Rex L. Camino's Blog of Doom

from rex's unpublished memoirs: october 30, 1982

2007-10-30T07:57:00.000-06:00

My feeld trip to shilow

One day Miss Harvey came in and sed gess what class and we said what and she sed were goin on a feeld trip. We all said hooray! and then we sed wher. She sed were goin to shilow where they fot a battul in the sivul war and I sed that’s weerd because my uncle sed thats wher they fot a battul in linkons illegul war of northurn agreshun and sally huchinson sed that must be a scary place then if they fot 2 wars ther and I dont want to go but Miss harvey sed it was only the one war and that my uncle just had a different name for it and I sed my uncle has different names for everything like his x wife and the joos and his hous was called a compownd and it had rebel flags all over it so maybe he fot in one of thos wars. I asked miss Harvey if she wanted him to com with us and tell us how it reely was and she said no reel fast. So then the next week we went to shilow on the bus and wen we got ther ther was peeple wering sivul war costumes and walkin arownd with guns and horses and beerds. Miss Harvey told us to talk to the peeple and we said hello who are you. This man in a raggity uniform and no shues sed im a confederet soldyer and this is the tipicul uniform of my rejimint. Ther was another man in a blue uniform and he sed im a yankey and I fot for the unyon and we sed wats that and he sed america and we sed were from america too and jimmy white kicked the man in the raggity uniform and we sed USA USA! until miss Harvey made us stop. Then we saw this man with a cart and he sed im a sutler and I sold stuf to soldyers and we sed that man needs shues but hes fiting america so don’t give him any. Then we saw a black famuly and mikey burton sed are yall spose to be slaves and they sed no were on vacashun you rednek basturds and then they walkd away. Then we saw another soldyer in a ragity uniform but he lookt funny becaws he it lookt like he had 2 softbals or oranjes in his pants and we laffed and sed whats that. He sed he had a funnyreel dizees and we sed like the chiken poks and he sed no. he sed funnyreel dizeesus wer rampunt in the sivul war and many of the soldyers cot funnyreel dizeesus like sillyfuss from a horse and sally huchinson sed oh no I have a horse and the soldyer with the funny pants sed no I sed hors like they cot it from a hor and I sed oh no thats what my uncle calls his x wife and then Miss Harvey sed yall get away from him hes not part of the ture.

perhaps the marketing equivalent of "hoof and mouth" isn't far behind

2007-08-06T17:12:00.001-05:00

I was leaving the confines of Casa Camino this afternoon at the crack of three-thirty when I, after gasping a string of curse words directed at the general state of sauna-ness in front of impressionable though slow-witted neighbor children, noticed a local restaurant advertisement on the ground that had just seconds ago been nestling peacefully between the knob and door frame. You may have also noticed the door-to-door salesman population on the rise once again. A general crackdown on telemarketing has brought a replenishing to their near-extinct herds and driven them out from behind their telephones, though we sadly see so few of their carcasses littered along the roadsides.

Then again, I suppose the poor bastard who has to slip these things around neighborhood doors is merely a newly hired peon at the establishment and therefore a different and more forgivable beast than the one who wishes to have me answer a series of questions or demonstrate a brand of detergent. Those kids probably have plans in life and will go on to someday either meet or fall short of those goals. Either way, they will likely go on to something higher than being a full grown man trying to sell things door to door.

I say that with some confidence because I safely assume that they will maintain a shred of dignity.

There were always telemarketing and door to door type gigs available when I was working through various temp agencies, and temp agents used these sort of jobs to gauge the desperation of potential employees.

"Are you willing to do any kind of work?", they would ask as the interview drew to a close.

"Anything", answered the obviously desperate bastard on the other side of the table with the useless English degree and apartment full of hungry and increasingly more desperate housepets and wife gathered teary-eyed on a tattered photograph in the forefront of his feeble and easily distracted mind. They were accompanied by sad depression-era violin music, and their eyes upon closer inspection were cartoonishly larger than normal. They blinked them quite a bit and always in unison as they directed them through the front window of the local butcher shop while huddling in the cold and driving snow, which was rather odd because 1) the young wife in question was vegetarian at the time, and 2) it was the middle of Summer. It made very little sense and served to only add to the overwhelming evidence that this poor bastard had indeed spent too much time in front of the television as a young lad back in...

"How about telemarketing?"

It would have been a startling question even if he had been paying attention and knew immediately the context and why exactly he was wearing dress shirt and tie in the middle of Summer across the desk from a guy whose name plate he couldn't read for the stack of papers piled haphazardly in front of it.

"What are you doing with those?"

This was an easier question. "Just straightening your desk a bit, Larry. You must be a busy man."

"So, have you ever done any telemarketing?"

Our poor bastard sweating through the dress shirt suddenly thought he knew how people who wind up doing pornographic films feel. He did a quick dignity check and found it to be small and disoriented, though fully capable of gnawing at his gut.

"No", he answered. He then followed it up with the tasteful and marketable way of saying, essentially, "Let's place that somewhere beneath Crack Whore or Assistant Meth Lab Technician on my list of acceptable positions."

Anyway, I folded and rewedged the advertisement and then went about my bid'ness with every intention of bringing it in to the recycling bin upon my return this afternoon. Imagine my surprise when I returned a couple of hours later to find it gone and replaced by a completely different advertisement and one that was in no sort of competition to the one that had nestled there previously. It was for water filtration or something along those lines, an the evidence showed that the clean water bastard had taken the advertisement left by the local restaurant bastard before replacing it with his own.

I gather from this that the herd has grown so large as to turn to cannibalism.

a most unfortunate interview

2007-07-26T09:06:00.001-05:00

The worst job interview I've had--and I'm a bit reluctant to place this crown on any interview for a job that I didn't get, as so many of the successful job interviews led to months of soul crushingly mundane employment and could therefore be argued to be worse by the nature of their success, though such a precedent would move this post from the merely anecdotal and into something a bit too philosophical for this hour of the morning--occured shortly after my graduating college and wasn't even for a "career" sort of job. English majors rarely have those interviews anyway. No, this was just a simple bookstore job involving little more that stocking shelves and the typical customer service activities. It was something to pay the bills while I tried to talk myself into a grad school program that never materialized. It was not unlike any of the other jobs I had worked while in college and I entered the interview seemingly calm and relaxed. I was trying to give that impression anyway, but an unusually warm January day had rendered my thick turtleneck sweater a poor wardrobe choice that left me baking and sizzling under the cafe atrium skylight like so many of the ants I tortured with magnifying glass as a young child and then again as an older child and young adult.

Ants are bastards.

One of the women across the table, perhaps after seeing me mop my brow with a napkin, offered me water that I declined under the rationale that a candidate refusing water might appear more employable than one swilling free water like there's no tomorrow, as if these two nice older women, one looking oddly like a taller version of my high school guidance counselor the other a dead ringer for a shorter version of the same woman, watching me sweat from three short feet away were in the market for a camel. It didn't make any sense, I know, but I would be that camel just in case.

Irregular sleep patterns, a bit too much drinking, and any number of similar shenanigans associated with the final days of one's college career had perhaps taxed the physique a bit too much to pull of a good impression beneath sheets of sweat, but I did a damn fine job of it for the first half of the interrogation. I leaned back casually in the chair with my legs crossed and a lazy half smile pleasantly stretched across my reddening face. I glided through a seemingly informal discussion of college and previous employment. I threw out anecdotes and asides like a regular Regis Philbin, doing so with such ease that not even I could remember which ones, if any, were true.

Then came the stumbling block that derailed my bookstore career and ended the interview in fearful looks from my tall and short counselors that I would see again and again from across the room every time I visited the store afterward.

My future was a bit harder to make up than my past. I threw out the possibility of going after a MFA in creative writing, which was partially true, and then took it a bit too far by mentioning that I was writing a novel.

"Oh really," the short one said, "What's it about?"

It was a reasonable question and one that I should have anticipated, but didn't. One should always have at least a vague outline in mind before lying about writing a novel. That's just common sense.

Emergency sirens went off in my head. The ~~lying~~ creative section had nothing at the ready, and all the other bits rushed to cover for this inadequacy.

Would I go with an Evelyn Waugh-esque comedy in which a number of tragedies befall some poor bastard, a dark and brooding war novel, historical fiction, some outlandish bit of sci-fi?

Each of these were dispatched from various parts of my cranium, and I unfortunately went with each simultaneously as the interview spiralled to a dark and unfortunate place. In my defense, the interviewing ladies could have ended the line of questioning early on when things less than promising and not insisted on dragging it out. When enough lies to constitute a sizable avalanche have been piled upon one another the decent thing to do is let it go, especially when it is in no way germane to the position being filled.

That's another bit of common sense.

So, as you can see, mistakes were made on both sides, though I certainly bore the worst of it there on my end of the table having just described a novel about hapless used car salesman who, after stumbling across a time travelling AMC Pacer, winds up, on the other side of a series of even more outlandish plot twists that my mind has kindly blocked in time, meeting his rather vivid, ghastly, and altogether senseless end alongside a lovable robot sidekick on the battlefield of Chickamauga.

I wish I was making this up.

After a moment of awkward silence the shorter and obviously more vocal of the two plunged the knife a bit further by asking, still with a look of fear across her face, "What does it all mean?"

Another reasonable question, I suppose. I've never liked those.

"Oh...you know," I stammered, "It's just meant to be light Summer reading. Nothing too heavy."

And that was that.

a cat question

2007-07-21T07:50:00.000-05:00

For some reason I awoke thinking about that odd and seemingly cruel tendency in cats to render their prey nearly dead--deliver all but the final "death blow", as it were--and then step back a couple of feet to leisurely crouch in cold observation of the slow and agonizing final moments in the insignificant life of some mouse, rabbit, or Shetland pony. My own cat is far too obese and skittish to have ever engaged in such activity, but I'm sure its one of the things lies dreaming about just before I sneak up behind him with the vacuum cleaner or a crudely fashioned can of rocks. Anyway, the whole thing seems against the streamlined nature of wild kingdom and served to implant a number of questions into my feeble and still-awakening brainmeat.

For instance, what would be the evolutionary benefit of such a thing? Was there a point on the evolutionary of timeline mice where they briefly had the ability to explode upon death? Could it be a savory revenge for any number of agonizing Tom and Jerry-like antics that elude human observation? Is the cat kindly giving the mouse time to make peace with its Jesus?

Just wondering.

lost episodes

2007-07-16T08:33:00.000-05:00

One thing I like to do to exercise the ol' brainmeat while driving around or engaging in otherwise mind-numbing activities during a rare sojourn from Casa Camino is pretend, just for shits and giggles of course, that I fell off the face of the Earth. Perhaps I was kidnapped and sold into white slavery or abducted by aliens or drove off an embankment and and wedged myself into a ditch to lie injured and subsist on rainwater and insects and wait on the worst. These and other cheerful contemplations aren't important really--the thing I focus on is this: Were I to go missing, the cops would understandably be interested in the last few Internet pages I visited. And, as I seldom Google search things like "How to get kidnapped and sold into white slavery" or "How to drive yourself off an embankment in such a manner as to live but be injured just enough to have to eat insects and drink rainwater and all that business", the police would have a bit more deducing to do.

For instance, just the other day I was driving around after having done some Wikipedia research on Vladimir Lenin that lead to the typical Wikipedia branching into other Communist leaders and whatnot.

"Ah", a reasonable detective assigned to my case would surmise, "This man has obviously chosen to become a Communist Revolutionary and is now living underground and planning to overthrow the government." He might then say something about the case being closed and proceed to light a cigar only to be told by Mrs. Camino that he can't smoke inside, but in his mind the frame is frozen and the credits have begun to roll. I might show up in a later episode to rob a bank in a bright red shirt with an Uzi and maybe a scarf and band of hippie ne'er-do-wells, but substantial advancements have been made in this particular plot line. Whether or not I turned into a recurring character would be based solely on ratings and is really out of my control at this point. If not, I would of course place the blame squarely on the script writer, as I can only do so much with the material I'm given.

What was I talking about?

Ah, yes. What the detective would be missing--and it's certainly no blight on his sub-Miss Marple reasoning--would be this: I was merely researching infamous bald men in history.

By the way, I noticed very few bald Communist dictators. They are, for the most part, rather soft and pudgy but with healthy heads of hair. Look no further than Stalin, Hugo Chavez, or any number of college professors to see that they greatly outnumber the Lenins and Maos. Perhaps the bald get things started, revolutionarily speaking, and the thick haired sidekicks then take over. Then again, Karl Marx was more a walking fern than a man, though I suppose he never overthrew any governing bodies. No, Marx was all talk. So, yes, I suppose we can safely assume that your finely quaffed Commie would be content to sit back and let the more follically lacking of their revolutionary brethren do the hard part.

You bald commie revolutionary types should really have more pride about you.

Anyway, the detective might not catch a pattern with Benito Mousilini and Dr. Phil preceeding my Wiki-branching into Communism.

Which I suppose would matter very little other than to serve as a bit of brain exercises for the ol' imagination as I dine on the slower crickets who come to investigate my wrecked and obscured vehicle.

though i plan to pass it off as an old "football injury" acting up again...

2007-07-13T15:27:00.000-05:00

I think I dislocated my shoulder while trying valiantly to shave my back.

if you see my little rex l. camino please drive him home

2007-03-13T17:18:00.000-06:00

Folks, I don't know where he is. I'd like to think that he's sauntering down a sidewalk somewhere in a cheap suit, muttering to himself, taking shots from a nearly empty bottle of NyQuil, dragging a bull fiddle behind him, and perhaps only stopping to wave the shaft of a broken martini glass at any fellow pedestrians who have the misfortune of passing while on cell phones, but all I know for certain is that he just left abruptly and without notice. I have rummaged through his desk and found it to be a tossed salad of Cd's, guitar picks, private detective paperbacks from the thirties through the fifties, unpaid bills, airplane bottles of gin, signed photographs of Emmanuel Lewis in which "Emmanuel" is frequently misspelled or even signed as Gary Coleman, and scraps of paper with things like "Oh what a tangled web we weave when we get really drunk and try to crochet ourselves a sweater" written on them, but it is in no way a clue to where he might be or why he is there. However, there is still some investigating to be done. It took quite some time of running through the most obscene words one could conjure before I found the password to the humble blog o' doom.

Your concern for him is ~~misguided~~ kind, and you can rest assured that I will pass along any info I encounter.

Yours,

Captain Howdy (or the "italicized bastard", if you prefer)

i hate to see that mornin' sun coming 'round

2007-02-07T06:23:00.000-06:00

There is, dear reader, but few sights more disheartening than that of dawn cracking through the window and blinds to cast pale blue stripes across an unfortunate insomniac in the place where he has lain wishing for the first time in his life that he was a Muslim woman of the strictest sects so that he may seek out a homeless person of comparable height and weight, place his burka firmly upon him, direct him to his place of business and very desk with strict orders to appear in a state of working or at least shuffle papers about without a too great a zeal or enthusiasm upon the promise of the finest bottle of hooch money can buy, and then return to the sweet slumber that had just begun to take hold of the ol' eyelids at the very moment the tiny blaring thing with the dancing red numbers began its shrill laughter and that aforementioned sun poked its head over the horizon with all the tact, consideration, and tastefulness of a Tony Danza.

That, sweet peruser of this humble blog o' doom, is the very flavor of morning I find myself savoring just now.

as this confessed manning hater sits stewing in the tragic absence of shadenfreuden, one superbowl question still lingers...

2007-02-04T21:42:00.000-06:00

Was Phil Simms born without eyebrows or did he merely lose them at some point?

rock me, dr. zaius

2007-02-04T01:24:00.000-06:00

It's half past one in the morning and the original Planet of the Apes is on the History Channel.

Am I to take from this that they have exhausted the realm of historical programming and are now focusing on the future?

a brief note to any unemployed bloggers or people who simply stumble onto the humble blog o' doom and just so happen to be in a state of unworkingness

2007-01-22T17:16:00.000-06:00

The place where I ~~work~~ feign the appearance of working is currently hiring for a couple of big projects that begin in mid February. The only thing one needs to qualify is:

1. A four year college degree. It can be in basket weaving, and I'm living proof that one needn't have accomplished it within four years.

2. That's pretty much it. I would say that you also need a pulse but that has been disproved.

3. No, that doesn't mean that I created a workforce of zombies. I wish. Zombies follow orders.

You also have to go through an interview and write an essay, but this consists of little more than making sure you can read, write, and appear semi-sane when clients are in the building. Also, there is a slight chance that you may have the misfortune of working directly under my supervision. Pray that this does not come to fruition. However, if so, it is probably best that you know of some special additions to the company rules that I demand of my workers:

1. I am only to be awakened in an emergency. An "emergency" consists of A) my boss has entering the room, B) the room happening to be on fire or in some other state that endangers my mortal, yet soundly slumbering flesh, or C) me sleeping through my lunchbreak again. You, however, will not be allowed to sleep. This rare, yet all too believable narcolepsy-like affliction of mine is my story, and it took me quite some time to craft it and forge the doctor's note.

2. You don't actually smell alcohol on my breath. That's just a side effect of the medicine I have to take for whatever it is that I said I had.

Anyway, it won't be the best job you've ever had, but you've undoubtedly had worse.

I should also mention that I am in lower middle management and therefore have no say in the hiring process and that my employers either have no knowledge of "Rex L. Camino" or there exists an unspoken agreement to pretend that they have no knowledge of him. I can't remember which it is, but it works best for all involved.

Feel free to email me at rlcamino at copper dot net if interested.

Also, I don't know if I'm going to capitulate to this new blogger business or find somewhere else to go. Late January to March is my busy time of the year and I've far less time to be around the computer anyway, so I haven't given the matter much thought. We'll see. Perhaps I'll capitulate for a while.

in which the blog o' doom takes another step toward become nothing more than my online dream journal

2007-01-19T06:52:00.000-06:00

Last night I dreamt that I was driving down a relatively empty stretch of Murfreesboro Road just south of Smyrna on a sweltering mid-August afternoon when I happened upon the fruit and vegetable stand of one Mr. Billy D. Williams. I had no choice but to pull over, as buying fresh tomatoes from Billy D. Williams is a chance a person only gets once, maybe twice in a lifetime.

He was leaning back in his folding chair and wearing sunglasses, a Mexican straw hat and his full Lando Calrissian outfit. I paid for the tomatoes and had been standing there shooting the shit with him for a few minutes when he suddenly looked over my shoulder and said, "Damn".

I didn't use an exclamation point because he was Billy D. Williams and he said it in a smooth kind of way, though I could still tell that a sense of urgency was implied.

So it was that I turned to see a small armadillo in a copper-colored robot costume bounding over the hill on his little armadillo legs.

"You better run, man", Billy D. told me.

"What do you do when he shows up, Billy D. Williams?" I asked.

"He doesn't just show up. I think he's after you."

That's when I began my leisurely jog in the opposite direction of the slowly charging armadillo in the copper-colored robot outfit. I don't know if armadillos are that slow in real life or if I was benefiting from super fast, yet leisurely jogging powers in my dream, but there was plenty of time to stop and have a bite of raw tomato and think things out while the armadillo pursued at his slow, yet determined pace. I asked myself:

1. What the hell did I do to this armadillo?
2. Does he think he's really fooling anyone with the robot outfit?
3. Why didn't I just get in my car and drive away?
4. Is Billy D. Williams stealing my car right now?
5. Is this some elaborate car jacking ploy put on by Billy D. Williams and a highly trained armadillo in a robot costume?

I remembered Lando's betrayal of Han and assumed the last of these to be sadly true.

However, in all fairness to Mr. Billy D. Williams, I awoke before it could be proven.

i dream of a breakfast supreme

2007-01-17T07:40:00.000-06:00

Last night I dreamt that I found John Coltrane sitting on my front porch, which was rather odd because:

1. John Coltrane has been dead for nearly forty years.

2. I don't have a front porch.

Still, he was sitting there chainsmoking and looking out across my yard at nothing in particular and saying very little. In fact, the only thing he said was that he wanted to go get some breakfast but didn't have any shoes. So it was that I gave him my nicest pair of black leather shoes and we embarked on a five mile trek to the I.H.O.P., even though I had a perfectly good vehicle sitting in the driveway. Trane didn't say so, but I could tell he wanted to walk.

He didn't say much over breakfast either. He just sat there smoking between plates of bacon, sausage, and eggs. In fact, I had to do his ordering for him and somehow just took him as the sort of chap to show little regard for cholesterol and such.

I ordered myself waffles and a slice of key lime pie and then spread the pie over the waffles. I offered some to Trane, but he shook his head after taking a moment to stare at them and give the matter some serious thought.

I picked up the check when we were done. Trane rummaged through his overcoat and found some wadded dollar bills to leave as a tip. He then patted me on the back and said, "Thanks. Now wake up."

So I did.

little rabbits have big ears

2007-01-16T09:03:00.000-06:00

One of the things that always troubled me about being around babies was the question of whether or not swearing was permissible. I mean, I always try to watch my language around people’s offspring when they are large enough to speak and follow me around or just sit there and look at me, but babies, as they are less conversational, seemed a gray area.

Then all my friends began having babies and expected me to come and look at their babies. I didn’t want to ask about using foul language since they were always so quick to turn down my request to smoke around the runt, but the tension that came from trying not to scar the fragile offspring quickly made these “baby introductions” the most nerve-racking of social endeavors. Then one of my friends used the word “shit” around their baby, and it was as if a burden fell from soul. I believe in my enthusiasm I uttered something along the lines of, “That’s the most fucking goddamn beautiful bastard of a baby I’ve ever seen.”

