The Freaking Archive Page!!!!!!

Yes! Finally a proper link to all the random crazyness you remember from the past five years of Jaeger's Blogs!!!

Oops!

What a scatter brain I am! Here's the link to the new site for all you casual blogger types!

http://chilledmonkeybrainz.blogspot.com

Terminus Part One

The RX-7’s headlights flash across the tarmac in front of you. You’re driving the speed limit, being careful not to over drive your headlights, and of course with a cautious eye open for roadside wildlife. You know that even at low speeds, collisions with elk, or moose, or bears could be fatal for both the driver and the animal involved.

A glance at the clock on the dash tells you its approaching 10pm, which means you’ve been driving for about five hours. You stopped for gas once already in Revelstoke and were surprised to see so much cash in your wallet. Thinking about it now brings about an intensely sharp pain to the frontal lobe meats of your brain, much like (as far as you know) the feeling of someone poking a red-hot ice pick into your skull. You decide it’s best not to think about it now and just concentrate on the long, dark, winding, mountain highway stretching out before you.

A yawn catches you unawares so you decide it’s best if you find a place to pull over and rest for the night. You don’t know how much time passes before you find yourself lying utop the covers of a bed in a tiny motel on the outskirts of Kamloops. Your head is a glorious miasma of confusion again because you know that Kamloops is at least a couple of hours from your last position just outside of Salmon Arm, and you have no recollection of driving for so long, even though you must have done.

You switch off the lamp and turn the radio on. There is an old time radio production of The Shadow (who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?) playing as you close your eyes. Somewhere in the back of your mind as you drift off towards sleep you get the feeling you are forgetting something very important.

Cardboard Cut-ups part two

What to do? Well you still have that wonderful car, so why not hit your favorite burger joint: Taste Buds. You, ah who are you trying to kid, your old man discovered this little hole in the wall about ten years ago. You’re so excited about the burgers soon to be filling the bellymeats that you don’t even remember blowing out the pilot light on the gas stove.

“The best burgers without a doubt!” You shout to no one and everyone as you shift into third. Your mind wanders, as it is wont to do, and you begin to think about work today. You were on the seven to three shift, which is unfortunate because you are by no means a morning person. The lack of rest was not the worst of it however. The worst was when your adipose, brainless, Dutch Nazi of a Supervisor sent you up to the 44th floor to take away some poor suit’s access card. Poor bastard, you think, the guy’s boss didn’t even have the stones to tell him he was fired. You continue to grumble about this to yourself for a few more seconds before arriving at your destination.

You tell the owner you want the usual. Dave, or as he is known to most, Maybeyouveheardofhimdave. Grunts at you and axes you just what the hell the usual is supposed to be. You order a double bacon and cheese avec pomme de terre frites. You happily polish off an entire bottle of catsup with your fries which taste perfect, as usual. You glace at your plate in betwixt delightfully greasy mouthfuls of meat, and bun, and cheese, and condiment, and you notice an ever expanding pool of grease, or as you like to call it, Dave’s Secret Sauce™ forming where once the stood a mound of fries.

You look around the tiny café and notice a guy you met a couple of weeks ago at the Underground Pub. He’s an artist named Corey and he is sitting in a booth in front of you chomping on great lomticks of fries and complaining to a Chilean looking guy sitting across from him.

“Look at this shit!” Corey says, bits of fries and spittle flying from his mouth, “Three songs by that talentless skrag Madonna!” He’s pointing at a small, personal juke-box item which is bolted to the wall beside him.

“Oh the humidity!” His Chilean friend says.

It’s getting later. You notice this by the clock on the wall. Corey and his friend have gone. You think it kind of assholeish that he didn’t even say hello to you, but then again, he probably didn’t even recognize you.

Who cares? Not you! You have a car, even though it’s not yours(this little fact matters nothing to you). You have the ultimate in freedom now! You begin to love your freedom, you relish it. You relish it like a good meaty burger. Much like the Taste Buds burger you just consumed. Still the best damn burgers on the goddamned planet. This you know for certain. At long last you pay the bill and take your leave. Nothing shall get in the way of your freedom now. The world is your oyster, and you shall want for nothing.

You step outside and just down the street a big red fire truck blasts by, horn and sirens whaling as it speeds through the intersection.

You decide to stop by you friend Dean’s place for a brewski before the rest of your life begins. You walk into the dingy basement suit (the door is unlocked) and as you move through the darkness you think you hear sniffing. You call out:

“Yo! Dean-o! Come check out my new car!”

