Thursday, February 17, 2011

Too Black Too Strong Dot Com

Has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than my newfound obsession for Marisa Miller.

I put up one of my domain names on Ebay in an effort to unload some of my impulse purchases. I bought "tooblacktoostrong.com" a year ago and wanted to see if it would go for some outrageous amount of money. I put the reserve at $1000. After the auction ended, someone sent me this message.

Keep it, wasn't even worth the $2.98 I bid (expiring soon) Crap (too long) domains like these (expiring soon) go for pennies on here. Don't waste my time. I WAS interested if the reserve wasn't so fricking high (outrageous!)

So angry. I mean, no domain should be less than $15 since that's the registration fee. Oh well. I bought it because it was the opening sampled phrase from Public Enemy's "Bring the Noise" (studio version). It's also part of a speech by someone that I should be aware of since it's Black History Month.

Fight the Power... indeed.

goochout.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

What did you do, Dave?

[I started writing this on 1/26/2011. I've been scheduling time to edit/complete it but never got around to it. I'm going to post it as it as is with no warranty express or implied as I purge my unpublished drafts. Can you believe how much time I spend on this shit? I need to hit the gym].
I'm not going to pretend that I and cop shooting suspect fugitive David Durham were friends. Physically, socially, lifestyley, you couldn't find two more disparate individuals. We worked together at the same commercial reprographics plant. Sometimes on the same shifts, sometimes the same projects/departments. I don't recall having a beer with him or ever hanging out while not on the clock. I sat directly across from him at a company Christmas party; he had a ditzy blonde girlfriend at the time. The girlfriend was told by a waitress to be careful not to set her drink on an unlevel junction where the tables joined under a table cloth. Expectedly, somehow, she did and expectedly her drink spilled. The girlfriend complained that they should "do something about that" because warning her was apparently not sufficient. Dave didn't join his date in her misguided complaints, nor did he remind her that she'd just been told five minutes earlier to avoid the mess altogether.

Dave was not one for confrontation.

And somehow in the last two months he's reportedly degenerated from a lighthearted, genuinely nice guy to a fugitive wanted for two counts of attempted murder, as well as a variety of other charges. As I write this, he's on the run, presumably in the woods in a coastal Oregon town. He's accused of shooting the officer that pulled him over for speeding Sunday as well as a fisherman that David might have mistaken for another cop.

The papers say that Dave worked for the same place for most of the last 18 years. I worked with him for about eight of the first of those years. I remember he was perpetually clad in camouflage. He owned many pairs of cammo cargo pants in myriad patterns and colors. I remember he bought a blue Harley Davidson that he would wheel into a freight elevator to take into our shop's third floor every night he worked graveyard shift. Once I pointed at the bike as he rolled it towards the elevator one night. "Is that a scratch?" I jokingly asked in a deadpan tone. "No... it's not a scratch" he replied with a smile without even looking (I at least hoped he'd look), knowing that the bike he probably cleaned hourly with a toothbrush didn't have any blemishes that he wouldn't know about. We would chat a bit in the break room. I remember one lively discussion about the neighborhood legend of Devil's Ditch.

Devil's Ditch does not warrant its own paragraph in an essay about a man whose life has disintegrated into a best outcome being life in prison. Having said that, Laurelhurst park in Portland, Oregon had a grass valley yielding a dirt path landscaped by various BMX bikes of the seventies and eighties. It's probably still there, I haven't checked. You know the ramps off of which ski jumpers launch? That's what this was, for bicycles. You would walk your bike as high up one side of the hill and then pedal down as fast as you could, gathering speed to jump as high and as far over the adjacent walking path and onto the field on the other side. I remember being surprised that Dave, seven years my senior, had ridden the same jump. As if somehow my "generation" of BMX cyclists had been solely responsible for discovering this landscaped phenomenon. If there was a magazine called "Kickass Bike Jumps of the Northwest," Devil's Ditch would be on the cover of at least 11 out of 12 months. Maybe every month, it's hard to tell.