I didn’t mean the word “bastard” in its traditional sense. I had actually forgotten that the word was intended to identify a certain type of offspring, and the gist of my compliment sadly did not come through.

Also, I think that the baby in question may have actually been a bastard.

I think my apprehension stems from one of my best friends back in middle and high schools. He had a little brother who was prone to follow us about, and any time a questionable subject was broached his mother would quickly jump in with “Little rabbits have big ears.” We would then wait for her to leave before teaching him all the foul language that our young minds had accumulated up until that point.

Anyway, I was thinking of this yesterday when I let Carl Weathers out to do his business in the back yard. It was cold and raining, and Carl took his sweet time before getting to the business at hand. He then decided to meander through every muddy patch on the way back. I stepped onto the porch and angrily prompted his return by yelling, “Get back here this instant, you fuckingly damnable bastard of a fucking dog!”

He knows this as the command to return at once, but it struck me that this particular command cannot be used if children are present when Carl has one of his days where sauntering about in the mud seems on his personal agenda. This is especially true if I happen to be wearing my clown suit. I suppose I could, but it has been my experience that children who grow up around constant streams of foul language from their adult figures turn out to be either white trash or angry hippies.

It has also been my experience that the world has a sufficient amount white trash and angry hippies as it is.

man shot in argument over james brown's height

2007-01-09T15:42:00.000-06:00

You can read this breaking news from my beloved home state via Mobile's Press-Register .

By the way, the "Hardest Working Godfather of Al Sharpton", if the deranged-looking stalker on this site is to be believed, stood a mere five foot six.

now is the winter of my content

2007-01-08T09:02:00.000-06:00

Folks, you won't hear me complaining about our unseasonably warm winter. I don't know if we indeed have global warming to thank for it, but our recent spring-like temperatures have done little to dissuade me from my SUV, my styrofoam pants, leaving the Christmas lights up year round, ignoring anything Leonardo DiCaprio says when he's not playing someone infinitely more interesting than Leonardo DiCaprio, or simply coating myself in motor oil when I want to feel special. In fact, I've been weighing the pros and cons of global warming and I've come up with the following. The benefits would be:

1. No more winter.

2. No more Florida.

3. Eskimos can grow corn.

I haven't really found any cons other than:

1. The extended summer might require one to shave his or her back more often.

2. There might be killer bees or something along the lines of a B-movie plague. I'd personally like to see flying armadillos.

Then there are the scenarios in which global warming actual cases a global cooling and a decrease in temperatures. I'm always unable to follow the science in these discussions, as I failed the majority of science classes taken in college and talk of science often leaves my thoughts too heavy and my brain confused, but I imagine some of the cons of a global cooling to be:

1. I can safely assume from the description that it will be cold, and that is exactly the opposite of the goal we had with global warming.

2. Eskimos, perhaps emboldened by the extended range of their beloved cold, will begin sneaking over the Canadian border to take the jobs that Americans won't do.

Anyway, it's just something to think about.

five true tales of rex

2007-01-05T08:47:00.000-06:00

There is no other option than to oblige when one is kindly tagged by Miss Brittney. These are supposed to be five things you don't know about me, but I can't be expected to recall everything I've said here before, so some of these may very well be repeats. Anyway, I suppose it doesn't matter that much so long as I tell the lie the same way twice.

1. I was briefly related to Jerry Lee Lewis during the marriage of my cousin to his sister, Linda Gail Lewis. I was too young to remember it, but Jerry Lee actually attended a family function back in the late seventies and promptly proceeded to liven up the gathering with the assistance of his trusty flask. He was, by all accounts, the biggest asshole anyone had ever met. However, that's how you knew it was really Jerry Lee.

2. I made it all the way through college without once ever using a computer. It was the mid nineties and your average technophobe was still able to write papers using only a typewriter, scribbled notes, a pot of coffee, and a pack of smokes. It wasn't until I married Mrs. Camino a year after graduating in 1998 that I got into this whole computer and Internet bid'ness. You can therefore blame her.

3. I was a sort of child prodigy when it came to doodling. I probably started drawing before I could talk and would often spend hours scribbling away. I never really transferred this into anything occupationally beneficial, aside from the occasional freelance graphic design gig, but I'm still known for doodling away in meetings and such. This often irritates others, as it gives the appearance of an utter lack of attention. However, it's actually the best way for me to stay focused and remember anything that was said.

4. I've seen UFOs on two separate occasions. The first was in high school with a couple of other people. We spent a couple of hours watching these two lights that at first resembled airplanes moving around in odd patterns across the sky. However, I doubt they were airplanes, as airplanes rarely make sharp ninety-degree angle turns in mid flight. I was unfortunately alone for the second and more impressive UFO viewing. I was perfectly sober and brushing my teeth before bed one night back in college when I noticed some blue and red lights fly over my apartment and across an adjacent field. It was completely silent and looked just like one of the UFOs in Close Encounters. I watched it for a full thirty seconds through the bathroom window before it disappeared over the horizon. Super-secret military technology seems the more plausible explanation in both cases, but I may just be telling myself that to keep the alien probes away.

5. I was a vegetarian for a while. I worked in a butcher shop back in high school and was given the responsibility of making sure all the equipment was absolutely spotless for the frequent health inspector visitations, and cleaning meat scraps from machinery all afternoon is probably one of the easiest motivations for vegetarianism. I eventually got another job and began eating fish and chicken again but laid off the red meat and pork for a good three or four years. Then I passed by a Wendy's one day and remembered how much I loved their hamburgers. It was easily the best hamburger I ever ate.

a beast unleashed, indeed

2007-01-04T07:57:00.000-06:00

I don't know where El DeBarge is now but I hope it is a dark place. I hope that his life has become tragic and unpleasant and that people say My God, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy or That poor bastard; I know he deserves to be in a horrible place, but this place he is in now is so unspeakably horrible that I might pity him if he didn't deserve it so. In short, I hope there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth and the like.

You see, I've spent the better part of aught-seven with his horribly unlistenable song "Who's Johnny?" stuck in my head, and it is all the fault of Meat Loaf.

It all began over the holidays when I found myself lazily collapsed on the couch before a flickering television late one night. I had probably eaten too much and then washed it down with half a pot of fully caffeinated coffee, thus rendering myself into a state of being hummingbird alert while still trapped in my slothful mortal casing. It was the perfect sort of thing for a "Twilight Zone" marathon, zombie movies, watching the same Sports Center over and over again, or whatever the hell it was that I subjected myself to on that particular evening. The television program itself isn't important, mind you, for offensive Meat Loaf visitation and the demon seed that implanted the foul fruits of DeBarge deep within me came in the form of a commercial.

Did any of you know that there is now a Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose? I dare say that you didn't, as Mr. Loaf has taken to promoting the thing through television commercials.

Look, I've made my love of the Loaf's original Bat Out of Hell no secret. However, though I have yet hear it and lack even the slightest desire to subject myself to any portion of it, I know that this offering, much like the ill-advised sequel, is nothing more than a defiling of the original.

Still, the Loaf had a number of accomplices to help him on this one, and a list of them rolled by as if I needed even less incentive to purchase Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose.

Look, Loaf, if the burning questions about how "the monster" indeed escaped, who was to blame for the failure of securing said monster, and the resulting compromised safety of me and my family didn't sell it to me, then knowing that there is a guest spot by Steve Vai--the very same Steve Vai who got his ass handed to him in a guitar duel with Ralph Macchio in Crossroads--can do very little to sweeten the pot, as it were.

At this point those of you who are still with me here might be asking yourself, My God, does El DeBarge have a guest spot on the new Meat Loaf album? I can assure you that he does not. However, it was another name on the list that began to torturous journey to DeBarge, for there with Vai, Todd Rundgren, Nikki Sixx, Diane Warren, and Brian May was a chap by the name of John 5. I couldn't place him at first and therefore did some old-fashioned googling within the dark corners of my primarily unused brain space. By brain returned with this entry:

John 5 was that robot in Short Circuit, a film so bad that they couldn't even get Steve Guttenberg to do the sequel.

Indeed. This settled the matter for a while. However, it was the strains of DeBarge's "Who's Johnny?", the theme song to Short Circuit, playing in the back of my mind some time later as if accidentally placed on the mental phonograph while rummaging through dust covered boxes for the John 5 reference that alerted me to the fact that the robot in question was actually christened "Johnny 5" and that John 5 was, in fact, some hack guitarist from one of those talentless NuMetal-Hop abominations.

Well, the matter had then been cleared, I suppose, but I had been left with a steady loop of unwanted DeBarge as a consequence, a price certainly too great to pay for having such a petty matter put straight.

Damn you, Meat Loaf.

seven deadlies

2007-01-02T10:31:00.000-06:00

The 'coma hit me with a meme asking for seven personal accomplishments in 2006. I suppose I will oblige, as it seems pretty safe at this point to say that I will accomplish nothing else in aught-six, but let it be noted that "accomplishments" are not always good things.

1. I killed James Brown. I didn't mean to, of course, but I did, and there you have it. This may be of little solace to the Brown clan, but there was really no way of knowing it would happen until Mr. Brown passed away and the pattern then availed itself. You see, I happened to notice that I've only devoted two posts to soul singers, yet each of those singers died within a month or two of the post. There was this sophomoric bit of word play and photoshopping devoted to Lou Rawls and then this bit about the Hardest Working Godfather of Al Sharpton. Each seemed harmless enough at the time, yet they robbed the world of two irreplaceable voices. Sorry about that.

2. Lou Rawls actually died in January of aught-six, so I suppose I should list his demise among my accoplishments for this year.

3. I found some poor bastard to impersonate me at blogger functions in aught-six. He hasn't embarrassed himself too badly, I suppose, but he certainly hasn't been earning his five bucks and seventy-five cents an hour.

4. I half-heartedly ran for senate and was surprisingly unsuccessful. I guess people really do get the government they deserve. Bastards.

5. I think I was also running for governor. It's really hard to keep up with such things. At any rate, I changed my middle name to "Ladies" in an attempt to shore up the female vote, yet it was to no avail. Either that or only a handful of ladies voted. Anyway, I've changed it yet again for political purposes, just in case there are any more feeble political attempts in my future. The "L" now stands for "Low tax".

6. I finally purchased and began learning my way around a bull fiddle. Really, I don't understand why more musicians don't switch to instruments that can double as small apartments in those lean months.

7. I generally don't stick with things. This blog was started as a way to cheaply kill a month or two of unemployment, yet the humble blog 'o doom be closing in on two years in a few short months. I suppose that's an accomplishment.

a bit of caminopedia for an unrelated camino

2006-12-29T09:14:00.000-06:00

Carter was kind enough to inform me of the existence of an El Camino college in Compton, California the other day, and I must admit to an early sense of accomplishment and pure giddiness at the thought of having a scholarly institution erected in my honor. Sadly, this was not the case.

Compton’s El Camino College was in fact named for Lord John Jacob Bodelwyddan Lucien “El” Camino, no relation, Earl of Bangwynbury and inventor of the car-truck hybrid that bears his name. This feat was especially impressive when one considers that Lord Camino’s work predates the inventions of both the car and the truck.

Other, lesser known facts and inventions from Camino’s body of work include a vehicle comprised of the front of a bass boat and hind quarters of a zamboni, the sousaphone, the phrase Don’t go there, girlfriend, penicillin, the Franklin stove, B-movies dealing mainly with women in prison, the prosthetic moustache, Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch cereal, apathy, Tesla coils, and a friendly toy known to impressionable nineteenth century children as “Jiggles, the Pantsless Marmot”. His “Jiggle me Jiggles” variation on the toy was the must-have Christmas toy of eighteen hundred and fifty-nine. However, the American Civil War was soon to put a damper on the pantsless Marmot rage of the mid-nineteenth century.

Broken and penniless, Camino then retired to California where he was a founding member CRIPS gang, which originally stood for “Camino’s Ragtime Internet Pep Squad”. Camino was once again showing considerable foresight, as this collective predated the actual Internet by well over a century.

Sadly, the group had turned to general mischief and shenanigans by the time technology caught up.

rex's health news

2006-12-28T08:28:00.000-06:00

Just before Christmas I was diagnosed with strep throat. However, I didn't show any of the symptoms of strep like a sore throat, fever, or difficulty swallowing. My symptoms--the stomach and back aches, the occasional bit of nausea of dizziness, finding entertainment in a large purple asexual dinosaur of questionable motives--are generally found in children with strep. This is odd for two reasons:

1. I am nearly a full grown man.

2. That's pretty much it. I just always like to have multiple reasons. I said two thinking that I could come up with another one by the time I reached this point, but the disease has obviously encumbered my thinking process.

Anyway, the throat culture told them strep, so strep it is. It may just be the power of suggestion that makes me feel a sore throat and fever now, but my symptoms still, for the most part, show me to have the children's variety of strep. I have understandably been researching this particular branch of the infection and have learned three interesting bits:

1. Strep coupled with a rash is sometimes referred to as "scarlet fever", and scarlet fever sounds considerably cooler than "strep throat". Saying that one has "scarlet fever" conjures images of lying on a cot in a thatched hut somewhere in deepest, darkest Africa while small native children fan you and mop your brow. I'm not getting any of that now.

2. More research on the theory needs to be done, but some believe that strep in children leads to obsessive-compulsive disorder. You can read all the scientific mumbo-jumbo, yip-yap, and jibber-jabber here. Some have said that I occasionally show OCD tendencies, yet just yesterday my left sock was a full two inches higher than my right and it did not bother me. I did not upon learning of the discrepancy immediately rummage through my sock drawer to find the proper mate for each. I let it go and gave it no more though throughout the day. Ergo, perhaps it kills OCD in adults. I still don't think I have any amount of OCD but would be a willing lab rat for the right price.

3. Damn. I couldn't come up with a third.

rex's holiday memories: christmas 2006, a heartwarming holiday episode from a medical center waiting room

2006-12-23T10:03:00.000-06:00

I like the modern variety of animated children’s movies about as much as I like pina coladas or getting caught in the rain, which is to say that I do not like them in the least. However, I suppose the large flat screen showing the Will-Smith-is-a-fish-and-Robert-DeNiro’s-career-dies-a-little-more movie was a bit more distracting than thumbing through copies of Redbook, In Shape, Better Homes and Gardens or any number of the automotive or non-sports related man-designated magazines provided in the waiting room at the medical clinic. There was only me, an older guy in another corner, and a young Mexican family in the back with children beating the tiled floor with Lincoln Logs.

Anyway, I don’t have to tell you that I was quite starved for entertainment by the time the tall gaunt man wearing a large swishy parka on what was really a quite mild day walked in with a still-smoldering quarter of a cigarette wedged between two stained fingers. He was pale, blonde, unwashed, unshaven, and of a roughly youngish, though indeterminable age. He said:

“Ma’am, I was hoping y’all could help me switch over to a new pain clinic.”

“Sir, you’ll need to put the cigarette out,” the understandably nervous receptionist told him from behind the relatively safety of her window.

“I am SO sorry, ma’am. I coulda swore I put that out,” he said as he pinched the smoldering end of the butt. “Anyway, ma’am, I just moved away from that other pain clinic you sent me to, and there’s another one down the road from my new place, ma’am.”

A ma’am sandwich, I thought, though I kept it to myself. The nearly visible cloud of alcohol fumes radiating from the man told me that he probably wasn’t in much pain at that particular moment.

One of the nurses had taken over from the receptionist at the window. She was explaining to the man everything he needed to do to switch pain clinics. She was doing so very slowly and in simple, well-enunciated words. He was thankful and scribbled down what he could while dispensing “yes, ma’ams” left and right. The smell of alcohol only seemed to get stronger. When they were done he thanked them profusely and left.

Within thirty seconds I heard the unmistakable stumbling swish of him re-entering the room behind me. I was glad, as that Will Smith movie, like most Will Smith movies, really is godawful.

This time he walked past the receptionist window to the phone hanging on the wall beside it. He picked up the receiver, dialed a number, and then leaned the top of his head against the wall in a defeated slouch. What follows is his end of the conversation as near verbatim as I can recall.

“Pick up …come one …Hey, baby, I am SO sorry …I know, I know …I am SO sorry. I just love you so much …Baby, I am sorry about that. It’s all my fault. I just love you so much. I love you and your little black baby …I know. That was all my fault, baby. I just love you so much …I’m coming home now …Huh? …What did they do? ...Did you shoot the other one too? …Okay, baby, I’m coming home …cause I love you so much, baby …All right …I love you too, baby …Need anything from the store? …Okay, I love you, baby, and I’m coming home because I just love you SO much …You want the menthols? …Okay, don’t go nowhere till I get there. I just love you, baby …All right.”

And her little black baby, I thought, though I also kept this to myself as he stumbled from the room for the second and final time during my visit, dropping a couple more “Thank you, ma’ams” at the receptionist window as he passed.

It was a heartwarming Christmas tale, really, and not even the obnoxious hip-hop dancing of animated sharks and guppies could knock the strains of Alabama’s “Christmas in Dixie” from the sound loop in the back of my mind after that.

mo fats

2006-12-22T08:34:00.000-06:00

It took me the better part of three days with a team of pack mules and some remarkably diligent Sherpas to be able to watch this over my primitive dial-up connection, but it was well worth it. Here is Fats doing "It Ain't Right" with Ada Brown from the 1943 film Stormy Weather. It would prove to be one of his final performances.

You may sing along in French if you wish.

vinyl findings, episode 2: fats waller piano solos, 1929-1941

2006-12-20T15:54:00.000-06:00

Jazz Academics and people who engineer the carving of mountains into statues may disagree with me here, but any Mt. Rushmore chiseled to honor the four greatest jazz pianists should bear the likenesses of Scott Joplin, Art Tatum, Monk, and this mug:

If you’re like me you can’t look at ol’ Fats without wishing that history could’ve put him and Michael Dukakis on this planet at the same time in order to have had one hell of an eyebrow fight to the death.

Anyway, if y’all don’t happen to know Fats, then you still probably know “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, “Honeysuckle Rose”, “Your Feet’s Too Big”, “All That Meat And No Potatoes”, “I Got Rhythm”, or any of the countless jazz standards he composed. Louis Armstrong was always at his best when singing Waller, whether it was the hypnotic swing of “Everybody Loves My Baby (But My Baby Loves Nobody But Me)” or the racism blues of “What Did I Do (To Be So Black and Blue)”.

By the way, you can learn more about Thomas Wright Waller by consulting your local library or just lazily clicking this link to his Wikipedia page, complete with the tale of how Fats was once kidnapped to play Al Capone’s birthday party.

I mention all this to lead into my vinyl finding of the reprinted two record set of “Fats Waller Piano Solos, 1929-1941”.

This is, as the title indicates, a collection of Fats alone at the piano. Absent is the trademark voice and witty lyrics, and one is left to appreciate the genius of the man as a musician. The keys stride in machine gun rhythm through a subtle hiss and crackle to reverberate off the walls of the Rexroom even now, and I must say that there is no better case to be made for blindness in the whole “would you prefer blindness or deafness” debate than music such as this.

Uh…where’s your thumb?

Excuse me?

Your thumb is conspicuously absent from the photo.

Yes. Well, I felt that the odd appearance of my thumb detracted from the last installment of “vinyl findings”.

So you don’t find your other digits to be in any way odd looking?

Is this better, Captain Howdy?
You do realize that I’m just a figment of your imagination, don’t you?

That’s what they said about the mischievous elf who lived in the back of my closet and randomly tailored my trousers as I slept.

That turned out to be a cat.

A cat?

Didn’t you read “The Captain Howdy Mysteries, Book Four: The Case of the Mischievous Elf Who Lived in the Back of Rex’s Closet and Randomly Tailored His Trousers as He Slept.”

Obviously not. However, cats cannot tailor one’s trousers. How do you account for that?

You were accidentally attempting to put on Mrs. Camino’s pants.

Ah. Indeed. It all makes sense now.

Anyway, where the hell was I before this digression?

You were telling the story of the time you met Michael Dukakis in the men’s room of an IHOP just off I-75 in Toledo.

I was? I did?

Trust me.

Okay. Um…Yes. Uh…Michael Dukakis was a swarthy little bastard of a man, quick with a condescending tone and raised eyebrows the size of legless gibbons, who…

I’m just screwing with you. You were actually telling the nice people about Fats Waller.

That couldn’t have been Fats Waller in the men’s room at the IHOP.

No, that was Jamie Farr.

What? I’m confused, and my thoughts are hurting my brain.

Shhhhhh. There, there. Now, you go have some eggnog and take a nap while I finish up here.

Anyway, folks, all you need to know about ol’ Fats is that he ate too much, drank too much, played the ever-loving hell out of the piano and then died on a train just outside of Kansas City at the age of thirty-nine.

We should all be so lucky.

a bit of rambling half assedly

2006-12-19T08:56:00.000-06:00

There was a troubling moment early yesterday when I noticed that half my ass had fallen asleep. If the few times I’ve impersonated a doctor have taught me anything it’s that I know very little about medicine and health and whatnot, but finding myself in a literally half-assed condition didn’t seem to be normal. So it was that I stood and felt about my backside. The ass—what there is of it—was indeed still there, yet the coupling of my ever-fattening wallet and an unforgivingly unpadded desk chair had worked to slowly choke the life out of said buttcheek. It was not money that fattened the wallet, unfortunately. People seem to want to give me their business cards as if I were the sort of person who transacted business or called people or didn’t dive into the closet with a blunt object at the ready every time somebody rings the doorbell. I politely take the business cards and file them away until they become painful, and yesterday seems to have been that point.

