2001-08-09 - 1:24 p.m.

the long, slow, slide into oblivion

okay, there's another entry from just a bit ago. if you read it, please promise me you won't hold my being a goober against me. sometimes i write stuff and post it and like five minutes later i'm wishing i hadn't. blame lack of sleep and *huge* amounts of caffiene.

every day i come in to work and promise myself that i'll work my ass off all day. every day i spend more time than i should on in-cube sabbatical.

like now.

by the time you're pusing 30, aren't you supossed to be mature and responsible? shouldn't i be a pillar of my community by now?

once, at another job that i hated, we played the radio all day. every morning we listened to KRFX, and back in those days Louis and Floorwax used to have a guy on the show called The Beer Man. he was basically a forty-year old alchoholic who they would send out on trips and to events. the joke was that he was a pretty smart guy, and people liked him, but as soon as he was able, he'd get sh*t-faced drunk and turn all belligerent and then pass out. (american humor at it's finest). so Beer Man was notorious around this office.

anyway, one day at a "social" gathering (this was a bunch of nerdy chemists trying to be social -- "demented and sad, but social") i was asked where i wanted to be by the time i was fifty. i said i either wanted to be like Don Felder (the other, other, other guitarist in the Eagles), or George Harrison (the Ringo Starr of the Beatles), or the Beer Man. basically my point was that i wanted to be really good at something, even if i wasn't in the lime-light, or i wanted to be a spectacular failure.

mostly it was a joke, but i was trying to point out that i wanted to eschew mediocrity.

my boss didn't get it.

he called me into his office and asked if i needed help with an alchohol dependancy. i found it amusing. he didn't even ask me if i had a problem with playing guitar.

hrmph.

so now i'm coming up on 30, and i'm a lot closer to Beer Man than to Don Felder.

time to start enjoying the long, slow, slide into oblivion.

who wants a drink?