Bowling alone again on the Fourth of July.

Well'p another holiday has passed and again it has been an SFB first. First what? First no going to a fireworks display that's what the first is. I'm sure some of you don't go and that's nice really I applaud your lack of desire to go out and celebrate our countries independence you Commi pink bastards. I think I just called myself a Commi pink bastard but that's ok my excuse for not going to any of the festivities was that I wasn't feeling very festivous. Festivous non Funous. I had one of these wicked sore throats that probably started after my Chariots of Fire run I had last Wednesday. Unlike Chariots of Fire I was NOT running with a beautiful elongated of a gazelle but more of the stumble of a three legged dog. I was wearing a white shirt though... a white undershirt.... SEXY! I call it my Chariots of Fire run because I decided to try out a new route which takes me from my house down into a nearby park, along a bike path and then up to a major street that the path parallels. The run is only about four miles but is still no small potatoes for me as the most I generally run is three miles on a treadmill in a environmentally controlled gym. Besides running on a treadmill is nothing like actually running as the treadmill has a tendency to propel you forward while sadly the ground does not. So on Wednesday I start running and I get to the point where I was supposed to turn around however at that point I decided "I'll go a little bit further". Well a little bit further became a little bit further until I ran nearly four miles one way which isn't bad as I had met my four mile quota for the run sadly I had that return trip to do. My second super power if I was allowed to have one would be transportation, instant transportation to any location just by thinking it. The first super power? The ability to blow my farts into a soap like bubble and then gently push them towards unsuspecting people. Sooo.... Yeah.

It was on the return run that things turned nasty and not in the way in which you want someone to treat you nasty, nasty like God oh God I'm going to die and potentially shit myself Nasty. It all started when I noticed dark bluish black rain clouds were blowing in with streaks of lightning lining them like veins of electrical gold. They were across the freeway a little ways off so I figured I was good, but of course I figured wrong. Sheets of rain started coming down and after that hail the size of small BB's began falling on my head and if that wasn't enough the Ent's decided it was time to shed some unwanted pounds. Yar. At one point while running I had so much water flowing down my head and into my ears that the music playing from my earphones sounded like I was listening to music underwater. If that wasn't bad enough I thought I had maybe shat myself without realizing it. A not so well known fact about running marathons and other distances that most people consider only worth traveling unless they are burning some sort of fossil fuel is that marathon runners have been known to shit themselves during a race. Since my longest run was about four miles I figured my body under the stress of my Chariots of Fire run had crapped itself and that along with looking like a drowned rat in a soaking wet see through undershirt that I now had a stream of liquefied poo traveling down my leg. After repeated checks to my leg and visual checks to my junk I realized that in fact I was just smelling dog crap and that I was ok. Soo I figured maybe I caught a cold from that, but most likely it was a combination of that and inhaling too much lead infused paint dust due to the fact that my disposable mask has now been used some umpteenth times. Disposable. See I know it's disposable I am just unwilling to throw it away.

No fireworks for me then, no parade either but I had stopped doing the parade thing a few years earlier. Something about no floats, little league football/soccer/baseball championship teams riding on the backs of various convertibles, flat bed trucks full of high school alumnus and some marching bands that really just don't do it for me anymore. I do remember there being more floats by the different neighborhoods when I was growing up and maybe this is just another bit of proof supporting Robert Putnams theory that we as a society are becoming more and more isolated and maybe like everything else things seemed better when you are a child. There is some merit in the bowling alone theory from my own perspective, I don't belong to any civic associations or clubs I barely know the neighbors who live to either side of my house and while I see my parents it is by no means on a regular basis. How much of this is due to the fact that I am a programmer and how much of it is due to the proliferation of video games, Television, Tivo's, computers is unknown however I think the culprit above all these other things could very well be something much older. Air Conditioning probably started the isolation from one's community, sure it's great but the minute everyone got it people started closing their windows and sitting in hermetically sealed bubbles. I can't imagine living in Ohio without AC but I do think there was probably something to everyone having their windows open and sitting outside or going to the pools to avoid the heat. Then again I'm sure family vacations in the family truckster with no AC and no interstates is often nice to talk about if one never went through it.

Anyway no fireworks. We could have had people over but the state of our kitchen and the fact that our dishes technically homeless due to my last and final white whale home improvement project made it all seem that much less appealing and I was feeling sick . Work sucks I'm sure that everyone knows this by now but I just got one of my favorite things of ALL time happen to me. This person walked into my office today and was like "So we are already to go with XYZ?" No you bucket of monkey urine we are not ok. How hard is it to grasp the concept that YOU, YOU must create a ticket so that I know that there is something for me to do. This coworker just assumed that when they gave me print outs of the latest specs a month ago that in the language of retarded Gorillaz with two digits missing from each hand that it meant "Worky now these yes?" Fuckers. Deadline? ASAP. Shiiiiiiiit. I'm think I'm going to call off dead next week. The silver lining in all of this however is that deadlines mean almost nothing at Sprockets I will have more than sufficient time to get this stuff done but you know it's the lack of thought that counts.

While browsing the web the other day I found an interesting article on "The Straight Dope" about what would theoretically happen if you were casually thrown into the vacuum of outer space. Good stuff, I have no idea how trustworthy the contributor of "Straight Dope" Cecil Adams is, I mean I'm sure it mentions it somewhere on there what he does I just haven't gotten around to the whole reading of it because reading gets in the way of me doing other things like sleeping. I love sleeping... though I keep getting less and less of it. This morning I felt like someone had picked me up in the middle of the night carried me to the top of my roof and dropped me over and over again just to test if gravity was still working.