It is time for my pre-bed burrito

On May 30, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Because it was a long day and shut up, that’s a thing.

But maybe my standards are too high

On May 29, 2017May 29, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Politics

We attended my mother-in-law’s funeral service a couple of weeks ago. Before we left, I had a quiet word with my five-year-old about my expectations for his behavior at the cemetery, and I reminded him of those expectations once we got there. He performed admirably.

This sort of behavior– today, at Arlington– would not have gone over well. We would have had words, and had them quickly. My son– who is, again, LITERALLY FIVE FUCKING YEARS OLD, is better behaved at solemn events in public than this… person. So was every single one of the dozens of seventh and eighth grade students I have taken on tours of the place.

It’s fucking unhealthy how much I hate him. I thought I hated George W. Bush. I had a shirt that said so, and I wore it! A lot!

That was fucking tee-ball, Pampers pull-ups hate compared to this shit.

ADDENDUM: Also, it seems pretty clear that he doesn’t know all the words to the anthem. Yes, I can be pissed about that too.

In which I will not sell to you

On May 28, 2017May 28, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Work4 Comments

itemeditorimage_54c12805aa7a3 I have decided something, as of yesterday. I am no longer going to be selling furniture to anyone I know in the real world. I will continue to recommend that people who know me in my Clark Kent guise come into my store if they need to buy stuff, but I’m not going to be your salesman. I’ll hand you over to someone who is good at their job and let them do it and that’s going to be it. Why, you might ask? Because since I’ve been working at the store I’ve had four people who I know IRL come in specifically to buy from me because they knew I worked at a furniture store. The following things have happened:

Person #1 bought a coffee table and a couple of other things. The other pieces were fine but the coffee table came in broken. Twice.
Person #2 bought a sofa and love seat. They were slightly backordered when they were ordered and they proceeded to slide back repeatedly after being ordered, and took, if I remember correctly, nearly two months to come in.
Person #3 ordered a customized sofa and loveseat. Normally these are pretty bulletproof in terms of coming in on time so long as they’re ordered correctly. Note the caveat in that sentence, though. For these folks, I discovered that what is called a “loveseat” when it is sold in the normal configuration is called a “sofa with console” if you special-order it, and so they had to wait eight weeks (normal for a special order) for the wrong goddamn loveseat to show up in the store and then eight more weeks for the one they wanted. Of the four, this is the only one that was unambiguously and clearly my fault; that said, I blame the company because that’s completely ridiculous.
Person #4 ordered a loveseat that was also slightly backordered and supposed to arrive in early April. When it finally arrived– in the middle of May– it was, inexplicably, the loveseat that they’d ordered but in the wrong fabric. The loveseat in question cannot be special ordered and does not come in that fabric. In other words, I couldn’t have ordered it the way they got it if I’d wanted to. No one has any idea how the hell this one happened. It has to have been some sort of screw-up at the factory but here’s the kicker: our company owns that factory, and we don’t sell our furniture to other furniture stores. So it’s not like this was the way this piece gets sold at Furniture Store B and it got shipped to Furniture Store A by accident. Even the warehouse guys at our main facility in Mississippi had no idea at all how this happened. This is, in other words, some bullshit.

So, yeah. I’ve learned my lesson and I’m done. I still recommend that you buy stuff from my store– despite those four examples, this shit really doesn’t happen all that often— but apparently I’ve gotten hit with the bad-luck stick in terms of selling to people I know. So I’m done.

Deja vu

On May 27, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I feel like I wrote this exact post a few months ago, but it is a fine night for baseball.Be nice to each other. See y’all tomorrow.

Briefly: This Is Who They Are

On May 26, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics

Let’s be real: you hadn’t heard of this derplord two weeks ago, and neither had I. And as an experiment, I’m going to be a bit of a dick and not use his name in this post– mostly to see if I can remember who the hell he is or what outrage against decent people he perpetrated when I inevitably go back to look at this post a couple of months or years from now. I haven’t been able to independently verify this, but I’m seeing on Twitter that the vote total on Election Day was more in his favor than the early vote. Meaning that Montanans saw this fucker assault a reporter and went “Yep, that’s the guy I want representing me.”

