The Daily Booger

Note: This article was originally written in July, 2006, to amuse the readers of my Xanga blog. I also put it on my website but have re-posted it here because I think it belongs here.

People are insisting I update with something. I doubt anyone’s eager to see my computer code implementation of MD5 or SHA-1, so instead I’ll write about, um… hmm… say… the trip we had to Six Flags Marine World a week and a half ago, to celebrate my younger sister’s 13th birthday.

When we got to the park, the very first thing I did was confirm that Six Flags was still touting their most famous attraction: the orca. I would’ve gone straight to it, but the other people in my group, by which I mean my sister, wanted to go on actual rides first.

So we spent a couple hours on roller coasters, not that I minded. If you think that we’d go to Six Flags and only go on a couple roller coasters, you’re insane. In fact, Six Flags had to create a roller coaster specifically for us, called the Tall ‘N’ Scary Ride Of Fear, Terror, And Destruction, just to interest us into coming to the park at all. The ride features several 50-story drop-offs, 12 back-to-back loops, and a brief accelerated thrust that propels you straight up into the exosphere. It almost woke Syd up.

So we went on roller coasters.

Then other non-orca related stuff happened.

Then orca-related stuff happened. My orca encounter was by far, without any exaggeration, the greatest highlight of the entire history of the United States of America. Six Flags has an orca that they keep in a giant above-ground pool with windows on the side, which allows little kids to look at the orca and allows big kids to press their entire face up against the glass and make puppy-eyes at the orca. I, and I am not ashamed to admit this, fell into the latter category.

I got to stand right up against the orca tank and press my face into the window, gazing at the orca. The orca must have been aware that I was a huge fan, because it abandoned it’s other admirers and spend a solid five minutes with me. It even moved its snout right up to the window, just a couple inches from where my snout was pressed. I was seriously
-> this <-
close to the orca, through the glass, standing snout-to-snout and making direct eye contact. Any closer and we would’ve qualified to have been be married. It was B-Con heaven.

One thing about the orca that I wasn’t expecting was how small its eyes were. From pictures of orca you can tell that they don’t have large eyes, but up close I noted that the orca seriously had very small eyes.

Then we ate lunch and did other non-orca related stuff, most of which involved going on more roller coasters. Although I was a bit tired at that point (maintaining solid eye contact with an orca for 5 minutes without blinking can be a bit draining) I continued to hold my hands high up in the air. Only by now I was holding my arms up not because I was enthusiastically enjoying the ride, but rather because earlier we had enjoyed the thrill of going on a water ride that saw fit to place me, for the second year in a row, directly beneath the only waterfall in all of Northern California, so I was holding my arms up in an effort to dry off.

I also continued yelling. Only I was yelling not out of excitement, but out of fear. The roller coasters we went on traversed through enclosures, and if this is not a scary idea for you, than you are, no offense, obviously not a lanky 6′2″ guy. Allow me to explain:

1) When you are on a roller coaster you are moving at high velocity, so objects that were a far way away at one point in time are right at you about a tenth of a second later.
2) Things appear small from a distance.
Now let’s combine those two facts:
3) Thus an opening that looks small from a distance is basically on you by the time you even realize how small it looks, and it feels like you’re going through a hole barely wide enough to fit a #2 pencil.

So there I would be sitting with my hands held high over my head and all of a sudden I would spot a tunnel around the track a few hundred feet ahead of us. From such a distance the opening would look very, very tiny. I mean, very tiny. Tiny enough to make me seriously wonder whether or not the roller coaster would even fit in there at all, or if the top half of it would get severed as we plowed into it at 314 mph.

Upon spotting such a tiny opening, my knee-jerk reaction, as a person who doesn’t want their more critical limbs clipped off by the sides of the tunnel, would be to suck my arms, head, and shoulders down into my torso and cringe as we roared into tunnel’s opening, with support beams cruising inches from the top of my head and with me yelling my final will and testament to whomever was kind enough to take notes.

I’m thankful to report that I lost no important appendages in those tiny tunnels, although I am considerably lighter now that I’m no longer encumbered by my left leg.

