Dean's Blog

People are not like electricity or water, because those latter two things will take the easiest route to whatever it is they need to get to next. Water, for example, is quite lazy and will always go downhill rather than uphill, and electricity is always taking the easy road and simply burning your toast instead of nicely browning it, because the insulation of your toaster has prevented it from frying your brain to kill you instantly, it uses carcinogenics as a chemical weapon against you.

At any case, Humans have a philosophy of resistance. It begins at a young age. Babies resist digesting their milk by spewing it down the collar of your shirt. Toddlers prefer to have a stewing diaper at critical mass, rather than have a clean bottom. Kids resist bathing, cough syrup, and homework, teenagers resist responsibility and accountability, and finally once we get out of the larval stages of human development, it gets worse.

I’ve been helping a friend of mine for several years now with his Mobile Disc Jockey service, and of course this is the time of year for corporate Christmas parties. We try to be quite sensible about how we set up the equipment, as it is expensive, heavy, and full of many many little electricities. We try to keep things out of the way so that no one will trip, fall, bump, or otherwise gash themselves to death. We also make a clear path so that anyone can come up and request a song that they would like to hear. So, in the seven years that I have been involved with all this, how has it all turned out?

Sometimes I wonder how we even managed to invent the fork, without blowing ourselves to bits. Invariably, every event people approach the DJ booth to request a song, by pretending that they are Delta Force Operatives who also just happen to be missing one hemisphere of brain. It is somewhat horrifying to turn to the side and see some 80 year old gentleman crawling through the assorted cables, wires, and truss support system that makes up 1800 pounds of electronic equipment. They come in droves, tripping over everything that they can possibly touch in order to come talk to us, scraping their elbows, knees and other associated extremities in the process, all the while a clearly indicated and unobstructed access point exists. Of course, once they have managed to crawl through the trenches to get to us, I do point them out to the appropriate path that they should have taken, and refuse to speak to them until they use it.

Here is a quote from Richard Hammond, one of the hosts of my favourite television show of all time, Top Gear! (The real version shown on BBC in England, not the boring Americanized version)

“Now, this is really quite simple, ok? Understeer works like this: (moving a model of a Ford Focus) you drive down the road, turn the wheel, but the car goes straight on, crashes into a tree and you die. OVERsteer works like this: (moving a model of a BMW series 3) you drive down the same bit of road, turn the wheel, but the back of the car comes round like this (showing how the car does a 180), and you go off the road, crash into a tree and you die. Now, oversteer is best, because you don’t see the tree that kills you.”

That’s great! Anyhow, on to the part of my blog where I complain about something. As most Calgarians have probably come to realize by now, driving in Calgary is like driving in hell, only instead of endlessly burning to death but never dying from it, you’re stuck in endless construction zones sandwiched between a big SUV driven by some lipstick applying woman in pink, and a minivan that is being used as a house.

Then there is the invariable sign that says, left lane closed ahead. So, naturally I move over to the right lane, as to avoid the left lane, which is closed ahead. Did I mention it is closed ahead? I feel the need to repeatedly mention that the left lane is closed ahead because of the huge amount of morons who continue to drive in the left lane, right to the utmost final inch of space before they have to merge into the right lane of traffic which has been very happy until this lethargic latecomer from the left hand path came along. Not only that, but dozens of other morons have also piled up into the left lane, and now expect the ones who noticed that the lane was closed and had moved into the right lane, to now make room, so that they can merge in. As if we don’t know what you’re up to, flapping about like you should deserve to get ahead in traffic because you took the lane less travelled by. I’ll give them room near the sign that said left lane closed ahead, but if they are trying to merge after they had ample time and are now stuck at the barricade, then too bloody bad.

This morning I woke up naturally. Meaning, I just opened my eyes and looked around. I thought to myself, wow, what a great sleep. I feel fantastic. This is amazing, I feel rested, I feel relaxed, and I don’t feel stressed at all. I rolled over and looked at my clock, which said 6:30. Huh, that is really something, I feel fantastic, and it’s only 6:30. I could sleep for another hour. I rolled over the other way and adjusted my pillow. It was too good to be true. Then I noticed that it seemed to be a little bright out for 6:30 am. I slowly peered over my wife’s shoulder to get a peek at her clock, which brightly beamed 8:30.

Crap! I should have been on my way to work ten minutes ago. Thus comes the flying out of bed and rapid-fire morning preparations.

It always happens that way though. If I ever wake up on a weekday in the morning and feel good, I’ve slept in. It’s just a fact of life. If I wake up to the screeching and blaring of the alarm and feel like my head has been run over by a garbage truck, then everything is as it should be. My body has the ability to turn off blaring alarms though, without consulting the part of my brain that pays the bills, especially when it becomes used to where all the buttons are. So I think that my alarm did go off at 6:30, when it is set to go off the first time, followed by an hour of hitting the snooze button. My hand must have reached over and instead of hitting the snooze button, decided to hit the alarm set switch instead. This has happened many times in the past. In fact my last alarm clock had the snooze button and all other potential sleep-in inducing buttons removed.