As the story stands: Dave, with his dog, is on the run from an ever growing force of local, state, and federal authorities. Armored vehicles and armed troopers are ubiquitous in the small, quiet town of Waldport, Oregon. Officer Steven Dodds, who was shot while pulling over Dave's SUV for speeding is in "critical, yet stable" condition at Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland. There's been so many shootings recently that it's become easy to emotionally distance oneself from the tragedies occurring in other states, towns, or even neighborhoods. I think it's horrific when anyone gets shot. I absolutely don't ever want to get shot by a gun. Police officers are amazing in that they face the chance of getting shot every time they clock in. I certainly can't imagine being a cop searching for a suspect that seems to be out to kill any cop that he may come across.

I and certainly his friends, family, and coworkers don't see David Durham as someone who could shoot anyone. His story is eerily reminiscient of Daniel Butts, the 21 year old accused of shooting Rainier Police chief Ralph Painter. Daniel Butts, according to OregonLive "had slid into wild mood swings in recent weeks, becoming increasingly erratic before the fatal confrontation at a car stereo store." Associates of David reported similar recently changed behavior. I think there's even an ended relationship involved in both cases as well.

For whatever reason David Durham or Daniel Butts decided to snap and do these horrific things, we want an answer as to why. Why did the gentle David Durham become so paranoid and delusional? Why does he think authorities are out to get him? Was it the pain from his degenerating bone disorder? Was it the pain medications making him crazy? Was he always an asshole deep inside? Is there something we're not finding out in the extensive news coverage?

[And here's where the story ends. At least my story. Dave's still out there, on the run. He managed to escape on foot and elude 250 members of various law enforcement agencies (and America's Most Wanted). There's speculation that he might have gone to the Carribean or to the Phillipines. The story is all but forgotten, save for the families of Officer Dodds and David Durham. I used to hit refresh on the Google news feeds whenever I was near a computer, but even I'd let this slip my mind. The media and its consumers may have let this story go away but I've brought it back from my cutting room floor and posted it at the 11:11.]

Sixty-Three Days Until My Birthday

This is all I want for my birthday. Thank you in advance.

John Gallucci

End of line.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Whatever doesn't make you stonger will kill you.

[I'm approaching my 2000th post on this site since I migrated to the Blogger hosting. I'm going through and deleting posts that I never or will never finish. I came across this doozie from a 12/19/10. Can you believe I don't remember writing this? It's so verbose. I'm guessing I gave up on it because I try not to spend too much time/work too hard on this site and when a piece of writing gets to this point I have to work at not being redundant. Maybe I didn't post it because it seemed too personal. However, I'm going to post it at the 11:11 because it's too much typing to throw away. Sold as-is. I haven't even read it fully, just skimmed, typed this, and hit 'post.' Enjoy, I guess.]
Between my Communications degree and an unhealthy self consciousness in existence since about the third grade, I can sense nonverbal and paralanguage as well as the best of them (whoever "them" is, I have no idea). As an unlikely yet somehow prolific bouncer in the mid 2000s, I learned to sense fights minutes before the first punch was thrown. I could also tell when my ass was going to get kicked minutes before it happened and was usually able to prevent my predicted beating. Usually.

But now, in the age of my sobriety, I'm hyper-hyper aware of my surroundings. In a crowd of strangers, as I found myself in a wedding I recently performed, I couldn't remember anyone's name five seconds after I was introduced to them. I could, however, tell you from which coffee decanter they filled their coffee cup, who was married to whom, when the photographer changed the lens... etc.

I sensed that an acquaintance was looking at me with a sense of skepticism. She had once been a smiling,  hugging overtly but sincerely friendly friend of a friend. Now, she looked at me like a white woman alone in an elevator on which a black man just entered: Smiling while she clutches her purse and backs away into the corner.