However, a recollection of my early years then popped into my head as unburdened the wallet and switched it to a front pocket.

Some friends and I began driving to Nashville from our little Alabamian around the age of seventeen. We’d come up for a night here and there to catch shows at 328 or the Exit/In or just to walk around west end or downtown. Nashville was the “big city”, as it were, and we treated these weekends like shore leave. We smoked out in the open without fear of being caught by our parents or their friends and would sneak bottles of vodka or PGA in to augment our drinks as we walked around at Summer Lights or just up and down Broadway.

“Big cities” can be scary places, but that’s part of the allure. We—or I, at least—always half expected to be mugged or stabbed or kidnapped and then sold into white slavery when walking around downtown or from Elliston Place down to Lucy’s Record Shop. Sadly, this never happened.

But the tidbit that had escaped me until the wallet constricted my hind quarters half to death yesterday was the fact that the very first thing we always did when arriving in Nashville was to switch our wallets to our front pockets. This was obviously done to avoid pickpocketing and probably would have bit a useless defense against the kidnapped for slavery thing, but the defensive measure was so engrained on a Pavlovian level that for the longest time I would immediately check my front pocket when I thought of Nashville.

Anyway, I hadn’t thought about that for a while.

Also, this has for some reason reminded me of the short-lived rap duo of Kris Kross (comprised, if you will recall, of the Mac Daddy and Daddy Mac) and their gimmick of wearing their clothes backward. Trends often elude and even trouble me, but there was something about their particular attempt at trend setting that I found especially disturbing. I don’t know why.

I didn’t much care for Christopher Cross either, but at least the man knew how to put on a pair of pants.

rex's holiday memories: christmas 1983, the tale of a third grade something

2006-12-14T09:42:00.000-06:00

The first seven of my educational years were endured at a small Free Will Baptist school. Now, I don’t have to tell you that private Baptist schools were set up to serve as a sort of prison for children, and you may have already assumed that I befriended small rats, marked the days with scrawled marks on the concrete walls, and slowly spooned an escape tunnel concealed cleverly behind a poster of Jerry Falwell, but you would then be exaggerating the situation slightly. But only slightly.

We were allowed two parties a year. There was always one on the last day of each semester, the first celebrating Christmas and the second being the end of the year. Christmas was understandably a big deal, and the entire school from kindergarten through high school held one big pageant, as small classes and an entire student body hovering somewhere just over a hundred students allowed for a manageable holiday performance. The older and more mature of these were given acting duties where they wove a morality play, biblical depiction, or both around the musical performances of younger children. I believe we were doing “Silent Night” my third grade year, and we would practice it at the third grade’s allotted time in the chapel every day for two weeks leading up to a Saturday evening performance following the end of the semester. That Friday we held our Christmas party before practicing.

I believe I brought potato chips. I was always bringing potato chips. Other students thankfully brought sandwiches and homemade desserts, and I recall gorging myself on M&Ms and sugar cookies and then washing them down with Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper. It was a trait of overindulgence that would earn me the “guy past out in the yard” description at later parties in high school and college. At any rate, the third grade me twitched and giggled somewhere between youthful exuberance and a diabetic coma as the class marched in an orderly single-file line from the classroom to the chapel. I managed to slip a red marker in my pocket while passing the board on the way out.

I didn’t have any plans for the marker at the time and was quite possibly hallucinating and when I picked it up. Jesus may have even handed it to me for all I know.

I quivered in my designated spot along the back row of the makeshift choir stand in front of the pulpit and glanced about the blood-red carpeted sanctuary. Aside from our class it was wide open and empty, and restraining myself from running up and down the aisles eventually proved more for a caffeine and sugar addled nine year old to handle, but I was able to hold back for most of our ungodly slow rendition of “Silent Night”. Each syllable seemed to drag out longer than the previous, as if the song were caught on something or time itself was grinding to a halt.

It was there as I quaked in my bridled torture that I noticed an absence of Satan from the pageant. I had seen the older students act out their part, and there was a manger scene interspersed with the Baptist school equivalent of an after school special in which young people who had somehow made it fifteen years into life without hearing about this Jesus guy and the story of his birth finally get schooled in the nativity, but Satan was conspicuously missing. I knew this because I was looking for him. The only sermons I didn’t sleep or doodle my way through in those days were the ones filled liberally with literal fire and brimstone. I loved and respected me some Jesus, mind you, but the stories of hellfire and damnation served as my motivation to don the coat and tie every Sunday. I came for the Michelangelo but stayed for the Hieronymus Bosch, as it were.

Anyway, it occurred to me then and there, somewhere around “round yon virgin”, I think, whatever the hell that meant, that I should improvise a bit and introduce Satan into the play. The other grades weren’t in there at the time, mind you, but my debut as Satan wasn’t something I wanted to leave to chance. So it was that I ducked down behind the kid in front of me and began coloring my face with the red marker. I then waited a few seconds for the song to drag itself into the “sleep in heavenly peace” crescendo where I seized upon the dramatic finish to leap from the makeshift stand and channel my pent up energy into running up and down those long aisles impishly chanting “I’m the devil” in my best Satan voice.

I was finally caught by my teacher and a janitor or two and then led by the ear to the principal’s office where I was promptly and rather righteously paddled. Needless to say, the principal, a large man resembling a young and somewhat less friendly Herman Goering, decided against my ideas for an improvised Satan in the Christmas pageant. He was the director and the call was his, as the pageant was, in the end, a product of his artistic vision.

However, I still think the absence of a villain in the play the following night was rather palpable amid the mundane renditions of Christmas standards and polite smattering of half-hearted applause.

a breakfast suggestion

2006-12-13T08:10:00.000-06:00

INGREDIENTS:

1. Grape Nuts.

2. Milk.

3. That jar of peach preserves you got from your Mother-in-law a couple of years ago and stuck in the pantry where it was then obscured by a bottle of fat free raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing that just managed to magically appear on the shelf one day even though you have sworn your allegiance to the variety of different ranch and Caesar dressings before friends, family, god, and country more times than you or any of the aforementioned care to count, or, at least, to the point that the raspberry vinaigrette having expired unopened should come as a shock to no one, though the fact that you were cleaning the pantry would probably raise a few eyebrows, even though it actually happened and you can prove it because you now have the rediscovered jar of peach preserves and a recipe for Camino’s Kickass Faux Peach Cobbler Breakfast Surprise to prove it, though you’d probably do well to spend more time in the naming department were you to actually market the stuff. However, if that had indeed been a long-term goal of yours, then the fact that you’re starting off by publishing the super secret recipe online is probably a poor decision on your part.

4. A bowl or similar contraption conducive to the containment of liquidy substances.

5. A spoon would be nice.

DIRECTIONS:

1. Combine grape nuts and milk in bowl and microwave for maybe thirty seconds.

2. Remove from microwave and add mix in three or four heaping spoonfuls of the peach preserve.

3. Return to microwave and nuke that sumbitch a full minute.

4. Take this minute to reflect on things. For instance, do you think that public television really makes a significant amount of pledge money while showing all those damnable John Denver specials? If so, then you finally have your answer to who would gain the most from John Denver’s death. Indeed. It’s all making sense now; the pieces are finally coming together.

5. Remove from microwave upon completion and enjoy. This concoction is both tasty and healthy*, so feel free to gorge yourself until sick.

*Rex L. Camino is not an officially licensed doctor. The claim that Camino’s Kickass Faux Peach Cobbler Breakfast Surprise is healthy is based on the fact that Grape Nuts contains enough fiber to dislodge a water buffalo from your colon. What exactly the water buffalo was doing there in the first place is between you and your god.

UPDATE: Nevermind. One discovers about halfway through the second bowl that Camino’s Kickass Faux Peach Cobbler Breakfast Surprise is actually kind of nasty and then proceeds to halt the correspondence with the patent office.

Then again, Carl Weathers doesn't seem to mind it much. Perhaps Camino’s Kickass Faux Peach Cobbler Breakfast Surprise For Dogs is in order.

the year in rear view: 2006's technological advance that pissed me off the most

2006-12-11T08:07:00.000-06:00

Okay, I know those earpiece cell phone thingies came out last year or maybe the year before that, as I recall them pissing me off before twenty aught-six, but those little bastards and the people who use them in crowded public areas have only climbed the R.L.Camino list of enemies in the past year. I mean, I’m not big on talking to strangers and I avoid them whenever possible, but it is only natural when someone standing beside you in the aisle at a bookstore asks,” I’m about to head to the grocery store. You want anything special for dinner?” to automatically respond with, “I was thinking I could go for some coconut and mango encrusted tilapia with yams and a nice dry Riesling.” Sure, I felt a little embarrassed when he turned to shoot a half-scowl/half-grimace in my direction and thus allowed me to finally notice the foul earpiece on his opposite ear, but the blame, in my opinion, rests squarely on him.

In fact, I think people who wear those earpiece cell phones in public are deserving of any amount of rudeness that those within listening vicinity should decide to inflict upon them. For instance, there was this aftershave drenched bastard at the music store the other day going on and on to some acquaintance in a loud voice to be heard over the music. He said:

Bastard: Yeah, Roy and Susan were in town this past weekend so Barbara…This music sure is loud…Anyway, Barbara and…I’m in a CD store…So Barbara and I took ‘em to the Coyote Ugly’s and…Coyote Ugly’s. It’s a bar…Yeah…I wish they’d turn this music down. I can’t hardly think…So, anyway, we took ‘em there and then over to the Wildhorse...The Wildhorse…It’s another bar…Hold on, Jimmy, there’s some guy in a dress staring at me…I don’t know why…Yeah, I’m gonna ask him…Can I help you with something?

Rex: (silently glaring)

Bastard: Can I help you? I’m on the phone here.

Rex: (still silently glaring)

Now, the beautiful thing about the silent glare is that it doesn’t require all that thinking associated with the voicing of displeasure, the coordination essential to administer an ass kicking, or the cat-like stealth needed for sneaking up behind someone with a blunt object for a good old-fashioned unashamed cheap shot.

But I digress.

Anyway, my point is that everyone seems to get unnerved at these people, yet everyone also treats them undeserved politeness by ignoring them. My proposal is to…

Were you really wearing a dress?

It was a kilt. Anyway, my suggestion is that…

A kilt?

Bastard: Kilts generally don’t have floral prints.

Look, I wouldn’t expect some gadget zombie asshole to understand the beauty in the ancient traditions of the Clan Camino.

Anyway, as I was saying…

Bastard: What about the lipstick?

Sometimes I just want to feel pretty, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, folks, I am but a simple man—a Luddite, if you will—who still manages to go through life without the benefit of a cell phone of any kind. Yet I’m sure that even those of you who embrace technology find that these bastards work to fray your last nerve. Therefore, let us go forward into 2007 with the thought that it would be quite difficult to arrest and try us all if we begin to employ immediate public beatings. You obviously didn’t have my back when I attempted this same strategy to combat Tickle Me Elmo, and I certainly learned that attacking small children was not in my best interest, but there comes a time, people, when society must gather together to purge ourselves of detrimental annoyances such as these.

Just a thought for those of you who have yet to think of any New Year’s resolutions.

holiday meat party recollections

2006-12-10T14:24:00.000-06:00

No one yelled at me last night. I know I don’t dabble in the political or in any way controversial blogging and that even the more diametrically opposed bloggers are genuinely friendly when face to face, but there is a part of me that half expects to be ambushed with a My mother was a zombie, you bastard! or My grandfather was John Jacob Rogaine, and your last post threatens to crumble the Rogaine family empire, you bastard! followed by a drink in the face. Now, the tragedy of this would of course be the wasted drink, but conversations that begin this way at parties generally do not end well.

Anyway, that didn’t happen last night. It was good to put some more faces and voices to blogs and to also introduce one of the humble Blog o’ Doom’s self-described “minor characters somewhere behind Carl Weathers” to some of you.

You promised to take me to the next one, you bastard! (throws drink in face)

You do realize that you’re a disembodied voice, Captain Howdy, and therefore unable to actually throw anything.

Yes, the stage direction was for you. It was supposed to be a self-inflicted thing...you bastard.

Anyway, the lovely and brilliant Mrs. Camino had a good time. She peruses some of the blogs—sometimes even mine for some reason—and presumably knew what she was getting into.

The evening began with Mr. Mack telling us we were welcome to look at Aunt B’s boob freckle and ended with Drunk, Drunk Ivy yelling something about Jesus at us from the porch as we scrambled to the Caminomobile. Mackie reached into his pouch as he made the boob freckle sales pitch, and I fully expected him to pull out a roll of boob freckle viewing tickets, but he only emerged with a shot glass. Methinks he lacks the true heart of a pimp. Anyway, in the middle of this was some rare socializing for the Caminos. Hutchmo neglected to bring Black Santa, but CLC neglected to wear his special holiday attire, so I suppose blessings should be counted. It was still good to finally meet the Hutch, RUABelle, Kate O, Ivy, the Butcher, Bobby Glen Dean, Mackie, Ginger, Dr.Woo, saraclark, Kathy, and probably a number of people whose names and introductions were unfortunately implanted on brain cells that weren’t long for this world. It was also good to again see those of you I met at the last shindig I attended. I'm glad to know that I didn’t embarrass myself so badly the last time as to incur any shunning.

Big thanks to Kathy for the calendar, by the way. I noticed later that it encompasses both 2007 and 2008 and has a number of helpful tips for homeowners. I especially can’t wait for May’s instructions concerning my garage door, as I got my head stuck in a closing garage door once and was then forbidden from being around the contraptions without a sober and responsible adult present.

All that ends in May.

rex's holiday memories: festivus 1997

2006-12-08T07:30:00.000-06:00

This was the year Sister Camino got me some Rogaine as a gag gift. Yes, we all had a good laugh at that one and then I cried a little on the inside and then we broke out the booze. Good times.

Anyway, I stuck it in the back of my medicine cabinet and didn’t think anything of it until some months later when I came across the bottle while digging around for a band-aid or some codeine. It then struck me that I could give it a try. She probably spent fifty bucks on the stuff, which is fifty more than I would’ve paid, and so I essentially had a free month’s supply and nothing to lose. Thus began my month of Rogaine.

Did it work? Well, it may have just been a placebo effect, but I certainly thought I saw more foliage returning to Cabeza Camino. It also seemed to have bolstered the defenses battling to preserve my now absent hairline. So, yes, I suppose I found it to be an effective product that delivered on its advertising.

So did I then continue using the product? Hell no. I wouldn’t have continued with it if I had been presented with a lifetime supply and a guarantee that I would soon have a strong and thick mane of Sideshow Bob hair. There are two reasons for this.

1. The stuff smelled just like vodka.

2. It itched like the sweet love of a hobo, yet the wearer was not allowed to scratch under any circumstance.

That second one began to threaten my otherwise strong grip on sanity. I applied the Rogaine each morning just out of the shower and then spent the next few hours trying to devise a way to scratch my scalp without touching it in any way. This consisted mostly of furrowing my brow, raising my eyebrows alternately, wiggling my ears, or in any other way attempting in vain to flex the top half of my head. This was unsuccessful and only served to make the itch greater while causing alarm in those around me. I was asked:

1. Are you okay?

2. Are you prone to seizures?

3. Could it be a stroke?

4. Are you coming on to me?

5. Why do you smell like gin and vodka?

Anyway, I got some hair back, I think, but it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t even go the full month and wound up throwing about half the bottle away.

However, I don’t know why, but there is a part of me that always wants to buy some just to slip into our angel tree bags at Christmas.

tommy turns 57

2006-12-07T17:58:00.000-06:00

I almost forgot that today was a holiday.

holiday decorations and a bit of seasonal rambling

2006-12-06T07:45:00.000-06:00

I had been meaning to put up a Christmas banner for a while now, but it wasn't until last night when I sat on my ass watching Mrs. Camino put up our decorations that I was inspired to break out the Photoshop and Illustrator. I had actually been meaning to put up a Fall banner for quite some time. I photographed the foliage and such and sketched a few things but I just couldn't relinquish the palm trees.

It occurs to me now that I should have incorporated palm trees into the Christmas banner. Damn.

Anyway, can I take this opportunity to let you know just how much I hate cold weather? Sure, that one and only snowfall we get is nice to watch and even play in, and I do enjoy my fireplace, but few things in life weigh on the gut more heavily than that sense of dread that grows when one nears the end of a warm shower and begins to anticipate the cold air waiting on the other side of the curtain.

Carl Weathers is a cold weather dog hates being dragged about on those ninety degree days, but I'll take a sauna over the bitter and stinging wind any day.

And this is just the Tennessee winter I'm talking about. I don't see how any of you people north of here can stand this sort of thing. I mean, I haven't spent much time up there during the winter months, but it seems uninhabitable from my safe distance.

Anyway, this is why I drive around in an SUV and waist aerosol hairspray on my bald head in a feeble attempt to warm the Earth's climate.

That, and I've always thought that icebergs just look so smug.

Anyway, I hope this has in some way contributed to you holiday spirit.

vinyl findings, episode 1: grits and soul

2006-12-05T07:22:00.000-06:00

I'm not one of the vinyl obsessed, mind you, but I do like to spend time digging through musty stacks of wax in the back of various music and antique stores. They are almost always scratched and quite a few years past pristine, but that often makes them too cheap to pass up. Anyway, I thought I'd occasionally share the fruits of these labors with you, dear reader or random internet peruser.

Raise your hand if you knew anything about the instrumental albums James Brown put out in the mind-sixties.

Now raise your hand if you suddenly find my thumb as odd looking as I do.

Now stop thinking about my thumb and return to the matter at hand. It's not nice to stare at deformities and such.

Yes, James Brown manned the Hammond B3 organ for four instrumental albums in the mid-sixties, and Grits and Soul was the first of these. I could spend the next couple of paragraphs telling you all about this time in his career but I'd only be plagiarizing it from somewhere else on the internet, so let's cut out the middle man. You can either consult your local library or go here for more info.

How is ol' JB on the B3? Well, had he decided to give up on the singing and stick with the keys full time I don't think we'd be calling him the "Godfather of Organ". However, he does hold his own within a group of very talented jazz and funk musicians and never seems to be in over his head. He throws down some tasteful solos and seems to know when to hold back and let Nat Jones or Les Buie or any of the other instrumentalists take center stage. He certainly knows his way around the keys.

My particular copy plays well enough through a few scratches and only set me back $3.99. I don't believe any of these are available on CD.

By the way, I'd like for those of you who raised your hands to please keep them up until a loved one or coworker (or loved coworker) enters the room and asks you what the hell you're doing.

where credit is due

2006-12-04T08:08:00.000-06:00

Now, I've never been one to toot my own horn, but...

Lord knows you've hurt your back trying.

Uh...Anyway, it occurred to me that the Titans were a sad lot up until this motivational speech of sorts. They unfortunately didn't win that particular Indy game, but the team that took the field at the RCA dome was not the hopeless collection of defeated souls we had grown used to in the early season. They finally played with heart and began to start to turn things around.

Then Albert Haynesworth stomped some guy's face and Pacman got arrested again. The team once again needed ol' Rex to get all up in their grill, as it were, and I did so on a much larger stage. The result was a win, of course, but I didn't ask for the glory. I had nestled them to my bosom in their hour of darkness, and the satisfaction of seeing them succeed was enough for me. That's how I roll.

However, it looks like Uncle Bud will soon be whipping out the checkbook to extend Coach Fisher's contract, and I thought this would be a good time to mention my contributions this season. Also, I'd like to let Uncle Moneybags know that I'm currently available for a full time motivational speaker/guru-type job with the Titans organization.

But you may want to act quickly, as I have yet to be officially eliminated from Alabama's coaching search.

four things that always bothered me about the wonder twins

2006-12-01T08:32:00.000-06:00

1. Allright, the brother could only turn into a liquid. Fine. I get that. However, where the hell did the bucket always come from? Could a small part of him also turn into a bucket? Did the monkey have to carry the bucket around?

2. The sister could turn into an animal. It would seem a helluva lot better than the "liquid in a bucket" thing, yet she seemed to always choose "form of a condor" or some other bird. Large birds are cool and all, but can't other animals carry buckets? Methinks a Kodiak bear or a T-rex could do some fine bucket wielding while cutting a more imposing figure to villians and such.

3. Did the monkey have super powers? If not, it would seem negligent to put the monkey in a costume, as it would give the impression to bad guys that this monkey needs to be dealt with. If the monkey is in fact you regular run-of-the-mill blue monkey, then you need to leave it naked. You are otherwise needlessly endangering your monkey, and that, frankly, sends the wrong message to children.

4. The Super Friends cartoon ran around the same time Donny and Marie Osmond were at the height of their fame, and a four year old Rex always got them confused with the Wonder Twins. To this day I halfway expect Donny Osmond to turn into a bucket of something when I see him on TV.

BONUS SUPER FRIENDS GRIEVENCE:

Seriously, how often does the ability to talk to fish come into play? I've always imagined the scene of Aquaman's hiring went something like this:

Warning: My childhood imagination had the vocabulary of a sailor.

