There are not now, nor have there ever been any Harrison Butker cards here. A couple Nick Lowery cards, yes. Everybody has their own opinion. whatever. just keep it outta my face. I could talk a lot of shit as I am a real shit talking talker.
If that guy was the commencement speaker at my daughter's graduation, I'd request a refund.
I will say here & now, professional athletes are placed upon a platform from which they can advance causes and "do good" if they choose to. They're role models if they like it or not, no choice.
sitting in a sawed off lawn chair in the garage with the sun poking through. having a beer in a Wheel Fanatyk cup reminding me of Ric. take a photo, fluff it up with a filter and send it to Ric. then he puts it on a postcard and sends it back in the full set full circle round trip return circuit out and back dinger.
In the 80s my mom got Breakfast Club on VHS at the video store, probably more than once. I definitely watched it more than once. With a pen and paper in hand I paused the VCR and rewound it until I had this scene down. In a short while I had it memorized.
To this day you might find me reciting it, once in a while, here or there, when I’m reminded of it, talking to myself, soliloquizing, rolling around the U-district, or grinding up the hill to get home…
Stupid
Worthless
No good
Goddamn
Freeloading
Son of bitch
Retarded
Big mouth
Know it all
Asshole
Jerk
you forgot
Ugly
Lazy and
Disrespectful…
As a kid my grandma would sometimes bust out a poem she memorized in school. A poem she still had stored in her brain, word for word, 50 or 60 years later. She could recite Rudyard Kipling’s
If–
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
It’s a 4 stanza 32 line poem, and I know she had that first stanza down word for word.
I don’t have any classic poems memorized but I have John Bender’s dad scene memorized. Word for word.
for the past couple weeks I was seeing a glove in a doorway of Bagley Hall at 3790 Okanogan Lane Box #351700. Propped up by someone in hopes that its rightful owner would see it and take it home.
Then this week I saw another glove displayed in the Ocean Sciences Building at 1492 Boat Street Box #355355. lost but never found.
Yesterday I decided to grab the Bagley glove and chuck it in the electric ass bathtub. Then a few hours later I rescued the OSB glove. I put them together to take this photo and that's when I learned that one was right and one was left and I created a new pair of gloves. A mismatched chilly spring morning commute pair of gloves.
When you’re a bike messenger, a real bike messenger, not a jimmy john or an uber eats or a panda express… …when you’re a bike messenger there’s a part of your brain that grows to absorb street addresses, numbers, letters, directionals and subtle clues that make a big difference. It all gets whittled down to a shorthand lexicon lingo spoken by those in the know and it fits like a glove or maybe a tea cozy over a 3-D map of the city that exists only in your brain.
you know
I know
you know
Just as the brains of baristas burn new neural pathways to absorb all the nonfat decaf no foam extra hot 3 sweet-n-low vanilla fucking bullshit without blinking an eye, keeping a straight face.
Your messenger brain is trained to visualize, categorize, optimize, epitomize the traveling salesman problem. Working it out in real time and space on two wheels with a satchel over your shoulder cutting through traffic and parked cars and pedestrians and MID ambassadors as well as legal secretaries, security guards, mom & pops, broken elevators and bad dispatchers.
I believe that that there part of my brain was exercised enough as a real messenger so that here & now it continues to kick ass as an electric ass mailman. Which is perhaps one reason why I’m constantly dumbfounded by the stupid little shit my current coworkers cannot seem to wrap their heads around. If you see the same things, the same numbers, the same addresses 10, 20, 50 times a day for years and years, how can it not sink in??? How can you not remember that shit??? Didn’t we talk about the UW Police Station yesterday? And the day before? And last week? And the week before that? 3939 University is not 3939 15th Ave. 3910 15th Ave is not 3910 Montlake Ave. 3751 Stevens is not 3715 Stevens. 4060 Stevens Way is not Box 4060… …and 4000 15th Ave doesn’t mean shit… …and so on and so on and so on
At that big state university on the Montlake Cut, each department is assigned a Box Number. With the combination of street addresses and box #s there's an infinitely variable amount of ways to fuck it up. A sloppy slurry of numbers. Add ignorance and apathy to taste. Sprinkle with dyslexia and serve at room temperature Monday through Friday.
With all the good/evil that is google, they make it very easy to create documents and keep track of them. google.docs beats the shit out of Microsoft's offerings in the same category. google makes it very easy to generate word clouds and look back on things. to sum it up. retrospectively.
If I was technologically proficient I’d be sharing actual word clouds with you, not just screen shots of them. Then you could scroll over them with your cursor and the tally for each word would pop up as well as its percentage of the total word count.
I recently created seven word clouds from this site in the past six years or so. I saved a few of them here, because they’re all so similar, there's no need to save seven. As you know I’m repeatedly repeating the same old shit.
The words in the previous 12 years of this site are not so easy to clump together, to run the numbers. Perhaps I could refer back to the printed pages I have stored in large 3-ring binders from 2011, to tally word counts by hand with a pencil in a small spiral notebook. Or not. I’m pretty sure those 12 year’s word clouds would look a lot like these 6 year’s word clouds. Lather rinse repeat.
In all the clouds like & bike are near the center. Over the years there are fewer legal messengers and more electric asses. More postcards bro. More junior juniors. Todd Beamer comes and goes. Let’s Roll. And there is always plenty of coffee and beer as well as shit fuck fucking fucks. But I was happy to see there wasn’t much rain.
On the slow uphill grind that is my commute home I was rolling slowly up Cowlitz Road to the corner at Lincoln Way yesterday when a guy in a wheelchair approached the crosswalk. I gave him a little nod and when he knew I was going to wait for him, he rolled across Cowlitz, all the while saying “number nine, number nine, number nine” and I thought, whatever, just another U-district wack job. Until I realized he was a Beattles fan and only then did I understand that my new Justin Tucker shirt kicked off his Revolution 9 rant and perhaps he would proceed to repeat “number nine” 101 times over the next eight minutes and twenty-two seconds.
