Riding the Bus to TV Land
Ah, the infomercials, with their
informing informants, like an
infomat of information, on the bus.
the lady, she speaks, at home is
where she made her millions. see?
see how her teeth glare as she...
she finishes saying to the riders.
"This is the one website you have
to visit.-----"
How I'd love to bear my teeth and
sink into her flesh to see if
it comes off like the flesh of an
asian pear, like she is shaped,
and is just as rosy-----
Webmaster of theformer.net and inhabitor of the "dijonaze" site on MySpace.com would like to post a partial retraction in regards to the post entitled "15 Things to Do in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, If You Live There." As some readers may have guessed, it has to do with item number seven. The clarification is this: I did not mean to suggest that Milwaukee's music scene is bad. Some of it might be in some reader's opinion, and I tend to prefer some to other of what it has to offer. I attended numerous shows in Green Bay, Wisconsin in the late ninties, and thought most of it f'n rocked despite limitations on equipment, or adherance to musical theory--which is what I will get at next. I was really referring to lofi productions, which is not a requisite for "shitty" music. The music can be fabulous, amazing, and fantastic without sounding studio-par. I respect the dedicated musicians of this city who play open mics, and small venues. I am one of them, and if anyone's music has been deemed shitty or great by taste, or is lofi and terrible sounding, it is my own. Please, take the post as tongue in cheek, and save me a black eye. Thanks for visiting, enjoy the show. And, about the comment in number nine. I am going on personal experience, and it was just kind of filler. I don't mean to criticize. If the reader can't tell by now, I was feeling a little guilty when I wrote this. Thanks again.
1. Sit around with friends and bitch about how the steel sunburst piece obstructs the architectural genius of the winged art museum as you are driving up Wisconsin Avenue.
2. Wonder if you would be lucky and be killed instantly if the megametropolis to the south, Chicago, fell under nuclear attack.
3. Do one fun-filled, exciting, educational brewery tour a week until that lame-ass, boring excuse for a thing to do runs out.
4. Visit the Milwaukee Art Museum and stand in front of each painting and sculpture while every molecule of your body is screaming to get the fuck out and go to the Grand Avenue Mall downtown. (Stolen nearly word for word from an Onion article.)
5. Following preceding, enjoy an Orange Julius at the Grand Avenue Mall, like you could in any city of comparable size, but by the smell in the air there just might be yeast and grain alcohol in your smoothie.
6. Drive by the Milwaukee County Zoo every day and realize that five out of ten times you pass you wonder about the psychological state of the live, some ferocious, animals in capitivity. Realize one out of the other five times you are considering they somehow do actually have real live dinosaurs like on all the banners.
7. Go to basement and dingy club shows and see shitty bands play shitty music and rave to your friends about how fantastically shitty the last band you saw was live. Start an underground zine about the fabulously shitty music you listen to and distribute it to the other people in Milwaukee who listen to this amazingly shitty music. Give the zine a mysterious, coded name, and interview artists on their completely schnazzy shit.
8. Take each first date to the Milwaukee County Zoo, or at least suggest or peculiarly insist on it with them.
9. See a larger name act at the Rave and wonder where they got the sound sample of a Yugo trying fruitlessly to start, until you realize it's a guy with a guitar and a really boring pedal.
10. Make use of the Cathedral Square Park wi-fi hotspot, and go home almost immediately where you don't have to contend with insects, sprinklers, and pricks asking for money while you look at sparkling incest pics--bros DOIN' IT for money!!!
11. Get the bends of culture shock bar hopping in the city's most segregated area within the Calico ghetto of Riverwest.
12. Enroll at the overpriced for men to women ratio, Milwaukee School of Engineering, and hatch a secret senior project for creating a fleet of nerd-serving electronic-erotic robot volleyball girls.
13. Throw yourself off the U.S. Bank dwarf skyscraper on finals week once you realize you'll never be able to create a dense enough transistor matrix in order to achieve the artificial intelligence needed for preceding Senior project.
14. Take the Milwaukee Transit System bus each morning. It's onboard television displays will recap last night's infomercial slew on how to make millions from home and regrow hair in places you never dreamed culinary courses could take you.
15. Pay an ungodly amount of money for an eight-ounce cup of domestic beer at Summerfest, which gets entirely spilled on both your Ron-Jon's Surf Shop tank top that barely fits, and your sunburned girlfriend's breasts. Blame the incident on the guy standing next to you on the picnic table, and get more beer splashed on you by your girlfriend as she tries to thwart you from bashing the guy's face in. Through this, try to have some consideration for the nearby concert-goers who paid to hear the Violent Femmes play from a mile away. (This is a true story, adapted for an alternate perspective.)
This past winter, I'd take the bus rather than walk even relatively short distances in the city. This was simply because it was bone-cracking cold outside, and precipitation was often a factor. Now, if you are an able bodied Milwaukee citizen, you are supposed to take a seat farther back in the bus, to make room for the disabled persons and seniors. Even though, on the night I write of, there were vacant seats behind the reserved seating at the front of the bus, I would have had to sit beside a stranger. With plenty of leg room, I took up a seat marked with a wheelchair symbol and soaked in some of the warmth of the heated bus interior.
