Here

is a boy singing a song he says he learned at Boy Scout camp (and sometimes forgets the words to) over a twitchy stop-motion, all of which he loaded into Windows Movie Maker so that he could add a rain visual and cricket accompaniment:



Also one of the cutest things i've ever seen. Is there a merit badge for this? That must be his motivation. It has as much heart put into it as a science fair project.

Because Benji and Emma said so, part I

I have decided to begin here that old exercise in which I sit down to write with such great momentum of intention that something interesting eventually emerges. Usually, when I do this, this silly little self-referential running start of a paragraph is dropped away, like the big part of a space shuttle (no, I won't be going to Wikipedia to research what this is called). So we will see, little friend.

I got problems is the thing. There is just not a lot of direction here. I get disability, and I get food stamps, and I'm pretty good about saving. It adds up to enough to cover rent, simple provisions, and, occasionally, very cool clothes or a new video game. It's a perfectly comfortable existence that affords enough time to do what I want. All of these concrete solutions to simple problems make it difficult to take seriously those anxieties that urge me toward some vague idea of more. Finally, I'm doing fine, and jesus, it's boring as hell here.

It doesn't help that I'm involved in a very promising lawsuit. Here is the outcome of a similar lawsuit that was recently decided for the plaintiff, a guy like me. The lawyers say that will be me in two or three years. What could I possibly accomplish in the meantime that would matter once $25 million (or even a hundredth of that) falls on me?

You're probably having a good, long shrug over that one. Mine's been twitching since I proved to myself a little over a year ago that I could function as a regular person again, and accidentally also discovered that I don't want to be a regular person. Not at all, not in that way, even if I am allowed a few modest chances at being exceptional (water-skiing, network management, database construction, body contortion).

It was a great experiment, and I still consider myself extremely lucky to have had the chance. Shortly after the last of the series of surgeries involved in removing my colon, Lena, once a coworker and now very good friend since around the time I arrived at college, suggested that I apply for a vaguely worded position having to do with computers at the Clinton Foundation's pilot program HEAL-AR. I interviewed with the small crowd of managers who, while clearly sharp and charismatic, knew almost nothing about the sort of things they needed for their small office of 15, and were nowhere close to qualified to decide if I was capable. But we had some laughs, talked a little shop, and agreed to a calendar-year contract. It was extremely validating after three years of being basically very useless, and seemed to be exactly what a lifetime experimenting on computers had prepared me for.

You might find a little about it on Google, but HEAL-AR is still apparently such a pilot program that they don't have much of an internet presence. Either that, or whoever they've found to replace me doesn't hold a candle. I still very much admire the insight behind the idea after seeing it in action: (1) convince large businesses to put up interest-free loans as a benefit for their low-income employees (2) so that they could pay HEAL-AR to retrofit their homes to increase the structures' energy efficiency, (3) with free labor via Americorps, (4) the savings from which repay the loan (5) and then continue to allow for substantially lower energy bills for the structure's lifetime (6) while providing marketable skills for "at-risk youth" to apply in the suddenly and rapidly growing industry of green architecture. In practice, with a few tweaks on the fly, it worked out very well for those blue-collar clients who trusted us enough not to swindle them in some unimaginable new way.

I came to my position when the program was about six months old, and was treated to a show of four very talented and optimistic leaders with surprisingly varying backgrounds (telecom, architecture, restaurant, and day-trading) growing this idea's practicality into something I was proud to be a part of, no matter how removed were my talents from the clients. I kept the gears turning, and performed well enough that I was mostly ignored. I imagined myself, and tried to perform my duties, as a kindly and infinitely patient old janitor who, if competent, would be left to his own devices. Despite every member of the small office having extraordinary intelligence, being mostly under 30, and having been educated out of state, they basically didn't have a clue about how their laptops worked, much less how to keep a network, or code and build a database.

And that made it all the better! Nobody questioned my methods; they only wanted results, and, for the most part, provided what I requested to achieve them. Each task was quite fulfilling, a quiet, meditative, deadline-free riddle resembling in all the best ways the games and projects I had taken up to while away the bedridden years previous. I had finally figured it out: surround myself with intelligent, interesting, and diverse people, distinguish myself via unique abilities, and believe in the program's goals. We were all buds, even the shithead who stole his jokes from Family Guy. I was still very sick and lacking in energy through most of my year, and thus somewhat set-up for disappointment in myself for not being there in the capacity I had promised, but was basically satiated by circumstances I didn't know I had been craving most of my life. This new, basic understanding of a large part of my intellectual hunger eventually led me to a new, separate, promising life experiment (to be explained later). Also, free sodas and creamer in every conceivable flavor, by request!

