I've moved on

My new blog is located here: http://www.bombaxing.com. Go there now.

Jury Duty

There are only a handful of things that excuse you from jury duty. If you’re a police officer or you’re caring for someone that cannot take care of themselves, you get off. No questions asked, other than those that establish proof of your claims of being a cop. Plastic badges purchased in the toy aisle at Walgreens don’t cut it... unfortunately.

There are a couple of other excuses as well, but they don’t apply to me, so I won’t bother listing them here. I think one of them has to do with being unthinkably old.

The most important one states that if you’ve served within the last twelve months, you’re free and clear. They have to let you off if it’s been under a year. They can, however, ask you twelve months and two days later, which is exactly what happened to me. Technically, it was twelve months and three days later, but I don’t count the imaginary leap year day since pretend days are bullshit.

I know leap year has something to do with astronomy, seasons and the Gregorian calendar, but I don’t care. I still think it’s a bullshit day.

Jury duty sucks enough in its own right, but it’s that much worse when you have to go on an annual basis. I considered not showing up at all, but I might have had to face fines, jail time and some sort of implied civic humility. I’m perfectly fine with the humiliation part, but the other two things sound pretty lousy.

When I showed up to the courthouse, the holding pen was already nearly full. I wedged myself in between a woman correcting test papers from her grade-school students and another woman who entertained herself by staring straight ahead into an empty space just a few feet in front of her. Surprisingly, she wasn’t the only one doing this. About thirty or so people out of the 350 in the holding pen didn’t bring a book, magazine or even a cell phone game to pass the time. They just sat there. Staring. Some of them watched the TV during the moments when it happened to be turned on, but for the most part, they just stared like some freaky cult members who were waiting for instruction from The Leader. It would have been genuinely cool if they’d all been wearing Snuggie blankets. Hell, it’s my story, so as far as you’re concerned, they were all searing Snuggie blankets.

There’s a delicate balance in communicating with people in the jury holding pen. It’s similar to talking to a stranger on an airplane. You might luck out and engage in a stimulating conversation with a truly interesting person. More than likely, though, you’ll be stuck talking to a total twit who refuses to shut up once you’ve shown them even the slightest bit of decency by being polite to them. I take the cautious approach and just block everyone out. I bring a book, shove my nose into its spine, and remain there for the duration of the unbearable experience. It usual works out pretty well for the most part, but chances are someone will eventually ask you what you’re reading. If this happens, pretend you didn’t hear them. Or, just say, “Not really sure” without looking over in their direction.

I was passed over on the first three roll calls. Lucky me. The space around me was freed up a bit since the test grader and staring lady had been called away, so I enjoyed the added elbow room while I continued to wait. One of the staff came in to announce that it would be at least two hours before any other jurors were called into the courtrooms, so we could wander about wherever we liked... so long as we confined ourselves to the space between our current location and the nearby hallway leading to the bathrooms. As long as we stayed in that very, very small section of the building, we were completely free to make ourselves comfortable and rome about endlessly.

I took them up on their offer to become free range and went to the bathroom. When I got back I noticed that a large gurgling gentleman was planted in the previously vacant seat to my left. I sat there next to him for a while, but eventually had to find another spot. He made a lip smacking sound every few seconds without ever opening his mouth. He also made a gurgling sound that was not unlike a water cooler with its bubbles rising to the top of its clear, plastic canister. After seeing him adjust his pants for the third time, I decided to find another seat.

I found a spot in another section of the holding pen. I was sitting in my new spot for about five minutes when I started to smell something. To be more specific, I smelled an entirely new smell. The room is overloaded with odor at all times, most of which is gut wrenching and partially unidentifiable. It’s kind of like listening to classical music when you hear a single instrument somewhere deep in the mix, but you can’t quite pick it out because it’s being overshadowed by so many other sounds. You know you recognize it, but you can’t quite figure out what it is. The funk in the holding pen is a collage of sweat, perfume, bad breath, food and unwashed clothes. It’s a symphony of stench.

But this new smell stood out from the others. I knew this smell. It was strawberry Pop Tarts. Problem was, nobody was eating strawberry Pop Tarts. Why was I smelling the distinct and unmistakable odor of strawberry Pop Tarts if not a single person was eating a strawberry Pop Tart? This new seat was even farther away from the coffee maker and the elevators than I had been before, so there was no chance that the stink was wafting into the room from another location. It was coming from the people that I was sitting next to. As in, the people themselves smelled like strawberry Pop Tarts. That’s not normal.

