Saline County road department was mowing with a huge tractor and completely demolished my mailbox today. Two half-ass visits later it’s “kind of” standing up.

Back from Buffalo a day early due to issues, and I go for what was supposed to be a quick errand run to get cat food and people food at the grocery store.

The cat food is there, but the deli isn’t selling anything that the wife or myself remotely want, and living in the last hole of the bible belt means that most of the restaurants in this “roll up the sidewalk at nine p.m.” town are closed on Mondays. That’d be fine if it was just a few, but nearly every semi-palatable option is shuttered….except one.

Fuckin’ SONIC Drive-In.

I order food. I wait. I get food. I turn the key.

Nothing. Clicks and whirrs.

Twenty minutes later, and I’m in my mother in laws car on the way home, and my car hangs out at “Americas favorite drive-in” for a few more hours, before getting towed away and fixed, for a whole new problem, with a whole other set of circumstances.

$80 down the drain later and the shitmobile is back on the road, tempting fate and just waiting on my next visit to Sonic.

Well, fuck that.

Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, hell, Jennings Osbourne! One of you retardedly rich sonsabitches cough up a few grand and help a brother out. It doesn’t even have to be fancy… Just a car, with air conditioning, that semi-dependable.

I know that’s asking a lot. I await your gracious offers with the utmost patience.

So I’m back on the road again. Looks like my alternator being out and/or on the fritz made my battery completely die.

70 bucks later I’m on the streets with a new battery and the knowledge in the back of my head that I have to eventually get a new starter sometime in the near future as well.

Thanks to mr. James Matthews for coming by the house and bailing me out of another fantastic vehicle ordeal. I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Have I mentioned I hate cars?

Okay, so I strongarm my car three miles with no belt on my pulleys (due to a locked up alternator) and luckily it’s still under warranty. My cool as he’ll mechanic friend James doesn’t charge me any labor either, saying he’ll pick that fight with the shitty parts company.

So, total cost of new alternator and fixed car: NOTHING!

Happily I come home, eat lunch, then go out to run errands before I leave for buffalo, ny tomorrow….car runs fine. Got some groceries. The old man who bags goes to the “wrong side” of my car, so when I get home I back intomy driveway so that side is closer to the door…

Put the groceries up and notice I’m too closely parked to my riding mower and A.C. Unit so I go to move my car and the fucking thing won’t start. At all.

So, I’m sitting here waiting on James to hopefully come by and help me out.

I hate cars.

Driving home from Sonic with dinner my serpentine belt blew out rendering me unable to properly turn my wheel.

This is a shitty development in and of itself, but about seven months ago the same belt blew in my car…. When I was coming home with dinner….from Sonic.

So basically, fuck you, Sonic.

You too, Cadillac.

If anyone wants to give me a new car, that’d be cool, too.

More on this “breaking story” as it develops, lol.

I got my mitts on a new iPhone 3G and it’s ridiculously impressive, if not a bit clunky to type with.

Thanks for all the wedding well wishes to anyone who called, wrote, etc.

With that I Am on my way to mr. doubledowns house in buffalo, NY

Mandy and I got married last Thursday.

Pretty rad, if I do say so myself.

So I’m going outside to make a phone call regarding a certain something happening on Thursday (which you’ll hear about then) and my friends J.P. and David are coming in the backdoor of our building. They say “You might not want to go out there” and I say “Why?” to which they reply “Well, there’s a crazy fucking bum out there.”

I say “I’ve seen crazy bums before” to which they both say “Not like this, c’mon he’s coming around the front of the building…”

So we head to the lobby, and I see him. About 5′8″ - 5′10″ black guy with black dreads, black t-shirt, and khaki pants. And he’s doing a kung-fu karate pose and yelling obscenities. Suddenly, a red Geo Metro, going the wrong way up the street, comes right at him and he leaps into mid-air, and is hit by the car, flipping over the top of it and hitting his head on the asphalt as he flies off of the car.

“Oh my god, that dude is dead!” is what I wanted to think and say but before I could even get out “Oh my–” he was up…like fucking TERMINATOR T-1000 and running FULL SPEED AFTER THE CAR.