(Laughter breaks out around the table as Aquaman's resume is passed among the Super Friends, though I always thought the term "Super Acquaintances" or even "Super Co-workers" would seem more fitting, as you never really saw them shooting pool or just hanging out. But I digress...)

Superman: You mean he just talks to fish and dolphins and shit like that?

Batman: Yeah, no shit.

Wonder Woman: It's like, "We're not hiring right now but I think Sea World could use Shamu translator."

Green Lantern: Have any of you guys seen my ring?

Batman: Hey, let's get the goldfish to tell him he's not hired.

Wonder Woman: That would be fuckin' awesome.

Green Lantern: Seriously guys, I need kinda need that ring.

Superman: Look, Lantern, I think I'd do a better job of keeping up with my shit if I were one of those "gadget superheroes".

Green Lantern: Fine. Did one of you alien freaks take my damn ring again? Cause that shit's getting old.

Batman: Seriously.

Robin: I think the Flash took it. He still isn't over the whole klepto thing.

Wonder Twin Brother: Oh, it's always our fault when you guys lose your gadgets.

Robin: Shut up, bucketboy.

Superman: You guys cut that shit out...but seriously, I think I'd rather be a sidekick than a superbucket.

Wonder Woman: For real.

Batman: Allright, let's get back to Fishman or whatever the hell he calls himself. Is everyone agreed that we don't need this loser.

Superman: Absolutely. Go tell the goldfish to pass it on.

Robin: Wait. Remember last year when Lex Luthor blew up Seattle because we weren't able to summon that legion of Chinook salmon to stop the nuclear submarine.

Batman: Fuck. I forgot all about that.

Superman: Shit...Fine. But sidekicks are no longer allowed in the meetings.

last night i dreamt of half a snake

2006-11-30T07:36:00.000-06:00

It happened to be the business end of a timber rattlesnake, though I suppose the “business end” on one of those things could be the bit with the rattle, as they do not call then “timber poisonous fang snakes”. However, hikers would do well to mind the oral end of the beast and not get mesmerized by the shiny rattle.

Anyway, in my dream I happened upon one shortly after someone had cut the thing in twain and, thinking it to be dead, passed by it with little regard. That’s when the business end began chasing me like some unceasing sock puppet. We happened to be in a shopping mall for some reason and I managed to slow the thing down by leading it up the down escalator. Keep that in mind if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

Feel free to interpret.

six weird things

2006-11-28T08:07:00.000-06:00

Sarasue was kind enough to tag me on the “six weird things about myself” post. It took me a while to come up with something, as I understandably seem pretty normal to myself and could more easily come up with weird things about Mrs. Camino or anyone else I come in contact with, but some thought on the matter eventually uncovered a few things. I’ll attempt to relay six that aren’t too embarrassing and probably don’t require professional attention, though I doubt they’re all that interesting.

1. My bat-like hearing picks up on every little rattle within a car and it drives me insane. If I’m in a car with you and there is a rattle going on somewhere you can rest assured that I’ve heard little of anything you’ve said.

2. If I had the money I would not wear the same pair of socks twice. They’re never quite as comfortable as the first time you wear them, and it is a travesty that in the wealthiest nation on earth only the super rich can afford to treat socks as disposable.

3. I also can’t stand it if my socks are the slightest bit uneven. I sometimes have to go through my rather large sock drawer trying to match up socks that are the same length. It then bothers me that I might be wearing one sock that has been washed more than the other, but I deal with it. I may not have heard anything you just said to me because I’m busy quietly dealing with it in my head, but my whole problem with “unevenness” is indeed getting better. For instance, when I was growing up and would bump into a door with my shoulder I would then have to bump into the same door with the other shoulder to even it out. This wouldn’t extend to things like slamming my hand in the car door or stubbing my toe on furniture, but it had to be done on the small-scale collisions. Anyway, now it’s just limited to compulsively attempting to even out my socks and sideburns.

4. But that isn’t to say that I no longer bump into things. I do, and it happens quite frequently, as I seem to have very poor depth perception and would probably move about more effectively if I employed my bat-like hearing and coupled it with some high pitch screeching in order to create a sonar effect. I’m always either bumping into things or misjudging the distance of objects on a table. In fact, if I spend any amount of time in your house and leave without tripping over something or knocking anything over you can rest assured that I was too busy concentrating on not doing those things to have heard the majority of our conversation.

5. I can’t fall asleep without a radio on, preferably tuned to non-political talk radio or new age, jazz, or classical music. I will otherwise keep myself awake obsessively thinking about random and insignificant things.

6. I’m a compulsive cat startler. If a cat walks by and I can sense that the slightest flinch will send it a good foot or so in the air I will make it happen. It’s a bit like fishing. One has to wait for that perfect moment in which the smallest movement will garner the biggest reaction and then seize upon it. It may be a bit cruel, but I daresay that few things in life are as amusing as a startled cat taking flight, though attempting the same thing when the cat walks under a coffee table can render the satisfactory thud of the cat’s head against the underside. This has the added bonus of the cat startler not being able to see the cat and having to just know when the perfect moment to flinch is. It occurs to me that the holy grail of the sport would be to get a cat to hit the underside of the dining room table, but that is perhaps thinking too big.

By the way, the cat always finds a way to avenge itself. This usually consists of leaping out from behind furniture to attack me like Cato in the Pink Panther movies, thus continuing the vicious circle

which reminds me of an anecdote involving one of my own racist relatives

2006-11-27T08:38:00.000-06:00

Desegregation was hard on my uncle Thurman. He lived his entire life in a remote part of Mississippi, with the notable exception of that time FDR sent him to Normandy, and never had much motivation for accepting others of races unlike his own. By the way, he emerged from Normandy unscratched but decided that war wasn’t really for him. So it was that he shot himself in the foot and then proceeded to dig around in the wound with a pocket knife each time it looked close to being healed enough to send him back into battle.

Anyway, no amount of self-inflicted wounding could keep desegregation away, but that didn’t mean that uncle Thurman had to like it. He didn’t, and he would tell you as much, regardless of your race, size, or whether you outnumbered him by a great deal. I only met my uncle Thurman a handful of times but I’m told that he would sometimes walk into a restaurant, find that it had too great a clientele of African descent for his liking, announce as much to anyone within earshot, and then leave. Only he wouldn’t quite phrase it like that. No, uncle Thurman’s favorite word was a derogatory term that he used quite often and in the midst of any group.

However, the reason he didn’t get his ass kicked had nothing to do with the fact that he was old, skinny, cross-eyed and therefore a little too pathetic to fight regardless of the insult. No, uncle Thurman also had an odd speech impediment that made all his words beginning with the letter N come across with a distinct R sound. For example: The word “nice” came across as “rice” and “night” was “right”.

Therefore, anyone sitting in that particular restaurant and paying any attention whatsoever to uncle Thurman would’ve clearly understood him to say, “I can’t eat here; there are too many rigors.”

rex's holiday memories: thanksgiving 2006

2006-11-24T08:03:00.000-06:00

First, let us begin with a random sampling of paraphrased things we learned from Mrs. Camino’s chainsmoking grandmother yesterday:

1. Cows are stupid.

2. You can’t ever really know what an Asian person is thinking.

3. Not all Mexicans cross over into Texas. Many of them just walk across the bridge into Sacramento.

4. Babies will steal your calcium and leave you a withered old woman.

5. She still doesn’t understand why we haven’t “begat” her any great-grandchildren yet.

6. We had to be thinking of the Spanish-American war because there was no such thing as the Mexican-American war. This came as news to my brother-in-law’s Mexican wife.

7. Santa Ana was still a bastard.

8. Most of your big band singers were either Jews or Italians, except for Bing Crosby. He was Irish and that's why he stayed drunk all the time.

9. Donkeys these days are lazy.

This was our second year to pick up Mrs. Camino’s grandmother and spend a pleasant half hour car trip with her to Thanksgiving dinner. Last year we put her in the back seat and didn’t talk to her much aside from trying to derail her dissertation on how short and ugly Mexicans were, but this only led to a year of complaining about how we ignored her, and that is just the sort of thing that gets one bumped from the will. So it was that we placed her in the passenger seat this year with her asthmatic Pomeranian in her lap and the window rolled down enough for the longsuffering dog to feel the wind on its face but not so much for it to leap out of the window into a desired separation from its owner. I even compiled a list of conversation starting questions on our way there, though Mrs. Camino only used about one and a half of them during the course of our trip:

1. What’s your favorite thing about me?

2. Have you ever seen a Bigfoot?

3. Can you be absolutely sure that cranberries don’t feel pain?

4. Do you love Satan as much as we do?

5. What would be a reasonable price one could expect to pay for a donkey?

Mrs. Camino used the first of these to derail a World War II reminiscence that made an ugly turn into a dissertation on Asians, and her grandmother’s favorite thing about Mrs. Camino, after considerable thought on the matter, is her curly hair. Her favorite thing about me is that I don’t talk much. Mrs. Camino was later able to work in a question about the relevance of donkeys on the modern farm when her grandmother noticed a donkey staring at her from a field, but the worth of the donkey was never actually discussed.

rex's holiday memories: the day before thanksgiving 2002

2006-11-22T08:00:00.000-06:00

This was in the midst of my two years as an office temp in Knoxville, specifically during my stint in the file warehouse of the large mobile home manufacturing company, and on a rare day when I was the first to arrive. I think perhaps that everyone else on that side of the building took the impending holiday as an excuse to come in late. At any rate, this left me with the responsibility for turning on the lights. It seemed simple enough at the time.

I began with the usual places for light switches to be located. It has been my experience that they are generally close to the door, and I began there with my foot propping the door open to bring in a little light from the hallway. However, the light switches were nowhere to be found, and this unfortunately meant that I would have to leave the propped door and its sliver of light and venture along the wall in pitch darkness looking for them in their seemingly inconvenient location.

This front part of the warehouse served as a small data entry room with computers along the wall that were usually manned by ladies who spent all day complaining about how their husbands and boyfriends never gave them any sex. This was quite common in my experiences in the data entry hen houses of Knox and Blount counties, and I sometimes wonder if a sociology thesis could be written on the matter, though writing it myself would negate the time and effort I’ve taken to fruitlessly attempt erasing these scenes from my mind.

But I digress.

Anyway, I’m feeling along the wall just above these computers and running my hand over motivational posters, lists of codes, and photographs of husbands, boyfriends, and litters of children proving that someone at sometime had in fact been kind enough to give these women some sex. I’m getting papercuts and probably an assortment of germs but I’m not finding any light switches.

Then the lights come on.

I turn and see one of the ladies from the data entry section across the hall in the mailroom just as she has finished engaging the row of light witches that had previously been obscured by a billboard beside the door. I think I said something along the lines of, “Ah. So that’s where they were.”

The woman looked over at me and began screaming at the top of her lungs. She did not stop for at least a full ten seconds.

Now, I had interacted with the data hen house across the hall on a few occasions when they needed files or had brought in baked goods. They were a much older hen house and gave off a more grandmotherly atmosphere. There wasn’t quite as much sex talk.

The woman presently screaming at me was quite short and probably in her mid sixties. She had a small head covered in short dyed black hair and wore large glasses, large earrings and Hawaiian shirts usually covered by a large olive drab cardigan. In the children’s cartoon of my life story she will be played by a deranged turtle.

Anyway, she screamed at me in a bug eyed primal terror for about as long as it just took to describe her and then stood there panting. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of these outbursts, but it is at first unnerving and then quite hilarious. Then initial surge of adrenaline that comes from the shrill and piercing call of the deranged little turtle quickly turns to an uncontrolled laughter that doesn’t stop with the screaming. I continued laughing as she stood there trying to catch her breath. She didn’t think it was that funny and even looked like she was about to go for round two. I wanted to apologize but I couldn’t quite get it out between the laughter.

She was still bug eyed. She was red and shaking, and just when I thought she was going to start with the screaming again she said, “You don’t expect for somebody to be there when you turn the lights on” and then quickly retreated back to her side of the hallway.

I was still laughing my ass off, but the current emptiness of the room really highlighted the fact that I was the only one doing so. The laughter then fizzled into an awkward evaluation of how exactly one is to proceed after an occurrence. I could either just go about my work like nothing happened or follow the turtle across the hall where, as I then began imagining, she was weaving a tale about how that temp who always hides in the warehouse taking a nap or reading a book finally snapped and had been waiting in the dark across the hall with a meat cleaver all night.

Going across the hall didn’t seem like the thing to do, but across the hall soon began coming to me and cautiously peeking through the door. There was fear in the eyes of little old ladies, and I began laughing again. However, I managed to stumble through my side of the story a number of times, explaining each time how placing a billboard over the light switch was bound to lead to a bit of confusion, though sending the turtle lady into cardiac arrest may not have been so foreseeable. It was an honest mistake, I essentially told them, though their blank stares seemed to ask me why I liked hiding in the dark to scare old ladies.

Thus proving once again that it is always the temp’s fault.

Anyway, our little Thanksgiving lunch was a bit awkward that day.

you be me for a while and i'll be you

2006-11-21T08:10:00.000-06:00

The great thing about traveling late on a fairly clear night through Tennessee is the assortment of AM radio stations from New Orleans to Chicago that one can pick up. Most of these deal in sports or news, but there is usually one or two with something a bit out of the ordinary enough to keep the driver awake and semi-alert and, for the most part, on his side of the yellow dashes.

For instance, a local show in Cincinnati the other night featured a pet psychic answering calls ranging from the thoughts of recently deceased pets in their final days to missing pets to the ailments of living and accounted for pets. One caller in particular was told that his poodle was indeed the reincarnation of a German Shepherd he had as a child. This, according to the pet psychic, is not uncommon.

It seems to me that the selling point on reincarnation is the possibility to move up the ladder with each existence or to drop a rung or two if you do something heinous or are the person who is responsible for Robin Williams films. The notion that one could keep coming back at the same level or that reincarnation itself is random rather sours me on the process. I mean, it's rather depressing to think that the Thanksgiving turkey this year could very well be the same turkey that sat on grandmother's table back in 1987 or that the exciting life of a semi-unemployed blogger awaits me on the other side of my impending aneurysm. Don't get me wrong, it's been a great life and I've had comparatively little to complain about thus far, but I'd much prefer to spend the next round as a Latin American strong man, a Japanese pop star, the white tiger that finally has enough and eats the magician, a chainsmoking grape harvester in northern Italy, a bona fide ninja, a crested warbler, Tony Danza, or anything else I haven't had the opportunity to be before.

Methinks a bit of variety would look good on the spiritual resume.

and do they also make a hat specifically for those being stalked by deer?

2006-11-15T07:53:00.000-06:00

And did Sherlock ever actually stalk any deer? Now, the closest I’ve come to ever engaging in a hunt were the times I would dispatch cockroaches with my trusty bb gun in those less than ideal apartments we inhabited en route to the Casa Camino, but it occurs to me now that nothing in the features of the deerstalker cap make it a better suited head adornment for deerstalking that it would be for, say, getting drunk and shooting rats down at the dump or dispatching with cockroaches crawling above your television set as the pets look on in amazement.

It’s odd. They see the filthy little bastards spontaneously combust and are thus embiggened with a new respect for their master. You should try it with your unruly pets sometime.

Anyway, in my brief digestion of the question in the title I’ve come up with only two possible answers. This hat would seem like the logical choice. It disguises the prey to appear as a predator and would give most killer deer a bit of a pause. My only other idea would be a Viking helmet—specifically the horned type worn by actual Vikings and not the purple football helmet worn by the Minnesota’s football Vikings. Two-dimensional horns are seldom as effective as real horns at combating a good set of antlers.

Why do I bring this up? Well, obviously, I feel that I’m being stalked by a deer. He is a young stag, specifically, and he often watches me from the edge of the woods along the battlefield as I walk Carl Weathers. He either wants or is giving the perception that he wants a piece of the Camino, and all that stands between your hero and the possibility of an unwanted evisceration is a Swiss army knife and a cowardly spaniel. He stands with his chest out, nostrils flaring and a harem of doe scattered in the woods behind him. It is mating season and he is probably just showing off, but he is doing so at increasingly shorter distances. However, he isn’t there every time, and the only way to guarantee that I will not encounter him on a given visit is to have my camera with me.

This has been going on for about two months now, and I wanted to mention it before, but it seemed like the sort of thing that needed visual accompaniment to provide the full effect and perhaps shut up once and for all any smart-ass therapists who choose to ignore very real possibility that random forest creatures are out to get one of their patients. I may have been wrong about the Mothman eating my favorite pair of corduroy slacks, lady, but that’s no reason to dismiss the phenomenon of killer deer. Surely you believe that deer exist. Just wait till I show up gutted and bleeding and then we’ll see who does the laughing.

I hate to spoil it for you, sister, but it is I who will do the laughing, though I’m sure it’ll probably hurt a bit.

Anyway, this reasonable recreation will have to suffice for now.

something more for the newscoma

2006-11-14T08:38:00.000-06:00

However, this story of a bigfoot sighting along the Alabama-Georgia border leaves me wanting more on the "Dogzilla".

to sell a better sasquatch

2006-11-10T08:23:00.000-06:00

Look, I'll be honest, I often buy books or CDs based on good cover design. Conversely, I'm sure I've bypassed a great deal of good music and literature simply because it suffered from unfortunate packaging. This is generally the fault of record and publishing companies and therefore shouldn't reflect negatively on the artists, but it does.

Now, let's imagine that you've dedicated yourself to the study of Cryptozoology. Specifically, you have made it your life's goal to find the Australian Sasquatch. You will no doubt face skepticism and disrespect from large portions of the scientific community and general public, but all this will do little to thwart your passion for the subject matter. You're forging ahead into the unknown, damn it, and you will return with truths that the rest of us might not quite be ready to comprehend. In fact, you're a bona fide author and you're going to put these things in books that aren't likely to recieve the the credibility they deserve in your lifetime, though the bastards will certainly respect your work when somebody turns up with an actual "Yowie". Yes, you believe in yourself, and that's all that matters for now.

Indeed. However, you or your publishing company probably should have put a bit more thought into your jacket design.

Yes, I've spent my life in search of this mythical beast described in the traditional stories of the Aboriginal people. I've been lampooned, discredited, and cast to the dark corners of the scientific community for the sake of unraveling the mystery of this elusive humanoid...What does it look like? Well, I like to describe it as a rabid Chewbacca with fangs and a penchant for lipstick. Do you think they could convey that on the cover?

fear of a black rex

2006-11-09T09:20:00.000-06:00

One of the great things about being adopted is that my ethnic origins are mostly unknown and therefore subject to a bit of creativity. I’m mostly white, obviously, and I know of some Scottish ancestry, but there is no one to say that some of the unknown branches in my family tree aren’t black, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, or Chippewa. In fact, there were a couple of regrettable binge drinking episodes in college when it was later recounted to me that I engaged in diatribes against whitey for stealing my land and then segwayed into discussions of themes for my Casino.

No, I’m not quite sure that any race would want my representation either.

Anyway, there was another incident a few years back when a Mexican janitor told me that I was a black man on the inside. I hesitate to tell the story since I found out later that the man was a bit of a fraud and that…

Ah, when did you find out that he wasn’t really a proctologist?

That’s a different story, Captain Howdy. Anyway, I discovered later that the Mexican janitor was actually Honduran and that he was simply a coworker who liked to sweep the hallway in his spare moments. I don’t know why. I never got to know him that well, but he was sweeping by my office one day when he was drawn in by some Howlin’ Wolf playing on the stereo.

“You like this music?” he asked.

Now, I rarely pass up the opportunity for a good sarcastic remark, but the plight of the sanitation worker deserved a bit of respect, I thought. Also, he had a crazy look on his face.

“Sure,” I answered.

He came in closer, leaned down toward me, pointed to my chest and said, “On the outside you are white, but on the inside you are a black man.”

I rarely remember the specific wording of things that people tell me. However, my brain took a moment to chisel this one out for posterity. It then took another moment to peripherally scan the desk for something that could be used as a weapon with which to defend myself.

I nodded politely, awkwardly answered him with some bit about wishing that more people could see the black man inside me, and then breathed easier at his exit.

He didn’t work there for long, and we never again discussed the black man inside me, but I was a bit troubled at the few conversations we had afterward, as they dealt mostly with his distrust of the actual janitor who he was convinced was a Gypsy out to curse him and steal things from him. The janitor was actually Serbian. I had never feigned being a Gypsy, a Serb, or a janitor and was therefore not personally offended.

Now, did the fact that a Honduran Gypsyphobe found me to be black man on the inside cost me the Tennessee senate race?

I’d like to think so.

democracy inaction: a concession speech of sorts

2006-11-07T21:35:00.000-06:00

Friends, Supporters, Assorted Sheep who voted for “actual candidates”, and a handful of Zombies that I may or may not have created using my very own Halloween zombie recipe for the sole purpose of getting votes and then maybe getting together a Camino team for the local basketball league, though such an act certainly would have neglected to take into consideration the fact that zombies are not the best exhibitors of hand-eye coordination:

It appears that my bid to be the next Senator from (or Governor of) Tennessee has failed miserably. Yes, there were those who said from the start that my chances of winning were about the same as a porcupine has for successfully making sweet love to a balloon animal, but I was not among them. The nay Sayers will always say nay, and I thought it best to ignore them and proceed with the greatest of optimism in those few times when I actually remembered that I was running.

