The Last Missive From CrySpace

[editor's/writer's note: The precursor of this little web-log once lived at an obscure little site called Myspace.com. I blogged there for a while, until I realized it's tools and reliability left a bit to be desired (ie: none). So I moved it here and posted links to what has become known as:

ThatDudeWithTheStuffThatHappens

I didn't mean to provoke anyone, simply to provide a venue for my handful of readers whom I love dearly and owe roughly $43 apiece. Time passed, and I noticed that the benevolent douchebags at CrySpace didn't take kindly to my dissing their site while promoting my own. What follows is my last transmission from that awful place. I closed the account soon after. I can now be found on Facebook and Twitter, and although those are not actively hijacking or censoring me, are already walking a thin line.]



I'm closing my CrySpace account. If you haven't noticed, this place is a dead scene.

It was lame/irritating enough as it was, but now the jack-booted minions of Rupert's are blocking links I post in my "blog". Paranoid much, FoxCorp?

I've opened a new blog at: that dude with the stuff that happens dot blogspot dot com, if you care to look. When I post links to it here, a snarky, oh-so-funny Hijack page comes up with this missive. Prepare yourself for hilarity:

"The link you are trying to visit has been disabled.

You have reached a link that is no longer in service. That means the link was very naughty, and, much like head lice, had to be eliminated before it spread.

You may be asking yourself, 'Hey, what was it about that link that got it in trouble?' An excellent question! Usually, it's one of the following reasons:

- The link was spam! No one likes spammers, and we don't like their links.

- You almost got phished! There are people out there who want to steal your MySpace password. They want to log in as you and send spam, harass your friends, change your profile, and generally run amok. Phishing pages are usually designed to look like MySpace to trick you. Other sites may also ask for your MySpace login information to customize your profile, insert videos or slide shows, track visitors, or any number of other things.Don't make it easy for them. ONLY USE YOUR MYSPACE LOGIN INFO ON WWW.MYSPACE.COM!!

- Viruses are not fun! Neither is adware, spyware, or malware. We cut the links to places that are known sources of infection.

If you really did want to check out some spam, viruses, or phishing pages, we're really sorry to have interrupted. We're sure you can find it elsewhere. There's plenty on the Internet "

Oh you witty bastards! You saw right through my fool-proof plan! Thwarted! Damn it all to hell! Closing my ability to express myself in a free manner outside the confines of your corporate paradise was bad enough, but comparing me to a head louse? Ouch, Myspace. That really hurts.

So... I'm gonna leave this Orwellian nightmare up for another week or so, in case some of my actual friends might not have another way of getting hold of me. Send me an email, and I'll give you your own set of keys to reach me away from this crap-wad. I'll shoot an email to those I think might wanna find me after I cash out from this fascist advertisement masquerading as a hip place for the kiddies to play.

I hate to say it, but I encourage everyone to throw themselves under the Facebook juggernaut. Just for spite.



Filthy Rich. And a Douchebag.

How To Get Telemarketers To Stop Calling.

Back in the days before home phones became known as "land lines" there were certain types of "irritants" who made their living as "telemarketers". Man, those were great days! 5-disc CD changers were the height of cutting edge. VHS still reigned supreme, giddy with the heady rush of its momentous besting of Beta. The INTERNET was yet an Al Gore wank fantasy.

Fuck blogs! In those days we had Journals! (or Diaries, if you were 12 and a girl) And who read those journals? NO ONE! Those were secret thoughts! We hoarded and kept hidden our inner-most inklings. Our deepest desires, too illicit and dangerous to elaborate were kept wedged firmly between mattress and box spring. Or futon and frame... No one is here to judge.

Our mundane comings and goings were just that: mundane. When I was sitting in the dentist's waiting room, that's ALL I DID. I couldn't tweet that shit because I was not a fucking bird. Facebook was just a face in a book.

So our "land lines" were the only thing keeping us tethered to the outside world. Got an emergency? Call 911! Psycho killer after you? He already cut the phone line! Run away!

Along with the convenience of a designated hard line to tie you in to the rest of society as a whole came the inconvenience of someone calling you at inopportune moments, usually begging for money. So Caller ID was invented. A part of me wonders how much cold calling could have been avoided if the subscription cost of Caller ID could have been passed off to phone beggars, just to keep them from getting hold of me. Just a thought.

