one long year

one year ago today, ruby left the building.

a common remark for the passing of a beast is "she did her best." well ruby did more than her best, she kicked ass and took names. our home was burglarized shortly before ruby joined the family. at the time we had a gentle old lab/shepherd cross. she was a fabulous beast, i am incapable of adequately describing the beauty of her soul and purity of her spirit. when the house was burglarized, she was locked in the basement due to her incontinence. several months later, her time was up and the ruby era began.

after your home has been violated, there's always a strange feeling in your gut when entering the house. you lose that feeling of confidence and security because in the back of your mind, there might be some asshole hiding behind the door with evil intentions. ruby was a 35 pound orphan described as a lab cross. i was drawn to her due to her size. after having a few large beasts who had a difficult time climbing stairs in their old age, a 35 pound dog seemed to be the perfect size. i would be able to carry her up and down the stairs in her old age. but the 35 pound orphan, advertised as being full grown, blossomed into a 90 pound pitbull with a nasty disposition.

it didn't take long for the feeling of fear and uneasiness to disappear when entering the empty house. it turned into, i wonder what ruby has destroyed. ruby had a very bad case of separation anxiety. she chewed everything with electrical cords being one of her specialties. i don't know how in the hell she escaped being electrocuted. one day she ate a box of chocolate brownie mix and it quickly passed through her digestive tract resulting in ample dark diarrhea. i'll never forget that day because it didn't smell like feces. it went through her so fast that it just smelled like chocolate soup. on another day she ate a bag of grass seed. later that day i took her for a walk and she left a steaming pile of grass seed filled crap at the edge of a park. it was just too soup-like to pick up so i left it. after a few days the seed began sprout and it turned into a lovely chia pet. it lasted all summer and it brought a smile to my face every time i saw it. god bless ruby.

ruby protected us very well for 12 years. she was no angel and frequently threatened to bite me when we had a difference of opinion. but so it goes, i'd rather have a beast with a backbone than some sweet cuddly cute decorator dog. ruby was a working dog and she did her job well. there were no security breaches on her watch.

god bless you ruby, i'm pretty sure you're kicking ass in valhalla. i miss you a great deal and i'm very close to shedding water for you at this moment. for a would-be fremen of dune, shedding water is a rare occurrence.

i love you sons of bitches.

art

gene gene built a machine

joe joe made it go

art art cut a fart

and blew the fucking thing apart

that would be my first thought when thinking about art but apparently there's a whole world of genuine art out there that some people put a higher value on than gene's machine:

the little beauty above sold for north of $20,000,000.00. and that's american dollars not the cheap canadian shit.

for the more budget minded, the above beauty can be had for south of $14,000,000.00

if these pieces of art tickle your fancy, here's the collection of 10 paintings that SOLD FOR $420,000,000.00

i suppose that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, value is in the eye of the investor or most probable, ego is in the soul of the acquisitor. it's easy for us rubes to sit back and be scornful of the wealthy for paying these prices but on the other hand, blowing your money on art leaves a minuscule carbon foot print compared to buying a $100,000,000.00 yacht. plus, art tends to increase in value whereas the value of yacht probably drops 25% when you drive it off the lot.

in case you missed the speech obama read from a teleprompter a few days before the fun in paris when he announced that ISIS had been contained, here is the gist of his message to the muslim peaceniks:

i love you sons of bitches

remedy

"there is a remedy for everything except death."

these wise words came from the greatest knight errant the world has ever known, none other than the esteemed don quixote.

it was a long hard read but i finally finished don quixote. this was the third time i've read don quixote and it didn't lose any of its magic. the things that made it such a long hard read were the very small fonts and the longest paragraphs known to mankind. I originally started reading it on the e-reader but after a few pages i decided that the greatest novel ever written should be read in its original form, a book comprised of paper and ink rather than plastic and electronics. Not only were the fonts small, the paragraphs were set up in such a way that there were several conversations and plot twists within the same paragraph, making it difficult to follow because you lose the points of reference that you normally rely upon when a new paragraph starts and when a different character speaks. it often became very difficult to remember who was speaking to whom.

in the course of reading don quixote, i asked several friends if they had read it, and shockingly almost everyone said no! i find it hard to believe that anyone professing to be an avid reader has not read don quixote. so if anyone reading this wee epistle hasn't read it, turn your fucking tv off and start reading. if you're old and have lost a little vision, do yourself a favor and get the biggest hardcover with the largest fonts you can find.

i had started reading it in february but fell victim to the small fonts and the enormity of the task, then much to my shame, i gave up. a trip to the optometrist for new reading glasses soon put things in order but something held me back until i was picking up rip's easter eggs in the park and a light turned on in my rapidly declining mind, read the son a bitch whilst soaking my poor aching back in a steaming hot bath tub. a few times each day i drew a hot bath and drifted away into the world of knight errants and chivalry. the only problem was when i closed the glass doors on the tub, my glasses fogged up but i suppose there are people out there with bigger problems than foggy glasses.

if i walked into a store and stumbled upon another don quixote character jug, do you think i'd be able to resist temptation?

absolutely not! (as long as it was reasonable priced)

i love you sons of bitches.

the dream machine

a more fitting title might be the not so dreamy machine.

i bought a sony dream machine clock radio several years ago to keep next to the tv so i could easily keep track of time and hopefully not miss any program i was planning to watch. it was kind of hate at first sight with the dream machine, i had to enter the time zone, year, date etc before i could get the son of bitch to operate. apparently this was so the infernal machine could adjust the time automatically in the spring and in the fall for daylight savings time. it seemed like a waste of time.

right off the bat it drove me nuts. it had a back up battery and the time was already set, but the clock was a few minutes off and no matter what i did the son of bitch bounced back to being a few minutes off. i decided to live with it and mentally subtract a few minutes. the first few times it did make the adjustment for daylight savings time but for the last few years nothing happened and i fritzed around with it to manually adjust the time. it was a massive exercise in frustration. then i gave up and lived with being an hour out of sync for 6 months of the year. ain't life wonderful

yesterday i said fuck it and decided to buy a new clock radio. there were a few at the store but they were in the box and i wasn't able to play around and see how easy it was to change the time so i made a mental note of the models and decided to look on line and see how easy they were to operate. as luck would have it i stumbled upon a you tube video that explained how to set the time on a dream machine and son of a bitch it worked! i had read all sorts of other shit on line telling me what to do but the video did the trick:

the trick is you have to set the fucking year, month and day before going to the clock setting. i guess things get lost translating the instructions from chinese to english. god bless google and you tube. have i ever mentioned how much i love google?

i love you sons of bitches.