Anyway, I need to make this brief, as the desk clerk here at the Motel 6 off I-24 has threatened to call the cops if I don’t either rent a room or vacate the premises.

Yes, I’ve apparently forgotten to mention that this would serve as campaign headquarters. It seemed like the thing to do since all the other hotel banquet rooms in the area were booked. However, I didn’t realize at the time that Motel 6 lobbies were this small, so I suppose that in the end it’s best that nobody showed up.

Anyway, I don’t have the patience to stay up watching election results to find out who the actual winner is and will therefore briefly address each scenario. Please skip over the incorrect one:

In the event of a Corker victory: Um, yes, congratulations on electing a smaller version of what you already had, Republicans. I suppose rubber stamps come in all sizes.

In the event of a Ford victory: Congratulations on electing someone who voted for the war, invokes the name of God in every sentence, and who strongly opposes gay marriage. That’ll really teach those Republicans.

Either way I think this election came down to a clear choice. Voters could either send a politician or a frequently unemployed blogger to Washington, and they, as usual, chose unwisely.

Look, I’m not going to forecast doom and gloom here, as the faithful rank and file of the losing party are certainly better equipped with the talking points for such diatribes, but you should know that we’re all screwed.

However, don’t worry about ol’ Rex. I suppose I’ll go home to literally and figuratively mend fences or clear brush or do something equally photo op-ish. There’s always next time and all that. For now I’ll just help this zombie basketball team that I’ve never seen before and certainly had no hand in creating clean up confetti here in the Motel 6 lobby before the law shows up. Then I'll return to Casa Camino in defeat, secure in the knowledge that there are other and more effective ways than democracy for rising to power.

So, goodnight and go drink.

RLC

one last thing

2006-11-07T08:45:00.000-06:00

The main thing you should remember when you're out there voting today is that not a single one of you received an annoying call from the Camino campaign. Sure, I may have hidden in your shrubs and taken the occasional incriminating photograph, but I never openly intruded into your life.

Yes, my fear of the telephone probably had a great deal to do with it, but I also like to think of myself as a considerate individual.

...with a lot of interesting photographs.

Anyway, just keep that in mind.

Also, I have yet to publish the manifesto, but one of the long term goals of the Camino Plan is the creation of an American monarchy, and a King Camino means no more getting pummeled with cold rain in the voting lines or running into trouble with the voting machines or getting those annoying calls or getting any calls at all.

But there will be time for talk of the Rextopia later.

First things first, people.

some last minute campaigning

2006-11-05T15:54:00.000-06:00

Joe Six-Pack: People who care about things have guilted me into voting this year, but I was surprised to find that there really isn’t anyone to vote for. I’m upset because A) the Republicans have screwed everything up B) God has apparently endorsed a Democrat for senate C) no hablo ingles. Who can I vote for?

Rex: You can write in Rex L Camino.

Joe Six-Pack: Who the hell is Rex L. Camino?

Rex: I am.

Joe Six-Pack: What is that, your porn name?

Rex: No, it’s a blog name. My porn name is "Pedro Pantalones".

Joe Six-Pack: What will you do if you’re elected.

Rex: First, I’ll stop doing porn, as it would be disrespectful to the office.

Joe Six-Pack: What office?

Rex: The office of porn star. Politics would disgrace it.

Joe Six-Pack: Then what will you do?

Rex: Can I have one of those beers?

Joe Five-Pack: Sure.

Rex: Thanks. Secondly, I’m sure I’ll find a way to disgrace whatever office I’m elected to.

Joe Five-Pack: Is that all?

Rex: Pretty much. It will be the same performance I’ve given in all the other jobs I’ve had, but this one has benefits and a six-figure income.

Joe Five-Pack: So are you a Republican or something?

Rex: No, I’m actually registered as a Democrat for the sole purpose of being able to vote for John Jay Hooker every time there’s a primary. However, I prefer to think of myself as libertarian.

Joe Five-Pack: John Jay Hooker…is that a porn name?

Rex: I’m afraid so.

novelvember?

2006-11-02T10:08:00.000-06:00

I'm going to try to write a novel and I only mention it here so that it has a slightly better chance of actually happening than all of the other things I set out to do for an extended period of time and yet fail miserably at. I have a short attention span and often give up before I'm finished, and there's an attic full of half-built perpetual motion machines to prove it. Then there's the whole zombie making thing, but, seriously, it's a little too cold to be digging up graves now.

I'm not officially going to try to write it as a part of this thing that I saw over at Newscoma's place, as that might be too much of a commitment that I eventually prove myself uncommitted to, but I'll shoot for the goal of 175 pages.

I tried novel writing in much the same kamikaze fashion a few years back when I was living in Knoxville and had two weeks to kill between jobs but very little money with which to slay them. I had a stack of jazz CDs by the computer and the general outline of a plot and commenced to writing without ever looking back or allowing myself to edit much. I was in the zone, and my mind wandered into thoughts of actually selling the damn thing until I let myself to stop at page one hundred--roughly half the way through--and read what I had produced so far.

Jeez. Think of every embarrassing thing that has ever happened to you and then place it in a cannon and have someone shoot you in the gut with that cannon and you'll have an idea of just how awful that thing was. I'm always hard on myself when it comes to judging my creative offerings, but there is no doubt that the collection of words I assembled in those two weeks were not meant for this world. I think I destroyed all copies, but a part of me wakes up in a cold sweat sometimes gripped with the fear that it lurks in the attic among the half-built perpetual motion machines and that android that could feel pain for some reason.

Again, I'm not a science person.

Anyway, I knocked out a chapter last night but I have yet to go back and read it, so I guess I'll at least make it a couple of days into the month without giving up.

i really should invest in a calendar

2006-11-01T08:24:00.000-06:00

After macing a gang of dwarf pirates I quickly slammed and locked the door, turned off all the lights, and then fixed myself another drink. I may have also screamed like a little girl, but the source of the shrill cry is still being debated. There frankly isn't enough evidence at the moment to attribute it to any one individual.

Anyway, I then remembered it was Halloween.

However, it occurs to me now that Halloween would be the perfect opportunity for the dwarf pirates to take over.

how to build your own bona fide real life undead zombie

2006-10-31T07:36:00.000-06:00

First, I should point out that any of you who wound up here in a search for that last minute costume idea for little Austin or Madison are in the wrong room. We’re going to be talking about how to turn your average human being into the walking undead, and only parents who want that sort of thing on a long-term basis for their child should be here. This isn’t the kind of zombiehood that scrubs away with a damp washcloth.

Next, I wanted to title this post “R. L. Camino’s Relatively Easy Zombie Recipe” but I thought that would A) draw too many folks in search of recipes for the drink “zombie”, or B) imply that I, a man who failed both high school and college science classes, figured out a way to make zombies through my own personal research and in my own spare time. I didn’t. The Internet figured it out and I distilled it down to a simple recipe and instructions that will be posted here directly. However, you can read my primary source for yourself here.

I should also point out that I’m in no way advocating that you turn another human being into a zombie. Don’t get me wrong, that would totally kick ass, but I’m officially telling you that, although there is no specific law against zombie making, there is probably something illegal within the process. So I didn’t tell you to do it or even how to do it. That was all the Internet’s doing.

By the way, here’s a recipe for the other kind of "zombie". Our zombie making, like anything else that requires effort, may also require motivation and courage, and alcohol at least gives one courage.

But that’s only if you’re going to make an undead zombie—which you shouldn’t, even though, again, it would totally kick ass.

Okay, let’s begin with a list of necessary ingredients, but don’t be that annoying bastard who starts asking questions this early on. The purpose of each of these will be revealed in time. Just shut up and write them down for now, even though you’re not actually going to be making a zombie:

1 puffer fish
1 marine toad
1 hyla tree frog
Some human remains (it doesn’t have to be much)
Some jimson weed (the amount will vary)
Salt (the ordinary table variety should work nicely)

Step 1: Combine the first four ingredients into a powder. I’m not really sure how to do that, as every source for the process I could find used a great deal of science in its explanation and science tends to make me sleepy or otherwise distracted, so just find a way to combine them and then turn them into a powder and you should be all right. Anyway, what you have now is called the “Haitian zombie powder”, and it relies on neurotoxins to make the intended victim appear dead.

I should probably have mentioned this before, but you don’t need to actually kill your intended victim before turning them into a zombie. If you’ve already done this, you’re screwed. It’s a popular myth that zombies are the dead come back to life, but that, in reality, is just an illusion, as you will see in a moment. So your intended victim, which you shouldn’t have anyway, is now nothing more than a worthless corpse. Way to go, dumbass. Now, let that be a lesson to the rest of you about not working ahead.

Step 2: Find some way to administer the powder unknowingly to your intended victim. This is where the whole zombie making process sort of runs afoul of the law, as the result of giving them the powder will be that they appear dead for a few days. Also, too much powder might render them actually dead, and, again, we’re not looking for corpses here.

Step 3: Everyone will be under the impression that your victim is dead. They will understandably want our to bury them, and you should allow this to happen. However, you will then want to dig them back up at your earliest convenience. Yes, it’s a bitch, but once you’ve come this far in the process you’ve really made a commitment. This isn’t like that gold fish you forgot to feed back in junior high.

Step 4: Greet your zombie. They will not be much of a conversationalist, as I’m sure you’ve gathered from television and film, but they will be rather mind-numbed and willing to do your bidding. Might I suggest that your first order be for them to refill their former grave.

Step 5: You will need the jimson weed, or “zombie’s cucumber”, as it is known in Haiti, to maintain your zombie’s cooperative and near vegetative state. This has the dual benefit of causing both an amnesia that keeps your zombie from recalling their pre-zombie days and hallucinations that only confirm that there is indeed some weird shit is going on and that their new master may in some way be magical.

Try, try, try to understand...You’re a magic man.

Step 6: Enjoy your zombie. The traditional thing to do at this point would be to sell them into slave labor on a sugar plantation. However, your local sugar plantation, if it is still operational, may be unionized these days. Also, any sort of legitimate employment will likely run one into problems with the I.R.S. or Social Security Administration.

Actually, step 6 depends on your original intention and is therefore subjective, though I dare say that a number of you first thought about things involving the naughty bits.

Step 7: Let’s face it; you may soon tire of our zombie. Life with a zombie can become rather lonely after a while and the drawbacks may eventually outweigh the benefits. Indeed. What now, you ask? The answer is simple: time to break out the salt. You see, tetrodotoxin, the particular neurotoxin found in our puffer fish from step one, works by blocking the sodium channels in nerve and muscle cells. The folklore of zombiehood says that salt repairs this, though modern medicine disagrees. I know this because it was outlined in a short paragraph within in an attention-holding bright yellow box at the side of the main article. At any rate, just to be safe, those in the midst of enjoying their new zombie and having no desire whatsoever for it to return to its formerly coherent state should make sure that it subsists on a diet extremely low in sodium.

Actually, the best thing to do to rid yourself of your zombie is to either hold off on the jimson weed or just sell them to someone desirous of a zombie yet unwilling to follow through on steps 1-4.

That is, if you had actually embarked on this kick ass, yet probably illegal or, at least, morally questionable, though scientifically based experiment in the first place.

shanananananananaknees, knees.

2006-10-30T16:23:00.000-06:00

Come on, you know you want to quit your job and live out that fantasy to play bass in the nation's #1 Guns n' Roses cover band.

Wait, maybe that's me.

No, couldn't be. I don't have a job to quit.

Anyway, methinks it would probably be a better gig than playing for real GnR right now.

southern nights

2006-10-30T09:35:00.000-06:00

Glen Campbell was in town last night, and although I hadn't seen the Rhinestone Cowboy in a couple years, it was just like old times.

oops

2006-10-28T10:50:00.000-05:00

I neglected to mention that I will be blogging in a semi-professional manner over here all weekend.

what happens in tunica stays in tunica

2006-10-27T09:48:00.000-05:00

Which is rather easy, as one is still in Mississippi and not privy to the hedonism offered in Nevada. No, I wouldn’t expect a Tunica branch of the CSI franchise anytime soon. In fact, the only sort of nightlife that non-gamblers like Mrs. Camino and myself could’ve experienced was a performance by Kenny G., and that, while certainly being something that one would wish to stay in Tunica for no other reason than the dreadful Kenneth’s act of musical necrophilia upon Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” a few years back, not to mention any other of his pieces of music selected at random, isn’t the sort of titillation that makes for good marketing.

So it was that we bypassed the claustrophobia of the casino buffet and drove fifteen minutes to Tunica proper where we dined in a relatively empty Mexican restaurant along highway 61. We later strolled through the casino for some people watching, but the hordes of half drunk gamblers sitting despondently in the unflattering light of the slot machines and the thick cloud of cheap tobacco smoke proved a bit more depressing than free entertainment should be. So we retired early. Besides, Mrs. Camino had to be up at a decent hour for her presentation.

That night Mrs. Camino dreamed of playing slot machines. She kept winning, but each time she won food instead of money.

I am not blessed with the gift of dream interpretation, but it seemed to me that she had actually been playing the vending machines.

While Mrs. Camino was at her conference I drove around in the drizzle looking at wide cotton fields dotted with pecan trees, pine trees, and the occasional shotgun shack or church. One is still in Mississippi. I then collected Mrs. Camino after her presentation and went to a park along the river where we happened upon the rare site of a live armadillo sniffing and snorting along the roadside for something edible. Bastard wouldn’t hold still.

It sort of looks like a possum dressed up as a samurai warrior for Halloween, does it not? Yes, someone should have named them Mexican Samurai Possums, I think. It would have done wonders for their marketing.

aerie girls lose again

2006-10-25T10:15:00.000-05:00

Tuesday night viewers of the new CW network are well aware of the "aerie girls" and the keen insight they provide after shows like The Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars. However, the CW is finding out that the public doesn't care much for having teenage girls essentially give a recap of the program you've just been watching, and I doubt that they will continue to grace our televisions for much longer.

Ah, but there is often opportunity in the misfortune of others.

I had the idea to bring the aerie girls here to the humble Blog o' Doom to review posts every few weeks much in the same way they so brilliantly expounded upon the happenings of Veronica and the Gilmores. It seemed a win/win situation at the time, but...Well, you can have a gander at the failed experiment in these random scenes from the first and only episode:

nighthawks at the diner

2006-10-23T10:57:00.000-05:00

I maybe only make a couple of late night visits to a Waffle House a year, but it occurred to me during the other night’s tarriance at said establishment that everything—well, the rigid floor plan, décor, and juke box selection complete with a handful of odes to the Waffle House itself, of course, but also the chainsmoking and sad-faced, yet sweet-talking waitress, the tables of chainsmoking older regulars swilling coffee, younger folks in from the bars to soak up alcohol with eggs and bacon, and the eerily quiet and David Banner-like short order cook with the shifty eyes who all the waitresses fruitlessly flirt with even though they know this is the sort of man who probably has the remains of a hitchhiker or two in the crawlspace under the house, but at least he has a house—is exactly alike in a way that makes one begin to wonder if the front door is nothing more than a teleportation device to the very same greasy purgatory under sickly yellow lighting or culinary hell, depending on one’s standards—which are hard to come by at that time of night, culinarily speaking.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I should try this theory out at the interstate exit down from Casa Camino where a Waffle House sits on either side. One has to wonder what sort of dilemma this puts the regulars into. Obviously, they should stop at the one nearest them, but at some point during the hours of chainsmoking and coffee swilling they are each bound to turn a weathered face to the window and glance past those interstate lights in a gnawing wonder as to what’s taking place at that other Waffle House.

This wouldn’t happen if they subscribed to my teleportation device theory.

mark your evolutionary calendars

2006-10-20T08:16:00.000-05:00

The human race, according to this article, will reach its peak in the year 3000 when we are all seven feet tall, coffee-colored, and have spectacular genitalia. After that we spend the next nine thousand years turning into chinless and technologically dependent housepets.

Then come the Morlocks.

uri geller seeks a "paranormal protege"

2006-10-18T16:11:00.000-05:00

I once rode in a reportedly haunted Miata. I didn't see or experience anything more than cramped discomfort. The Mazda Protege is a bit more roomy, but the skeptic in me believes that Mr. Geller will find nothing more than a sensible and gas efficient automobile.

Then again, Mr. Geller knows how to make these things happen.

Anyway, learn your own version of the spoon bending trick and you may just win the "huge", yet undisclosed prize that awaits the winner of Geller's "American Idol"-styled competition to find his "heir".

Yes, one would assume that Geller already knows who will win. So does Miss Cleo.

No, I don't know why David Blaine and Michael Jackson are pictured with Geller.

Yes, I too wish an asteroid had struck that very spot at the moment the picture was taken.

one toke over the line, sweet jesus

2006-10-18T09:07:00.000-05:00

Dear Lord,

I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but you've heard very little complaining from your humble Rex on the subject of all these maladies you've seen fit to visit upon me. I know you certainly would have heard any and all complaints but I didn't know if the omnipotence thing covered stuff that didn't happen. This would include my not saying a word about all the allergies, the baldness, the bad back, the dizzy spells, the theme song to Matlock constantly running through my head, the toothaches, the stubby fingers, or the way that taxidermied deer heads sometimes come to life and tell me the most inappropriate stories when no one else is around. I have accepted all these things, God, because I know that you and Buddha and Allah and Bear Bryant probably get a kick out of them.

However, this new thing...

You forgot to mention the wide feet, the short attention span, the near-reclusive state in which you live, all the drinking, your crippling fear of the San Diego Chicken...

Bastard! You don't belong in my correspondences, Captain Howdy, and I expect you to be gone by the time I get back from fetching a drink to settle my nerves after seeing that.

Ah. That's better. Sorry about that, Lord. Anyway, I want it to be noted that I haven't complained once about any of these things. Well, I have actually complained about them a great deal, but it should be noted that it was never to you specifically. However, I really feel I should mention something now, as things seem to have gone a bit to far.

You see, I'm noticing an increasing number of gray hairs in my beard as of late.

That's a beard?

Quiet, damn you! It's only five days of one.

Ch-ch-ch-chia!

Ignore him, O' Lord.

Anyway, if it isn't asking to much...

Why don't you just photoshop it out like you do with everything else?

Lord, I'm just asking that you hold off on the gray hair for a while. I don't think it's...

Rex! You hast askethed a great deal of me this day...eth, but me thinkest I can doeth it for a large sum of cash...No checks...only cash.

Yes, I'm proud of you for finding Blogger's color chart, Captain Howdy. However, your sacrilege probably means that I now have to shell out for some Just For Men.

If you acteth now I'll also throweth in a good smiting down of the San Diego Chicken .

Thanks again, bastard.

i am now 1 in 300 million and so are you

2006-10-17T08:07:00.000-05:00

There's no way to be specific about these things, but I suspect that the 300 millionth kid is named Austin*. They are named Austin and their mother will yell that name in an ineffective, yet nasally way as Austin runs like a drunken Comanche up and down the grocery store aisles leaving a trail of candy wrappers in his wake. His mother will also briefly tear herself away from the cell phone to shout things like Stop it, honey or Put down those steak knives, Austin or Get away from that man, Austin; He smells drunk and it looks like you're either frightening him or making him very angry.

Yes, I went to the grocery store yesterday. Why do you ask?

Anyway, welcome to the world, Austin.

*If you happen to have a kid named Austin and are at all offended by the familiarity invoked by the use of this name, then pretend I said Herbert**.

**If you happen to have a kid named Herbert, then you really don't love them anyway***.

***However, I have no doubt that a Herbert would conduct himself more like a proud and sober Comanche.

a bit about marriage and a new candidacy idea

2006-10-16T08:27:00.000-05:00

I'm given to understand that there is an amendment dealing with marriage on this year's ballot in Tennessee. I also gather that it is a simple Yes/No question and therefore leaves one unable to write in the name of Rex L. Camino, but I will not let that keep me from trying. It would certainly kick ass to be the first write in candidate in history to win on a Yes/No question, but I'm sure "the man" has ways of thwarting me on this. He always does.

But I digress.

I don't know if marriage questions ever end up on the ballot in India, but this story leads me to believe that they are far more liberal on the matter.

Will this inspire any Vol fans to propose to Rocky Top? Only time will tell, but I hesitate to link to the article for that very reason.*

Anyway, I babble on about marriage here because today happens to be the seventh anniversary of my wedding to the lovely and talented Mrs. Camino.

Happy anniversary, dear.

*It's not like Vol fans can read anyway.**

**Oh snap. Oh no he didn't.

ramblings for friday the 13th

2006-10-13T07:54:00.000-05:00

There are ten* Friday the 13th films, and I won’t try to give you the impression that I’ve seen them all or even a significant number of them. Personally, I prefer suspense to blood and gore, and these slasher films at some point shifted focus from trying to scare the audience to seeing how much carnage the audience could stomach. Besides, the whole masked killer thing really impedes the believability here.

Look, I don’t know if you’ve ever chased youngsters around a summer camp with an axe, chainsaw**, or garden weasel to punish them for their recreational drug use and pre-marital sex, but the wearing of a mask really dulls one’s senses in these situations.

And don’t even get me started on ergonomic disadvantages of the clown suit.

You know, Freddy Krueger had it right with the fedora, the comfortable sweater, and the killing implements conveniently affixed to a leather glove. It’s convenient and still leaves one with the benefit of peripheral vision. However, it’s still about the carnage in the Nightmare films.

The Scream films were a little better in that they had the element of satirizing the genre, but are their even eyeholes in that guy’s mask? Am I to also believe that one would not get entangled in a cloak?

