So I had this dream….
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under Amore & Vita
I had an f’ed up dream last night. Apparently I was some sort of clandestine “guy you go to when you don’t know who to go to” type guy. Some company hired another clandestine dude to perform some operation; he needed to get them a submarine but didn’t know how to do that so he called me in the job. Apparently despite the fact that I was a clandestine “guy you go to when you don’t know who to go to” type guy I didn’t know how much to charge them for my services. It has to be enough to justify becoming a bad guy and live off for a few years til the next job. So we’re going around doing our sneaky stuff and all the while I’m trying to figure whether to bill by the job or by the hour; mileage from my house to their HQ to “the spot”, etc, etc.
Later I ask the company why they called me in on this job and they’re like because if we get caught you’re going to be the scapegoat and go to jail, not us. I’m like crap, now I have to factor the risk of going to jail into my rate. So I’m doing the standard contractor calculations of annual salary divided by 2,080 hours then multiply that by three. Can’t figure out what annual salary to use. Do I bill them upfront for expenses and at the end for my services? Of course we’re doing all our sneaky stuff at night and I’m a single father so I have to figure out how to leave Junior home alone without raising the ire of child protecive services and shit.
How do those guys figure that shit out anyway?
Oh and we showed up at the warehouse one early morning. There’s a ditch out back with a creek running down it with a giant dog sleeping in it. Giant like the dog’s head was the size of a Mini Cooper. He was friendly but still, dogs don’t need to be that big.
I think the dream had to do with the fact that I do tend to get lost in minutiae sometimes when I’m working toward something. Can’t see the forest for the trees.
It’s ya burfday…
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under Amore & Vita, Cycling, Work
It’s been a while. I can’t get motivated to do long posts anymore. I wish I had dictation software. I come up with long blog rants while I’m at my desk or in the car but i don’t have the time nor energy to type them all out. I’ll spit out a few brief thoughts now and commit to more frequent but shorter entries in the future.
First off, my birthday presents to myself. I have no idea what anyone else got me because I’m still at work and somebody was late putting stuff in the mail. Better to be late with that than something else.
Reynolds Assault full carbon clinchers wheelset. :insert Tim “The Toolman” Taylor arrgh sounds:
Second, I now have enough money set aside to get Lasik surgery. I just need to find a place to have it done that won’t leave me blind. I’d have to return my new wheels and trust me, you don’t want that.
Also, last week was the annual Angry Sex Bowl. My Georgia Bulldogs vs Belle’s Tennessee Vols. We call it the angry sex bowl because no matter who wins one of us is really pissed off…unless it’s a tie, then we’re both pissed off. Thankfully they don’t do ties in college football. My team won for the first time in three tries. We never mention the game once it’s over so that’s all you’ll hear from me about it.
What was the number one song the day you were born?
Close call with the Grim Reaper
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under Amore & Vita, Phun
So anyway, last night I met up with a group of folks to go to the Griffith Observatory then hit up a few bars. We met for some fish tacos first tacos to form some carpools. I’m driving my car with 3 others on board.
We’re driving up the hill/mountain to get to the observatory, which is on top of Mount Hollywood. It’s about 20 minutes from dusk. We’re tooling along chatting with the windows up and stereo on, about to make a left up a switchback turn to go higher up. All of a sudden there’s a pedestrian woman in front of me looking to my left. There ain’t shit over there but trees so I’m transfixed on her malfunction. The girl sitting next to me her mouth drops open. Turns out there’s a minivan flipping end over end down a 250 foot hillside that is at least 45 degree banking. SHIT! Brakes to the floor. The fan lands right in front of me, rear wheels on the road, front wheels facing up the hillside. The front is completely crushed. Anybody still in front has to be toast.
This is right up the street from Griffith Park so there are a fair amount of people a bit down the hill. I pull over, we bolt over to the car. Three of us pull off what is left of the sliding door on the minivan. The driver is alive but pinned under the windshield. We’re telling him to stay still but he’s afraid. He manages to pull himself out of his seatbelt from under the windshield down to the rear seat where we don’t let him move.
At this point I’m still don’t know how he got to where he landed. I look up the hill and it’s got to be nearly 80 yards of thigh high grass to the road he drove off. The last 20 yards are about 60% grade. Apparently he came around the corner too fast and went off. If he had not hit the tree right at the road edge he would landed on us. In the end we survived. The night wasn’t clear enough for the observatory but we hit up The Griffin and Bigfoot Lounge afterward for drinks. Well, drink as in singular for me. I was driving. 
- After I’ve told this story a few times it will have grown to include the van was on fire, his passenger was pregnant and we delivered the baby before getting them out whereupon the van exploded.