But the day was not perfect. On the last ride of the day the roller coaster malfunctioned and I died in the accident. But such is the price one must pay for meeting an orca.

I love flying, primarily because there is little about the current air travel process that is not thoroughly comical. This fact is made especially juicy when combined with the fact that I’ve already realized, about a day or two into this blog, that I’m desperate for writing material. Thus my recent visit to my out-of-state girlfriend had the added benefit of providing me with blog material. Although, for my readers that happen to be said girlfriend, I would like to stress that this was a totally secondary, side-wise, minuscule benefit to my trip.

At the airport I shared the shuttle from long-term parking to the Sacramento International terminal (it was an exciting day in the city when the Sacramento airport went international, with one flight to Mexico every other week — take that Los Angeles!) with a lady whose dog loves to run and kill things. I know this because she talked about her dog to the other lady next to her non-stop for the entire duration of the shuttle ride. Her dog also likes to travel, eat, poop, and bark loudly at night for no apparent reason, thus setting him sharply apart from, I don’t know, the genre of dogs who don’t like to eat, poop, and bark.

After I made it to the terminal I printed my e-ticket from the e-ticket booth provided, for my convenience, at the end of a long complicated maze of elastic rope which was keeping an disorderly line of approximately one passenger in line, counting myself. The concept of an e-ticket is that, if your life is structured such that the one thing computers have the inability to screw up is your travel schedule, you can amend that by purchasing a plane ticket on a computer, from another computer, and then print it out from separate computer just in case neither of the previous two messed anything up. Not that it really matters whether or not you ever manage to print your ticket because your flight will be delayed and eventually canceled. The last time I flew I departed from San Fransisco on the only flight to successfully leave the airport during that week, and even that was delayed. Sitting in the San Fransisco lounge before my flight I spoke with a man who had been in the terminal since the Carter administration, surviving on complimentary peanut donations made to him by arriving travelers. His latest travel goal was to catch a flight home in time for his daughter’s wedding, whom he had last seen as a three-year-old.

But the people who run the airlines do not care. They’re out of touch with the real world, remember, these are the same people who have seen to it that the airport overhead speakers continually broadcast useful information to you, the traveler, such as that you are not accept packages or luggage donations from strangers, or to let them carry your luggage for you unattended. I’m not sure what these people are thinking because it’s obvious, if you just look around the San Fransisco airport, any stranger who attempted to assist a random passenger with their luggage would probably get shot before they could even touch a suitcase.

As I sat in the lounge for my current flight, the pattern of loud speaking women broadcasting interesting details of their lives to the world at large continued with a southern woman talking on her cell phone. She was talking to someone at our destination (Salt Lake, Utah) where I was to lay over, and at one point was desperately trying to figure out the time difference between here and there. After listening to her make numerous comments such as “so wuz the tam difference in Sat Lake?” and “Aye don’t mean to be dumb… but… ha’d aye check dat?”, I piped up and confirmed for her that, yes, it was a one hour difference, naively hoping that this was the last question the lady needed to before she could hang up, or at least lower her voice. But I was wrong and she proceeded to discuss, at length, the intimate details of her business job, which apparently has to do with both dead turkeys and the stock market.

But thankfully everything went well on my flight and I made it to Texas in time to share dinner with my girlfriend. Because I love to eat. And bark.

After many months of underground top-secret development (I forgot about it for a while), The Daily Booger is finally ready to open its doors and embrace the adoring public.

For those just arriving, you can read more about The Daily Booger and who runs it. Hopefully not because you’re considering filing a lawsuit.

The first official article should be posted soon. Assuming that the administrative staff doesn’t forget about that too.

So I’m trying to get through the kitchen this morning trying to do what any average Joe might be doing in their kitchen at 2 AM, namely, find a screwdriver and some nails.

At least, that’s what my original intention was. Once in the actual kitchen, my updated mission assignment was to exit the kitchen carrying said supplies without looking directly at the kitchen wall, which was inhabited by a small black blob that looked suspiciously like an arachnid. It was doing it’s best to look like a small coffee stain on the wall — whose house doesn’t have at least one or two of those? — but I wasn’t to be fooled. All of our wall coffee stains are on the other side of the kitchen.

