scotch on the rocks

Glug glug.
Today, no two paragraphs are about the same thing. At least I had some time to write this weekend. Time that should’ve been spent mowing lawns or painting walls or doing laundry or any number of other things – but wasn’t. Tonight was Chivas Regal scotch on the rocks at a coworker’s place for dinner… four of those and the fingers are a little heavy and stubborn on the keyboard.

Got my bermudagrasss killer in the mail the other day, and I eagerly opened the package to find the pint taped securely shut across it’s lid. Anxious to put the stuff down on my weeds, I sat down to read the product label and advisories. Apparently this stuff is the most caustic poison on earth. You can read the warnings for yourself, but this is some evil stuff. When applying, you’re advised to wear long pants, a long sleeved shirt, and special gloves to avoid skin contact. You can’t breathe it or get it in contact with your skin, and God forbid you somehow get it in your eyes or ingest it. You’re supposed to triple-wash the container before recycling, and are advised not to burn it or spray it near irrigation or animals. When I placed the order online, I chose the full pint over a half, thinking that, if I did need to do several applications to get the job done, I didn’t want to run out. Turns out the stuff is so potent, that you use less than an ounce for 1000 square feet of turf – so my $60 pint is probably enough to treat an entire city.

I’m sorry Death Cab, I probably jumped the gun. The more I listen to your new album, the one I panned a last week, the more I realize that my downloaded copy is probably not the real deal. The quality isn’t stellar, and some of the songs sound half-done. If this is, indeed, the studio version and not some comp of demos or whatever, I’m cool with that too. It’s not 100% bad, but it’s not what I’ve looked forward to as a follow up to that album with the bird and string on the cover. It’s slow, and drippy, with only a couple peppy numbers to break the melancholy. Most times, I love the dreary indie-pop, dig the teary-eyed horned-rim stuff… but this stuff is kinda… bland, kinda… vanilla. I’ve got some hope that, when and if the proper album leaks, it’ll be a little more polished and a little more instrumented… but who knows.

I was sitting in church this Sunday, looking down at my folded hands as I often do during a prayer. That’s when I noticed a smallish raised bump on my finger – what I used to call my “writing bump.” A callous from holding my pen/pencil tight as I write, only now it’s merely a dwarfed miniature of what it once was. I just don’t write anymore. Thinking about it, I write so little, I can name the few instances when I do: signing something, such as a document at work ; writing the one check a month for that single remaining bill which I can’t setup for auto-debit; or taking quick notes during a meeting. All of this probably amounts to only a few hundred words per week. Using my hands to write has almost become a thing of the past. I type everything. Back in college, when I would fill both sides of a piece of notebook paper with the step-by-step operations of a laborious LaPlace transform – my writing bump was prominent, well-worn. Since college though, the actual times I hand-write something have dropped so sharply, I hardly have a bump at all.

Goodnight.


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