Remember that. This is who they are. This is who they have always been. Beating up a reporter now GAINS you Republican votes. He will not be the last one, and the next one will do it as a matter of strategy, not unchecked id.

(That said, I can’t get too het up about anybody deciding they didn’t want to vote for this dude, who sounds like a mess as a candidate also. But at least he’s not a thug.)

And then there’s this pigfucker:

There’s some yammering going around about how the toy medals on this idiot’s jacket are “stolen valor,” which is an accusation that has a very specific meaning: that he’s wearing military medals that he didn’t earn. That’s not quite what’s going on. David ~~Duke~~ Clarke has not claimed to be in the military and doesn’t claim to be wearing military medals. The shit’s literally costume jewelry, for the most part, as this probably overly-literal Snopes article points out.

So, okay. He’s not guilty of stolen valor. But he’s for goddamn sure assuming that most people who see him in his little costume up there are going to think those are real medals and not some flair he stole from his waitress at one of those put-shit-on-the-walls restaurants. And he’s absolutely right. Because appearances beat out reality every single time for these fuckwits. Truth doesn’t matter, just the appearance of it. David Clarke wears a bunch of pretty pieces of plastic on his stupid little jacket so he must be Tough and Honorable and Real, and not a child trying to impress other children.

This is who they are.

So, my car

On May 25, 2017May 25, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

Screen Shot 2017-05-25 at 5.02.01 PM I done fucked up today, I think.

My current car is a 2001 Ford Escape with nearly a hundred and seventy thousand miles on it. The fabric on the driver’s side door is mostly peeled off, there are big patches of rust inside all the doors, and there’s a big crack in the rear bumper. The radio intermittently decides it needs to take a rest and won’t turn back on for anywhere from a few seconds to a day. It leaks oil from a leak so deep in the engine that repairing it is an absurdity. And its gas mileage… well, leaves something to be desired.

That said: it turns on when I need it to turn on and it gets me where I want to go, and while it’s loud as hell at speed it’s not an uncomfortable ride by any means. It’s just that at 170K it is only a matter of time until something breaks that will be pointless to repair. To get ahead of myself a bit, I was offered $1200 for it as a trade today and I think it was probably a pretty generous offer, all told.

The boy has named the car Joey Car Kristofferson. I will very much miss having a car named Joey Car Kristofferson, to the point where I will probably insist that its replacement be named Joey Car Kristofferson II. (My wife’s car, incidentally, is called Lisa Car James. Don’t ask where the boy got the names. No one knows.)

So anyway, I took that car up there for a test drive earlier today. It’s a 2016 Kia Soul in the + trim level, with 28,000 miles on it. It’s immaculately clean and seems to run beautifully. It’s small– trunk space, in particular, is kind of a joke– but it fits my main need in a vehicle, which is that it rides high enough that I climb into the seat and slide out, rather than the other way around. I refuse to struggle to get out of my car, which means I’ll never own a sedan again. I’ve started to seriously hate them. I test drove a brand-new Ford Escape a few months ago, and loved it, but financially I think it’s a better idea to go for a lightly used vehicle right now rather than a new one. Unless I lease, which I might choose to do but <insert every website and argument about leasing ever> and my brain isn’t set up for that right now.

It’s just under fifteen thousand bucks, that car, and with the financing I’d expect to get I’d probably be making payments of just over $200 a month. Which is in the neighborhood where I’m thinking Yeah, I can swing that rather than I can afford that. To my mind, that’s a real difference; you can swing a new purchase if you can come up with some ways to cut costs that would absorb a lot of the new bill and figure you’ll be okay. You can afford something if you don’t have to think at all about what you’ll do to pay for it. For example, I can afford to spend $25-50 pretty much whenever I want so long as I don’t, like, do it every day. But if I want to buy a new shirt or something? I don’t have to think about that. A car payment means I’m thinking things like well, I do eat out way too often anyway and I’m spending too much fucking money on comic books every week while I’m considering what it would do to my budget. And the down payment would have to come out of our mutual savings, which my wife will likely have something to say about. We did just drop three and a half grand on a new bed, after all.

