Monkeying around with my muse

I believe the Monkey Playing Cymbals merits some more explanation. So if you click on the link on the left (the highlighted "Monkey Playing Cymbals" text) you will find the first blog post dedicated to the little bugger. He eventually took on a life of his own and had his own blog for awhile. But he gave that up because he has a very short attention span (he is a monkey after all) and in all honesty, he is only a mechanical toy that doesn't really work.

There, I said it. The monkey isn't real. Oh, he is a real object, but he doesn't really talk or move outside of my imagination. This may come as a great shock to anyone who already followed the monkey on my blog. But at least I now have the monkey off my back.

I really shouldn't blame the monkey anyway for not having interesting things to blog about. I could blog about many things going on in my life, but unfortunately, since this is a public blog, I have learned the hard way not to share too much personal information on the Web.

I used to think it was okay to just blurt out anything about my life and history. But a brush with a stalker and a heightened awareness of identity theft and fraud have made me err on the side of caution as to what I talk about.

I will say that I have been trying to sell a 1978 Bally Pinball machine online. I'd bought it about 12 years ago in my bachelor days. It took up the better part of my family room in my old house. For the past five or so years, it has taken up a corner of my garage covered with blankets. It is a great vintage machine that actually still works. It is just like a machine I used to play at the Student Union Building when I was in college and the Playmates depicted on the machine were Hugh Hefner's favorites. Since he never seems to date anyone under 23, I imagine they have long since retired.

Anyway, I have trying to sell the machine at a site called Mr. Pinball. Right after the ad went live, I received this e-mail:

-- 

Hello,

Do you still have the above item for sale for sale?i would want to know the present condition as well and arrange for the shipping myself,i';ll like to know if you would accept a cashier cheque.....kindly email me back as soon with your final asking price.i reside in U.K and your quick response will be highly appreciated.

Thank you.

In the good old days, I would have been elated and trusting about receiving such an inquiry. But I was immediately skeptical, especially since Mr. Pinball warned buyers and sellers about scam artists trying to bilk people with a scam whereas they send a counterfeit cashiers check for more than the amount of your item (to cover shipping and your inconvenience). The check apparently clears and you wire the shipping money to an address designated by the scammer. Then the bank discovers the check is bogus and you are libel for the money you've wired.

So even though I figured the e-mail was a scam, I replied to "Mr. Perry Bridge" who for some reason lived in the UK but had no command of the English language or any apparent knowledge of pinball machines. I sent a few photos of the machine and said I'd accept a check but wouldn't ship until it cleared the bank (this was before I'd done research on the cashiers check scam). 

Mr. Bridge fired back this e-mail:

Hello,

Thanks for the quick response.i will be buying the machine you have

for sale,so kindly reserve it for me.However, the payment will be

deliver to you this week or next week...So please as soon as you

receive the payment, get it cashed immediately, deduct the money for

the item and send the remaining balance to the shipping agent that

handles the shipment via Western union money transfer. Moreso, I'll be

giving you an extra $40 for keeping this item for me till the

shipper's come for the pick up and to know you're selling this to me.

So in view of the above, Here are some of the details I will need for

final issuance of the Check or MoneyOrder to you.

(1) Full Name

(2) Mailing address, not p.o.box please

(3) your direct telephone number both home and cell.

Once you get back to me with all the above informations, the payment

will be issued out immediately and it will be sent to you.

hope to hear from you.

Best regards.

Perry

All of my red flags were flying full mast at this point. I did a quick Google search and discovered Mr. Perry Bridge who uses the e-mail addresses "king.kuyt0009@yahoo.com" and "king.kuyt0009@gmail.com" was quite the active buyer. He had used the exact same e-mail trying to purchase several other pinball machines, a horse trailer, a horse, and various other big ticket items online that would require a hefty shipping cost wired back to the shipper (who we can bet was Mr. Perry Bridge). 

Okay, all of this depressed me. There was a time when I cashiers check was pretty much as good as cash. Now if you sell something online, you are pretty much stuck using Paypal or only selling for local pick up and demanding cash. 

I thought about goofing with Mr. Bridge like I used to do with the Nigerian spammers in the old days. But, although it would waste the spammers time, I didn't have the energy. 