I managed to escape the kitchen with my supplies by closing my eyes and striding briskly past the wall, breaking out into a full on sprint to my bedroom only after it occurred to me that I was walking past a wall with a spot on it that could be a spider.

Needless to say, I’ll be dining in my bedroom for the remainder of the week, not that this is anything new.

I just now (literally, three minutes ago) went to take a shower. As I was approaching the shower to turn it on, I noticed that, for reasons unbeknown to me, my family had decided to leave a chair in the bathroom, close to the shower. As I approached the shower and got a better look at the chair, it came to my attention that a) the chair had eight legs, b) the chair was definitely alive, and c) the chair was actually an overgrown mutant spider of a size appropriate for spearing with a stick for the purpose of rotating above a fire and feeding a small community of cavemen for a week.

I resolve never to shower in there again, which may actually not be an option now that the cement truck is laying down the 15th foot of concrete over said bathroom and said offending arachnid.

For those of you new to planet Earth, possibly having just arrived from some other planet like Mars, Neptune, or North Dakota, I hate spiders. Really, really hate them.

While in Texas, I took it upon myself to purchase a shirt for the formal occasion of breathing on Easter. We weren’t doing anything fancy or out of the ordinary on Easter, but apparently the blonde population of the Thomas household (namely, my girlfriend) came to unanimous consent that I should a) get a shirt they liked, b) wear it on Easter, or c) they would pout at me.

While on the shopping escapade, I visited all of one store and actually bought two shirts, since I don’t have many and, practically, I could use another.

So I came home with two new shirts. One (the blonde-approved one) I hung up in my closet, the other I kind of laid out over the night stand in the middle of my room and forgot to hang up. For two weeks. Don’t ask, I just forgot.

This evening my mom noticed it and, apparently, hadn’t viewed it yet. So she picked it up, examined it briefly, and left it on my bed. I figured that, since it was now in the way of my going to bed, I should hang it up or something already. So I picked it up and clipped off the tag and looked over it for stickers, removing one or two. Then I lay it down flat spread out on my bed and examined it to ensure it was ready to be worn. I have to carefully examine all my clothing before I wear it because, once I deem it wearable and hang it up/put it in a drawer, I will never notice any tags on it. I have worn shirts with a sticker on the sleeve for a full week before someone pointed out to me that I looked like I had just shoplifted from the clothing department at Mervins and was attempting to flee on foot.

Anyway… After I quickly inspected the front of my shirt, I flipped half of it over to inspect the other side. After checking out my computer quickly to make sure something was doing what it was supposed to do (or possibly to make sure something wasn’t doing what it wasn’t supposed to do), I turned my attention back to my shirt.

And there sat a spider.

On my shirt.

And it had clearly been there the entire time. It was giving me that “Haha, sucker, you were holding your shirt while I was on it and I could’ve walked onto your hand — and what’re you gonna do about it, huh?” look.

I sat, staring at the one-centimeter long eight-legged freak of nature for half a minute before reaching for three tissues (you have to have as much protection as possible) and killing it. I don’t really care so much that the spider was on my shirt, walking around and touching it, I’m just thankful it’s gone now, and I’ll cheerfully be wearing the shirt to church tomorrow despite the fact that I’ll be touching a shirt that a spider also touched.

I am, of course, kidding. I destroyed the shirt with a blowtorch.

And I suppose it goes without saying that spider events come in pairs. I saw a spider in the shower today, that had been hiding against the tile grout line against the floor on the opposite side of the shower. It came out half way through my shower and ran in a full circle before going back to it’s hiding place.

I blowtorched the shower too.

I suppose you could say that this is the first official unofficial post for The Daily Booger. It’s official because, well, I’m posting it, and unofficial because, well, the blog isn’t public yet. As of posting this, The Booger still in design and will be for a bit while I work on getting everything (visual tweaks, fonts, all kinds of nit-picky settings, etc) ready for the fawning adoration of the mass public. During that time I’ll start logging a few posts, primarily so that when this site does go live it won’t be empty, but mainly so that I have yet another excuse not to do my homework.