Ash the Mighty

Condolences.

Last night, a man named Thomas Proffitt was involved in a motorcycle accident somewhere in the Valley of the Sun. Not only was this man a prominent lawyer in Mesa for over twenty years, he also just so happened to be the father of my best friend and brother, Spencer.

I know very little more than I just said . . . it was a bit past six in the morning when Spence called and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to do anything but be totally and utterly shocked. Mr. Proffitt, like everyone else in the world, was no saint. But he was a good man who always tried to do what he thought was best for his family. I weep for Spencer and indeed all of his family. Alas, as a result of Hurricane Wilma, Spencer is still without any sort of internet access, but when he does check his e-mail those who are so inclined can reach him at stproffitt@gmail.com.

Thanks for putting up with my maudlinity (new word!). A return to just plain surliness will surely soon occur!

~DTAR.

Traffic makes Baby Jesus cry.

There are days I’m not sure that my PDA was a worthwhile buy. Today is not one of those days. If I hadn’t had this thing, I would be unable to write a post speculating about how long it’s going to take me to get so tired of the stop-and-go traffic that is endemic to the Valley of the Sun that I’ll be BEGGING to return to a pedestrian-friendly city. If this traffic doesn’t move SOON, it’s gonna be right bloody now!

So I made it home OK. The flight(s) weren’t exactly a pleasure by any stretch of the imagination, but the fact that the longest of them was in Business class made it at least at bit more palatable . . .

Holy moving cars, Batman! It looks like my torture is coming to an end! Praise Allah!

Later.

~DTAR.

On the road again . . .

I just can’t wait to be on the roa . . . oh. Wait. Already am.

I’m typing at an airport computer terminal. Nicer than the usual ones. This one is less like a payphone and more like a PC with a lockbox with a slot for money attached to it. I’m diggin’ it.

So this is me on my way back to the States. The last few days have been . . . hard. Really hard. Not only the hard stuff like packing up everything and what not, but even more the hard stuff that comes with having to say goodbye to people who have been your closest friends and substitute family for the past two plus years. That’s tough. Seriously, how do you say goodbye to people like that? Answer, you don’t. You pretend like everything will eventually be like it was once was. Of course that doesn’t convince anyone, but it’s the easy lies that get you through it all.

All I know is that I really do need to see most of these people again. Not just the obvious one, Chris, but everyone else too. Shona and Manny and Nats and Erin and Kathleen and Katie and Claire and Sooz and Fiona and Georgie (oh Georgie!) and Ray and Aoeisha and Tia and David and Amy and even Ryan. I’m going to miss all these people so much that it already hurts thinking about not seeing them again. I only hope that they know how much they’ve meant to me all this time.

I’ll not forget any of you soon . . .

All of yours with all my heart,
~DTAR.

Ah, the irony . . .

I don’t know why I’m surprised. Things like this happen to me all the time. The only thing that would be more apropos would be if, this weekend, I meet a girl who looks just like Sienna Miller (or, in fact, Sienna Miller) who totally digs me and wants to date . . . if only I wasn’t moving back to the States. Well, if I met this theoretical goddess, I would now have a place to take her that fits me and all my weird taste in music.

Let me explain. No. Too much. Let me sum up.

OK, so last night was my “leaving do” (going away party). Chris did most of the organizing and it was pretty damned cool! Once again every single person from work proved to be less-than-interested in whether I live, die, or grow mushrooms out my nose; but my Uni friends all more than made up for it. Katie Mathis even took a bus from Edinburgh (and then had to immediately leave again) to see me off. This is made even cooler when one realizes how gross those buses are! Seriously, it was great. We rented out the top room in the Uisge Beatha (which is basically the pub I want to shamelessly copy when I open on myself in AZ) and set up shop from 8 til close at 12.

During the course of the night many people came and went, but by 12 all that were remaining were Shona, her flatmate Laura, Chris, Claire, and Alistair (aka Manny). And me, of course. Chris and Claire are total wusses and went home at that point so the rest of us got a taxi into town to go to a place that Laura knew called the Buff Club. I had heard of it but never been. She promised us Old School Punk.

Instead what we got was Old School Funk. And pretty much everything else Old School.

Much better.

I walk in and what are they playing? Everything from Al Green to the Supremes. The Beach Boys (!). James Brown. Those of you from back home, imagine a modern club with young people absolutely filling the dance floor and the contents of 94.5 KOOL FM playing through the speakers. I was in heaven. Of course they also threw in some great 80s and even some 90s stuff, but very little that could actually be considered modern.

So the irony is killing me. I’m leaving Glasgow forever in about four days and have only NOW found a club that I could really dig going to regularly. In fact, the music is such that I might have even been able to convince Chris to go every once in a while too! Perish the thought!

~DTAR.

P.S. Had coffee with Katie Lowe a couple days ago. Baring the external examiner hating me, I’ve passed. So woo hoo!

Anti-Semitism or just Theatre Critic?

So I was just told a story that my PDA and I just had to share. I’m told that when “The Diary of Anne Frank” was first performed in the 50s the casting was chosen . . . poorly. You could even call their efforts an insult to the story. The production was so outright terrible that about half-way through the performance, when the Nazis first broke into the house, an exasperated audience member helped the search effort by shouting “She’s in the attic!” I don’t have a clue as to whether or not it’s true, but the idea of a play being THAT bad just warms my heart a little bit. How ’bout you?

