The Timeless Mr. Busey

Sorry for the lack of posts, friends, but I got called off due to a death in the family. Things are back on the right track and I'm ready to get down to business.

When I say get down to business, I mean the actual business that feeds the crocodiles of Castle Powellskull's moat. As some of you may know, I work for a startup called GotVMail. We just unveiled a big marketing campaign that revolves around one of the leading business minds of this century, and, probably, of all time. I'm speaking, of course, about Mr. Gary Freaking Busey.

We're doing a company challenge to see who can get the most traffic on a particular clip. I'm handling the following little nugget of fried gold:

If you like it, I don't know, send it around or something. Confused Chinese ladies who make up the readers of Goulash, do your thing!

Pssssssst: there are a whole lot more of these at GaryBuseyOnBusiness.com.

BRAAAAAAINS!

Things are a little chaotic tonight, if only because the Texas Rangers just had the most improbable and awesome win of the season. After that, I could definitely see myself going as Josh Hamilton for Halloween. The only problem with this is that I don't know where I'd get the machinery to shoot lightning bolts from my hands.

Actually, the Halloween costume is a topic of some importance. Laura and I are getting married on November 1, and we're having our rehearsal dinner the day before, which happens to be Halloween. It's going to be a costume rehearsal dinner. As the groom and, I suppose, person of importance at this shindig, I need a killer costume.

I've actually already come up with the greatest costume in the world, I just can't pull it off. I'm going to go ahead and share it here, simply because I could die happy if I actually saw someone dressed as this.

Here it is: the greatest costume in the world is Zombie Michael Jackson from the Thriller music video.

Unfortunately, I don't even know where to start here. I'd have to get made up to look like Michael Jackson, and then apply zombie make up on top of that. I'm not sure I could do either one of those steps on their own, much less combine the two while keeping this under a $10,000 budget. I just know that I'd look like some sort of smudgefaced lunatic, and that all of that makeup would sink into my skin overnight. Who wants to get married to the bargain-bin Zombie Michael Jackson? That's a hard sell.

I have come up with a good alternative, which, for better or worse, doesn't relate to Michael Jackson at all. And no, it's not Zombie Rod Stewart.

Enough with the Hospitals

What a ridiculously crappy Fourth of July I had! Well, my weekend wasn't as bad as my relatives had, but it wasn't exactly a hootenanny supreme. In short, I spent a lot of time in hospitals. My mom was in the ICU with something very scary, as was my aunt. The good news is that my mom is okay; my aunt isn't yet, but maybe that will change sometime soon.

In case you're wondering, ICU waiting rooms are really, really depressing. We were at my mom's hospital on Sunday and I noticed that some people had made up some beds in the corner. "Wow, something bad must've happened last night," I thought.

While making polite conversation with these folks, they mentioned they'd actually been sleeping in the waiting room for three weeks now. Three weeks! I wouldn't even want to go on vacation for three weeks; I'd miss the Q-tips and sock selection I have at home. Prison might even be better, since you get a real bed. There are lots of white supremacists in prison though, so that comparison may be a wash.

Anyway, what's even worse is that the relative they were waiting on had been in a coma all of that time. What can you say to something like that? Equally impressive is how friendly they were to us and everyone else in there. If anyone deserves some good karma, it's those folks. I'm rooting for you, ICU buddies.

Since I've been thinking about it, let me just make this clear: if I'm in a coma, I don't expect any of you to wait for three weeks in the waiting room. In fact, don't even wait three days, just pop by a couple of times a week. First of all, I'd have no idea how to repay that kind of devotion. Imagine you wait for three weeks, I wake up, and then a week later, you need a ride to the airport. However, I have a doctor's appointment. I really don't think I could allow myself not to take you to the airport, but at the same time, a man who just awakened from a coma shouldn't be skipping doctor's appointments.

Second, there's a good chance I'd be faking my coma just to get a nice vacation. No point in sticking around for that.

Beer and Cigars Meets Football

When I was up in Boston over the weekend, we had this company bbq and, after all of the eating and drinking and such, a bunch of us menfolk played a touch football game. (The next time someone accuses me of being a terrorist, I'm going to point them to the sentence above.)

Sports at a company outing are always a little dangerous for me. Do I want to try hard and win, thus proving my dominance and, in the process, establishing my reputation as the office violent lunatic? Or do I want to take it easy out there and lose, thus displaying my carefree attitude while also showing everyone that I don't care about anything in the world, even something as pure and true as team touch football?

Luckily for me, some of the other guys set the tone for this game right away. We were lining up to get started and I looked over at the guy next to me; he had a beer in his hand and a cigar in his mouth. Maybe you could get away with that on defense, but we were on offense and this guy was running pass routes. Maybe it was a little tricky to catch with all of that, but at the same time, who wants to tackle the glass-wielding dude with fire in his mouth?

