The Fall of a Masterful Empire

When I was young, I collected Hot Wheels cars. Matchbox too. I remember those John Cleese commercials where he’d slip one into his shirt pocket, and that always made me feel so good. I made my mother buy me a white dress shirt with two breast pockets just so I could stand in front of the mirror and slip into my pockets my two favorite Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars again and again.

I collected them. Like I do guitars, books, Elvis Costello albums, tattoos and Evan bottles, I collected every one of them I could find. They had realistic die-cast metal miniature automobiles with vibrant colors and awesome chrome wheels (and sometimes flake paint). It was magical when my mom would take me to the Wal-Mart and I had a five-dollar bill in my pocket. I could buy five new cars. They were 89 cents apiece. The only problems I ran into back then was which five or six to get. There were so many to choose from, and I knew that at any minute, Matel could go out of business and the Wal-Mart could burn down, and I’d be forever kept from completing my collection. So I had to select the best five.

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Where are the good cats?

This last Monday I took my folks to the airport for their trip to Hawaii. Yeah, I’ve heard it from just about everyone now: “Tell your parents they suck, dude.” Why, because they were smart enough to fly south for the winter? If only a week, at least… Anyway, I loaded them up with memory for their camera and Cheez-Its for their flight and sent them on their way.

That meant I was driving my mother’s Porsche for the last couple of days, because I was too lazy to make the trip back out to their house to pick up my trusty old Wrangler. It’s amazing how lazy one can get about things like that when he is driving a sports car. Either way, I took the wife and kid out to Red Lobster last night for a feast of seafood (OMG those lobster tails and crab legs holy god they were awesome…) and then made the trip out to Silent Hill to swap out the cars. I gassed up the Porsche (I tend to put my foot in it a little too often and turn what should be a one-gallon trip into a five-gallon adventure) and parked it neatly between the lines in the garage. After my wife hopped out and moved all the shit out of the way.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 5

Volume Five: Old Guy and The Onion Incident

The Dredge House wasn’t always fun. We did more than just party there. If you want specifics or anything, I’ll have to get back to you on that. But what I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t always fun and games. Sometimes we got serious. Sometimes people almost died.

At the time I was seeing a girl called April pretty regularly. Now I’ve told you what the word relationship meant to me back then. It meant that sure, I’ll call you my girlfriend and we won’t date other people. Just remember that the word ‘dating’ and the word ‘sex’ aren’t synonymous. So anyway, April was my girlfriend, and I loved her quite well. I don’t think I ever needed to see anyone else while I was with her. So it was all good. Regardless, that has nothing to do with the story, so I don’t know why I’m even telling you that except that maybe to establish that I wasn’t a complete asshole. But I was, so that point is moot anyway. So, moving on, I mentioned April because she had two friends with whom she lived a lot. These were Cammie and Cody. They had a pretty slick apartment in Dallas but were almost never there. They were pretty regularly not even in town. They stayed mostly in Houston, and just about every weekend, were loading up to go south. April didn’t though. She mostly stayed with me.

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The Coolest Places I’ve Worked

Being an unruly and independent sixteen-year-old means you don’t take shit from anyone. Or in the parlance of the age, you don’t take shit from no one. Ever. You do as you please. You wake when you want. You go to school if you feel like it. You listen to your parents if it suits you – because obviously you know better than they… How the hell should they know what it’s like to be alive in the 80s as a teenager? They were teens in like the 50s and shit. Trust me, Pop. You just don’t understand.

It also means you have to work in as many jobs as you can fit between your sixteenth and your nineteenth birthdays. Seriously. I didn’t quit because I got sick of places. Actually yes, I did. But I was going to say that I quit because I was ready for something new. I wanted to experience it all. And both are true. How long can you work at Skaggs bagging groceries before you begin to believe you could manage the store yourself? It can’t be rocket science, dude. That’s why you, Mister Store Manager, only make like thirty grand a year. When I grow up, I’ll make twice what you make in my spare time. I’m sixteen, all powerful, hear me roar.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 4

Beth, My Sister, and the Open-Door Policy That Failed Me

While I’m on the subject of my sister, I’ll go ahead and tell you about another incident that occurred involving her. This is a fun one! I had a girlfriend named Beth. She was German. She didn’t speak German, she just was one. In fact, she could have been full-blooded American and I wouldn’t have known because she didn’t have an accent or anything. She just told me she was German and I had no reason to doubt her. So for the purposes of this story, I’ll just ask you to believe she was German, and that’s that.