I realize that this was a major digression from writing about the monkey, but I think in a roundabout nonsensical way, it was relevant. The moral is that, not all monkeys are as they seem to be and there is a lot of monkey business on the Web.

The sun also rises in Seattle

After a long, rainy winter and a long, rainy spring followed by a rainy June, we finally have some warm, sunny weather in Seattle. And even after all of the bitching about the rain, people are already complaining about how hot it is.

It is simply the nature of people who live in this place of endless gray drenched greenery. I personally like a more moderate climate. Give me temperatures of about 70 to 75 degrees max and I'm fine. I don't really mind rain as long as it is in moderation. I just get sick of day after day of drizzle and drabness. So even the relatively high heat is a welcome change.

Growing up in Idaho, I got used to summers that often erred on the unbearably hot side. To me summer was the dead time. No matter how much you watered things in the summer there, they were brown and brittle. I spent most of my summers hunkered down in my room with the shades drawn waiting for the sun to go down. So I can kind of relate to how vampires must feel, if, they existed.

I can't believe I've resorted to blogging about the weather. My creative muse seems to wax a wane a great deal lately. My Monkey Playing Cymbals is ignoring me right now. He has been smug since he had an extended cameo appearance in Toy Story 3. I hate to break it to him, but the movie just furthered the stereotype that Monkeys Playing Cymbals are annoying little shrieking villains who narc on their friends. I suppose it isn't really a stereotype in his case.

I do miss the monkey being more active in inspiring my writing, however.

But I digress and I am sure most people don't have a clue as to what I'm talking about. But either you know the monkey or you don't.

It sure is hot out.

Always after me lucky charms...

When I was a kid, I was big on lucky charms. No, not the cereal. I mean objects that brought you luck. They came in all shapes and sizes. They could be simple as a shiny penny or a pretty rock. Or a feather or a four leaf clover.

Rabbits feet were hot items as lucky charms for awhile. I'm not sure why they were considered lucky. They certainly weren't lucky for the rabbit. You used to be able to buy them at grocery stores or Dime Stores. I assume they fell out of favor as lucky charms when the animal rights advocates pointed out that a rabbits foot was put to better use on the rabbit than on a key chain.

I was thinking about lucky charms recently not because I believe in them, but more at why people project attributes such as luck or magic on an inanimate object. It dawned on me that nothing has power until we empower it to have that power. If you really believe something brings luck, you kind of stack the deck psychologically that it really has that power.

I think the same applies to religion or politics. You have to give an entity or institution power before it has any over you. Ditto with relationships. You have to give up power to another person before they have any over you. Conversely they have to give up power to you before you have power over them.

The beauty of this theory is that if you recognize that you are the one empowering anything to have magic, luck, healing properties or power to cleanse your soul or psyche than you are really the source of the power. So you don't really have to give it away. You just need to use it.

I suppose this is too simple of a theory to catch on. It also wouldn't be too popular because it eliminates the ability to blame your circumstances on someone or something else and forces you to take responsibility for everything that happens to you. You can't blame things on bad luck, god's will, mother nature or your parents. If you are in a bad relationship, lousy job, crappy neighborhood or have a bad haircut, it is something you have the power to control or gave up that power to put you there.

Okay, I'm not saying you can control the weather (but you can control putting yourself at its mercy). And maybe you can't control some diseases, but you can control how you treat your body to allow yourself to get sick. I am suggesting that before you blame fate and the blue bird of happiness for crapping in your cereal you retrace the steps that got you in the situation you are in. Then seize the reins of power and get the hell out of dodge.

More power to you if you do.

Random acts of randomness

After rambling yesterday about the maddening quality of repetition and sameness in life as we age, I was remiss in not pointing out that the occasional encounter with a random thing does break up the mundaneness of it all. Point in fact: I was driving to the train station this morning on my usual route encountering the usual traffic at the usual places and stopping at the usual lights when I noticed a watermelon in the gutter next to the road.

This struck me as odd. One might expect an apple or an orange perhaps, cast off from a passing car. But you don't normally see a whole watermelon just sitting there down and out in the gutter wondering why part of its ambitions to be part of a summer picnic had been thwarted. This was a whole, unscathed watermelon, mind you. It hadn't been tossed in the gutter. It had been placed or perhaps rolled there. The only thing odder fruit to be found just sitting in the gutter would be a coconut or perhaps a pineapple. But even those could have accidentally fallen out of some one's grocery bags. Watermelons, however, don't just happen.