To be fair, it might have just been one person. I actually hope it was only one person. I would hate to think that more than one person goes through life from day to day smelling like strawberry Pop Tarts, and a notable handful of those very people happened to show up in a courthouse on the very same day only to sit right next to one another by chance alone.

I don’t think I mentioned that this particular day happened to be Inauguration day. That sucked. Do you want to know why that sucked? Because if I ever happen to be asked where I was on the historic inauguration of the first black President of the United States of America, I’ll have to say that I was stuffed into a room with disgruntled people staring off into space, some of which smelled exactly like Strawberry Pop Tarts. I’d prefer not to have any memory of that day remain, but now that it’s been tagged with the inauguration, it’ll be stuck in my crawl until the day I’m too damn old to serve on jury duty.

After sitting around for the better part of the day, the courtroom staff eventually let the rest of us go. I was conflicted. I was definitely happy to get the hell out of there and not have to return for another 367 days, but I was disappointed that I was never was able try out my bag of tricks to try to convince the lawyers and the judge that I was unfit to serve, like twitching every twenty seconds or so and saying “apparently”. Or, loudly saying “case closed” when the judge told us to be seated. No matter. There’s always next year.

Not just yet

I still haven't had a chance to finish the design on the new blog. Bugger. It's not my fault, though. Different members of my family have insisted on coming into town to spend "quality time together" and "enjoy each others company" for some reason. That's put a crimp in my free time and made it nearly impossible to sit in front of a screen for hours at a time.

That's not counting the time I spend at work while sitting for hours upon hours in front of a monitor, but I can't really design my personal blog while getting paid to do client work.

Now that the family who "really enjoyed seeing me" has finally left, I can get back to work on this damn thing. I should have it finished up over the coming weekend, and it'll (hopefully) be marked up shortly thereafter.

Until then, enjoy this.

A slight pause

I've only had this blog up and running for a short while, but I'm ready for a change. I'm going to be switching things over to Wordpress (with a little help from a friend), and revising the design. I've been spending quite a bit of my free time designing the new look-and-feel, so I'm not going to be posting much of anything until it's wrapped up. Shouldn't be much longer now. I expect I'll have the new site fired up within a couple of weeks at most. Check back soon... and repeatedly. Every day.

Little Entrepreneurs

My family didn’t have much money when we were just starting out. My father was a Presbyterian minister at a small church in Baton Rouge, which we had re-located to from Pennsylvania when I was still a baby.

The church was a double-wide stuffed full of folding chairs and layered with brittle wood paneling that was attached to nearly every surface of the trailer, except for the stringy indoor/outdoor carpet that served as roadways for my toy cars while my Dad talked about God.

The few members of the church were plenty loyal, but the paychecks were about as thin as the decorative paneling. We were moderately poor more often than not, but we weren’t destitute. We had money for the essentials. That’s all that really mattered. My parents fed and clothed me and my sisters (and later, my brother), and we never missed a Christmas. There were plenty of parts of my childhood that were traumatic in their own right, but our financial status was never one of them.

I think our money issues did affect me and my sisters in some way, though. Either that, or we were just a bit strange.

My sisters and I were constantly trying to think of ways to make money for ourselves. We started by taking our old, unwanted toys, fixing them up when possible, and selling them to the people in cars as they drove past the street in front of our house. We stood with Tupperware bowls filled with junk, hoping that someone would be compelled to pull over and buy something. We jumped up and down and yelled at them, but nobody ever stopped. Looking back on it now, that’s probably just as well.

We also tried to sell our toys to each other. We would set up an entire store in one of the rooms in the house, placing tiny strips of torn paper next to each item to indicate its price.

This idea worked better than the first, but we didn’t actually make any money since we would just pass the pennies back and forth to one another and trade out one broken toy for the next.

At some point, and I can’t pinpoint when it happened, my sisters and I decided that the best, and possibly only, way to make real money was to turn one of our neighbors into gum. Sticks of chewing gum, to be precise.