I’m not sure I have a point here, and I don’t know if I’m asking for advice or just talking. I just need to decide how quickly I think I need a new car, and whether I should buy a new one before I need a new one.

Go buy some of my books and make this easier, dammit. 🙂

Adventures in Lexapro, ch. 325

On May 24, 2017May 24, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn life4 Comments

Jeremy-Renner — The title of the .gif claims this is Jeremy Renner. As I have never seen him smile at any time whatsoever, I have reason to doubt it.

You will not believe what just happened. I woke up this morning– before my alarm went off, a full half hour before my alarm went off– and upon discovering, to my extreme surprise, that I was awake and refreshed, got out of bed and started my day. It is ten minutes before the boy and I have to leave for school; he is dressed, I have had breakfast, the dog is fed and let out, the cat is fed, his backpack is packed, a spot of Monster Legends has been played, and I still have time for a short blog post.

I have been tired, 100% of the time, for a year.

Is this what life was supposed to be like before Lexapro? Is it the new bed? A combination of both? What the hell is going on here?

Three quick anecdotes

On May 22, 2017May 21, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories7 Comments

None of these are really worth posts on their own– well, one, maybe– but I wanna record them, so here you go.

Driving home from dropping the boy off at school one day last week, a bird happens to catch my eye at a traffic light. It’s probably a blackbird, but it’s a bit too far away for me to be sure– crow-shaped, and black, but too small to be a crow unless it’s a juvenile. So, sure. Blackbird. As I’m watching it, it abruptly does a tight 270° turn and heads straight down to the ground, wings out. I think at first that either the bird has been shot and what looked like a turn was actually a tumble or I’ve literally just seen this bird die in midair— which has to happen to birds sometime, right? Surely once in a while a bird just has a stroke or a heart attack or something?

At any rate, it pulls up right before it hits the ground and lands and then I lose track of it. If it had dove down at an angle, I’d not have said anything about it and just assumed it was going after a mouse or something, but 1) it looked way too small to be a bird of prey and 2) I have never seen a bird fly straight down before. It was weird as hell.

I’m at work, and I notice a spider perhaps two feet above my eye level and maybe three feet off to my right. The building I work in has very high ceilings, and my first thought is where the hell is his web attached, because if he’s coming down a string of silk it’s gotta be thirty or forty feet long by now. Then I notice that he’s coming straight toward me, which is not something I’d expect a spider coming down a strand of silk to do. He’s a tiny spider, and I’m not frightened of them, so this provokes fascination rather than oh god kill it fear. As he gets closer, I realize that he’s not attached to anything and he’s not acting like he’s climbing a web– he’s got his legs curled up underneath him, in fact. The damn thing is floating. I even wave my hand above him to check, and the breeze from my hand stirs him a bit but I clearly don’t break any strands of web. I try to film him but he’s too small for the resolution on my phone to handle. I watch him drift onto a sofa and crawl away.

Yesterday, first customer of the day. He waves me off at first, saying he’s only looking, which is just fine. I tell him everything in the store is on sale (which is true, and is useful information, I figure) and that the way our current deal works is “spend more, save more.”

He looks dead at me and says “You mean Jew more, save more?”

It takes me a second to process yeah that’s what the fuck he said.

“No,” I reply, shifting into my Teacher Voice. “I said spend more, save more.” And then I walk away and let my manager know that this fucker will be receiving no help from me whatsoever while he’s in the store and that if he speaks to me again we’re all lucky if the only thing I do is refer him to another salesperson.

The man and his wife circle the sales floor and leave without speaking to or being spoken to by anyone else. I spend the rest of my day with half of my brain proud of me for not losing my job by lighting this fucker up and the other half of my brain ashamed of me for not lighting the fucker up anyway.

I am, much later, trending toward the second option, for the record. How the fuck are you so fucking comfortable with being a bigot that you’ll just say shit like that to random fucking strangers in public? I shoulda thrown his ass out.