Regardless. I found myself the owner of a phone bill. I'd get calls, usually in the evening, after business hours. You could usually tell the nature of the call from the lag between when you said "hello" to the callers response:

"..... [clack, pause, shuffle] Hello, may I speak to Mr. Sullivan?"

You got 'em pal. I'd listen politely, decline politely, and get on with my day as quickly as possible. This did not discourage their ilk.

Eventually, I couldn't take it.



I don't want a subscription. I can't donate. How did the local Socialist party HQ get my number? True story.

One evening, I fielded a call:

"Hello?"

"May I speak with... Mr... Sutherland?"

"Who is calling?"

I listened once again to the pitch. Drastic measures had to be taken:

Me: "[sighs heavily] Oooh. Yeah, see... here's the thing. Brandon died this past weekend in a car crash. I'm here taking care of his effects. I'm sure wherever he is now he doesn't need your service(s). No offense, you might want to take him off your list."

Sometimes I could actually hear the caller cringing on the other side of the line. Eventually I learned to relish that tiny sound.

What I Learned:

Tell enough people you're dead for a long enough time, and soon enough they start to believe it. I'm getting ready to deploy this technique on my stalker.

I didn't mention I have a stalker? Well, it's true. I'm being stalked. It's the strangest thing though, because all she wants to talk about is my student loans. Weird, huh?

Ode to Tank Top

From January a few years ago:

Ode to a Tank Top

Bless you, half yard of cotton
You should be cocooned in wintry slumber
Yet this unseasonable warmth
Has brought you forth
Dazed and blinking.

What prestidigitator revealed so much
While hiding so much more?
Copperfield has got nothing on you.

What tempest has stirred so violently
So much chaos in my pants?

Bless you, early springtime.
Bless you, spaghetti strap.
Bless you, pale and tender flesh.

A whisper of better things,
So many months ahead.

I have but to sit and wait
For your timely flowering
And savor this vision
Which will carry me through.

(originally published 10/19/2006)

Evaluating My Creepiness

First off: I need a roommate. Not right away, but May 1st shall see a new chapter in my living situation. If you know anyone who would like to live in a fairly large, no-frills apartment in JP, steer them my way. Oh, and it's the cheapest place in Boston, hands down.

My current roommate Adrienne is great. We get along quite well. She's an arts educator, and when we are able to hang out in the apartment together we have no shortage of conversation. But she's met someone, they've fallen in love, and are moving in together. I'm happy for them, but wish I didn't have to go through the stress and annoyance of finding a new person to share my place.

When I was interviewing Adrienne for the room, an interesting bit of conversation occurred. I informed her that I've never had a lease on the apartment, and that she wouldn't need to sign one, a bit of information which she was very enthusiastic about. Her enthusiasm raised red-flags for me and I asked her about it.

"Well," she explained, "It's good in case this doesn't work out, if we don't get along... if you're creepy..."

I assured her I was not, in fact, creepy. I try to be a decent guy, abide by the rules, all that. But it got me thinking.

What if I am creepy?



They say that people who have body-odor issues don't realize it, because they are around it all the time and can't distinguish their stink from fresh air. When I was a freshman in college a fellow dorm-dweller earned the unfortunate nickname Stinky Elvis, due to his BO and prodigious sideburns. I tried once to be friends with him, but he stank up my dorm room. He didn't realize he smelled bad.

I've known creepy people, too. Bad News Gary was one of the creepiest dudes I've ever met. He was the genesis for me leaving a job, he was that creepy. But I'm sure he had no clue about the fact that he made people's skin crawl. Even now, years later, I'm skeeved out by him. To Bad News Gary, though, each day was like any other. He left in his wake a sea of people with the sudden, strong urge to take a shower, and he had no clue.

So it stands to reason that I could be creepy. I could be a weirdo, and not even know it. That is scary as hell.

I've never had the urge to kill anyone and dress myself in their skin. My sexual piques and proclivities tend to be somewhat vanilla and definitely self-contained. I've never stalked anyone. (Does Twitter count?) So I think it's safe to say that no, I do not stink, and no, I am not creepy.

I am, however, paranoid about both.

Crappy Job III: With Soundtrack!

