The Candy Man Can

I know, I know… I suck. It’s been like, another 2 and a half weeks since I last wrote something. Like I said before, it’s so much easier to just write a sentence and post it as a facebook status update. It’s the death of blogging.

I feel better than I did last time I wrote. Things got moving along so I could process the things that were bothering me. 11 hours in a car listening to some tracks I haven’t in years was good. Let my mind deal with everything.

Then there was Halloween. I was Willy Wonka, the Gene Wilder version of course. It was pretty sweet. My wife and I went out two nights since my parents came down to visit and watched the kids. It was pretty great, and we both had a lot of fun. I need to remember to send a thank you note to the woman my wife was a being a Doula for, for not going into labor until the Monday after Halloween. It allowed my wife to drink. On Friday we went to a party of a coworker of mine. A dude ended up getting shot in the side with a bb-gun, so you know it was a good party, and the beer was free. On Saturday we went out with some of my wife’s friends and I had to listen about divorce for the first part of the night which was a big downer, but then we made our way to the gay bar because the women “wanted to dance”. Whatever, if the day prior had told me anything is that I was entirely heterosexual so I went. Now I’d never been there before with out my normal facial hair. Mr. Wonka is clean shaven so I got rid of the beard for the costume. Little did I know that clean shaven lawyrde = gay magnet. I get it, I’m a good looking skinny dude, and without facial hair I look a lot like I did when I was 18. I got hit on like 4 times (I’d like to top that hat! Leaving so soon! Dude in drag grabs the air behind my ass and tells my wife to keep me close to her.) and got a simulated bj from Cher. It’s good to feel loved.

Had our first hockey game, interleague playing down against a C-league team. We destroyed them 8-2. I had two goals, the very first of the season on my first shift which felt good. Something seems to have clicked inside me lately playing hockey. I feel way more confident. I think the key is getting low. You watch a good player and their legs are bent and they are crouched down. Shitty players are almost vertical. You don’t get any power skating and you can’t make tight turns like that. I played pickup last night and scored a sweet top shelf goal that made even some of the better players give me an atta’ boy.

I think we may get destroyed by some of the better b-league teams, but I think we’ll still have fun. I put together a good group of guys. We’re the expansion team so it’s kind of expected we won’t do very well.

20 days... really?

That's really too long in between blog posts. One of my old friends called me out on it via a facebook message a few days ago.

I could say I have excuses, work and family and all that.

Truth is I've hit some sort of low point so this seems like as good an idea as any other. It's helped in the past right?

It doesn't feel as bad as times before, yet, at the same time it is.

I nearly punched a 2 inch thick piece of steel today I was so overwhelmed. I would have broken my hand.

At the time it didn't seem like a bad idea. I'd get to leave work, have minimal tasks after. I'd get sympathy, mind numbing pain and mind numbing endorphins and mind numbing pain killers.

He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.

All these Nihilistic and generally depressing quotes and phrases have been bombarding me all day. Thinking about all the bad things that have happened and that could happen, and wondering if my children's smiles make up for all of them.

Is it ironic or not that it's been raining all day today and still is... no you'd expect that. Bad weather to match a bad mood, too predictable.

I can only hope that hockey makes me feel better tonight. That's a true sign of depression, not enjoying what you've found pleasure in in the past.

Perhaps this will be like a steep economic recovery. A V not a U. Maybe I'll score like 3 goals tonight, and then come home and have great sex with my wife, and then sleep soundly till morning, and then maybe the sun will come out, and my machine's software will not act like mentally retarded monkeys wrote it, and maybe they'll say they are reinstating raises at work, and my kids won't be so exhausted when I come home after work that they only want to test the limits of my patience, and everything, every little thing will be all-right.

Three Little Birds and Redemption Song always make me sad in that music is so beautiful my heart aches kind of way. Bob Marley as well as David Bowie have that affect on me. I'll make sure to que that up in the MP3 player tomorrow.

The Long Hiatus

I haven’t written anything for a long time. Don’t really know why. I guess it speaks to twitter and facebook’s popularity. I’d rather just condense my thoughts into one sentence rather than a long drawn out story. Maybe this is the death of Pure Gonzo Engineering. More people look at my facebook status than this blog. Maybe I’ll try and be more in depth with my facebook status updates rather than: Lawryde is eatin’ lunch or Lawryde is sleepy or the other bullshit that I and other people ramble on about.

I have been working harder than I normally do. Not for anything more like I should be getting, but because we are understaffed. OMG, we got rid of all kinds of people and have a shit ton of work. This would be like if I crashed a dozer into the side of a building. Manager’s are allowed metaphoric crashes all the time with no repercussion. I’d be fired. I reported like 20 hours of overtime last month which is unheard of for me. I’m an 8 and out the gate type of guy. If I worked 20 hours of OT then my young single coworker worker like 100 hours of OT last month. Dude is here till like 7 or 10 at night all the time. I told him he needs to stop that shit. People will just start to expect it, and you won’t get anything in return.

I’ve begun to search for Gonzo Engineering work in Wisconsin, had a phone interview this Tuesday. I felt like a fucking idiot. When I was interviewing in college, when I got like 6 offers, I was a fucking professional interviewer. I knew what I was going to be asked, and I had stories for each of those questions. It was a think of beauty. Interviewers loved me. Last name Ever, first name Greatest. Now I’m all out of practice and my stories aren’t current. I stumble and repeat myself and have a hard time getting to the point, trailing of in incomplete sentences. Hopefully this one will be good practice for any future. Get me back in the game. I guess I’ll know if I was any good or not at this one depending on if I get an on site interview or not.

I’ve got this elitist hockey team I put together of(almost) all Opposite of Dog employees. We’re going to be the yellow team. (Ha ha ha get it, yellow… Opposite of Dog.) Can’t be really affiliated with the company in any way, wouldn’t want to sully the brand in any way. God knows I would, in the locker room and on the ice. The team seems like it will be OK, but there’s all this underlying anger towards Opposite of Dog and towards those that work at Opposite of Dog within the community. Hating the popular kid sort of thing, so we may have everyone step up their game to humiliate us.

Ahhh, this felt pretty good. Maybe we can do it again some time, more frequently than once a month. (ha ha, that’s funny right coming from a married man… that old stereotype of never getting laid once you’re married ha ha ha ha) (suck it lol, I type out my laughter, you can’t just box it up in three letters like that.)

The most compelling argument I've read

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/08/im_safe_on_board_you_can_pull.html

My wife found this, and it's a fantastic argument for Obama's health care.