The Tax man hath cometh
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under Amore & Vita
No, not Uncle Sam. This time it was the SoCal Great Weather Tax Man. He comes to collect the fees we pay in exchange for having 350 days of sunny 70 degree weather every year. The fees are paid by having to deal with fires, earthquakes, mudslides and sometimes, in the case of unpopular jury verdicts (think Rodney King and O.J.), riots.
I’m too far away from forested areas to worry about fires and too far away from ‘tha hood’ to worry about riots. Therefore my taxes are paid in the form of earthquakes. After ten years of living in L.A. I finally experienced an earthquake large enough to feel. The Northridge quake was four years before I arrived. About six years ago there was a very mild one in the early morning. I slept through it all and I’m a light sleeper so that tells you how insignificant it was. Two years ago there was one around 4pm on a work day. It happened to be raining that day and since my office is window-less I just assumed it was thunder.
Last week we had 5.4 on the Richter scale. I was sitting at my desk and it shook for 15-20 seconds. To be honest I wasn’t scared at all. It actually felt pretty cool. I’m told there’s nothing to worry about until things start falling off the walls, although most people use something called Quake wax to prevent that from happening.
Hopefully the Tax man won’t return for another ten years at least. As for now I feel proud that I’ve done my duty as a good citizen of California but for the record, as a native Atlantan I feared tornadoes much more than I do earthquakes. On average they do more damage and are much more frequent.
Bitter Much?
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under Amore & Vita
So I’m sitting at my desk on the computer since…well, that’s what I do. I’m a Sys Admin. About every six months or so I get into “I wonder what happened to…” mode. I try to find somebody I went to school/played sports/hung out/was involved/worked with. Apparently my friends are all part of some conspiracy against technology. In all this time I have managed to find exactly ONE person I went to high school with…also named Steve. He’s an on-air radio personality in Atlanta.
Anyway, a few months ago I looked up a girl I knew from an AOL chatroom about 12 years ago. She’s on Myspace like everyone else on the planet except people I went to school with. She was from Northern California but going to school in Nevada at the time. We chatted online and talked on the phone once in a while. She ended up moving to Atlanta for a summer job and I guess she thought there was more to our friendship than there was. While she was here we went out onnce and spent the night together. We talked online after that but I never called her or pursued a relationship with her. One of the few “hit it and quit it” encounters I’ve had. It’s not my nature and I felt bad about it but there just wasn’t much we had in common really. This did not sit well with her apparently.
I sent her a message that was part ‘how are you’ and part apology…not that I truly needed to. I had never said anything to her that would’ve indicated I was interested in us becoming a “we”. She responded, said it bothered her for a good while and was glad I apologized. That was the end of that. I didn’t follow up with her. Then last month I sent a happy holidays type message via Myspace again. She never responded to that. Apparently despite my apology she’s still angry. For chrissakes how long are you gonna let something that happened 12 years ago bother you? Get the fuck over it. I know she’s had much worse happen to her than that. I would never let something eat at me that long. Somebody needs a therapist.
Most all relationships/encouters end on a bad note. Are you gonna beat yourself up over all of them? Dang! I’m just sayin…
Your Just Desserts
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under Amore & Vita
So, the other day a friend of Belle was expressing his extreme disastisfaction with his marriage. Apparently he feels his spouse is not meeting him halfway in making the relationship work. He expressed his disatisfaction by repeatedly using the phrase “I deserve…”. That got me to thinking about my life.
What about all the things I felt I deserved? What about you people out there in Blog Land? What if you could go back in time and get everything you truly deserved? Would you really want to? Think about it very seriously. I mean everything! You don’t get to pick and choose what, when and where.
Sure, maybe you deserved to be first string in high school instead of the coaches son. Maybe you lost out on a job because the other less-qualified person knew somebody with influence. Maybe you think someone isn’t treating you the way you feel you deserve to be treated.
Well, my friend…that coin has two sides. What about the bad things you deserved that didn’t happen to you. That time in 5th grade when you broke a window playing baseball and the kid next door got blamed for it. The time you cheated on your SO and got caught but they believed the lies you told them because they loved you and wanted to believe the best about you. Or the time you drove home from the bar completely shit-faced. You caused an accident that resulted in an innocent person being killed while your drunk ass escaped without a scratch. My parents bought me a car before my sister got one, despite the fact that she was three years older, in college and on her way to medical school (full scholarship, no less). Granted she got a new car instead of used but I still feel guilty about that 20′something years later.
I’m willing to bet that if each and every one of us goes back and does the math on our lives we’ll discover that the things we got away with outweigh the things we missed out on by a large margin. They say the key to happiness isn’t getting what you want…it’s wanting what you get. I’ll take the things I’ve got over the things I didn’t get any day of the week. We should thank God every single day that we haven’t gotten what we deserved. I sure do.
Love
Posted by Dubbayoo | Filed under Amore & Vita
To want to be with someone all the time is infatuation.
To have to be with someone all the time is obsession.
To feel you are with someone all the time whether you are or not is love.