My first real job when I moved to Boston was at a one-hour photomat called Moto Photo. The thing that makes the job crappy was that I was paid probably about $6.25 per hour, but other than that, it was kind of an awesome gig. Plus, take it away, Def Leppard!



One of my main jobs was quality control/packaging. The process was fairly automated. Rolls of film were fed into a machine that spit out developed negatives. These were then put into a machine that exposed the negatives onto a giant roll of photographic paper. It was carried, through rolls and conveyors through development chemicals, and spat out at the other side of the machine into neatly cut 4x6 photographs. My job was to collect the piles of photos, look through the entire stack to make sure the colors and alignment were correct, then package the prints in envelopes with the negatives and file them into bins alphabetically for the clients.

On one hand, this experience warped my perceptions for all eternity: I cannot look through a stack of photographs the way a normal person can. I look at them in a rapid-fire manner, scrutinizing for color balance, exposure, etc. I take in what I'm seeing, although it doesn't look like it to the proud owner of the prints. More than once I've heard, "You're not even looking at them!"

But I am. I am.

Working in a place like this, you experience the joy and wonder and good times vicariously. I've been three steps removed from weddings, births, vacations, parties, reunions, sporting events, concerts, celebrity sightings, you name it. This was also the days before digital cameras. We had a number of repeat clients, people I saw several times a week. Insurance companies, galleries, Realtors all needed photographic documentation often. So I got to know some of our regulars. Every once in a while, one of them would have a couple frames left on a roll, and would snap off shots just to fill it out before dropping off. I've seen a number of wife-boobs due to these thrifty urges.

On the subject of naked people: I've seen A LOT of them. I did not ask for or seek out the exposure of nakedness. I simply punched a clock, and voila! Naked people. It's not so bad. I went to art school, after all. I've seen naked people. I've even drawn them.

On one day in particular, I was leafing through photos at my usual breakneck speed. I picked up a stack that looked a lot like a number I had seen before: The College Keg Party, known primarily for the proliferation of red keg cups, baseball caps, and chummy, arms-around-shoulders, cups-hoisted head shots. One girl in particular was featured in a majority of the shots. It became clear, in retrospect, that this girl owned the film at hand, and posed in most of the frames. These were run-of-the-mill pics, boring, really. Until the last few shots. These featured our young lady, pants down, leaning back on a bed with what can only be described as a Huge Apparatus inserted into her lady-bits, with a look on her face like the one that most people reserve for riding on an awesome roller coaster. If this photo could speak, it would say, "WOOOO HOOOO HOOOO!"

Somewhat amused, I nudged my friend Dan, "Hey, heh. Check it out."

Time passes. I'm packaging, Dan is working the counter. I hear a girl's voice, here to pick up #3497. Dan digs in the bin near me, retrieves an envelope, places it on the counter and takes the money. She asks, "Do you guys look at these pictures?" I say, without looking up, "Yeah, sometimes we pass 'em around," to look up and see that girl, aghast. She turns crimson, does an about-face, and bolts from the store.

Whoops! Sorry... She should have gone with a Polaroid.

Stay tuned for Part IIIa: "Way More Excessive Porno Than Even I Can Tolerate In The Work Place."

This Weeks Guest Blogger

[editors note: Nancie K is the Blog's first guest blogger. She is fairly awesome and maintains her own Blog on her adventures in her community garden. I highly recommend it if you like to garden, eat vegetables, or are the least bit interested in garden drama. -brandon]

I Got Peed On At Camp:



Some of my most vivid summer memories are from camp. It's sort of a thing in the Jewish community to send your kids off to summer camp where they can hang out with other kids, play, learn songs and learn some of the hows and whys of being Jewish. There's also the idea that it teaches independence, but probably more important than all of these is the chance for parents to get rid of their kids for 2, 4, 6 or 8 weeks and enjoy some child-free peace and quiet!

A lot of the fun of camp is the unfettered freedom. You're mostly being supervised by teenagers!

Here is a sampling of things I learned at camp:
1) How to swim and especially how to dive
2) How to play card games like "spit" as well as American, Chinese and Israeli jacks
3) How to play Newcomb and Volleyball
5) What a hickey was and how to give one
6) How to "moon"
7) What all the "bases" are and how to french kiss
8) That the girls in G-3 "did pot" although I think I learned what "pot" was much later on.
9) How to put someone in a "trance," how to hold a seance and how to use a ouija board.
10) bats like the rafters of rec rooms and sometimes like the very curly hair of counselors - ew!