My point here is that I had a good time, and I found work-related sporting to be much more relaxed when I'm playing with very diverse competitors. Maybe I'm advocating for some football affirmative action here. (Clarence Thomas just unsubscribed from my RSS feed in disgust.)

Alright, the Fourth of July is on Friday and I'm now having a hard time remembering back when I used to enjoy four day weeks. I know this happened at some point, probably just a few years ago. I'd go in to work, shout, "Four day work week!", and high five the janitor. Now, I'm a fully-fledged adult and whenever I'm deprived of a work day, I wake up in a cold sweat, screaming, "AGHGHHGHGG WHERE ARE THE REPORTS??!!!"

Nevertheless, I'm going to eat some hot dogs and light some fireworks. This is still America, damn it.

Jack!

How was my trip up to New England, you ask? Well, let's time travel back to Friday evening, just after we touched down in Boston.

The trip was for work; all four of us from the Austin office had come up for the company bbq. For Friday night, we had nothing to do so we decided to get adventurous and somewhere in the vast megapolis that is the Boston area.

After numerous wrong turns and run red rights, we finally found ourselves at this little pizza place. I'll be charitable and say that this place had five tables. All of these tables were taken. Most were inside of the restaurant, but a couple were out on the patio of the restaurant. A quartet of older ladies sat at those tables, and it was clear that they were finishing up their meal.

We're no dummies; we spotted the telltale signs of a nearly-finished dinner date and we started loitering around the tables. We'd all been traveling for a while now, so we were just standing around, talking and zoning out. In the midst of all of this, one of the older ladies gets up from the table and heads back into the restaurant. Her hands are full with some napkins and whatnot, and like I said, we were all zoning out after the travel, so she had to do a bit of shuffling to open the door.

As soon as she did that, one of the other ladies at her table looks over with absolute venom and shouts, "You don't help a woman open the door? You're clueless, Jack!" Had murder been legal, she would've massacred all of us right there with plastic flatware.

The best part of this whole thing is that there was other dude milling about, and all of us Austin folk just assumed she knew him, that the dude was named Jack, and that she was giving him a hard time. We didn't say anything or even shrug, we just continued to watch for that open table. Eventually, "Jack" walked away without any further interaction from the screaming meanie.

In the act of waiting, someone brought up the idea that hey, maybe that lady had been bitching us out? Great debate ensued. Do people really just scream at perfect strangers like that in a civilized society? Is this a New England welcome ritual, right up there with pelted with rotting lobsters? After a while, I found myself back in the restaurant with "Jack" and he leaned over and said, "Wow, she really tore you guys a new one, huh?"

The trip went up from there, fortunately. Still, there's nothing like that Yankee hospitality.

Taking This Truck to Bahhhhhstun

If there's some sort of widescale tickle-fight in the streets of Austin this weekend, don't call me. Ordinarily, I would want to know about this, participate, and, perhaps, keep score, but this weekend, I'll be in Boston for work. People of Boston, you know the score so keep me involved.

I'm going up to the northeast for our company bbq. This is going to be pretty interesting for me because I haven't met a lot of the people I work with. The company is based in Boston and my group is in Austin, and so, while I spend several hours each day talking to the Boston folks, I haven't actually met many of them.

Should I be concerned about this? I mean, what if they think I smell bad? Personal odor can't be adequately conveyed through a video conference and I'm worried that one faulty container of deoderant on a hot Saturday afternoon might ruin my whole career. The smart thing here is probably to fall into a mud pit as soon as I hit the bbq, thus giving me a good excuse for any strange smells.

One unfortunate aspect of the trip is that, once again, I will be driving around the streets of Massachusetts. Last time I did this, I racked up over $300 in toll violations. Almost all of that was charged inappropriately due to the jackasses at Alamo Rental Car; I think I got out of it with only a $60 fine, but I'm not entirely that ended up at the right place. There's a very good chance that, upon landing, a Massachusetts Turnpike Authority sniper shoots my eyeballs out.

If that does occur, don't mourn me. I will have died doing what I loved: gypping toll roads.

Finally, I'm one of those morons on Twitter now. Follow me at http://twitter.com/codypo.

What Are We Waitsing For

I took a little trip last night to musical heaven. For the first time in roughly one billion years, Tom Waits was playing a show here in Texas that I could attend. Let's not talk about the cost of the tickets. Let's not discuss that the show was in Houston, not Austin. Let us not even mention that the show was on a Sunday night, ended at 11 PM, and that some of us had to be at work on time the next morning. Let us only discuss the pure rocking, and the fact that Dean Zyvarb and I were on the fifth row.

I couldn't find any actual media of the show, but here's him doing one of my favorite songs on Letterman:

I'd get more into it, but I'm pretty worn out from the drive back. Let me only say this: it was a great night to be a seller of pork pie hats in the Houston-area.