ALAS

By the end, there was only chalky, Kroger-brand, non-dairy dust next to that old, neglected cylinder of Sweet N Low. The environment, like the coffee, went bittersweet, and eventually downright sour.

Next time, Part II: When All of My Friends at Work Left at the Same Time

Dernit

Southwest Airlines is doing a sale with some very reasonable fares - $40-120 one way, depending solely on distance. I can't afford it at the moment because of a looming car repair that may take a lot of my savings, but maybe you can! And maybe you'd like to come here? Yes?!

OR

Fly me there! I'll pay you back in a week; it's just that the sale only lasts until 6/23.

I'm angry at these circumstances! Make them a little better, somehow, please.

UPDATE: A kind, anonymous donor has taken up my cause. I'll be 2,500 or so miles northwest of here from 8/27 to 9/5. HOWEEEEVER I am still open to donations. For instance, it might be fun to revive the Coast to Coast in Augoast tour for 2011 if you have a couch for me over east. There are precious memories at stake here, yours and mine.

UPDATE 2: Benji has stepped up to bring me to New Orleans for Halloween! Thanks, Benji! Maybe this time I will dress up as an albatross.

Do you like online quizzes? I'm kidding; everyone likes online quizzes.

click to expand

Collision

Self-help, helping myself

I'm hoping to get very good at making and baking cookies quickly. Breakneck speeds. I got the idea from the muffins I just got into the oven in less than five minutes.

I'm writing this here to increase the likelihood that I follow through with my idea to be able to produce cookies so fast. If I get good at doing it quickly, maybe I'll do it more often.

Dustings of fragrant nuts and bark, glops of proteins and lipids, piles of inflammable and relatively simple chemicals. Making them cooperate in spite of their molecular structures, a ritualistic dance performed alone in a small room with fire. A sacrifice to me, the god of self-indulgence.

A Baby Story

Jeezy Petes!

I forgot all about this place, and now I find myself ranked number two in Benji's column of links! Content! Need content.

uuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmm

oh and

See ya next month!

The answer!

It came via text message at 6:19 this morning. Mysterious ways:

Ok barry, challange fo yo ass! Make a comp. Program that know its going to be dropped, and have to compesate for gravty and being (hurt) i kkknow im. Dum[break]b wiitth tthis shiit.latte drunk. If a comp knows its going to reconfiigurre.. Ha ! I know thiis shit aint nano yet! But you need to make money$$$$$$ go[break]program nano bots niigga!

brb programming nano bots

Unemployed

check back soon for more frequent updates than before!

Processed

I'm eating a Spam® sandwich. It's two slices of white Wonder® bread, each spread with enough mayonnaise to absorb the bread's texture, folded around two slices of first butter-sauteed, then pan-seared, Spam®.

Isn't that disgusting? Do I have any idea what kind of awful, chemical lies that went into making this? How could I even consider these ingredients food?

I'm an animal. I'll thank you to stop pretending that you aren't one, too.

it finally happened yesterday - i picked up a crazy old man who freaked me out on an instinctual level. i even pulled a knife on him, and that bloodshot gaze never changed. he explained he'd recently got of prison. a carjacker doesn't typically tell a sob story about prison while letting his mark pull a knife on him, so i wasn't sure where we stood. in the end, he was basically just a greedy dude who still feared jesus in some way. i wished him luck and drove away, knife balanced on my knees.

it's called the arkansas toothpick, and mine has a man wrestling a bull embossed onto a copper hilt. got this one in olympia, though, from a head shop run by an old, mean chinese family.

i didn't lock my car once in three years while living in conway. all that ever happened was that i once noticed my receiver's faceplate was gone, then found it a week or so later at the top of the driveway. speakers didn't work anyway.

i remember one time, when i was fairly young, dad challenged me to tell him what the word "just" means. i couldn't, and he couldn't either.

the first time i genuinely hated someone for being very stupid was when i was fifteen. i couldn't yet drive, but nick could, and he's only three weeks older. that puts it in early november 2000, just before i decided to start growing my hair out of boredom. his cousin and i were visiting out at nanny's in southwest, and the poor kid, three years younger, was purely and innocently ignorant, with absolutely no malice. and we all got stoned, and he went on and on and on about how "hey guys, what if THIS is the dream world, and when we're asleep that's when we're actually AWAKE. for real yall hold on for real yall think about it." yeah man, cos when we dream, we dream about going to school all day and getting high in a storage room for the eighth friday in a row.

just sayin: fuck that guy.