I don’t know if you’ve ever chased youngsters around in a full cloak, but…nevermind, I’ll keep that one to myself.

It is interesting to note the evolution of the slasher mask here. After watching the original Friday the 13th movie any kid could walk into a sporting goods store, purchase a hockey mask and instantly have his Jason costume for Halloween. That’s great for promoting the film, but the hockey mask industry sees all the profits. This isn’t so with the Scream franchise. Their mask may be the least functional of all the masked killers, but you at least have to pay them anytime you want to don one.

Keep that in mind when embarking on your own slasher franchise.

*Do we count the Freddy vs. Jason film? If so, that makes eleven. However, I don’t really think it belongs, as it seems like a feeble attempt to piece together has-beens for the sole purpose of swindling those sad fans that still cling to the genre. It’s sort of like the Velvet Revolver*** of horror films.

**Sure, chainsaws are scary and all, but can you really sneak up on somebody with a friggin’ chainsaw? Are we killing Helen Keller here?

***I’m no gun aficionado, but I can’t quite see the purpose in having an actual velvet revolver****. Sure, it would feel cuddly soft to the marksman who wields it, but wouldn’t firearms forged from sturdier materials be more effective. I mean, you couldn’t even hit somebody over the head and knock them out with a velvet revolver.

****For that matter, what is the purpose of a “def leppard”*****? I feel sorry enough for leopards as it is, as they are easily the most overlooked of the big cats. Lions are the kings, cheetahs are the fastest and therefore more popular of the spotted big cats, and tigers are more often the cartoon spokespeople and get to eat the occasional “magician” in real life.

*****And what is with the spelling? Am I to believe that this is also a “special needs” leopard on top of the hearing disability******? I’m saddened even more.

******Still, I suppose you can sneak up on it with a chainsaw*******.

*******Yes, one should really stop after three asterisks.

a pirate looks at thirty-two

2006-10-08T12:13:00.000-05:00

You know, just once I’d like for Jimmy Buffett to run into some actual pirates. I've never actually seen any myself but I’m given to understand that their lifestyle has very little to do with songs about cheeseburgers or fruity drinks or restaurant franchises based on said songs. Blackbeard once shot the kneecaps off of a cabin boy as an example to the rest of the crew when he thought they were going soft. Jimmy Buffett loses his saltshaker and proceeds to wallow in self-pity. About the only similarities I can see is that the two of them have boats. I have a bicycle and one testicle, but you won’t see me claiming to be Lance Armstrong.

Wait, there are two. Nevermind.

But I digress.

I am thirty-two today. Soon my age and waist size will be as one, though my waist size keeps creeping higher in what I can only assume is a valiant attempt at avoiding this inevitability.

Other than that, I can’t complain much.

mr. manning (have pity on the losing man)

2006-10-06T08:14:00.000-05:00

Dear Peyton Manning,

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this to you or not, Peyton, but I was actually the manager at a Books-A-Million for nearly half a year back in the thick of that Pokemon phase a few years back. It sucked, and I was witness to something really sad and pathetic during my brief tenure that will haunt me the rest of my days. I even fear that it will flash before my eyes just before death to fill a quota of “sad and pathetic” things in that proverbial slide show that greets us like the rolling of life’s credits just before our sad demise.

Anyway, trust me; this has everything to do with you. Just listen.

You see, these little kids would gather in the clearing around the magazine racks every Saturday to have their weekly Pokemon tournaments. Parents essentially dumped their kids on us for a day, Peyton. You know how that sort of thing would certainly bother me in most situations, but I’ll remind you again that I was in management and therefore had any number underlings to send out for dealing with children or the disgruntled.

One of the common problems the underlings reported back to me with there in that small office with my books and free coffee—and this is the sad and pathetic part, Peyton—was the despicable phenomenon of freakishly nerdy teenagers who would show up, compete against these little children in their Pokemon tournaments, and then sometimes even trash talk their recently vanquished enemies now squatting there on the carpet, many times in puddles of their own tears. Bear in mind that these freakishly nerdy teenagers drove themselves to the bookstore to do this. They had access to a car on a Saturday, Peyton, and they chose to spend it defeating small children in a pointless Japanese card game. I don’t know about you, but back in Alabama we went around either drinking or breaking shit when we had access to vehicles on the weekend. Sometimes both.

Hell, even if your Saturdays consisted of Archie chaining you and little Leroy—or whatever his name is—to a tree in the backyard and beating you with mannequins dressed up as linebackers until you both became better ~~mealtickets~~ quarterbacks you still had a more noble Saturday than the bastards I just spoke of.

Anyway, here’s what this has to do with you: You see, Peyton, The Titans secondary—hell, the whole defense—is sort of like those little children who get left at the bookstore. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but our secondary will impede your passing game about as effectively as a basket full of legless kittens. I don’t know why the kittens are legless, Peyton, but I’m here to tell you that there is no honor in exploiting the situation just to make your stats look good.

In fact, our secondary reminds me of my playing days back in high school. We were horrible, and each of the coaches would tell us about how much better their grandmothers would be in our respective positions. They would then add that their grandmothers were in wheelchairs. They would say things like you couldn’t cover my grandmother, and she’s in a wheelchair or the offensive line was blowing holes in the defense wide enough to wheel my grandmother through…and she’s in a wheelchair.

I don’t know why all the grandmothers used to be paralyzed, Peyton, but I always suspected it had something to do with all that Polio business back a long time ago.

Anyway, I came to hate and despise all those grandmothers. You see, Peyton, I was out there busting my ass. We sucked but we at least put forth an effort, and I never saw any of those chickenshit grandmas show up to try and take my job. Grandmas are all talk, Peyton. Remember that if Tony Dungy ever pulls that shit with you guys.

That being said, I really don’t think Lamont Thompson or any of his well intentioned, yet inadequate Titan brethren could cover my grandmother. She’s not in a wheel chair but she’s frail and she’s ninety-two. Hell, a wheelchair would probably speed her up a bit.

Anyway, you guys won’t need her. You may meet some resistance on the defensive line, but the pass threat will be enough to weaken that. Besides, one of our main run stoppers—a fellow former Vol, in fact—went batshit crazy and Tennessee Waltzed all over some guy’s unhelmeted face last week.

This means that Albert Haynesworth will be gone for quite some time, and my sources at Titans headquarters tell me that their going to try to fill his vacated roster spot with someone who will help stop that nosedive in the ratings.

Anyway, just bear in mind that any given member of our defensive squad could snap and go batshit crazy if the game gets out of hand and that a stomped-in face equals no commercials.

Well, you’ve been kind to listen, Peyton, and I only ask that you go out and get really drunk Sunday morning or try and pass with your feet or let Archie play or do something along those lines to keep the game interesting.

Please.

Sincerely,

Rex

making a difference in one child's life

2006-10-03T09:23:00.000-05:00

Now, I’m no Ms. Marple, but the sound of children playing in the cul-de-sac outside my window these last couple days leads me to believe that Rutherford County’s fall break is upon us. These days are really the only thing I miss about teaching. Ah, to get paid to do absolutely nothing.

That pretty much covers all your employment situations, doesn’t it?

I suppose it does, but there was something extra special about getting paid to teach without having to do any actual teaching.

That’s pretty much true for every day you were in the classroom, isn’t it?

Probably. But you digress.

These sounds of happy children don’t bother me so much, as happy children tend to keep to themselves and even ignore me. It’s the children with that contemptible mix of unhappiness and talkativeness that I make every effort to avoid. I remember one such child at a birthday gathering here at Casa Camino for one of Mrs. Camino’s relatives…

(Rex looks up from the keyboard and stares at the bare wall to his right for a minute or so)

Anyway, that pretty much covers that story. I’m not sure there’s a moral to be had there, but…

You appear to have just thought about the story without writing it down.

Ah, so I did.

Well, I seem to recall that this particular child was the offspring of either a distant cousin of Mrs. Camino or some random passerby looking for free beer, margaritas, and trays of Mexican themed appetizers that, though quite tasty and much appreciated, seemed oddly out of place at a gathering for a family of Welsh descent.

I had been watching the child as he went from adult to adult asking questions about everything and talking about his sad little life. His parents seemed to encourage this, as they were obviously suffering a sort of fatigue from the child and were hoping to pass him on to others for a while. I did well to avoid him as I semi-mingled while hovering around the food and drink before sneaking upstairs with some beer to watch football in the comforting solitude of the Rexroom.

The kid, as you may have guessed, saw this and followed, and the only things worse than being in the company of an annoying child is being the only person in the company of said child.

Kid: (looking around) You have another room upstairs?

Rex: No, this is actually part of the neighbor’s house and I’m afraid they only invited me over. You’ll need to go back down at once.

He didn’t, of course, and I spent the next half hour having to explain the various contents within my fortress of solitude, hearing all about how bored and unhappy the child was, and then explaining to him the dangers of coming between a man who had been drinking and his televised football games.

Other adults eventually trickled upstairs, drawn perhaps by the increasing volume of the television that did little to drown the kid out. I was no closer to my desired solitude, yet I was grateful to have to a wider audience for the kid to choose from while dispersing his annoyances. He soon began a routine that he had tried quite unsuccessfully on me only minutes before. He spoke it like he knew it was his best material, and I suspect that he launched into so quickly with this new audience as a means of erasing the utter failure it proved on me.

It was one of those “everybody at school says I’m stupid” bits that stupid kids so often bear as their mantra, and the husband of one of Mrs. Camino’s friends listened to it and then spoke at length about how no child is stupid. I searched in vain for my cheesy little Wal-Mart keyboard to accompany him with some serious, yet comforting background music not unlike that found on any given eighties sitcom. It was unfortunately buried somewhere in the attic. Anyway, women swooned and remarked on how sweet his words to the annoying kid were, though I noticed that this only emboldened the kid and re-energized the annoying tendencies that had actually been waning a bit before someone went and paid attention to him.

Still, I was glad that other adults had been absent during my handling of the same situation, as they appeared to show a higher tolerance for this sort of thing.

Kid: All the kids at school say that I’m stupid.

Rex: All the kids?

Kid: Yes. And then they…

Rex: Well, Gerald…

Kid: My name’s Kevin.

Rex: Whatever. You see, Gerald, if all the kids agree on something it forms what adults like to call a “consensus”.

Kid: What does that mean?

Rex: It means that you should accept the situation and consider your options. Sure you don’t want a beer?

Anyway, You can see that I’m not completely heartless. I went on to explain to him how one goes about taking all their anger and hate and rolling it into a tight little ball to store deep within their soul and then survive off for the majority of their formative years. I explained that beer aids greatly in making it through this time, but he insisted on letting his dislike of its taste get in the way.

Ah well, you can lead a horse to water.

you blessed googlesearchers always teach me so much about myself

2006-09-29T11:33:00.000-05:00

However, ironically, now that you mention it I don't recall having ever seeing a dwarf in a necktie. I'm sure I have, but it's not one of those things that always gets filed away in the more accessible of the memory banks.

UPDATE: Well, I've had the day to think about it and I've concluded that bowties really make more sense for those of limited stature. Indeed.

meet oliver gilmore

2006-09-27T09:22:00.000-05:00

This was certainly an odd, though foreseeable turn of events from last night's season premier of Gilmore Girls.

Did Cousin Oliver's racquetball hyjinx earn him the love of the television public?

Only time will tell.

because breakfast at tiffany's is on and i'm tired of wondering why audrey hepburn never made a guest appearance on the a-team

2006-09-26T08:49:00.000-05:00

But seriously. I mean, she was doing all that UNICEF work back in the eighties while the A-Team was traveling around the world fighting second rate drug lords or corrupt sheriffs and their assorted henchmen--who, as you may have noticed, invariably played the same drug lord or sheriff and henchmen with the same wardrobe but different names the following week on Magnum, P.I. or Simon and Simon or Hunter or the short-lived Riptide and then maybe MacGuyver. It would have been so easy to have these second rate drug lords or corrupt sheriffs in some way interfere with UNICEF doing whatever it is that UNICEF does. Both side would win, and I'm sure that it would have made George Peppard very happy.

A missed opportunity like that really sticks in my craw, and I am a man who cannot abide a cluttered craw.

Anyway, they're both gone now, and thinking about this can do no good.

However, my question from this particular viewing is this: What exactly is a "huckleberry friend"?

open letter to mothers who nervously clench their strollers more tightly when they pass an unshowered rex innocently walking his dog on the greenway

2006-09-24T11:42:00.000-05:00

I don’t want your kids. Seriously. Frankly, I’m afraid of most children and avoid them whenever possible. In fact, I dare say that I am more afraid of your children than you are of me, and the same goes for Carl Weathers. He doesn’t slip behind me as we pass because he is well trained--rather, he stays away from them of his own accord, as they tend to poke him and prod him and sometimes even pull on his silky ears. Believe me, he will not eat you children. He may not be well trained, but that dog is keen enough to know that children these days are composed of more fat than meat and therefore not worth taking down.

Anyway, I can see how frequent elementary school performances of my critically ignored puppet show The Smoking Monkey That Could But Didn’t might lead you to believe that I have an interest in the next generation. I do not. It is simply that most local judiciaries have been kind enough to classify these performances as “community service”.

So, as you can see, you have nothing to worry about, especially those of you with babies. The only thing more uninteresting than children are baby children, and I can assure you that I have no desire whatsoever to relieve you of them.

Anyway, all I ask is that you try to avoid giving me that look of fear that is only allowable in those who have gotten to know and legitimately fear me for valid reasons.

Let us not forget that we are living in a society, ladies.

Yours,

Rex

the r.l.camino random admission of the day

2006-09-20T12:59:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, if the house is empty and I find myself standing on the hardwood floors in dressy shoes, I begin a seemingly spontaneous fit of tapdancing for no other reason than to watch the dog wag his tail.

However, I'm fairly certain that he wags out of fear rather than happiness.

the r.l.camino random question of the day

2006-09-19T12:47:00.000-05:00

Was Anthony Bourdain in Sha Na Na?

a little ditty about rex and diane

2006-09-18T08:04:00.000-05:00

Why does Diane Sawyer talk to me like I’m “special”? I mean, I know I have the appearance, mannerisms, conversation and college transcript of one who is seemingly slow-witted, but I don’t think I deserve to have a morning television personality read me headlines of celebrity gossip and the latest household dangers in a voice better suited to interpret The Little Engine That Could in the short time it takes me to locate the remote and change to Univision. I may not understand the news in Spanish, but at least the ladies there aren’t quite as condescending…I don’t think.

Also, they're usually hot. I think it’s the black blood.

Perhaps it is, Captain Howdy. All I know is that the affairs of the world are less troubling when you aren’t quite sure what’s going on and when there is a good chance that the newscasters will erupt into seemingly spontaneous salsa dancing at any given moment.

just a reminder

2006-09-15T06:58:00.000-05:00

I may not have Bob Corker's money or Harold Ford, Jr.'s unshakable religious faith, but you can still write in Camino for Senate.

life is all about meeting and then surpassing your goals

2006-09-13T07:58:00.000-05:00

I don't mean to gloat, people, but I have now worn the same pair of shorts every day for over two weeks straight without incurring any significant stains.

random thoughts of a disgruntled NFL fan, week 1

2006-09-11T07:05:00.000-05:00

I don't know if you were aware of this, but Kerry Collins is one of the few NFL quarterbacks not sired by Archie Manning.

Archie is a smart man. He knew that giving them all the surname of Manning would quickly lead to a "Manning fatigue" and therefore chose names like Grossman, Roethlisberger, and Leftwich for some of them.

Only time will tell if Peyton will surpass Dan Marino as the greatest QB to never win a superbowl, but he's certainly already giving the former Dolphins QB a run for his money in the area of selling crap on TV. However, I have no doubt that Archie, like any good father, will still love them both when it is over.

Methinks the Titans would do well to play in Ravens uniforms the rest of the year.

To be honest, I stopped watching the Titans game around the time someone got word to the sideline that yesterday's contest was not a preseason game. It was a rather embarrassing mistake, though it does explain why they were only going half-speed and avoided breaking a sweat for three quarters.

Has anyone ever studied the effect of hair transplants on coaching decisions?

irony

2006-09-08T08:46:00.000-05:00

I've noticed in my recent late night flippings about that one of the cable channels is replaying episodes of the original Extreme Makeover in which ordinary people born with large noses and very little in the chin department would undergo surgeries to have part of their nose taken to construct a new chin...or something to that effect. I've never actually sat through an entire episode and am not even sure if the program is still on.

Anyway, I recall that they would sometimes take a couple who thought themselves goofy looking and reconstruct each and then have a big tearful reuniting in front of friends and family. They had literally put all that ugliness behind them and were set to venture together into a happy and rather average looking future.

However, the thing that was never addressed on the show was the fact that the young couple still had chinless and nose heavy genes to pass onto their children, and those traits they had so happily put behind them would only be compounded in their offspring.

There must be another spin-off in that somewhere.

it happened

2006-09-06T09:07:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the infrequent posting as of late, but my arm, as feared, fell off at an inopportune moment early last week.

August the 28th started off like any other Monday. I awoke, breakfasted, guzzled half a pot of coffee while perusing the blogs, scribbled out a short an uninteresting post of my own, touched up a small graphic design project, played the bull fiddle a while, walked Carl Weathers, landscaped about Casa Camino until it was semi-presentable, showered, shaved, luncheoned while checking in on my Spanish language soap operas, and then headed out. I ran a few errands and perused out the used sections of a couple of guitar stores before making it the square. I browsed the library first and then dropped off my watch at a jeweler’s to repair some damage sustained when I rather stupidly kept it on while kayaking on Center Hill Lake the previous Saturday. I then thought about getting my monthly headbuzzing a week early at my barbershop across the square, but it, like any respectable barbershop is closed on Mondays. No problem. Liquid Smoke was open and a beer and cigarette while trying to finish Brideshead Revisited seemed like a good way to wait out an impending afternoon thunderstorm.

I should mention two things here.

First, I’m more of a social smoker. It is rare to find me smoking either during the day or while sitting alone, but it is good to know that there are some public places that allow one to give one’s lungs a warm hug in a comfortable indoor setting when in the mood. Smoking, despite the numerous examples of cold and shivering smokers standing demeaningly outside office buildings, is cool. I can understand how it falls into the category of things we must lie to children about, but it, if done correctly, can be a rewarding hobby that lasts a lifetime. Moderation is the key, kids. Also, never buy those generic cigarettes that taste like cardboard. If you’re going to do something, do it correctly.

Secondly, I highly recommend the novels of Evelyn Waugh to anyone in the need of some reading material, though I won’t put the seal of approval on Brideshead. It was quite un-Waugh-like and a bit too soap opera-esque for my tastes. Check out Decline and Fall and you will not be disappointed.

Get on with it, damn you!

Patience, Captain Howdy. Patience.

I emerged refreshed from Liquid Smoke an hour later, rummaged through the record shops and the square’s used book store for over another hour without buying anything, and then settled into a corner table at a coffee shop to wait out the afternoon’s second wave of semi-thunderstorms with some green tea. Once that had passed I began the trek back to the Caminomobile, as the hour was getting late and I still needed to swing by the new Indian grocery store down the road from Casa Camino and find something adventurous to have waiting on the table by the time Mrs. Camino got home from work.

Then, as so often happens on my saunterings around the square, a carload of visitors pulled up beside me to ask for directions. This turned out to be a group of Honduran cedar bucket enthusiasts nearing the disappointing end of a pilgrimage that would only lead to a slab of charred concrete. I hadn’t the heart to tell them the fate of the bucket and instead attempted a conversation comprised mostly of phrases I had picked up from watching Spanish language soap operas. However, I don’t really understand Spanish myself, and a later consultation with a Spanish dictionary validated the troubling looks I received when I told them I was carrying Pedro’s baby. At the time I only knew that the conversation was wearing thin and that I should probably send them on to the former site of the world’s largest cedar bucket. So I smiled politely, pointed them in the right direction, and then listened to the terrified reaction elicited by having my arm fall into their rented convertible.

By the way, the Spanish word for leprosy is lepra, while a leper would be called a leproso. It certainly seems that the two should be reversed, though it didn’t matter much at the time.

Anyway, I was going to try and play it off—you know, casually pick up my arm, wave goodbye (perhaps even with the severed arm, as if that sort of things was a common American occurrence), and then continue about my sauntering. However, their quickly driving off prevented this and created a rather embarrassing scenario in which I had to chase them across the greater downtown portion of Church Street before I was able to leap into the car and retrieve an arm that was rightfully mine.

I spent that evening attempting to save money by festooning the arm back onto my person myself, but it was no use. So it was that I sought the assistance of a licensed medical professional and spent the last week in a rehabilitation that consisted primarily of my conversing with multiple handpuppets for the better part of the day.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been.

but will there be a bowtie?

2006-08-28T07:45:00.000-05:00

I've noticed that at least one person a day winds up here in a fruitless branch off of this particular search.

These Internets is a strange and lonely place.

pelee island, part 2

2006-08-25T07:50:00.000-05:00

I remembered two things from the crash:

1. Thinking and perhaps even shouting Why me, O Lord? as I went down. This is typical. I have many accidents and find that it is better to call out something along these line—perhaps even a Why do you hate me, Jesus?—while they are occurring just in case death is imminent. Many people like to repent just before dying, but I find that repenting implies an admission of wrongdoing.