You step into the main living area and are disgusted by what you see. Sitting cross legged in the middle of the room that looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in the last seventy years, is your friend Dean weeping for lost beer.

He stares, hunched over an empty cardboard beer case, salty tears forming a dark puddle in the bottom. He seems to be calling the beer “Connie.” You think it strange that you’ve only seen him this emotional over one thing before, and that was an empty rye bottle.

“It’s the only friend I have,” he says, “It won’t ever let me down.”

You are forced to wonder about Dean’s sanity before you slip away out the door, unnoticed, towards your new and exciting life.

Today in the Strife

I come in the door and past security then hang a left. There is a big sign on the wall that says: “You Are Here” with a HUGE “1” above it and a clear plastic screen below that should have a floor plan of the building in it but it doesn’t. It holds nothing. You Are Here. You Are Nowhere. And this is where you are going to spend more time this week than you will with your family.

The rows upon rows of sodium lamps hanging from the corrugated roof turn night into day inside the plant as they cast low, circular, non-distinct shadows and ghosts of shadows across the concrete and tiled floor.

Short and Squat With Pigtails is waddling along in front of me slowly, ever so slowly, and I can’t pass because of the human traffic on the left and the stacks of matte black anti-static boxes on my right stacked as high as a man. Clip clop goes the sound of her toe-caps. Then she stops to chit and chat with a pair of lovely, young, Chinese ladies. One has a short bob of dark hair and a GIGANTIC rock on her ring finger, the other a cascade of wavy, mocha ringlets that I just want to run my fingers through and say where have you been all my life you beautiful head of hair? I don’t, because it would be wrong.

It’s only about 06:49 and I don’t even remember the drive to work but I remember the dream from last night or early this morning. I’m at my Wednesday Night Hockey game and the gym is getting new walls for some reason and people are showing up. Scads of people to the point where we have enough people for two full teams of twenty-one players. Than as I wait for my shift I eat some South African turtle soup that is blackish-gray in colour and filled with all sorts of unpleasant looking floaty things that I just cannot eat so I pass it to someone else and just before I take the opening face-off I wake up to the sound of some guy talking on the radio about steroid use by football players in the eighties.

I’m at work, sitting at my test bench, it’s almost seven AM and this is my strife as the Doomsday Clock ticks inexorably away, second by second, closer and closer to midnight.

Cardboard Cut-ups Part One

She’s looking at you.

She’s barely able to contain her excitement. She’s obviously quite taken by your youthful good looks. Your azure eyes and longish, sandy blond hair have always been winners with the ladies.

“Go ahead,” she says, “Take my car. I don’t get off work until eleven.”

At first you protest.

“I couldn’t,” you say, “I mean, I don’t even really know you.”

You do, however work with her, have done for some time now, but you never really would have considered the two of you close.

She insists, “Yeah, no, go ahead. I know you don’t have a car, and you live so very far away,” you wonder how the hell she knows where you live, “from here so go ahead. Just try to get back here by eleven. We can go out for drinks or something.”

You nod, take the keys and head down to the fifth level of the parking structure where the black RX-7 is parked.

You think it’s a nice car. It is. It’s a stick shift, but you don’t care, even though you’re used to driving an automatic. What self respecting man can’t drive a manual? The only thing you’ve never understood is why in this day and age a manual transmission is still produced. You always thought they should have become obsolete five seconds after the electronically tuned computer controlled automatic transmission was invented. Oh, well. . . it’s a debate for another time.

You drive the car home to your apartment up on 19th avenue in Mount Royal where you microwave two roast beef sandwiches for yourself. Beef being your favourite of course, manly man that you are. Red meat. Yeah.

Nothing like MEAT! You think to yourself. We all are carnivores after all. One can tell by the incisors. Warm roast beast and Miracle Whip™: the food of the gods, manna from the heavens, or Mount Olympus, or whatever. You cannot help but notice that these are the finest meaty sands you have ever had the pleasure to microwave and consume.

You switch on the TV and watch a Batman™ cartoon. You never outgrew cartoons for some reason. You are often heard remarking to your friends that you will be immature forever because you can only be young once. Your friends believe you.

“Hot damn but that’s fine roast beast!” You say good and loud because you can. No one is home but you. There is nothing odd about this because you live alone. This bothers you not at all as you happily gobble back the Final Bite®. That is the last of it. And that is a shame you think.

“Fuck!”

You are still hungry of course. That figures. You are so hungry you believe you could easily polish off two or six more.