It had taken me a bit of time to become savvy with taking the bus from destination to destination in the city. I had to learn landmarks, street names, and intersections, as well as what routes the bus numbers referred to. There was a girl sitting even closer to the driver, looking a bit nervous. She had on a small amount of blush, or perhaps it was the cold of February, but probably not. She was short, her light, skin-tight blue jean clad legs dangling from the seat. She wore a white polymer winter jacket, white shoes (swaying above the floor), and thin-rimmed glasses. She was cute--I guess cute in a metropolitan-newbie college student sort-of way, probably not much older than eighteen.
It turned out she was fairly lost. I find it probable some friends directed her to take this bus from the deep east side to her street in north downtown. She knew if she found a certain landmark, the Kern Center, she could find her way home, she told the bus driver.
I know how it can be when asking for directions or help in general. I often take the response and dismiss the party from helping me, even if I am still unclear on the instructions. In the case of the girl and the bus driver, she might not have wanted to distract him too much, and just remained lost, even after he gave his advice. She went back to nervously fidgeting, and glancing at the bus driver as if she wasn't sure if she should bother him more.
I happened to know that the bus went right by the Kern Center, so I told her to stay on the bus. She beamed at me, and showed the large amount of correction her glasses gave--her eyes were huge behind the lenses. Affirmation that one is not as lost as first thought can be very relieving, and I was glad to help. She thanked me, and fiddled with her IPod a little.
The only thing I didn't think of is that if she didn't see the Kern Center from the far side of the bus, where she sat, she might miss her stop. Oh well, what better way to learn the bus system of Milwaukee than to find oneself in the Calico ghetto, where I suspect the bus was headed.
I am prescribed several medications, and the dosages are always subject to change as my doctor sees fit. When I am to take less of a medication, in order to conserve what I have, I will often cut pills in half using what is known as a pill cutter. A pill cutter is a small, hinged, mostly plastic device housing a typical razor blade. When used properly, one places a non-capsulated medication in the cutter, and squeezes until the pill is broken in two by the razor. The little guillotine works well for this purpose.
I'm sure many pharmacies are stocked with pill cutters, but most recently, I did some light research at a Walgreens. Whisking by aisles of mixed nuts, roasted so many ways, and cases of diet soft drinks masquerading as bottled waters, and a variety of flavors of condom, one finds himself near the pharmacy window and a display automatic-massage chair. The pill cutter is grouped with pill boxes, none too decorative, as they can even be ornate. Hard plastic full-month, weekly, or daily schedulers for medication ingestion are on display with the cutter. It only costs a couple of dollars, and it can mean a lot to be in ownership of a cutter when your prescriptions require a compartmented box to keep your days and weeks straight.
I am in ownership of a cutter, and I have examined it thoroughly. It seems like it would be fairly easy to disassemble the contraption, or that it could break apart from misuse. And, it appears the razor blade component could easily be separated from the device. In the case of paint chippers, or Exacto-knives, sure, blades need to be replaced and should easily come loose. Not much more than a pair of decent pliers, or a heavy glass drink tumbler could be used to pry the blade free, or smash the cutter apart, respectively.
So what? Well, with the number of patients prescribed for depression medication climbing in this nation, many of these depressed patients might find themselves in possession of an easily attainable razor-sharp razorblade. I remember turning the cutter over in my hands at a particularly low time, realizing every other free cutting edge in the house was serrated or dulled. What's more, the device is called a "pill cutter." To point out the mild irony, disassembly and self infliction of a fatal wound could definitely "cut" out the need for "pills" in one's life. This is all I mean to say on the subject of the pill cutter. A useful device, yes. Aptly named in more ways than are immediately obvious, perhaps.
"So, this girl I know. No, you don't know her. Anyway, she chased after this guy on the street after he dropped his wallet. The guy seemed really nice, she said. He gave her five bucks. If you knew her, you'd know she tried refusing it. They took off in separate directions after that. Anyway, it turns out that her stalker got on the news later for getting massively ganked for all of his money at gunpoint by a bunch of dudes. Talk about Kharma, right? Wait, so she sees the guy's picture, right, and it was the fucking guy whose wallet she saved. Fucked up right?"
- prepare all night
- obtain
- philips brand discman
- small philipps screw driver
- soldering iron
- a small amount of coiled solder
- 15v operational amplifier component (opamp)
- appropriate resistor as found in prelab
- a camera battery
- two 25mm sections of insulated thin-gauge wire
- a small amount of solder wick
- perform
- disassembly of discman
- desoldering of connections to lineout
- soldering of 25mm wires to lineout connections
- soldering of camera battery and connections to opamp to 25mm wires and resistor in series combination found in prelab
- reassemblage of discman
- utilize acquisitions and performance by:
- attending a large shopping mall
- inserting into discman my bloody valentine's "isn't anything" on compact disc
- enjoy:
- glancing at the shoppers while skipping to the beginning of track one, "soft as snow but warm inside," once every several seconds as one judges appropriate