Buy

Best Buy and Marshall's have series of commercials that rewrite old Christmas carols as sales pitches for televisions and touch-screen phones to passers-by. ABC cut scenes from A Charlie Brown Christmas and sped up the animation to fit more commercials into the time slot. Wal-Mart freely reinterpret Christmas as the sum of its material products, claiming, "Family moments cost less at Wal-Mart." Hallmark commercials play out similarly, except each with a big red delivery truck pulling up to the store with the word "MEANING" painted on its side. BMW tries to convince me with smarmy cynicism that it understands my repulsion, then suddenly abandons tone to cheerfully sell me a car with a special Christmas financing plan. Toys 'R' Us, Pillsbury, Target, etc. etc.

There is a growing idea in sociology (at least there was back when I kept up with it) that our culture has abandoned Christianity/Puritanism as its hegemonic value structure and is near the end of a process to replace it with consumerism as its central religion. For example, malls are "cathedrals of consumerism," to which Americans make pilgrimages (especially to the bigger malls - my mother, for one, just got back from her annual weekend trip to the Branson outlet stores) to find or create who they are to the world as unique, special individuals. Like churches, in many ways. These commercials seem to fit right into this idea, blatantly co-opting Christmas from Christianity and reforming it to fit a consumerist dogma.

There is also an idea (which scares me more than any of it) that many advertising campaigns since the early '90s have worked on the assumption that their ads will be consciously ignored. Often marketers expect that, while attempting to ignore them, a consumer won't pay enough attention to scrutinize the messages being transmitted. So they sneak in through the backdoor of our subconscious, passively absorbed so that they can plant little bits of trust via familiarity that yell out later at the recognition of a product. Those billboards along the freeway, for example, that are just huge prints of beer logos - sometimes with an exploding bottle, or a woman in a swimsuit, but mostly just a logo - don't have any remarkable scene or attempted message except, "You know me; don't forget that I'm always here."

It all makes me think I should know better than to watch TV. It became a habit when during most of the day I was too exhausted to focus my eyes. Now I've got no excuse for putting up with its arrogance. The bullshit I watch is always such a compromise, anyway: shows about cooking things quickly, shows about eating big meals, or old sitcoms are usually the best I can do for my tastes. Maybe all these presents will be enough to distract me away from it.

You know, for all those classes on writing over the years, nobody gave me even a bit of useful advice on writing titles.

When I logged in to Blogger just now, there was a little green box with a sentence informing me of a new feature. This feature promises to email me about new features. After that sentence, there was a hyperlink that read "Enable." I clicked it. The green box vanished without another word, and I stared at an unchanging screen for a good minute, looking for some sign of .jsp or .cgi or even mailto. But no, just a dignified, silent retreat, like a concierge bowing himself away to do who knows what in the back somewhere. I think this is the first time that I've felt like something on the internet is cooler than I'll ever understand.

Anyway, I came here to write, "I'm doing fine." Here's picture of me and a friend:

Well

"today at the mall, waiting for my shift, before it was even open:
i'm sitting on a bench near the ice rink and that song 'hallelujah' starts over the ice skating rink speakers and it's all echoey because the mall is empty and i'm just sitting there clicking my heels drinking my soda.
thought of you."
-Emma Barry, 12/9/02

"Hi Barry. I was throwing up all day. Thought of you."
-Bailey Swindler, 8/18/09

Ruth Seebacher, 1925-2009

She helped us in the mailroom in the mornings because she wanted to. For forty years she'd worked in the Timex factory and was laid off unceremoniously. She never got to retire because of her parasitic husband and sons. She was candid to me with good humor about her ugly talents. She took cups of ice for the ride home to throw back at cars if they cut her off. Never complained, but occasionally would insist on treating herself to a frozen shrimp cocktail from Kroger. "Gally-bum" was her favorite cuss. She made me a ginger cake from scratch for my birthday, and even loaned me the Pyrex over the weekend so I could finish it.

She was 83 and in poor health, but still, it's one of those days in which everything seems unbearably sad.

BRB

Let's all just try to forget about Ethan Moore.

I took all of this down a few weeks ago after deciding to come back to Arkansas. My main reason for writing here was to keep family updated, and now that I'm back home, there's no need because I see them almost every day. I thought I'd probably pick it up again someday, but for now, I don't really have much interesting to say. I changed the address to make it clear to everyone that I wouldn't be updating for a while. Some friends were disappointed, but seemed to understand after I explained. Not Ethan Moore.