In my youth, I went to a lot of different camps: day camps, sleep-away and even a teenaway camp when I was in junior high where we went someplace cool in the city every day.

Unfortunately some of my camp experiences were better than others and the very first camp I went to was a girl scout camp when I was seven. This is where I got peed on. It's really not that much of a story, but here's what happened:

A girl in my bunk wet her bed and her sleeping bag needed to be washed. While her sleeping bag was at the laundry she couldn't use it and for some reason they couldn't get her stuff washed before we all had to go to sleep that night. My counselor had the brilliant idea that we should just stick her in my sleeping bag with me and she'd get her bedding back the next day and all would be ok. Well, this kid was a bedwetter and so, she wet the bed, but this time it was MY bed. I don't really remember much of what happened next, but I have some vague recollection of them maybe sticking me in her sleeping bag the next night while mine was being laundered. It seems far fetched so maybe it didn't happen that way, but I think these girl scouts were that stupid and it really may have.

I stopped going to that camp. It was lame and there were no boys either!


Links:
Jewishsummercamp.com
Newcomb Ball

My Brush With Fame

Bored at work, I started cataloging all of my brushes with famous people. I asked around, and nobody had any interesting experiences, except for the boss. He went to a concert with Boz Scaggs' younger brother. How cool is that? Not really, I know.



My earliest memory of a brush with fame was shaking hands with Sugar Ray Leonard at a boxing match at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. I still think it's kinda neat, even though at the time, I really didn't understand who he was.



Along the boxing vein, a later brush with "fame" was when "Hurricane" Peter McNeely asked me for directions on Newbury Street once. He had recently got his ass whooped by Mike Tyson, and I was more than a little amused to have a run-in with him.



Also, at the same job, Curtis Armstrong came in to the store and bought a vest. Don't know who Curtis is? He's more commonly known for the tagline "We've got bush!" in Revenge of the Nerds. That's right. Booger. Or Charles DeMar from Better Off Dead: "This entire mountain is made of snow!"



A couple doors down from that job was another job at a cafe where I had the following brushes with fame:
Greg Hawkes was a regular, and a pretty nice guy. Don't know who he was? Me neither, at the time. He was the keyboard player for The Cars.



I served coffee to Joe Perry at one point. He seemed a little freaked out to be among the commoners. It was too quick an exchange to get any sense of Joe's coolness. Also, once at the airport I saw the bass player for Aerosmith.



Recently I came within feet of the tiniest Dixie Chick. They had pretty tight security. I found out that one of the Dixie Chicks owns a monkey that she takes on tour with her. It's true.



Also, through the same friend, I got into the green room of E-40 and his posse. Don't know who 40 is? Stay there. He's a hardly marginally talented rapper. And he's a DICK. And so are his hangers-on.



The brush that I'm kind of ashamed with took place in Denver, when I ran into Charles Lewton-Brain.



He's a jeweler and sculptor who writes little books on techniques, tricks, and shortcuts. A big writer/teacher, he writes great articles about steamlining one's workspace, and lo-fi techniques. I've been an avid reader of his books and articles, and really respected his knowledge. I ran into him at a conference and was rendered nearly speechless. It was pathetic.

My coolest brushes took place over a weekend recently. I found myself having breakfast in the same room as Mean Gene Okerlund. Fucking badass.



I'm way over it now, but I was a fan of WWF as a wee kid, and Mean Gene was the voice of it. Also, on that same day, I got within two feet of Hulk Hogan. The Hulkster. If seeing Gene was a big deal, Hogan was like walking by Elvis. I also saw a bunch of superstars of the modern fake-pro-wrestling, but don't give a crap about it, so I didn't recognize any of them, aside to say that it was filled with Huge Dudes, and Smokin hot chicks.



Also, living in Boston affords some odd perks: I sat on the orange line opposite former presidential candidate Mike Dukakkis once.


(*no caption necessary)

Walking with Pollard in Kenmore Square, he claimed that we had just walked past Frank Black, but I wasn't paying attention, so I can't confirm that one.

Anyone else?

(originally published 11/10/2006)