The neighbor we had in mind was a notably large woman who lived directly across the street from us. We rarely saw her. She came out of her house once each day to yell for her two sons to return home to her. She screamed each of their names a handful of times before going back inside until the following day when she would come back out and do it all again.

“Larry-Chad! Earl-Wayne!”

Then she was gone.

The woman’s name was Fat Judy McGee. Her name was not Judy. It wasn’t Mrs. McGee. It was always the full Fat Judy McGee without any deviation. As mean as kids can be, we didn’t intend for the title to be impolite or cruel. We honestly thought that was her real name. It’s just as well that we never spoke directly to her. She never found out the nice, little Edwards’ kids next door had tagged her with such a nasty alias.

I suggested to my sisters that we take one of our kitchen knives, a cheap, serrated instrument with a plastic, yellow handle, and carve Fat Judy McGee into very thin slices. Following that, we would take the slices and send them off to a factory somewhere; a vendor that happened to specialize in the task of converting overweight women into sticks of gum.

I know it sounds a bit gruesome, but we didn’t intend for it to be. It was incredibly innocent. When we imagined the process from start to finish, we didn’t see any blood or guts. We were about five, seven and nine. We were kids. It was harmless.

Well, not completely harmless. Fat Judy McGee would indeed have to die to make our gum, but aside from that slightly disagreeable incident, we didn’t see anything wrong with it.

I think we ended up losing interest in the idea within a few hours, but we would dredge it back up every once in a while for the next year or so, wondering if we could pull it off. It seemed strangely plausible in our odd, little minds. Still, it's probably just as well we never went through with it.

We all went on to get normal part-time jobs in our teenage years, having failed to start a business of our own. We came close to hitting it big, though. Fat Judy McGee gum could have been huge.

Christmas photo

I shot this about four years ago for a Christmas card. I still dig it.

Old Yelper

I live next to the neighbor from hell. I live in a modest dump of a house that has a total of five other lots backed up to it. Four out of the five neighbors have dogs, one of which is a deplorable, wretched little creature that never stops barking and yelping. None of the other neighbors cause any problems. They all follow the basic rules of dog ownership. Dog barks. Owner opens door and lets dog in. But this one neighbor does things differently. Dog barks for 23 hours straight. Owner does nothing.

And it’s not just a barking dog. I’m overly sensitive to any noise that shouldn’t be there, I’ll admit. I spend most of my time waiting to be irritated by some audible invasion, which is the result of living next to a long list of the worst imaginable neighbors, from crack-heads to a sixteen year-old kid repeatedly beating up his own mother. Seriously. I have a keen and unwanted ability to be annoyed by the slightest twitch or whisper.

But this dog goes far beyond that. It doesn’t so much bark as it does yelp. It sounds like a cross between Catherine Hepburn hailing a cab and a blast of an air-raid siren. If Ross Perot is ever executed by way of electric chair, this is what it will sound like. It’s a tiny dog. It probably weighs about thirteen pounds. But the noise it makes cuts through solid walls and travels lengthy distances so that it’s yelp sounds like it’s coming from a spot just inches from your ear.

The first time I heard it, which was about six months ago, I had no idea what it was. When I saw the tiny dog through the slots in the half-rotted fence, I laughed. It yelped again. I laughed again. It sounded ridiculous. This wasn’t a dog. It was a pig being slaughtered after forcefully being jacked up on meth.

Day two, and it still made me laugh. By day three, I was ready to puncture my eardrums. And it’s gone on like that ever since. Try to imagine scraping the outer edges of your upper teeth over a dusty chalkboard. That’s the sensation I’m experiencing right now while writing this. He’s out there now. I can hear him.

Things improve for a week or two after I call the cops or animal control, but it just jumps right back to the start after a handful of days.

And I love animals. I really do. I have two dogs of my own, and I name each and every random animal before I run over them in my car. “I’ll call that one Hoppy” (thump). “That one is Mr. Fuzzle” (squish).

I don’t run over animals intentionally. That’d be pretty horrible. But, if there’s no possible way to swerve and change direction before crushing a squirrel beneath my tires, I make sure to name it something adorable before robbing it of its last breath on my way to grab a smoothie. Seems like the right thing to do.

Anyway, it’s about time to insert my earplugs and crank up the volume on the TV to an inhumane volume to drown out the miniscule beast. I gotta get some sleep somehow.