2. Feeling and hearing what I can only assume was my left arm coming out of the socket. I quickly stood, brushed myself off, checked the severity of my skinned knee, and then noticed numbness in my left arm dangling there beside me. It had gone right back into place after the crash and looked to be fine, but I couldn’t feel it. Then I could, and it hurt. It hurt considerably. I walked around shaking it off for a minute or two. The pain wore off and it seemed to be fine, thus depriving me of the opportunity to see what socialized medicine is all about.

However, it has started hurting a bit since our return. Do any doctors know if this is something that should be checked out? If so, do any socialists know if my injury is still the responsibility of the Canadian government?

Just thought I’d ask. It might be awkward to have my arm fall off in the middle of some random everyday activity. Also, it would render this room full of musical instruments tragically useless. Then again, I could perhaps sell them all and have enough cash for a kick ass bionic arm with rocket launchers, assorted can openers, and maybe even an animatronic hand puppet.

However, I’m finding it difficult to think of how “one arm bandit” can best fit onto a license plate.

But I digress. I think I was speaking at this point of the negative aspects of our vacation, and there was no more negative draw back than the Canadian mosquito.

They are whiney and insatiable little bastards who seemed to have a particular bloodlust for visitors or maybe just visiting Caminos. Native islanders and even travelers from the northern states complained about them, but Mrs. Camino and I never noticed anyone else swatting them with the same zeal we used to defend ourselves. We could generally go about in the direct sunlight with little problem, but wooded areas and any outdoor setting at or after dusk could not be ventured into for long without earning a great deal of itchy welts, scratches, and other assorted battle scars.

The natives try to defend against the bastards by setting up purple martin houses or allowing barn swallows to build against their houses, but it does little to stop them. Mrs. Camino and I supplanted television by driving along the back roads ten or fifteen miles an hours while listening to books on tape and would encounter mosquito swarms in some areas that looked in the headlights like a heavy snowfall. Flipping to the high beams at these times filled the entire windshield with sky obscuring cloud of hungry mosquito. This never failed to elicit horror movie gasps from each of us.

The Canadian person is quite different from the Canadian mosquito. Though they seem to show a lack of respect for the American flag (much to the offense of Tim Morgan), or at least a preference for their own flag, they have learned to speak the American damn language, with the notable exception of the inhabitants of Quebec, who perhaps learned French just to piss us off.

Still, you’ll find the average inhabitant of Pelee Island to be quite laid back and immediately friendly. Everything is a bit more simplified within their tiny confines, and they seem to genuinely enjoy having the company of tourists. As you can imagine, each of the one hundred and seventy five residents know one another quite well, and it is understandable that they would be so welcoming of new blood.

I didn’t take any pictures of Canadians while on my trip. I went to Morocco a few years back and tried to take pictures of Moroccans but found that many of them would immediately dive out of the way of the camera, as being photographed went against their particular sect of Islam. Once I learned this I would sometimes use my camera to help thin the crowded alleyways of the Kasbah or simply for my own amusement. Remind me to show you some pictures I have of blurry scattering tunics sometime.

Still, I can’t help but feel that I played some minor role in our unfortunately poor relationship with the Islamic peoples of the world.

Anyway, I would like for our relations with our neighbors to the north to go a little more smoothly, and thus left the people unphotographed. However, you can view the rest of my vacation slides here.

making the most of our time together

2006-08-24T04:55:00.000-05:00

Cats, I've found, are essential to maintaining one's sanity while battling insomnia, as is the ability to make tiny hats out of construction paper. However, one cannot expect the first to always appreciate the second.

Bastard just ate his sombrero.

pelee island, part 1

2006-08-22T09:56:00.000-05:00

In the western end of Lake Erie lies a cluster of nine islands, primarily named for poultry, that comprise the southernmost inhabited point of Canada. However, the islands of Hen, Chick, Little Chick, and Big Chicken are mostly uninhabited, though one would think they either contain or resemble chickens in some way. I wouldn’t know, as we stayed on Pelee, by far the largest of these islands and the only one of any real significance, other than the fact that these smaller islands played crucial roles in that blessed rum-running underground railroad from Canada into the states during the prohibitionary years of our nation’s dark past.

Known for primarily for its wine making and summer tourism, Pelee is a quilt of nature reserves, vineyards, and wheat fields dotted with a handful bed and breakfasts and beach houses. It encompasses roughly forty-two square kilometers, but you’ll have to decide for yourself what this means in terms of miles.

The metric system doesn’t bother me like the Celsius scale. I’m horrible at judging distances and often have just as much trouble communicating in miles as I would with foreign measurements. However, the supremacy of the Fahrenheit scale is undebatable.

One hundred degrees in Fahrenheit is damn hot, but this same heat measured in Celsius gives us only a whopping thirty-seven degrees. We have the psychological advantage of our heat waves rising into the triple digits. Once it has gone beyond the hundred, we know that it is effing hot. This also works on the other end. True, the Celsius zero marks their freezing point and serves as a reasonable boundary to the unreasonable cold. However, our zero is much colder and strikes fear much like our triple digit heat. We know that zero is effing cold and that to venture below that into the negative would be fucking cold.

But I digress.

Within these kilometric confines reside some one hundred and seventy five permanent residents and few occupational choices. In fact, many work multiple jobs on the island. It’s quite natural for your waitress at one of the islands few restaurants—one can easily exhaust the dining options in less than a week—to be your guide at the winery or cashier at the marina the following day. Everyone, as our host at the Tin Goose Inn told us, has to work nine jobs, and even then has to find work on the mainland for the three months that the island stays frozen over.

I liked the liked the Tin Goose, but my limited experience with bed and breakfasts gives me little to compare it to. I imagine that your average B&B should lie somewhere between an episode of Newhart and the Waltons with perhaps a slight dash of a P.G.Wodehouse story thrown in, and that was pretty much what we had.

I prefer staying in more historic places while traveling, but one of the drawbacks to this is a misconception I’ve picked up from watching fat too many of those haunted hotel shows on the Travel Channel. I fully expect to see the ghost of an old woman, Civil War soldier, or pirate standing at the foot of my bed if I wake up in the middle of the night. I therefore keep my eyes shut if I happen to wake up before daylight. Still, I like to think there’s a pirate ghost waiting patiently there for the chance to frighten me—perhaps twisting his face ghoulishly in anticipation when he sees me stir and is then let down each time I refuse to sleepily glance in his direction.

Anyway, there was neither ghost nor Internet access nor television at the Tin Goose, and most of our time within the one hundred and eleven year old house was spent reading or breakfasting continentally before heading out to wander around the island. The mornings downstairs were quiet during the week and a bit more crowded near the weekends. The guests were mostly families from Ohio, Michigan, and mainland Canada, with the occasional British accent thrown in among the Colonists. Tennesseans are a slight oddity.

We had dinner at the restaurant there one evening and it was pricey, though worth it. Our host was also a gourmet chef who easily distinguishes the Tin Goose from the primarily fried perch and chip establishment that make up the majority of the island’s other culinary offerings, though there is certainly nothing wrong with that sort of thing.

Another place I would recommend for travelers to Pelee would be Connorlee’s Bakery. Though only opened during the day from Tuesday to Saturday and nights on the weekend, it is the best place to get lunch and coffee. They use vegetables from an organic farm down the road and provide picnic tables under the trees out front where their lethargic cat lazily watches you eat.

Did I mention that there are no fast food restaurants on Pelee? In fact, there are no chain stores of any kind. Gasoline and groceries have to be purchased at the island’s Co-op located on the northern shore across from the Canadian mainland, and most items still have to be ordered. Some islanders prefer to take the two-hour ferry every couple of weeks to shop in Kingsville or Leamington in Ontario.

Another thing missing from the island is a police force. There is not even a policeman, Mounty, or Barney Fife figure roaming the streets.

Neither are there garbage men, as residents drive their garbage to the dump every week.

The only sign of anyone being employed by the town was the guy whose responsibility it was to maintain the roads. We encountered him on each of our drives, and just seemed to drive around in his pick-up all day filling in potholes with shovels of gravel and then pouring tar over them. I didn’t notice him having another job anywhere else despite the fact that probably less than half of the roads on Pelee are paved.

Half the people on Pelee move about by bicycle, and we spent a day exploring on a set of these particular bikes built in the bike shop/bike rental place across from the ferry dock.

They are designed so that the rider sits upright and are therefore more comfortable, though, as our host put it in his thick Windsor accent, “They make you look kinda dorky, eh”. I suppose they do, though they are comfortable up until the point one, while flying along some ATV trails on the way to see some glacier grooves on a remote limestone beach, hits a rut and goes flipping over the handlebars at an alarming velocity.

That would be me. One minute the weather is perfect and I’m gliding down a trail worn through the middle of a relatively flat glade, and the next, as if tripped perhaps by the foot of some unseen and understandably frustrated pirate ghost, though there is not sufficient evidence to cast blame in any direction, I find myself awkwardly intertwined with the dorky bicycle in the most unflattering heap in the middle of the trail.

Coming soon: Pelee Island, part 2. Will our Rex get to experience socialized medicine? I don't care either, but he will probably tell us. Also, there will be considerable rambling on the subject of the Canadian mosquito.

adios

2006-08-13T05:30:00.000-05:00

The bags have been packed, the back has been shaved, and the pets are filled with the skittish uneasiness of the impending kennel visit. It is vacation time, and Mrs. Camino and I are headed north where the air is a bit cooler, though unfortunately measured in Celsius.

Feel free to write an epic in the comments section in my absence. Here's your opening line:

Vespa the Resilient, having earlier slain Mr. Chuckles, the friendly and much loved Dragon of Perpetual Joy, in error, presently emerged with understandable trepidation from the cave, though she carried with her the head of Roy, a bastard of a dragon and the one listed on her contract with the village, which she fulfilled with the use of a rusting door from a 1969 Dodge Charger, a box of the leading brand breakfast cereal, a copy of Band on the Run on vinyl, and considerably more effort and skill than was required for the late Mr. Chuckles.

pictures of kitty

2006-08-11T14:12:00.000-05:00

The Wonderdawg has kindly asked to see my desktop, and I am obliging. Actually, there isn't much to my desktop to be seen. It is a small and cheap yard sale quality particle board desk that holds little more than the keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and here is my view from it.

Click to embiggen, as always.

Trust me, some actual planning and decoration went into the rest of the house, but the Rexroom resembles my college apartment. It's just a bonus room above the garage. I have things to go on the walls but I'm waiting for more things and perhaps some new furniture before I go to the trouble of putting them up. I'll give you the full tour once it is made presentable, but here, from left to right, is the corner I see from where I sit on August eleventh of twenty aught-six.

First is a small edge of the all important television, followed by my grandfather's antique Silvertone deluxe portable crank phonograph. This sits beside my old college Wal-mart nightstand, which currently holds an eggcrate of records and my Crosley Stack-O-Matic. Next is the upright bass lying in front of the coffee table that graced my childhood home throughout the eighties. It holds assorted guitar accessories and an amplifier. The amplifier holds a Jesus candle from Dollywood that I like to have present when recording. This is followed by shelves of randomly stacked CDs and a telecaster. Last is the aforementioned and sparsely inhabited desktop. Aside from the keyboard and monitor, we see only a speaker, CD, and a 3-hole punch with the name "Kitty" taped in the center. I don't recall having ever used this 3-hole punch or why it sits on an otherwise nearly uncluttered desk. One would assume that it was taken from someone named "Kitty", but there is a very real possibility that Mrs. Camino simply decided to give our 3-hole punch a name.

On my monitor is a picture I took at Ft. Morgan in Mobile a few years back. You will also notice the glare from the window just behind me. Carl Weathers is currently curled up unseen at my feet and refusing to come out and pose for the picture.

uncle wilbur gives the finger

2006-08-10T08:14:00.000-05:00

I smashed the birdie finger on my right hand between two concrete blocks yesterday. Actually, I was about to smash it when I jerked it away at the last moment. However, my normally catlike reflexes failed me, and my fingertip remained and thus became partially pulled away as I jerked my hand back, leaving a small flap of fingertip that took a moment to begin trickling blood. It was one of those hold your breath moments where you wait to see the amount of blood for an accurate assessment, thinking both How bad is it? and I can't believe I did that. They soundtracked the visions of an amputated digit dancing in my head.

The blood tricked, and I ran into the house screaming like a small and embarrassing child--which was unfortunate, as I was mowing and doing other assorted yardwork during the most unforgivingly hot time of day precisely to appear as a bad ass.

The cat and dog gathered behing me at the sink as I cleaned the wound and used very loud and unsuitable language. Some might call that concern on the part of the Camino children, but I know that it was purely because they could smell blood and were hoping that my possibly impending death meant they could very well feast like kings upon my corpse until Mrs. Camino got home from work.

Anyway, I survived. I may have to use a pick while playing guitar instead of my preferred method fingerpicking for a while, and some of you may have noticed that I'm typing a bit slower that usual, but the finger is healing well.

It reminds me of a story about the uncle of a high school friend.

There were actually two uncles in the story, and we'll call them Wilbur and Hank.

These two brothers enlisted for World War II at the same time and were both sent to Europe to essentially be cafeteria workers at bases in England and then mainland Europe as the war progressed. However, Wilbur was not proud of this and instead wrote back to his family with tales of purely fictional skirmishes against the dreaded Hun as they made their way to Berlin. Hank was coerced to play along, and the two brothers emerged from each battle victorious and unscathed until Wilbur happened to lose a finger. It was the middle finger of his right hand, and he lost it, according to the letter he sent home and the story he told up until his deathbed, while giving a German the finger.

His platoon and a platoon of Germans had been sitting in opposing foxholes across a small field in a tense but quiet stalemate for sometime. Wilbur stuck his head up one day and found a German looking back at him. He decided to give him a typically Alabamian gesture of recognition while obviously underestimating his adversary's marksmanship. However, having his middle finger shot off gave him the necessary adrenaline to leap from his foxhole, storm across the field, and kill this particular German with his bare hands--which now consisted of only nine digits. The rest of his platoon quickly followed, and the surprise move left them victorious. Wilbur was again a hero.

What had actually happened was this: Wilbur accidentally cut off his finger while peeling potatoes.

He swore Hank to secrecy, bought a bona fide German helmet off another soldier, and returned with the story and what he reported to be the helmet of the man who shot off his finger.

Wilbur died of cancer some half a century later. While on his death bed, he gathered his family around and confessed the true story of how his finger was lost, as he didn't want the lie to somehow effect his impending afterlife.

"We know", his wife said. "Hank's been telling that story every time you leave a room for the last fifty years".

another elevator story

2006-08-08T07:39:00.000-05:00

I sometimes fear that I’m cursed with an air of sympathy. Total strangers will sometimes tell me their stories, and, though my brain sends me signals like dispatch them quickly with talk of the streets filling with the blood of the nonbelievers, I can do nothing but appear to listen and sometimes even go so far as to feign interest. It is my cross to bear, and I occasionally must bear it even on the dreaded elevator.

I stepped onto the hospital elevator to bring Pa Camino some pants for checking out about the time a group from the smoking section had finished and decided to return to their various loved ones. There were four stocky older women who resembled Mount Rushmore and a man who I swear was Dickie Betts from the Allman Brothers’ Band, though he probably wasn’t. They made for a fragrant ride up.

Anyway, Teddy Roosevelt was the talkative one. I believe she may have been the wife of the patient they were visiting, as she was going on and on about someone named Marlin while the others looked on stoically, perhaps quiet because years of experience had taught them that their chances to talk were few and far between. George Washington, who seemed like a sister of Marlin, was obviously the designated nodder, as she went on like a giant George Washington bobblehead. Jefferson threw in an occasional “yep” or “right”, while Lincoln mutely showed recognition by raised eyebrows. Dickie Betts seemed equally mute.

So it was that we all showed a bit of surprise when he snagged a break in Roosevelt’s monologue to throw out a “shore is a purty hospital, ain’t it” just before stepping out at the second floor.

Mount Rushmore didn’t step out. They were headed to my floor, and the remark of an outsider had in a strange way brought the other outsider into the understood “conversation”. Unfortunately, I was that other outsider.

Roosevelt resumed. She continued looking down the row of the other three as she talked, but this time her gaze extended to the quiet guy behind Lincoln holding a pair of pants.

“I don’t care if it is a pretty hospital,” she said. “A hospital is still a hospital, and I don’t ever want to see the inside of another one as long as I live. No, once Marlin is up and walking again we are out of this place.”

Lady, I’m just a guy on an elevator with some pants, my brain said. However, my face seemed to anticipate all the fun times we were all going to have with Marlin just as soon as he got out.

Poor Marlin. I don’t mind talkative people, but Roosevelt had the uncanny ability to fill the air with the most uninteresting collection of words. Most talkative people sometimes stumble onto things that are worth hearing just as buckshot generally hits its intended target, but Roosevelt’s routine seemed to be nothing more than a stating of the obvious.

Then again, perhaps this Marlin is actually the one cursed with incessant gabbiness and what I was seeing was nothing more than Roosevelt’s lifetime of pent up conversation. It had been suppressed for so long and now, perhaps born of a “freak throat accident” that the loquacious Marlin suffered while in his sleep, was awkwardly attempting to find its legs like a newborn farm animal.

I hope so.

the pride of the boro

2006-08-07T07:24:00.000-05:00

Number one in the hood, G.

theory of elevation

2006-08-04T06:48:00.000-05:00

Pa Camino is in town having some massive back surgery that is to leave him hospitally confined for at least a week. It looks and sounds painful as hell, and the other day I found myself in the awkward position of having to look out the window and make small talk while the nurse gave him a morphine shot in the backside.

There’s the batman building; it’s not going to hurt you.

Anyway, he’s recovering well and should be moving about as well as any other sixty year old man in a couple weeks time.

Ma Camino was a nervous wreck leading up to the surgery. I sat with her at the hospital for ten hours while the surgery took place on Wednesday and then enthusiastically volunteered to run back to the hotel when she noticed that she had left some medicine there. It is on Broadway, and I parked and left the Caminomobile in a highly illegal manner rather than pay some obscene parking fee for the short time it was going to take me to run in and right back out.

So it was that I took the elevator. I don’t normally do that, but time was of the essence and…Well, here’s the beginning of a post that was being composed in my head as I awaited the descending elevator. I probably wouldn’t have gotten around to actually writing it, but it would have gone like this:

I don’t care much for elevators. I don’t like heights, confined spaces, or other people, and this is unholy trinity, in my experience, is what the elevator is all about. Therefore, I will generally take the stairs when the destination is within ten floors and the stairwell is unencumbered by an automatic fire alarm.

…and so forth. Riveting stuff, I know. Anyway, I was lost in composition as I stepped onto the thankfully empty elevator and didn’t see the large man in the navy blue jumpsuit bounding across the lobby and lunging onto the elevator just before the doors closed. He had a crazy look in his eye and he leaned toward me.

“You get to be my guinea pig,” he told me.

This didn’t comfort me. The part of my brain that senses danger and then fruitlessly attempts to warn me of said danger began flashing things like THIS STRANGE MAN MAY WANT TO KILL OR ROB YOU. THEN AGAIN, HE MAY WANT TO SIMPLY TOUCH YOUR NAUGHTY BITS, BUT I DON’T THINK IT WOULD BE OUT OF KINDNESS. IN FACT, I SINCERELY DOUBT THAT HE CARES WHETHER OR NOT YOU WANT TO HAVE YOUR NAUGHTY BITS TOUCHED BY A STRANGE MAN. THIS FRANKLY ISN’T ABOUT YOU. YOU SHOULD THEREFORE ASSUME SOME TYPE OF KUNG FU STANCE OR SOMETHING AND PREPARE TO DEFEND YOUR LIFE, POSSESSIONS, AND/OR NAUGHTY BITS. YES, I KNOW THAT YOU KNOW NOTHING OF THE MARTIAL ARTS, BUT, MY GOD, YOU’VE WASTED ENOUGH OF YOUR LIFE IN FRONT OF TELEVISION TO HAVE CAUGHT A BRUCE LEE MOVIE OR TWO. JUST WING IT.

I assumed the utterly useless crane stance from the first Karate Kid film and almost didn’t hear him elaborate by telling me how he had just finished repairing the elevator or ask why I was standing like that.

“Just stretching”, I told him.

I then went on to sarcastically express reassurance at being the first to try out a recently repaired elevator and learned the hard way that one should never do this to a professional elevator repairman. Gus (or the man who was simply wearing Gus’ yellow stenciled navy blue jumpsuit) proceeded to lecture me on the safety of elevators, focusing mainly on the rigorous standards and burdens placed on all who toil in this, the world’s safest form of transportation, from engineering to maintenance.

“An elevator won’t fall,” he said, “but you might get stuck on one for a while.”

Personally, I’d prefer the fall.

new directions in literature

2006-08-03T08:47:00.000-05:00

Our Rex, perhaps as a result of having landscaped a couple of days in this soupy and oppressive heat wave to the point of having his brain rendered the consistency of a soft-boiled egg, believes that he has invented a bold new form of writing, but I imagine you have already gathered that from the title. You shouldn’t believe him. He will tell you with a straight face that his new and sophomoric hobby of taking Wikipedia articles on oddly named animals or assorted insects and replacing the subject with the names of semi-obscure television personalities, then smoothing the work by changing the pronouns, verbiage, and perhaps even a bit of the scientific terminology, is not unlike the “sampling” techniques employed by various forms of techno and hip hop music, but you and I know that this is not the case. He has yet to name this new genre of writing, but I have thus far suggested “schizophrenia”. This did not meet with his approval.