Beth and I got pretty close pretty quickly, and found our way into some rather embarrassing scenarios more often than I’d probably care to admit. Just by virtue of our being young and wild, I suppose. But she had a lackluster trust for me to begin with, and I can’t tell you why. I think she thought I was still seeing some other girl and couldn’t give her (Beth) my full heart. Uh, yeah. I was too young to be giving anyone my heart. I did, however, give them a different part of me, if you know what I mean. Wink, wink. Anyway, of course I was seeing other girls! That was none of her business though. I treated her like a queen, and gave her roses and all those things women love. She had no reason to doubt that I was for real. I just like to keep a spare account open on the side in case my primary account runs dry all of a sudden. Know what I mean? Anyway enough about her.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 3

Volume Three: Lisa, the Notorious Cereal Thief

Lisa, my sister, likes cereal. I actually used to call her Cereal Killa. No I didn’t. I just made that up. But I should have. Being that she lived right around the corner from me, she would skate up to my house (literally, rollerblades) and visit me in the mornings. However, I knew she wasn’t really there to see me. She was there to eat my Honey Smacks. Can’t say I blame her. That was some good ass cereal. I should place a hyphen there between good and ass. I’m not sure I’m fond of the thought of ‘ass cereal’. I digress.

So she would skate up and eat a couple of bowls of cereal just about every day. And I was finally like, “Why the hell don’t you just buy your own, then you wouldn’t have to skate a quarter mile uphill in your pajamas every day?” And she was like, “Then I wouldn’t get to see you.” Uh huh. At least the quarter mile home was downhill. Well, one day I was feeling particularly generous, so while at the store, I bought two boxes of Honey Smacks. And when she came up the next morning, I gave her one of the boxes. “Here, take this home and you can eat it whenever you want!” So she did take it home. After she had a couple of bowls at my house.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 2

Volume Two: The Great Mate-Swap of 1994

As I’ve told you, the Dredge House was always full of people. Mostly beautiful people, but sometimes people like you and me. Randoms, we call them. It was ridiculous how many times I would come home and see a living room full of strangers watching my television (13″ with no cable), playing my stereo or my guitar, and drinking beer that was undoubtedly from my fridge. Back then we did indeed have a beer fridge. Ask me how I afforded that on such a humble wage. Well, it came with the house. For rent. This is not to say that I had a normal fridge plus a beer fridge. No, we just had different priorities, and thus, called our primary source of food refrigeration the Beer Fridge. There was simply no room for anything in it other than a few ketchup packets and Beer. The Ones were always cold at the Dredge House.

So I’d walk in the door and everyone would look up and I’d scan their faces, looking for someone familiar. Some of them would smile, and an occasional voice would pipe up, “You must be Space.” To which I would reply, “Well if I must, then so be it.” And having not seen any familiar faces, I’d remark, “Where’s X?” And fill in X with a name of someone who lived there with me. Most of the time this was TJ. Stu was really never there. Not when I got home from work. And most of the time, this remark was met with something like, “Oh he left to go to Fry Street.” Oh. So he left to go to Fry Street and left my house full of strangers.

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SpaceBrew Review: Ratatouille

Just a quick note for you movie buffs out there. We picked up Ratatouille the other day for the kiddo, and watched it last night as a family. Awwww. :rolleyes:

Let me start by saying don’t waste your time with this one. It’s a waste of time, film and money. The story line is ludicrous. It’s about a rat who knows how to cook. Hot hot hotSo he controls some guy to help him get better at cooking. It’s ridiculous. The characters are paper thin, the plot is very predictable, and the language is hardly appropriate.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 1

Volume One: Weiland, the Racist Dog

My first story is about Weiland, the racist (and possibly homosexual, as Captain made mention to in my last column) pit bull I had when I lived in the Dredge House. When I first moved in, Blake came over one day with Easy E, his 80-pound pit and said he knew a guy who was getting rid of a brindle pit. Was I interested? Well yeah! Who doesn’t want a tough dog?

So we went to collect him. He was chained to a tree in this guy’s front yard and I actually walked up and took his chain off, put a lead on him and walked him back to my truck. The dog immediately took to me. He was beautiful too. I named him Weiland after the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots, because they were very relevant in my life at the time.

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Take the Mall by Voice

In my never-ending quest to find and archive things I’ve written, I’ve come across a little gem here about a friend of mine we all know. And rather than posting it with the date I wrote it, I’ll just post it as current and tell you when it happened, because I remember when it happened. But not when I wrote it. This was back in July of 2002. This story is about Katy 80. Sweet little Katy Fanning, who almost never writes here, but always has something to say. Or in this case, to sing. She had just turned fifteen.

I work at a web hosting company, building the web servers. I often go into work at midnight or later and grab my stack of server build sheets and stay until five or so knocking them all out. My boss doesn’t care when I come in or leave, so long as I get them all built by their due date. And I work better at night. This frees up most of my days to do more important things like baseball games, beer drinking and, well, whatever I want. I live in Flower Mound, but work in Las Colinas. My friend Kim and her sister live in Coppell, and we often have lunch together when Katy has decided to skip school or is off for a teacher’s work day. Oh the glorious Teacher’s Work Day. Yes, that should be capitalized. I think she told her big sister she was out for TWDs a lot more often than they really were. On Friday of last week though, we were all off. It was the day after Independence Day, so everyone was off. And most of the world was at the Vista Ridge Mall. Which is, for whatever reason, where we decided we should head for lunch.

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