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[jwee1125]

Reminiscing

Remember back in the 80s where any trip to Panama City Beach meant seeing the Miami Vice colored pink and teal Lifeguard tank tops? Man how I miss those days. And if you were serious about your bf or gf, you made it official with matching airbrushed t-shirts?

Good times, I tell ya...good times.

[jwee1125]

"I feel sorry for vegetarians because they can't have any pudding."

- Me

[jwee1125]

So your microphone quit working after the Windows 10 update...

Check your privacy settings for your mic. The damned update made it so that no applications could use the damn thing. Turn it from "Off" to "On" and - voila! - everything works again.

[jwee1125]

I just saw an out of order sign on a fitting room.

How does that even happen? What kind of troubleshooting steps does one have to perform before being able to say with all certainty that, yes, that fitting room is most definitely out of order?

Is there a door? Yep, there's a door.

Does it close? Yep. Dadgum it.

Does it lock? Yep. Well hell, it's out of order. We gotta send it back.

[jwee1125]

Unrealized Aspirations

I've had several ideas for videos that wanted to record and post online. Several of these were conceived and fleshed out with my friend and partner-in-crime, Derrick (the Monk) Ward.

Derrick has the gift of being a tall, thin young man who, when he allows the hair on both his face and top of his head to grow out, bears an uncanny resemblance to J.H. Christ or, should he don a robe with accompanying head cover, a fellow of Middle Eastern descent.

The best thing about him, though, is his irreverent and rather askew sense of humor. In that, we are two peas in a pod. As such, many of our skits tended toward dark humor. Some were darkly humorous in the setting they were generated.

One such idea was having Monk dress up in the aforementioned ethnic clothing and visit one of the few remaining video arcades open in a nearby mall. One of the games they had at this arcade was a jumbo jet simulator. I had the idea of him walking in, looking around nervously, and sitting down at the game. Shortly after lift off, he was to crash the plane into a virtual building and then jump up flailing his arms over his head yelling the "ALALALALA!" chant. The plan was to have 4 or 5 cameras positioned around to get reaction shots of the crowd and then edit the whole thing together and post it online. Needless to say, he was a bit concerned for his safety, so we never did this. Dammit.

Another idea was the Peanuts funeral. The shot fades in with a single camera looking down on a small church interior where there is a funeral taking place. There's an open casket at the front where a body lies in state wearing a yellow shirt with a zig zag pattern across the torso. The pews are filled with a young curly haired blond girl, a young man clutching a blanket, and a black and white beagle among others. A blond haired young man slumps over a piano playing traditional funeral tunes. As he finishes one song he flips the page in the hymnal, plays a test chord, then breaks out into Linus and Lucy, the theme song of Peanuts. As he did this all the mourners would stand up and begin dancing their respective dances from the many animated specials. When the song was over, the mourners would all sit back down and the pianist would turn the page of the hymnal and start with the next dirge. Fade to black.

[jwee1125]

You know what the worst part is? That feeling of helplessness; of feeling like the most impotent and worst daddy in the history of parenthood. I'm talking about when he cries for seemingly no reason and nothing I do can get him to relax. When he's literally pacing the floor whining, sniffling, and wiping tears away from his puffy little eyes and all I can do is ask him if he wants to sit with me so I can hold him in the quiet, still darkness and love him unconditionally.

But he doesn't. So I sit there and wonder if there is anything I can do to help.

I can only hope that at some point he learns how to express his feelings or that he eventually learns how to put his thoughts and anxieties into words so that we can talk about them. But for now I'll sit in the dark, sharing his tears for an unknown grief that he harbors and shedding tears of my own for my inability to be there for him like he needs me to be.