Pictured: Ethan R. Moore, Hendrix College alum, b. May 4, 1983 in Boxford, Massachusetts, currently residing in Little Rock, Arkansas, employed as Web Coordinator for Arkansas Public Policy Panel / Citizens First Congress

No, Ethan R. Moore (who sometimes operates under the aliases WhiteNoiseEthan and crimethinc) hastily jumped at the opportunity to punish me through libel and ridicule on the internet, hijacking this blog's address before I had a chance to explain (he was probably drunk). He created a fake celebrity news blog under my name at this address, attempting to portray me as some sort of pervert with petty interests. I still don't know what he expected to accomplish. I tried using official channels to convince Google to remove the defamatory site, but because Ethan didn't use my legal name, Google would not help.

In the end, because I am smarter than Ethan and much less lazy, I was able to hack into his Google account, take my URL back, and move his fake site here. I could have hijacked his account permanently, of course, including his Gmail and other Google services, but I would never sink that low. Not Ethan Moore low.

I would, however, mention Ethan Moore of Little Rock, Arkansas, "Web Coordinator," vandal, and general drunk, specifically enough that this might show up on Google as a testament to his character. Why would you hire this man? He can't even keep his own Google account secure; would you really trust him with your internets?

More Reasons Not to Hire Ethan Moore

Ethan Moore spends more time playing computer games and reading technology news sites than getting his work done, and even if you ask him if he's getting his work done, he'll say yes, no matter what's actually on his screen.

Ethan Moore once ate my E.L. Fudges that I bought myself for a school club meeting, even though everyone was supposed to get some.

He is a very messy eater.

He also ate my Pop-Tarts while I was asleep and it took him like three weeks to replace them.

Ethan smokes!

Ethan Moore once expressed to me his interest in adopting refugee children, but only "so that I could use them to get attention from women who want to [commit adultery with] me [in spite of my family]." He went on to say, "I am not kidding here, Barry. I simply cannot wait to [disappoint] over my wife and adopted children."

He broke my couch just by sitting on it, so he'll probably break all of the chairs and such in your office, too.

Feel free to use this site as a forum for discussing Ethan Moore's moral shortcomings in the comments below. Send a message to all of the Ethan R. Moores out there so the world knows that bullies have no place on our internet.

UPDATE:
Benji shows some spine.
Ethan buckles.
Alex probably cares, somewhere, deep down.

Easy Bad Risotto

Here's a recipe I made up the other day. It came out a lot like risotto, but less fussy and pretentious.

Barry's Failed Attempt at Some Basic Chicken Soup When He Was Sick

2 cups chicken stock
2/3 cup medium-grain rice (or any rice, probably. I just like medium-grain.)
1/4 cup heavy cream (more or less; really, you just want a little to make it kinda creamy)
2 large carrots
1/2 cup frozen green peas
1 tsp. salt
asiago and black pepper to taste

Bring stock to boil, covered. Add rice. Recover. Peel and chop carrots. Add carrots. Recover and boil on low heat for about 15 minutes, as if you just wanted to cook some cheap white rice; try not to think about how much money the ingredients cost or you'll want to check on it too often. Take the pot off heat, uncover, and stir in cream slowly. Serve topped with pepper and asiago.

This really is pretty good! And easy when you consider that you're doing about as much work as you would to just cook some rice. I bet if you added another cup of stock at the end, and use maybe half the peas and carrots, it would be more like what I was trying to make to begin with, but that probably wouldn't be as good.

Leaving

So it looks like I'm coming home on Thursday. I was on the fence about it for the last week, but after talking to Grandma this afternoon, I think it'd be best if I'm around to help out. I don't have any idea how long I'll be in town, but it'll be at least a month, probably. Got to get some more money together to offset the cost of this plane ticket, the cost to get back up there, and the time I'll spend jobless in the meantime. I don't know much else about my plans.

Did you know that the bereavement rates for all of the airlines that offer them are more expensive than the normal rate you'd get online? I guess they figure that people who have just been smacked in the face with something like this wouldn't be in the mood to comparison-shop.

About an hour after I found out about Dad's condition, a friend called me up and offered me another free car (the first being Sheriff's Buick), a '96 Saturn. He said that someone gave it to him, but he didn't need it anymore, and it would help me find a job. I guess they'll be here when I get back.