At any rate, I thought that you should have some sort of warning before being subjected to a bit of this.

The following is a perfectly useful entry on the Wandering Albatross that has been modified to read as an article on the actress Joyce DeWitt from "Three’s Company". There is no redeeming value in it. It makes no sense, and I beg of you to look away. But if you insist:

__________________________________

THE ACTRESS JOYCE DEWITT

The actress Joyce DeWitt (Joyusses DeWittious, the actress) is a large seabird from the family Diomedeidae which has a circumpolar range in the Southern Ocean. She was the first species of albatross to be described, and was long considered the same species as the Tristan Albatross and the Antipodean Albatross (in fact a few authors still consider them all subspecies of the same species). Together with the Amsterdam Albatross she forms the Wandering Amsterdam-DeWitt Albatross species complex. The actress Joyce DeWitt is a member of the genus Diomedea (the great abatrosses), and is one of the best known and studied species of bird in the world.

The actress Joyce DeWitt has the largest wingspan of any bird, up to 3.5 m. The length of her body is up to 1.35 m with females being slightly smaller than males, and she might weigh from 6 to 11 kg. Her plumage varies with age, but is white overall on breeding adults except for the tips and trailing edges of the wings. The actress Joyce DeWitt is the whitest of the Wandering Amsterdam-DeWitt Albatross species complex, the other species having a great deal more brown and black on the wings and body as breeding adults. The large bill is pink, as are the feet.

She feeds on squid, small fish and on animal refuse that floats on the sea, eating to such excess at times that she is unable to fly and rests helplessly on the water.

She lays one egg: it is white, with a few spots, and is about 4 inches long. At breeding time she occupies loose colonies on isolated island groups in the Southern Ocean, such as Crozet Islands, South Georgia, Marion Island, Prince Edward Island, Kerguelen and Macquarie Island. Her nests are large cones built of vegetation that are 1 meter wide at the base and half a meter wide at the apex.

Sailors used to capture the actress Joyce DeWitt for her long wing bones, which they manufactured into tobacco-pipe stems. The early explorers of the great Southern Sea cheered themselves with the companionship of the actress Joyce DeWitt in their dreary solitudes; and the evil fate of him who shot with his cross-bow the "Joyce of good omen" is familiar to readers of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The metaphor of "the actress Joyce DeWitt around his neck" also comes from the poem and indicates an unwanted burden causing anxiety or hindrance. In the days of sail she often accompanied a ship for days, not merely following it, but wheeling in wide circles around it without ever being observed to land on the water. She continued her flight, apparently untired, in tempestuous as well as moderate weather.

liveblogging the wait for my now-tardy monday afternoon guitar student to show up

2006-07-31T18:17:00.000-05:00

The good thing about these summer months is that it is easy for parents to forget about things like guitar lessons. The company I teach for will still charge them, as the contract clearly covers these things, and I will get paid while being able to hold that week’s lesson over to the next.

Cha-ching, as it were, but on a very small scale.

I’m down to two students now, and each is an absolute beginner. There is a girl who practices religiously and wants me to teach her all manner of songs from these endless teen acts spawned by the Disney channel. I don’t mind it so much since she’s evidently enthusiastic about the instrument and has already started writing songs with the seven chords she’s been shown thus far.

She's only eight, by the way. I had a guitar at the age of eight but did not attempt to learn how to play it until much later. By then the neck had warped from years of using it as a bow to launch homemade arrows.

Wait…

Damn. They’re here within the grace period. I’ll be back shortly.

(You can either choose to simply imagine a lapse of a half an hour or so or go somewhere else on the Internet and come back in that same allotted time. Actually, you should better make it more like forty minutes, as Carl Weathers demands to be fed and let outside immediately following a guitar lesson.)

Yes. Anyway, that was the other student, a ten year old boy with a healthy curiosity in musical instruments but a noticeable lack of enthusiasm when it comes to learning how to play them. For example: Today we went over the minor pentatonic scale in G. He can navigate it reasonably well and I told him as much in more youth-centric terminology.

I believe your exact words were: “Yo, you gots the mad minor pentatonic on the G-tip manipulatin’ skillz, Beeee-otch!”

No, they weren’t. Besides, I think my teaching methods fall under the same rules as attorney-client privilege or something and are therefore a private matter. Anyway, that’s not the point.

Once he had finished the scale I asked him to attempt it backwards. It is an extremely easy scale and he picked it up in no time at all. It was a reasonable request on my part.

“No”, he said. “That sounds hard”.

I then slowly showed him how easy it was, but he only shook his head and told me that it also looked hard.

Things didn’t start off well with this one either. I always like to talk to the kids about the music they listen to at first, and this particular student only had one influence to list: Tim McGraw.

My face twitched at this and I began to involuntarily mumble something. The kid then told me that I had used some bad words and asked me what “arch nemesis” meant.

“That comes later”, I told him.

Look, I suppose expecting a kid in fourth grade to show up here with an Elvis Costello album tucked under his arm is about as realistic as him also showing up with a box of cigars and a nice bottle of pinot noir for me to enjoy while I teach it to him. It won’t happen, and the best I can hope for is a kid who would rather learn Hendrix than (insert name of the Korn guitarist here; I’m not going to bother looking it up).

Those kids at least have a reasonable shot of one day appreciating Django Reinhardt.

Hell, maybe the Korn kids would even like some Django. Perhaps I underestimate them.

Still, I don’t see that sort of desire occuring in anyone who confines themselves to the McGraw body of work. Were I to make that leap occur, I would sort of be like that lady who taught Helen Keller how to do those things she did to get famous so that people would tell jokes about her, but in a good way. My story would be the stuff of after school specials or maybe even a Hallmark movie.

Nevermind. I seem to recall that Hallmark movies are just the place for Tim McGraw songs.

At any rate, I like the kid because he spends most of his time pointing to the various other instruments around the room and asking interesting questions about each. This allows me to play the upright bass or mandolin a bit and answer questions, therefore imparting some knowledge within the lesson time and relieving myself of any guilt that may arise if I am ever implanted with a conscience.

Still, methinks that some kids would be better served with lessons on how to use one’s guitar as a makeshift bow. This would allow the instrument to serve a purpose until ths student inspired by the need to impress high school girls or whatever it is that drives them to want to more properly manipulate the guitar.

I would call it “Guitarchery”.

you know what, stuart, i like you. you're not like the other people, here, in the trailer park.

2006-07-28T07:37:00.000-05:00

Actually, the preferred nomenclature would be "mobile" or "manufactured" home. I was told this over and over again by a woman I worked alongside in the file room of a large manufactured housing company just outside of Knoxville. She lived in a trailer park.

I was there at the company headquarters through a temp agency for six months, though my actual work ran out before my first two months had finished. This happens quite a bit when temping with a large corporation. The woman in charge of the file room thought that having a temp made them look busy and therefore wanted to keep as many temps employed for as long as possible. This was unspoken, of course, though it was obvious to all involved.

So it was that I spent four months reading books in various self-made hiding places throughout a warehouse that resembled the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I even got so bored that I rummaged through the discarded office furniture corner of the warehouse for chairs and unfashionable paintings and other assorted decorations to adorn these makeshift hiding places that sat behind seemingly endless stacks of boxes containing old "manufactured home" contracts with a Polaroid of a different crumbling trailer stapled to each.

The assistant vice president--who we will hereafter refer to as "Stuart"--would sometimes have me rummage through these boxes to look for a specific contract and Polaroid. He would sincerely apologize for taking me from my reading, as he himself began in that very same useless position before casually working his way up the corporate ladder out of boredom more than anything, and would then weave tales of delinquent trailer mortgages or various customer service oddities as we shifted and sifted through boxes. We once even had to find the paperwork for a woman suing the company for selling her a used trailer that she later discovered to be haunted.

But the times that really stuck with me were those occasions when we had to find contracts for trailers that had recently been scattered in the wake of a tornado. Stuart or one of his underlings would show up with a stack of obliterated trailers and documentation of the damage to staple to the old contracts and Polaroids. I remember him once holding up a photo of nothing more than a couple of scraps of aluminum wrapped around a tree and saying, "That's why you never want to live in a trailer".

I didn't much fancy the idea before that actually. However, the more I looked at them the more I began to have an appreciation for the artistic form of the trailer and its various adornments ranging from year-round Christmas lights and plastic flamingos to vivid paint schemes and designs in the (presumably) Mexican style of its owner. Still, it never struck me as a suitable domicile. I couldn't even try and sell one in good conscience or with a straight face.

Many can. I occasionally had to emerge from the warehouse into a sea of cubicles abuzz with the angrily raised voices of a thousand mortgage brokers attempting to impart the fear of God into a thousand previously proud manufactured home owners. Subtlety was not a virtue in this line of work, and I at first thought that the operators were each yelling at their own children at the other end of the line. It was sometimes brutal and unsuitable to be printed here, and this is presumably why Stuart often liked to work in the warehouse himself rather than send an underling.

Also, there were a few formerly proud manufactured home owners who didn't appreciate being yelled at. Many of them lived in east Tennessee and knew exactly where the headquarters sat and were interested in finishing the conversation on delinquent payments in person. This is why all employees needed one of those sliding encoded badges to operate any of the doors.

However, I worked there for six months without being issued a badge, as my official orders were simply to just "follow someone in". It is an artform and I perfected it, though it started off quite awkwardly. In that first week, I would run up behind people as they entered and soon learned that those who spend their days yelling at trailer park inhabitants can be quite skiddish when out of the safe confines of their cubicle. However, by the end I had the timing and movements down. They would even hold the door for me as I feigned looking for by badge. I would pretend to be oblivious and then notice and acknowledge their kindness before sneaking off to the warehouse for a quick nap before the day's reading.

Disgruntled trailer park inhabitants should take note.

another campaign update

2006-07-25T15:48:00.000-05:00

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. - Winnie Churchill, avid painter and martini enthusiast.

I early voted today but neglected to retrieve the little sticker that boasted as much from that little old lady behind the sign-in table. Therefore, you'll simply have to take my word for it.

Who did I vote for? For governor, I voted the same as CLC. I hadn't planned on assuming the governorship, but one takes what one can get. I then John-Jay-Hookeringly voted for myself on senator as well. I also wrote in my name wherever incumbents were running unopposed but then chose to vote for a few people actually on the ballot.

If I am completely clueless on a given race I simply vote for the candidate with the most unfortunate name, regardless of party. For instance, while I despise UT football, Jim Bob Cooter can fall back on politics and always have my vote. That goes for governor, mayor, or dog catcher. I'm there for Cooter.

I am tempted by Corker, but he would need to change the "Bob" to "Bobby" and then slap a "Jim" or "Joe" or "Beauford" in the middle to earn my support.

If all of the names are equally unfortunate and there are no Libertarians on the ballot, I then alternate between the parties. However, I probably vote more Democrat on judgeships, as they tend to be considerably more lenient in their sentencing. This will come in handy when I am eventually caught.

One must always think ahead.

Anyway, the governor and senator races are still in the primary phase, and this leaves you plenty of time to vote Camino.

Gracias in advance.

when pygmies roamed my television

2006-07-24T07:40:00.000-05:00

There was a moment at work a couple of weeks ago when I brought up that house with secret passageways that Ma'am, George, and Webster went to live in after Webster burned down their apartment. The conversation had been about houses with secret passageways, and I thought it relevant to rummage through my damaged mind and surface with an otherwise useless television reference. Anyway, the infusion Webster garnered me only silence and confused stares. I think there were even tumbleweeds.

Nervously, I persisted.

"No one else remembers that?" I asked. "There were all these secret passageways and a room upstairs that the landlords strictly forbade Webster and the Papadopouloses--or Papadopouli, if you prefer--from entering."

Still silent. By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I didn't actually use "forbade" in conversation.

"There was even a running gag in which Webster would move from floor to floor by using the dumbwaiter," I added.

They recalled there being a Webster, but none of them admitted to having watched it. Which is understandable, as I am younger than most of the folks I work with. White families adopting undersized black children was not a staple of their formative television watching years. No, they were bred on talking horses, the tomfoolery of redheads and their Cuban bandleaders, and a more demure Mary Tyler Moore who watched in feigned agony as her husband tripped over the same damn ottoman each and every week.

Let it be known that I also have nothing but love for these older programs and that they probably overflow more of my mental filing cabinets than time I spent with my grandparents or any number of assorted conversation topics. However, The Andy Griffith Show never taught me how to escape from the old pervert at the bike shop or deal with a newly diabetic Ben Vereen. Life is all about variety, people, and there is nothing wrong with admitting that you've probably seen every episode of Webster and Diff'rent Strokes multiple times.

Well, perhaps there is. I'm not quite so proud of myself now that I see the admission there on the screen, but there's nothing to be done about it now. Maybe I'll take the dog for an extra walk or feed an old person or do any number of the things that all those Mormon commercials told me to do.

But I digress.

My conversation at work presented a problem. Even my younger coworkers who admitted to having actually watched Webster from time to time didn't remember the house with the secret passageways, and I was left to wonder if I had imagined or hallucinated entire seasons of the program.

Enter the Internet. This site helped to verify that I still have a grasp on sanity. Also, it proves that someone else wasted a great deal of time in front of the television and then a great deal more in front of their computers documenting it, and that, for some reason, makes me feel not as bad.

presently a beast

2006-07-20T05:32:00.000-05:00

I always wonder if there is a point at which a feral human raised by wolves looks down at his wolf boy hands and notices a set of thumbs or has the sudden realization that he is the only one who can move so easily on his hind legs and then thinks to himself that perhaps his talents are being wasted in some way. The same thing goes for a dog girl. I also wonder if a monkey raised by dogs or wolves would have the same realization of not meeting its potential, but one never comes across such stories.

I suppose we are an impressionable species. If running around on all fours and eating raw meat seems the things to do, then that is what we'll do, at least until we find out that there is beer to drink and football to watch. If a baby is born into an Amish family and knows nothing more than beards and zipperless clothing, then they will proudly wear their beards and saunter about in zipperless clothing oblivious to the fact that they could be watching episodes of "Everybody Loves Raymond" on any given channel at any given time.

I hope you like buttermilk.

Anyway, the interesting thing about feral children is the way the primal part of the brain takes over. I thought about that when my fattened spaniel was young and in the midst of seemingly fruitless housetraining. I would first yell at him in short sentences like "That's my shoe, you little bastard" or "Why did you eat that first edition paperback of Catcher in The Rye when there was a tasty copy of The Scarlet Letter sitting on the same bookshelf?" or "Stop humping daddy's Beanie Baby collection". This quickly gave way to sort words like "no" or "bastard" or "neuter". After that came a series of short and stabbing sounds to convey anger. Then I digressed to barking at him and would even growl when he appeared to be contemplating shenanigans.

I find myself doing that around children now. I don't quite go so far as to bark at them, but they seem to understand some of the same primal sounds that thwarted the dog for a while. Actually, I think there was some barking and growling involved when I was a teacher, but many of those kids had yet to make the same realization of thumbs and bipedal movement that evades wolf boys and dog girls for so long.

I've found that the other time those primal sounds come in handy is while drinking beer and watching football.

nine random things that a person is likely to hear while making a day of sauntering about

2006-07-17T18:01:00.000-05:00

1. Stop that.

2. Sir, are you trying to sneak up on someone?

3. Do you require medical attention?

4. I only ask because you appear to be frightening the other customers.

5. I see you started early today, Camino.

6. Are you sure that's not a mosey?

7. Then get out of my way, you sauntering bastard.

8. You seem to have a serious misconception as to what constitutes a saunter, Camino, for I have been witness to any number of saunterings in my day and I don't recall any ever having been performed with such a degree of unnecessary lewdness.

9. However, I think the parasol was a nice touch.

just because it's monday

2006-07-17T06:25:00.000-05:00

Today I will not merely walk, I will saunter.

I've never been much interested in bird ownership, however...

2006-07-14T06:59:00.000-05:00

Just as soon as they get that Jurassic Park technology worked out I want me a "demon duck of doom". It would no doubt kick the ass of your parrot.

Also, maybe then those bastard geese down at the park will leave me the hell alone.

a campaign update

2006-07-13T06:30:00.000-05:00

There were two things that really surprised me at last weeks blogger meet-up. The first was that a large number of primarily political bloggers had heard of and even read this humble site from time to time. The second was that a large number of you remembered that I am a write in candidate for the US senate seat soon to be vacated by Bill Frist.

Some of you may even be considering voting for me, and I can see why. If both sides succeed in eliminating Corker, the Republicans will then be left with the same two guys the party rolls out for each and every state race. You are understandably less than thrilled with this option. Liberals are even less thrilled with Harold Ford Jr., as he is undoubtedly to the right of the majority of you and will cast socially conservative votes on issues like gay marriage and such.

I would never do that because I never plan to actually vote. In fact, I will rarely even be in the chamber, as the majority of my time will be spent at the Smithsonian getting my learn on or gorging myself on beer and crab cakes in Maryland. I’ve even started a rough draft for the Smithsonian tour I plan to offer. Here’s a sampling:

Just before firing his fatal shots at Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth was overheard to shout "Sic Semper Tyrannis". This roughly translates to English as “Emancipate this, Beardy.” Indeed, it doesn’t sound like much. However, it was a stroke of brilliance on the part of Booth, as research into his victim’s history and tendencies led him to discovery one of Lincoln’s most regretted shortcomings. You see John Wilkes Booth knew full well that Latin was Lincoln’s poorest subject and that this fact bothered the president to no end. Lincoln was known to drop whatever matter he was presently embroiled in and immediately attempt to translate any and all Latin phrases that were muttered within earshot. This gave Booth a still and easy target.

Anyway, just think about it. We have sent politicians to Washington for far too long, and I just think it’s time to get the politicians out of politics for a while. I happen to think that my firm platform of non-voting would appeal to disgruntled voters of both sides but that’s just me. You won’t have to fear any frivolous amendments or embarrassing speeches from the floor of congress with me in office.

No, the only time I’ll show up is to provide any of my constituents a tour of the capital, attend any and all cocktail parties, and the state of the union address so I can get on the TV. I’ll be the one in the stovepipe hat.

did anyone else know this is wednesday?

2006-07-12T12:10:00.000-05:00

It just feels like a Thursday for some reason. I'm sure that either Heather Orne or Sporto "the non-Neil newsboy" Dwyer made mention of today's Wednesdayness at some point this morning, but I didn't catch it.

I wore my Thursday pants for nothing, and this will undoubtedly complicate the pants situation tomorrow.

the adonis phone book company

2006-07-11T07:10:00.000-05:00

The new phone book showed up at work the other day. About the only thing I use my phone book at home for is to keep up with the Alexander family and their automotive empire through the ads that have graced the back of each year’s edition since for as long as I can remember. The son appears to be in the Air Force now, and the daughter is practically all grown up, but I can remember a couple of kids fighting off that awkward middle phase just long enough to help pops sell a couple of Fords. Mrs. Alexander’s hair has been cut increasingly shorter, but I like how she has it now. Mr. Alexander still looks like my childhood dentist.

Anyway, with typing things into the Internets being so much easier that flipping through hundreds of sickly yellow and easily smeared pages, my Rutherford County phone book has increasingly served as more of a yearly postcard from the Alexander family than an actual source of information.

Still, it’s nice to see it out there on the step each year.

Workplaces generally receive multiple phonebooks stacked in clear plastic bags in front of their main entrance. That’s how we received ours the other day, but I forget to check the back to see if folks outside of Rutherford County get to feel that same Alexander love I’ve come to look forward to each year.

You probably don’t.

Anyway, whether at home or at work, the phone book always reminds me of this guy I knew back in Alabama who went by the name of “Bubba”.

Yes, there are a lot of those in Alabama, but most have an equally stereotypical given name that “Bubba” takes the place of. Not this Bubba. This Bubba bore the real name of Adonis. I made him show me his driver’s license once.

Adonis, as we will henceforth refer to him, was the husband of the office manager at a print shop where I worked during my first two misspent years of college back in Florence. I drove the delivery van there, and you should remind me sometime to tell you the story about the when the brakes went out as I barreled toward a busy downtown intersection.

Good times.

Anyway, Adonis was six and a half feet tall and bore an uncanny resemblance to that big guy who chases Pee-Wee around the dinosaur in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. I’m really not sure as to his line of work, other than it had something to do with maintenance at a few different apartment complexes, but I do know that he was rarely at work, as he spent most of his time hanging out at the print shop or sitting around smoking on the loading dock out back, leaving only to hit the fast food restaurants within a certain radius of the print shop two or three times a day.

We all liked Adonis. He was a simple and easily amused man who could’ve snapped any of us like twigs with only the slightest of efforts at any given moment. I think another term for this would be “fear”, and it motivated us to always humor Adonis.

Anyway, Adonis pulled up to the print shop one day and beckoned us outside to his truck. The truck bed was a sea of bright new yellow phone books. Adonis leaned against the side of his rusting truck and asked, “Y’all want a phone book…for free?”

“You workin’ for the phone book company this year, Bubba?” someone eventually asked.

“Naw”, he said. “ I just showed up and fount ‘em all just sittin’ outside the apartments free for the takin’, so I snatched ‘em all up before anybody came out.”

What followed was a confused and uncomfortable silence broken only by the clear sound of our office manager slapping her forehead.