Time for drastic measures, or I could stop being an idiot and go to sleep early, like I say I am going to do every night, but never accomplish.

It’s interesting, as I find myself somehow growing older I am finding myself more interested in things that I should have been paying more attention to in High School, such as the Law of Conservation and Entropy. Likewise I also find myself interested in Thermodynamics against the infinite Monkey Theorum, that a large group of monkeys and typewriters could, given a few eternities, produce all the books of the British Museum (or one immortal monkey).

It’s basically chaos verses order. Naturally, things want to break down into lighter and smaller particles until molecules release their bonds and all becomes unorganized matter. That’s the first and second laws of Thermodynamics (Conservation and Entropy). Matter isn’t created or destroyed, and it wants to become unorganized from an organized state. So, how did things become organized? The monkey theorum states that there is a 24 in 10 million million million million million million million million chance that a shuffled deck of cards will fall into an orgranized grouping. Pretty near impossible.

Likewise, the idea of walking along a beach and finding a fine watch. One would assume that someone dropped the watch, and that some factory produced it, not that the universe came together and happened to make a watch for you to find on the beach. Yet the monkey folks think that is the case, that once and awhile, there’s just a watch , or a car, or perhaps a skyscraper that just comes together out of chaotic unorganized matter. Seems pretty silly, but I have had my keys and money vanish without a trace. Some accelerated Entropy perhaps. Maybe that is what happened to the WMD’s in Iraq, and the reason there is nothing good on TV anymore.

As I was heading into work this morning I was recalling a few other things from my early days in Elementary school. Most of them from Grade One.

My teacher was always threatening us with death whenever he didn’t want us doing something. For Example, someone had their chin propped up in their hand, when he suddenly screams out: “Melita! Don’t do that! You’re going to push your teeth up into your brain and die!”

We had chairs and desks that were attached together, and the girl who barfed in my previous entry had tied the tassles of her shorts to the desk. She got yelled at for that because: “What if there was a fire? You couldn’t escape because you’ve tied yourself to your desk and would be burned alive!”

Other threats were uttered, like the all the kids who’ve had their legs and arms ripped off under the merry-go-round, and don’t touch the water fountain because you’ll get mononucleosis and die. Of course, the water in the fountain only came up about a quarter inch from the riser, forcing direct contact, and there was always some sweaty rotund fellow endlessly slurping away at the fountain at the front of the line.

Come to think of it, my grandparents were also threatening me with death. One grandma told me not to stick my arm out of the window, not because it would get cut off and I would die, but the even more convoluted reasoning that I would get an air bubble in my bloodstream, which would get into my brain and I would die. Grandpa was always saying that sugar was poison, and I shouldn’t eat anything my grandma baked.

When I was little I had a fear of being barfed on by other kids. Somehow I got into talking about this subject early this morning, and I’ve been thinking a little about it in my spare moments. When I was in grade 2, a girl came in late because she wasn’t feeling well. Her name was Tracy, and she sat right in front of me. Mrs. Preddy was reading a story aloud to us when of a sudden there was this horrible sound, like a yak being crushed to death. As I leaned to the side to look, I could see that there was this gigantic mound of chewed up orange segments on Tracy’s desk, solving the issue of why she wasn’t feeling that well that morning. It looked to be about half a case of Mandarin oranges to my 7 year-old eyes, maybe it was less, but it was however dripping quite tremendously all over the floor. I quickly grabbed my desk and backed it up to the back of the room, not wanting to get near the oozing steaming pile. Troy, who was nearby, horked up a bit of grey ooze that sort of looked like wet dryer lint at the sight of Tracy’s offloading. I feared it was to be a big barf-a-rama, but that was not the case.

Now I only really fear being barfed on by beings that could hold a substantial amount of barf ammunition. Sitting directly across from someone on the train or bus for example, or a crowded elevator, wondering if the sickly look on a person’s face is the result of over-indulging on oranges that morning. Knowing that a substantial bit of barf would soak me to the bone, or get into my eyes and ears or something equally disruptive is what I consider a valid cause for concern. I have actually been scouring around for a World War II style trenchcoat to wear.. to keep me dry.. from the elements (of surprise).

Personally I haven’t hurled up barf in about 15 years or so, which I think is pretty good. I’ve gagged a lot, mostly on vitamin pills that apparently are made with the molds for horse pills in order to save money. My cats (Bonk and Spider) throw up enough to compensate though, despite the anti-hairball treatment. Always a nice cold surpise on the bottom of your foot on a chilly morning. Whenever kids come along, I am sure that experience will be multiplied.

I’ve recently discovered a quote that I am sure the whole world has known about. I’m always the last to know. Anyways, I think it is pretty good, and here it is:

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

That is almost good enough to replace my all time favourite quote:

We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible, for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long with so little, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing.