cruel and morbid logic / It tells a truth known to everyone who / Truly knows me.” This is a dark world not for us designed to keep us tied up. But there is a dangle of hope there, that we can like them be unshackled to this, that we can get over it.

In “Magickal Cost” which starts out mournfully and explodes in a guitar-fuelled battle, it ends with “My voice reaching back / Of rippling impulse / True, real raw hunger / My voice reaching back.” What we need to fight is within us anyhow.

Maybe I’m making too much out of this. I do acknowledge that the lyrics can come off as a bit cheesy and prog, especially as the album ends on “The Valley” with “You see them there? / Ancient and seething / Up in a pyre / Get them out of my way.” But I guess we need a little of that in our lives sometimes. I mean, how many fucking people loved Game of Thrones?

But I like that despite the bleak narrative, there is something within us that transcends all of that bullshit and help us become free.

Hopefully I can find a little more of that.

Thanksgiving 2020

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Thanksgiving 2020

jimmy

November 26, 2020

In the news, people are going crazy because they’ve been advised not to see their family this Thanksgiving. Despite the prospect of getting their family members sick, people still decided to travel home to be with family although in decreasing numbers than in normal years. But this has me confused. The jokes at this time of the year is how fucking unbearable families are, how stressful the holidays are because of Uncle Ted wanting you to pull his finger and other traumas that make you want to slit your throat. So why are so people so looking forward to being with family now? Has COVID damaged our brains so much that we would rather put up with these traumas than be by ourselves now?

As you can see, I prepared a little mini-feast for myself today. You see a Ralphs rotisserie chicken, green bean casserole and Stove Top cornbread stuffing. I should have made the stuffing myself because it is too goddamn salty. The chicken was all right, but the green bean casserole was good since I used fresh green beans. I guess all of this isolation has gotten to me too, because after dinner I thanked myself for my meal.

One good thing that came out of today was finally getting the archives back up on the site. I took a shortcut and rather than create a whole new database, I just deleted the existing table that contained all of the posts and recreated the table from scratch then copied the archive table to the new one. That means the images are not connected to the image files on the server, so the images won’t load for the individual posts. But that I could live without. For now.

It also meant that I had to manually post the 25-or-so posts that I had created since 2018. This caused all 3 people who subscribe to the newsletter version of this site were emailed all of these posts since I didn’t know how to turn that off. It’s a good thing I haven’t been prolific.

But that’s it. Other than listening to music — how the hell did all of this good music all of the sudden pop up out of nowhere?? — nothing much more has been going on here.

Error

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Database Hel(l)p?

jimmy

November 22, 2020

Ugh. I’ll repeat… ugh.

Back in 2018 I had to delete and reboot WordPress, and in the process I lost all of my posts I had here. Some of these posts date back to 1999. So that’s a lot of history up in the air and up to the whims of the Wayback Machine Archive.

This weekend I figured out where all of the posts were backed up to, but in trying to figure out a simple solution of copying the contents of one table in pasting them into another, I instead kept coming up with the 1062 duplicate entry error.

So it looks like I’ll be creating a new WordPress database, importing the old posts and other content tables from the old database and manually inputting the newer posts. Fortunately there are less than 30 new posts here, so it won’t be too bad.

Unless someone has any alternative methods to make this an easier process.

Ugh. I remember when I just manually updated the html for every time I wanted to post. Things were much simpler then.

Anyhow, this is my excuse for if this page it down for a significant amount of time. Oh, look at me pretending people actually come to this page. Silly me. Nevermind.

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Escape?

jimmy

November 10, 2020

I went to Montana in October because when I was there in 2019, I fell in love with it — Northwestern Montana specifically — and wanted to see if it was an illusion. As I was sitting in the balcony of my Airbnb cabin while looking at the above scene sipping on my morning coffee with my closest neighbor a half-mile away, it was hard not to totally fall in love.

Downtown Missoula
Downtown Missoula
Look at Missoula!

My boss is going on maternity leave in late January, so I decided that I would take a vacation before she leaves — I don’t think I can handle another six months of no vacation even on antidepressants! So I’m headed back to NW Montana then. Yes, this native Californian will be going to fucking Montana in the dead of winter. For vacation.

I do want to see if I can handle the winter there and see how feasible it is for me to move there at some point in my life. Let’s see how it goes.

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I Can’t Leave

jimmy

May 31, 2020

Sundays are usually the day I go to the Korean market. I drive down Olympic Blvd. or Wilshire Blvd. depending on the store to get the banchan (side dishes) and ingredients I need.

I just couldn’t today. It’s not that I’m scared of encountering looting, or violence, or being stranded. I just couldn’t bear to see my city looking like this.

I’m saddened by all of this. Is this what Trump wants? Are we going to have an election in November? How much longer will choppers be circling overhead until 4 am and flashbangs go off all hours of the night?

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Day 68 – The Last Dance

jimmy

May 19, 2020

A lot of sports fans are busting their nut over this 30 for 30 44253-part series “The Last Dance” about Michael Jordan. “Oooh Michael Jordan is so great, blah blah blah.”

Puke.

Growing up I hated Michael Jordan. Well to be fair, I didn’t even think about him until 1991 when he beat the Lakers in the Finals. I think what pissed me off the most was seeing kids my age wearing Bulls gear all over here in LA. Really? I think that’s also when my cynicism towards people started at the tender age of 12. People are fucking stupid and have no loyalty.

Throughout the 90s there really was no reason to watch basketball. If MJ was playing, then the Bulls were going to win the title. The Lakers were… Well no one really reminisces about the great Nick Van Exel era or Del Harris.

During Jordan’s second comeback with the Washington Wizards from 2001-2003, I got sick and tired of hearing everyone kiss his ass. So I did what any early 20-something would do, write a slanderous story about him.

I just read it, and oh fucking hell is it just a bunch of cringe. But I guess that’s what happens when you read what you wrote almost 20 years ago. So I present to you: I WAS MICHAEL JORDAN’S SEX SLAVE.

It began innocently enough back in my senior year of high school back in 1997. I had been out of the closet for just over a year and was naturally horny. I was ready to stick my dick in any orifice available (and have other dicks in my orifices).

My mom and her boyfriend had an extra ticket to the Lakers game against the Bulls. Of course this was the time the Bulls dominated the NBA. Although basketball bored me to tears (still does), I had nothing better to do that night so I decided to go.

My mom’s boyfriend, though, was a basketball nut. He wanted to get to the Forum early in hopes of meeting some of the players. I decide to separate from the old folks and sit against the wall to write my poetry of angst. As I’m lost in my world of verse and doom, I sense a shadow standing over me. “Does it say ‘circus’ on my fucking forehead,” I yelled, not looking up from my notebook.

“It’s mighty nice to see someone being productive with their time,” a deep voice intoned. I looked up and there he was – the driving force behind the Bulls (and Hanes, and Nike, and Gatorade, and countless other brands). I admit I was a bit starstruck for a moment, but that quickly passed as I realized he broke my concentration.

“You made me lose my train of thought,” I exclaimed. “What are you going to do about it now?”

“Come with me,” he said.

I hesitated. It would be cool to hang out with a superstar, but he interrupted me as I was going to respond.

“Let’s tell your parents that you’re going with me,” he offered, and off we went. He said he wanted to change his clothes and take me out to lunch as a peace offering.

We arrived at his hotel room, and I waited on his bed checking out the room as he went into the bathroom to change. As I was fiddling around with the clock radio (little things interest me so much), he came into the room wearing only a leather jockstrap that was too small for his willie.

“I’m sure you want to have some fun now, don’t you,” he asked.

“I have no idea what you mean,” I coquettishly. I could feel my ass clinching and a hardon starting to form.

Right then he tackled me onto the bed ripped my clothes off and tied me to the bed. After whippings and multiple orgasms, it was game time for him. When he came back, he continued his complete usurping of me into the wee hours of dawn.

From then, we started a bizarre relationship. Whenever he would come into town, we would “hook up”. The sex we had was way too perverse to go into details here (I’ll save that for Penthouse Forum). Let’s just say that I still have some scars from those days.

There of course was a monetary benefit for being a sex slave. I didn’t use any blackmailing schemes or anything; this was something implicit in our relationship. He was more than willing to give me money, and I was more than happy to accept. I won’t divulge dollar figures, but there was enough money to keep my CD collection flowing and build up my wardrobe.

There was a time when he escorted me on a shopping binge. After a day of scouring Melrose Ave. he decided to get me a nice bondage outfit from a store on Santa Monica Blvd. He chose one out for me and had me try it on. As I was undressing in the fitting room, he came in holding onto his dick. As the dutiful slave, I got down on my knees and nursed that baby to completion.

As with all good things, it had to come to an end. I had just graduated high school and was ready to go off to Santa Barbara for college. After nine months that we were together, he told me he was getting bored. He wanted to get into fisting and I absolutely refused. There was another boy who was “more open to things”. Like all men, he wanted the newer model with more features.

Whatever. I told him respectfully to fuck off, and that was that. I’ve gotten over it in the five years since, though it was hard as first (as with all break ups). The only thing that surprises me is that his wife was willing to take him back after they filed for divorce. Perhaps he IS a changed man and will control his urges, that we won’t “just do it”.

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Day 61 – Peanuts

jimmy

May 12, 2020

I moved to Los Angeles from Louisiana when I was eight years old when my mom separated from my dad. My dad stayed, and I went back to visit him a couple of years later. During that visit he made some boiled peanuts, and I remember I used to love them when I lived in Louisiana, but we did not have that out here in California.

I still don’t understand why more people don’t eat boiled peanuts out here. I get that it takes a while since you have to boil the peanuts for hours. But then seeing all of these assholes decide, “Oh I’m going to be a fucking baker during this pandemic,” and go through flour, salt, sugar, butter, sifting, vanilla, mixing, folding, eggs, stiff peaks, preheating ovens, clean toothpicks for five fucking hours only to get some shitty looking second-rate bread or cake or muffin or what not that can serve as an alternative to a hockey puck.

Yes, I’m still pissed off that I couldn’t get eggs for a month because of you assholes. I hope you can’t see your toes.

Oh yeah, peanuts. There is one place I would actually buy boiled peanuts: a dumpling stand at a Korean market in Koreatown. But because of the Rona, this stand is closed until further notice. I swear, Rona is a fucking cunt.

I’ve been craving boiled peanuts lately, so I’ve decided to make some. I bought 2 pounds of raw peanuts from the Korean market this weekend and soaked them overnight in water with 1/3 cup of salt, 3 tablespoons of creole seasoning and a teaspoon (or two) of chili pepper flakes.

Since I’m using raw peanuts as opposed to green peanuts (raw peanuts that were just dug up — they are not actually green) that’s why I soaked them overnight and cooked them for a longer amount of time. If I used green peanuts, I probably would have just soaked them for an hour then boiled them for two hours. But with raw peanuts, I soaked them overnight and cooked them for eight hours until they, shells and all, were soft and moist.

Man, they are good. That’s it.

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