Now granted this watermelon was in the vicinity of a real estate office that is surrounded by life sized fiberglass models of animals. There is a life sized elephant, a giraffe, a gorilla and I believe a zebra. It is a virtual Noah's Ark of fake animals staged for some unknown reason under a tree in front of the office. But these have been there for several years and have merged into the sameness of my everyday experience driving to the train station. The watermelon is a new anomaly.

I am actually quite fond of random things. They spice up the mundane. I was in a lawyer's office with my family the other day signing some papers when a transient looking gentleman popped in the front door and proclaimed that there was a live opossum outside and he just wanted us to know about it because we had small children with us. The lawyer thanked him and returned to pointing out where I needed to date, initial and sign a document. I had to resist the urge to jump up and say, "Hey kids, let's go out and play with the live opossum. They are lots more fun than the dead ones we have at home."

I work in downtown Seattle so I am actually pretty used to random things. One of my co-workers was waiting for the bus outside our building a couple of years ago when a man wheels up to him with a shopping cart loaded with hams and asked him if he'd like to buy one. I debate sometimes whether this was a random thing or just odd. This is a fine line we are talking here.

Since I am contradicting my post from yesterday anyway, I must say that I find any movie done by the Coen brothers an exception to the rule when it comes to breaking out of the hackneyed plot realm. I love their films because they epitomize a sort of organized randomness. It is refreshing in a "I don't really understand it, but here's something I haven't seen before" way.

Kind of like the watermelon in the gutter this morning.

8:52 a.m. in the garden of good and evil

It is kind of pitiful to think that I am only fifty something years old and I've run out of things to say. I've begun to understand why old people repeat themselves all of the time. Because the older you get, the more life seems to just repeat itself. You see the same movie and television plots over and over. Politicians spout the same rhetoric over and over, and the news reports the same stories over and over.

Sometimes I think the only way to be innovative is to lock yourself in a room, pull the blinds and ignore the rest of the world.

Though sometimes I believe I am blissfully obtuse about what is going on around me in the world. I watched the film, Battle in Seattle last night. It was a dramatization of the riots that took place in Seattle when the World Trade Organization met here in 1999.  Until I watched the film, I never really had a clue what the WTO was and why people were protesting it here. I live in the Seattle area and work in downtown Seattle. I was here during the riots and I pretty much only knew they were going on because it messed up my bus schedule at the time and I saw stuff about it on the local news.

I was oblivious to the whole Grunge music scene that was born in Seattle as well. Here Nirvana, Soundgarten and umpteen legendary groups were performing at clubs around town and I was totally unaware of them until Kurt Cobain blew his head off with a shotgun. So by the time I was aware I could have seen them perform for next to nothing, their concert tickets cost a fortune.

Apparently not being able to keep up with the latest on everything is another symptom of aging along with repeating yourself. By the time I am aware that something is cool, it has become uncool. It is really hard to be cool when you are middle aged. It will become nigh impossible when I am considered elderly.  Though this is why Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World is my hero. He is the only near geriatric character I know of in the popular media who is cool.

But I've said that before so there I go repeatedly repeating myself again.

Sigh...

In the zone

Under no circumstances would I consider myself an athletic person. I was more content as a kid to go to lay in my room in the summer and read books than joining a little league team. It is not that I didn't like to play baseball or football or other sports. I was just wasn't built to be a jock and I had little in the way of talent when it came to running, jumping or throwing.

Oh, I had a competitive nature, just no skills to back it up. So I shied away from competitive sports until I was in junior high and participated as a necessary evil to get service points and be recognized as a well rounded student in anticipation of getting into a good college. And though I tried hard in wrestling, basketball and tennis, I was less than mediocre in all of them.

I was an 'A' student in everything but physical education. I hated it with a passion. And one of the things I hated most about it was running. My 7th grad PE instructor used running as a punishment so I grew to loath it. I developed a psychosomatic cough I'm sure was related to running the dreaded "cross country" in P.E.

I say all of this because now, at this juncture in my middle aged life, I find myself running. Oh, not all the time, but for the past year I've just about gone to the gym everyday. And to mix up my workout, I alternate between an elliptical machine and jogging on the treadmill. The longest I have jogged on any given day is an hour, but believe me, that is something that I would never have dreamed I would attempt a year ago, let alone accomplish.

