“i feel great, inez.” –dignan

on tuesday i took a day off from work and took a trip to austin to visit my brother and nephew. he took the month off to stay at home with his son, so he had a lot of time to fill. i decided to take my motorcycle since it’d get me ~40 mpg, as compared to around ~10 mpg in my car or pickup. (at $3/gal that’s quite a bit.) it was the first longer trip i’d been on this season. as such, i made some good decisions and some poor ones. first, it was still kind of chilly. i made the good decision of wearing my leather jacket and taking my 8-bit flame beanie. but the first 2/3 of the trip up and the last 2/3 of the trip back was still a little nippy. in the poor category, i must have never used the googles i took on a long trip before — they let way too much air in. my eyes were tearing up most of the ride. even more poorly, the googles are tinted and chromed and i forgot to take some clear googles for after dark. coming home at night, the combination of tinted googles and tearing up made my vision very poor — when i could see, i was only seeing about 50 feet in front of me. fortunately nothing was in the road. 🙂
the visit was only for the day, and it ended up being kind of weird. miles (my nephew) is sort of fussy, plus my brother was running a fever, plus i fell asleep on the couch for about an hour and a half. but we did go to the alamo draft house and we ate and saw big man japan. it’s a fake documentary about a guy that is one of the giant super-sized heroes that protects japan from giant monsters. he grows from normal size (just like his father, grandfather, etc.) by being electrocuted at a power station. but the problem is no one really likes the giant heroes any more, and he’s pretty much the last one, and his life kind of sucks. the monsters he fought were weird and disturbing, but it was funny. the best part was the ending. although it seemed disjointed from the rest of the movie, it was a group of poor quality tv show costumed japanese superheroes beating the crap out of a guy dressed up in a monster outfit. i was crying i was laughing so hard. this will make sense to those of you who know i kind of have an irrational fascination with people fighting mascots or mascots fighting each other. oh man, the last 10 minutes or whatever were side-splitting because of that. i mean, it was seriously hilarious.
as we were walking out of alamo, i looked over at a display stand for the ironman movie coming out. they had a daniel johnston ironman drawing on a t-shirt. but then i noticed a black work shirt with the “s.h.i.e.l.d.” logo real big on the back of it. holy. crap. that was it, i had to have that. for whatever reason, i became a fan of nick fury when i was a kid. i had one nova comic book that nick made an appearance in. and i think he may have shown up in a fantastic four comic book my brother and i had too. we didn’t have many comic books. but for whatever reason, the eye-patched, cigar-smoking, gruff guy with grey hair on the sides was fascinating to me. when i got to college and first started using the net (bitnet/decnet, then internet) i quickly picked the handle of “nick fury, agent of s.h.i.e.l.d.”. i dropped it probably 1992 or 1993, but it’s my past.
(as an aside, this makes clarence’s discussion of nick fury at the comic shop with alabama in true romance endear me even more to clarence and increase my identifying with him. as another aside, jack recently shot a wedding where the couple used music and themes from the movie for their wedding. that’s pretty cool. as a further aside, the theme music for true romance — the marimba piece — was borrowed from badlands, which is a terrence malick film. you should check it out.)
one day last week (i don’t recall which day) someone broke into the potts’ house. it appears all they really took was an apple laptop and two laptop chargers that were near the place they came in. having been a victim of home theft, i’m aware of how much it sucks. so a couple of days ago the potts’ got a new dog. he’s a hound/shar pei mix. anyway, i’m going to sell them my old 12″ ibook laptop.
wednesday i got talked to at work about the fact that i’ve been spending too much time away from my desk. which i didn’t deny. but after a couple of hours stewing on it, it really started annoying me. i don’t really like criticism, positive or negative, deserved or not. and i don’t like negative attention either. plus the issue wasn’t that they weren’t happy with my work, or i wasn’t getting enough done. so i started taking down the stuff in and around my cubicle that makes my space unique and my own. i continued doing it on thursday. my actions appear to be really scaring and/or freaking out a lot of people at work. i think a lot of them think i’m indicating that i’m leaving. but that wasn’t really what it was about. in fact, on thursday i had to talk with three managers in my group. and on thursday and friday i probably had at least twelve to fifteen people ask me what was going on and what happened. some of them thought i was told to clean up my cube. i gave away a couple of computers that i had. i’ve cleaned/hidden probably 2/3 of the stuff that was on my desk, and i’ve removed at least 3/4 of the stuff that was “personalization” of my space. i told some people they wanted a corporate cog, so i was going underground. we’ll see what happens i suppose.
friday evening was the geek gathering. we had it at the petrol station in the heights instead of the usual tropioca. turnout was pretty decent, but i got there an hour and a half or two late. some people were going to joystix from there, but i decided to bow out and head home.
last night i was hanging out at the potts. i started getting tired and decided i was going to go home. this was around 10pm, which is odd for me. but then brad texted me to see if i was riding. i hadn’t gone riding with brad or others in several months, so i couldn’t help myself. i went home and got my bike and met up with brad. we met at mcelroy’s near my house, rode a bit, then hung out at the dark horse. i ended up not getting home until around 2:45am. so much for being tired.
last weekend i took my sha-sha blue flame leather shoes (the ones in the picture in the previous blog entry) and my chocolate brown tony lama western boots to a shoe shop. i got the boots resoled, and i got the shoes reconditioned and the soles re-glued. i picked them up yesterday. i think i’m going to not use the boots on my motorcycle anymore. in fact, i’m probably about to order a new pair of motorcycle boots to replace the frye harness boots that finally fell apart too much a few months ago. i think i may get some pretty awesome boots. we’ll see.
friday my oldest pair of pants started shredding. so today i went to old navy and picked up a new pair of jeans so the number in my rotation would stay consistent. i also picked up a pair of really dark brown/greyish loose khakis, and a few pair of interesting socks (stripes, squares, skulls). we’ll see if i wear the socks or not.


inez: (concerned) how are you, jerry?
dignan: (flat, emotionless) i feel great, inez.
anthony: he’s…uh…under the weather a little bit. so i, uh…
(from bottle rocket)