Neanderpundit

Yesterday morning, on my way to a job pretty well downtown Chicago, I sat on the stevenson for FORTY FIVE MINUTES TRYING TO TRAVEL SEVEN MILES. My Sweet Lord, talk about fucktard friday. I got to the job, eventually, but by that time I was in hate with all my fellow travellors on planet Earth.

When I finished the job (Ten minute’s work, really) I left and got back onto the Stevie at Pulaski. Or at least, I tried. I gotr behind some idiot who felt it would be a screaming laugh riot to just SIT AT THE STOPLIGHT FOR TWO CHANGES OF THE LIGHT.
Anyway, I tend to buy stiff sidewall narrow tires that have a high weight rating, but i had forgotten the new Sploder still has Yokohamas. The second time the light turned green I nudged out around him and tapped the gas, and the Sploder got tail happy, and I drifted that fucker about 30 yards down the ramp!! I’m sure I was just as startled as all the people around me, but I backed off a second, tracked it down and hit the road for parts unknown lest a Chicago cop decide to find and fuck with me.

Hard to get an AWD vehicle to swing around like that, but it was wet and greasy, and it just broke loose like it was made to do it.

Now I’mna have to find some empty lots to play in, at least until I get some proper truck tires on this beast.

She often writes things that hit home, though our lives are very different.

I have been, all my life, the go to guy for bizarre and eclectic trivia. None of it has ever done me a bit of good- people suggested to me “You should go on X game show” I always had to explain that while my memory was more than adequate, my retrieval system is flawed. I could have the entirety of the Knights of Columbus initiation ritual up there,(actually, it is!) but be unable to retrieve it unless specifically prompted to do so.

I was at a customer today, who was asking me “Why does this robot do X?” and it took me back to the time I was programming that very robot. The customer at the time whined “Why doesn’t the robot wait in front of the machine so it can be ready to load?” fact was, the robot only took three seconds to get to the machine, and you never knew what machine was going to be ready next. So having it wait was always a waste of time, but the customer could never be convinced of that fact so we spent an extra week writing meaningless code so the customer could say he’d done something to reduce cycle time. And now it’s costing trouble and time and aggrivation, exactly as we said it would.

Discussing this with a co-worker, it dawned on me WHY my retrieval system is horrible, for the first time. I recounted the conversation we’d had, and he said “great memory”. I said “It’s a curse. Imagine having crystal clear memories of every stupid thing you’ve ever done, or every bad thing that ever happened”

And it dawned on me like a 200 watt light bulb going on right over my head. My retrieval mechanism sucks because it’s what i have instead of the ability to forget. There are so many things in my head that I don’t want to look at, that are as clear in my memory as the day I witnessed them, that I wish I could make go away. Instead, I’m not very good at accessing those memories, and that has been a sort of a blessing.

I don’t know how many of you may have seen the Mythbusters episode about exploding beans, but it brought back memories for me.

Not memories of an epic asswhipping- sure, there was an asswhipping involved, but it wasn’t a world class asswhipping, it was sort of a lackadaisical thing. Ho, hum, i can’t sit down, yay, what’s for supper, I’ll just eat standing here in a corner.

I had arrived at an age where I helped cook the evening meal fairly often, and I was no stranger to using the stove. We had a big stainless Hardwicke cooktop, gas, with those grates that looked like giant ninja stars. (if mom only knew how many times those things had been off the stove, and embedded in rotten logs in the backyard!!)

Anyway, I knew Mom had ordered some ribs from the little restaurant that was on her way home, and I though, shit, what goes better with ribs than baked beans? I knew there was a can in the pantry, so i went down and got them.

I was about to crank them open when I thought to myself, damn, the can is metal, right? And when Mom cooks stuff i the pressure cooker it gets done faster, right? heat + pressure = great tasting food!!

Good Lord, I am a friggin’ GENIUS!!!

I’m gonna put the can RIGHT on the stove, it’ll cook up great, and we won’t dirty a pot, and it’ll be WONDERFUL! Whyinhell hasn’t anyone else ever thought of this? hell, I already had a set of Dad’s welding gloves ready to hold the can and open it.

So I set it on the stove, and put it on “high” There was an anxious moment as the paper label burned off the can, but it was soon gone.

I heard Mom pulling into the garage and realized I was still wearing my PJ’s. This was a capitol offense; we were not allowed to ‘Lounge around” all day, we had to get dressed- even though we werent’ allowed to go outdoors. So I ran into my roomto change before she got up the stairs.

Thenkfully, something else happened before she got up the stairs. She was on the landing, in fact, when the can went “BOOM!”

Sure, an asswhipping ensued. But the cleaning was the worst bit, I spent most of that evening cleaning and it was a mess. Years afterward, each time there was a remodeling project, we’d find a couple beans we’d missed, like stuck to the wallpaper in a place where the pattern hid it, or on the top of one of the blades of the ceiling fan, or behind the cabinets. The asswhipping wasn’t half as memorable as the lesson learned, nor the cleaning of the baked beans.