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About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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A Sutter Home Companion Chapter 1
At the time of this writing, I've been married for eight days and six hours to a woman who has been sick for five of those days. I've had my new day-job for four days. People moving into the house, people moving out of the house, car trouble in the eight to nine hundred dollar range, sharing one car between two working people on different yet minorly overlapping shifts, pissing people off and burning bridges, calling the State Department and US Embassy in New Delhi concerning reports of backwater religious fundamentalist fuckheads coming after my orphanage-and-hospital-running sister and her family with pitchforks and torches (still not satisfactorily resolved but somewhat more stable now), dealing with Macintosh® servers.... It's been a full week. Next week I drive two thousand miles to promote my new novel and hammer out printing and distribution deals for the publishing company, and, oh, maybe drink. The hard work never stops.
Sometimes it's like someone flipped a fucking switch. I'm sure you've experienced it. Some days you can just expect to have a three-in-the-AM phone call from one of Condi Rice's minions wake you up (said minion asking if you could just happen to remember your brother-in-law's Social Security number off the top of your head) after a long evening spent configuring Cisco routers. Fortunately there's still booze in the house so you can get back to sleep. For everything else, there's MasterCard®.
Chapter 2
For those of you who have never done it, corporate-scale network engineering is like building a 1700s era pipe organ out of drinking straws and toothpicks—except the only tools you can use are a welding torch and a sledgehammer. At some point you develop powers of telekinesis to hold the structure together while you lovingly tap toothpicks into place and melt straws to make glue. It's the only way.
Plus, the structure is large enough that there is weather inside. Also, you get rats.
The chief appeal of a job like this is the development of telekinesis, because rarely is the money worth it. Oh, and make sure you're not around if anyone ever tries to play the organ.
Chapter 3
If you're wondering what causes those disgusting splotches near the top of your windows at your house or apartment, it's not where birds hit them and exploded. It's carpenter bees. Those splotches are time-release sprays of sawdust and bee spit.
When I was a kid (as opposed to a child or an infant or a teenager), I would stand on the back steps of my house in Columbus, Georgia, with a mop handle in my hand and swing and swing and swing at the little hovering bastards until I finally connected with one and knocked it into the next yard. This was maybe a year or so before Star Wars came out, but if you remember Luke's lightsaber training on board the Millennium Falcon, you probably have just about the right picture. I wasn't blindfolded, but I may as well have been. Even so, I still whacked one every once in a while.
As far as I knew, they just flew right back and kept gnawing away at a roof I was using. There was an endless supply of bees. There was the occasional wasp, too, but they didn't get back up when I hit them.
Later that year there was so much honey in the walls of my bedroom that it was dripping out of the electrical sockets.
Chapter 4
When you marry someone, you marry his or her entire family. If they have children, then this includes not just their children but also, to a certain extent, their ex-wives or ex-husbands. In fact, your entire family marries their entire family, and, at least in America, none of them have anything to say about this. This is, if you are sufficiently cruel, one of the coolest things on earth. If you despise your family, your choice of families to nail onto theirs can be a perfect way to punish them.
A good second-best way to punish them is to spend five years getting a bachelors degree in a liberal arts program. And then get a job in your field.
Back to the original subject.... Don't marry someone who will give you in-laws you can't love and exes whose asses you can't kick if you can at all avoid it.
Chapter 5
Some of the best advice I ever got concerning writing and drinking was from Cris Baty, a freelance writer in Oakland, California: "You might think beer will help. It won't. You might think bourbon won't help. It will." Speaking as a finally-admitting-it southern writer, I have to also admit that large numbers of successful drunkard famous southern writers heartily endorsed bourbon as the device that allowed them to stop all the thinking about what they were about to write that was what was keeping them from writing. Read that last sentence again if you need to. The message is well worth the tortured syntax. Of course if you think about what you're writing you'll realize it's crap and never commit it to paper. It's the second pass that makes it not crap, and it's next to impossible to do both passes in your head before the words dribble out your fingers. Lobotomize your internal censor any way you can or you'll never write the first word.
Bourbon seems to work better than beer because it's a short sharp shock. Beer gets you tipsy and keeps you that way. What's written on beer stays crap, because, let's face it, you wrote it when you were drunk Beer is inexpensive and plentiful, and you'll keep drinking it for the duration. Bourbon lets you start off writing crap, but unless you're truly hardcore enough to finish off the entire bottle in one sitting, you gradually sober up, go back and fix all the crap between shots, and sheer momentum will carry you long into the sober hours. Especially if you're too poor to buy more than one bottle per month.
The danger is that bourbon also temporarily fries that little part of your brain that lets you realize that for all of your effort, you'll also be paid crap. Too much bourbon will leave you with a million or two words in untidy stacks lying around the house, no money, and a liver you could use for a catalytic converter in a late-model SUV.
Some people write just for the excuse to drink bourbon. They're the ones that tend to be successful.
Chapter 6
The reason you drink when you're discussing business deals is the same as for writing. If you think about what you're doing, you'll wonder who gave you the right to act like an actual grown-up and agree to all the risks that are involved in acting like grown-ups doing business deals. The trick is to buy more drinks for the other guys than they buy for you, because the soberest one doing the signing wins. Don't worry about the cost of the drinks. You can expense it. Or at least put it on the MasterCard®.
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Vidicon's buying the next round. |
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Pages: 1 of 1 A Sutter Home Companion
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