You see, I say a lot of things. If something strikes me as funny, I'll immediately spin it into a joke. Often, I don't take into account the company in which I'm in earshot as I spew forth some sort of goochified wit. I don't even keep track of what I say other than posting it on Twitter. I mean, I consider myself a writer and if my publishing options over the years has whittled down to this website, I still want the review board of "anyone with a Twitter/Facebook account" to hold me accountable. It's a nervous habit. If you see me in a social setting and I'm shotgunning attempts at humor, it's because I'm likely wading in an ocean of anxiety with the arm floaty of my attempts of comedy keeping me afloat..

I discussed this at anxious paranoid length with my friend, the gateway into this social circle. I realized that I was near obsessing over the approval of some guy's wife. I back tracked and started explaining why I was so concerned about the perceived loss of approval by a distant acquaintance. I had to figure it out for myself as I simultaneously figured it out for her.

When I was drinking, I was just as more obnoxious and funny. I would take a table full of people and try to get them laughing. If they're laughing, they can't notice I'm fat, or question my career choices, or pick apart my personality flaws. If someone doesn't care for me after one of those sessions, I can excuse such disapproval as a byproduct of my being drunk. They don't necessarily dislike me. Rather, they don't necessarily like how I acted when I was drunk.

Drinking is fantastic. There are so many wonderful things.  It gives buffer between the world and your real self.

Tron: Legacy

Tron: Legacy - is the plot about a Tron no longer supported by the manufacturer and no drivers for Windows 7? #geek #tron #dejavu
- @goochonline Twitter, December 2010


Tron: Legacy is a movie where Jeff Bridges reprises his role as Jeffrey Lebowski (complete with beard and bathrobe) to reprise his role as Kevin Flynn [ideologically, Linus Torvalds] from 1982's Tron. In 1989, Flynn has been frequently going back and forth between the real world and the computer world working with his program, Clu, who looks exactly like the character Terry Brogan in "Against All Odds." One day, Clu gets corrupted and before Flynn can run chkdsk /r, he gets trapped inside the computer and helplessly observes Clu commit genocide on a bunch of useless free programs (which I wish Android Market would do occassionally).

In 2010, Flynn's son unwittingly gets sucked into the computer world after Alan Bradley, Flynn's friend and creator of Tron (but we'll get to that later) receives a page from Flynn's Arcade on the last activated pager on planet Earth (my house doesn't have a land line, but an arcade that's been shuttered for 20 years apparently does). Instead of calling the number back,  Bradley visits Flynn's son at his standalone garage apartment and suggests that he, not him visit the arcade instead. He finds his way to his Dad's secret computer lab and sits in a seat directly in line with a gun that can import you into the computer at the touch of a button (the one time that UAC would actually have been a nice feature). You'd think that after his incident in 1982's Tron, Flynn would aim that thing away from the office chair, but anyways.

Wait wait wait... In 1994 it took me 30 seconds to scan a full 8.5X11 document and Flynn's got a device from 1982 that can import a full grown adult male? Crazy.

After entering a bunch of UNIX commands (he doesn't work or go to school, and he hasn't seen his computer wiz Dad in 20 years, but he's wildly skilled at UNIX and has intense views, yet misses the point, on the Open Source movement)Son of Flynn immediately gets into arena type Discs of Tron battles with who later turns out to be the Tron who has turned to the computer version of the Dark Side. In nearly 30 years, Tron has beccome very adept at parkour. So for 20 years, Flynn Lebowski has been living in a post modern apartment with a hot piece of ass named Quorra (Olivia Wilde) who was probably bummed out to be inevitably cockblocked by his son. Sam sort of figures out a way to get himself, Dad, and Quorra out of the computer world into the real world which was supposed to be impossible, then it became possible, then they make it to the portal to the outside world but then get portal blocked by Clu (again, played by 1985 Jeff Bridges). In the end, Sam and Quorra literally ride off into the sunrise.

Once again, Tron is the name of a character that has little to do with the plot of the movie. I mean, in this movie, it's almost as if they forgot to include Tron at all, so they made the henchman (very Darth Maul type character) Tron and he doesn't do too much to move the plot along until the end.

Geek:out.