After a year of doing this, I have built up enough endurance that I'm not gasping for breath after three minutes. But psychologically, I have to say I dread running as much as I did as a teenager. I just wish I could achieve that "zone" they talk about where you get euphoric, pumped with the chemicals released when you exercise vigorously. I even try bending time like I've written about so that an hour running on the treadmill only seems like a few minutes. But I get pulled in by the gravitational pull of the ticking off of the seconds on the treadmill clock, turning the hour into an eternity.

But as much as I dread it, I force myself to go to the gym everyday. It is too easy to string together excuses for not working out into stopping all together. And then, instead of dreading going to the gym, I'd dread looking in the mirror.

Lost Verizon

Last fall, just before my annual fee was due for my independent Internet provider, I decided to look into consolidating my telephone, Internet and television into a "bundled" package and save the hassle of dealing with three different providers. Supposedly I would save money, too. I was inundated with direct mail from the major companies like Verizon and Comcast claiming each one was the best. I ended up choosing Verizon FIOS, because something about fiber optics just sounded cool and Verizon seemed to be cheaper than Comcast.

Big mistake.

Verizon was already our telephone provider (mainly because they were our only choice in the area we live in). And I must admit that getting the Internet and FIOS television set up was pretty simple. I was replacing Direct TV as our television provider (who I never heard boo from until I cancelled). I'd had satellite television for many years and had never been thrilled with DirectTV's incomprehensible pricing and program selection. I was also not thrilled that occasionally the signal would disappear during inclement weather and customer service would simple tell me that occasional signal loss was common if it was raining.

I live in the Seattle area. Enough said.

So Verizon dug around our property and installed fiber optics cables for our television, Internet and telephone. I set up a single billing account and got a sweet selection of premium and HD channels. It all seemed to work okay, though I don't really see a difference between regular and HD channels. But then again that could be my television. And I like the on demand feature that Direct TV didn't offer (until after I dropped them). But I didn't like that the signal would pixelate occasionally and the troubleshooting guide could only tell me that I should make sure my television was connected to the fiber optics cables.

My biggest problem with Verizon isn't the television, the Internet or the telephone. They all work. My biggest problem with Verizon is their stinking Web site. I have been using the Internet Highway since it was a dirt road and I have never experienced a more frustrating Web site and terrible customer service. First of all you can wander on their site for days without finding the information you are looking for. All I want to do is see what services I am paying for and how much. And, although the Web site claims this is possible, it  just sends me into a loop continuously asking me to enter my user name and password whenever I try and access this information.

My other big problem with Verizon is that they sold all of there service rights in Washington to Frontier Communications and beginning July 1, everything is switching to the new company who swears that we won't notice any change in our services. As a person who works in marketing, this statement makes my blood run cold. It is a statement fraught with snake pits of despair. I am sure our service will change. And even if it doesn't change, it means it will continue to suck the same way it did with Verizon.

The sad thing about all this is that I don't think anything would be better with Comcast. Oh they probably wouldn't have sold their assets in Washington, but I seriously doubt I'd have any luck navigating their Web site to see my account information. Plus I don't like their television commercials showing customer service people helping their customers use their televisions for Karaoke. This is wrong on so many levels.

I am not sure why we even have a home telephone anyway. We never use the land line. And Verizon's wireless service was too expensive to use even if we'd bundled it with the rest of the package. I actually am not sure I even want a phone period since I have made it clear on many occasions that the telephone is the devil.

The only thing I really want is a fast Internet connection and on demand television. I don't give a rip about the 400 channels of crap or local programming. Just let me watch episodes of Treme, Gravity, Party Down, Spartacus Blood and Sand, Dexter, True Blood and some almost first run movies any time I want and I'm a happy camper.

I am a simple man.

So in the long run, I guess I don't give a rip that I won't be paying whatever I'm paying for television, phone and Internet to Verizon. Let's just hope that Frontier doesn't panic and just sell everything to Comcast.  Maybe someone could plant the idea in Apple's corporate brain that they should just take over the world and run everything. I bet you could find your bill on their Web site (and even download it on you iPod or phone). But then I'd have to get one.

Sigh...