~DTAR.

I don’t like IQ tests.

My cousin sent me this one (rules here) and even though I managed to figure it out before too much time had elapsed, it still had me wincing every single time it made the “you screwed up” noise. At first I thought the true test of your IQ was whether or not you realized it was impossible, but after I figured out the trick to it all, I realized that the real test was if you realized you could have just muted the damned thing and been done all that much quicker because you didn’t have the distraction!

In other news, I still haven’t finished packing. Shock. I have spent my time instead applying for jobs in Arizona online. This is not going well. Again, shock. For some reason people want their stupid applicants to have, you know, experience. Plus they don’t want them to not be able to start until late November.

Oh yeah, and I’m taking a road trip. Two, in fact. One is when I first get home. I’ll be flying up to Colorado, helping Gigi to get the Denver house all ready for a long winter, and then putting her on a plane and driving her Jag (!) back to Arizona. I’m going to live for that drive! As if to demonstrate the fact that the rest of my life will be downhill after driving a Jaguar over 1000 miles, I will in mid-November be flying out to Florida to help my brother and his wife to pack up and move back to Arizona. For that lovely trip I’ll be driving a bloody Ryder van the 3000+ miles from Florida to Arizona. Proof positive that my life will have reached its pinnacle!

And then I have to really find a job. Because no chica is ever going to fall for a guy who lives in his parents’ house. Just ain’t gonna happen!

Stay chill, y’all.

~DTAR.

Remember that whole moving home thing? Yeah, never mind.

Why? Well, because of this. If I moved home, how in the world would I be able to comfort poor little Sienna and help her forget the painfully-obviously-gay man that she almost married? That kind of long-distance relationship just wouldn’t work for us, and there are some things that are just too important . . . like being with Sienna Miller. Now I know what you’re going to say: But what about Daniel Craig? Well, I figure that he’ll be off being James Bond or something, and we all know that Sienna needs someone to keep her warm at night. I’ve decided that, tough as it may be, I’m willing to make the sacrifices that obviously need to be made. So now that I’ve made such a dramatic statement of intent, who has her phone number?

Please?

~DTAR.

Congrats are in order . . .

My very very good friend (and ex-girlfriend) Meggan Ladewig absolutely shocked me yesterday. That sneaky girl went and got herself engaged without checking with me first! I have absolutely no information beyond the fact that the boyfriend (first name Rueben, last name ?) asked her a couple of days ago and that she said yes. I know that most of the people out there have no idea who I’m talking about and why I’m taking up “valuable” internet space talking about it, but suffice to say that there’s one more girl who I’m never going to have a chance with. Between her and Lyssa Kaehler nee Clark, I’m running out of women who actually, you know, like me!

In other news, I’ve finally received the eight cardboard boxes into which I must fit the entirety of my life here in Glasgow. I found a (relatively) cheap shipping company who will be taking all my crap via sea to Phoenix. It’s one of those things where my two primary jobs are to a) decide what goes and what stays (and of what stays, what gets thrown away and what I think I can actually sell successfully) and b) to not pack in such a way that some boxes weight 50 kilos and some weigh 4. That can be tough because most of what I’m sending home are books (and comic books) which just aren’t light. I don’t have that many clothes here anymore and what I do have I need to keep right up until I leave so it’s tough to fill such a LARGE box when you reach its weight capacity after only a dozen or so books.

Anyway. So that’s me. I sincerely wish Meggan the best of luck in her future matrimonial adventures (because lord knows anyone on such an adventure needs all the luck they can get!) and I hope everyone in turn wishes me luck in my packing, etc. I just wish there was an easier way!

~DTAR.

Oh yeah, that too.

I wanted to mention that one of the things that I like most about the whole LiveJournal thing is that you are able to leave me feedback on my posts. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to make that feature import onto my webpage. But, if you’d like to leave a comment or view what other people have said, you can go to my LiveJournal webpage here or you can just open the “Older Entries” menu and then the “All LiveJournal” link. This’ll take you to the proper LJ website and let you lambaste me for anything that I have said or done . . . which is usually a lot!

Hope you’re all doing well and I hope even more that I hear from you a lot!

~DTAR.

An overt simplification.

It was time anyway. While I liked having a great big image in the background of my website, I found that it even distracted my eye and I’m the one who both took the picture and designed the website! So, when it became clear that my previous design was annoying me (and that it just wasn’t working in IE at all), I decided to move on.

Once again I have made overt use of hollsterhambone‘s original idea by using PHP to mine LiveJournal for entries and embed them in my website. This doesn’t actually make things too much easier in the longrun, but it does mean that I can now update my blog from anywhere in the world via my PDA or even a WAP enabled phone. Why in the world I would want to, I don’t know. But the options are there.

And to those of you who are strictly from LJ and have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, well what else is new? Eh, I’ll just remind you that I have long mocked the LiveJournal community (despite reading my friends’ posts daily) and must now eat my own words by becoming an active LJ poster. These posts are, obviously, being funneled directly to my webpage, Ash Rhodes.com where they are hopefully being correctly displayed in a much less pain-in-the-ass method than all previous.

And that’s that. Nothing to really report. I’ve spent the last couple days sitting on my duff watching TV and occasionally throwing things in boxes in an effort which vaguely resembles packing for my move home. Oh, and avoiding turning in library books which are now pleasantly overdue. Yay.

~DTAR.