I call 911, tell them there’s a dude outside our building and he’s acting crazy, a car just hit him and he ran after it. I start to describe him and the 911 operator says “black dreads, black shirt, white pants?” and I say YES and she says a car is on it’s way already. J.P. then tells me what they saw before they came in and I tried to go out was that the car was just going up the street, and dude jumped on the hood and punched the windshield, just shattering it. The guy drove off. Then crazy dude started screaming “I’m tired of all you motherfuckers! Sick of this shit!” and moved to the front of our building, where the same car he punched (the red Geo Metro) turned around and drove the wrong way up a one way street hitting him before he got right back up and chased after it, where the guy, I’m assuming came to the realization that he really didn’t want to mess with someone crazy enough to punch out his windshield and then be hit by his car and get up to chase after it.

We saw him cut across a parking lot, and go into our local gas station, before coming out with napkins wrapped around his bloody fist and walk down the street. About this time he walks into a mexican joint down the street from our place Juanitas. A cop car pulls up to our building and I tell him what happened and that the dude just went into Juanita’s, and he then backs up and high-tails it over there.

My friend Josh the Devil and I decide to go to the gas station to see what went on there and we literally follow a blood trail up to the store, and the inside of the place is a disaster. Blood all over the place. We both buy a drink and ask what went down and the lady behind the counter is all “I don’t like violence, dude be comin’ up in here all cussin and actin a fool sayin some doo try to hit him with a cah and then he’s all grabbin the napkins and walk out all crazy.”

We see the cop car is gone from in front of Juanita’s right when some dude is coming out of there. I yell “Hey man, is that crazy dude still in there?” and he says the cop cornered him in the kitchen, and that there was blood everywhere and that dude jumped the fence and got away, ran a few blocks and passed out, either from blood loss, losing his high, or a combination of both, but that he’d been captured.

We headed back to the building and saw a huge pool of blood, I guess from where he had originally punched the windshield out and was standing in front of our building and then an impact splatter from where he got hit by the car, rolled over it, and hit head-first on the ground.

It was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen in my life.

From Zvika Krieger at The New Republic:
Is it the GOP’s horrible reputation (in light of Bush, Katrina, Iraq, etc.) that is making voters not like them, or is it actually just their positions that are making them so unpopular? Josh at Next Right points to an interesting study, done for NPR by GOP pollster Glen Bolger and Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, that tries to answer that exact question. The poll asked 800 likely voters their opinions on various issues, first giving the positions in a vacuum, then attaching them to their respective parties. The results are pretty surprising: The Democratic position, even when not attached to any party, consistently beat the GOP position by 11 to 25 points. In other words, it’s not the Republican “brand” that’s the problem–it’s their policies. Josh (who by “we” means Republicans) breaks down the results by issue:

Let’s start with the economy. When voters know what party each message comes from, we loose 37% to 58% and trail among independents by 18%. Ouch. However, when you read both messages without telling voters who they come from, the story gets worse. Republican voters like the Democrat’s message more than their own party’s message by a large 14% margin when they don’t know which party it comes from. Just as disturbing, numbers among independents drop by another 10%… giving the Democrats a massive 28% advantage. Even our horrifically damaged image is better than our message on the economy. Independents and even Republicans simply like the Democrats’ plan more than ours.

Iraq and trade both follow the exact same pattern. We’re getting smashed on both issues on the partisan test, but when you look at the nonpartisan test where our damaged image isn’t a factor, the numbers get even worse among Independents and Republicans. A few Democrats (and in the case of trade a bunch of Democrats) move our way on the nonpartisan ballot, but Independents actually agree with our messages more when they know the messages came from Republicans.

On taxes, the picture gets more complex. On the partisan text, Independents like the Democrats’ message by significant 14% margin, but Republicans still like our message and give us a resounding 39% advantage. That changes drastically on the nonpartisan test. When the party’s names are removed, Independents are almost evenly split, giving the Democrats’ message a small 5% advantage. However, Republican voters stampede away from the GOP message. Among Republicans, support for the GOP message on taxes drops by a gargantuan 53% when the party’s names are removed, leaving the Democrats with a 14% advantage. You read that right, on the nonpartisan test, Independents like the GOP message on taxes more than Republicans do and even Independents slightly favor the Democrats.

The takeaway? Our message right now is electoral poison and this isn’t all about “brand.”