Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   I bowl like a programmer
Thursday, November 19 1998
We in my workplace would have received cash bonuses had we completed a few of our recent projects in a more timely manner, but since (due to no fault of our own) we didn't finish these projects on time, we received no bonues. My team coach felt like he owed us something, so this afternoon he took all of us in the engineering and design staff bowling. 3pm came and we all piled into cars and headed to Sunset Bowl on the hill above Pacific Beach. The inside of the place is one huge panoramic mural of a Southern California Beach Scene.
We broke up into three teams (the Engineering Team Leader and the Database Administrator were on my team) and bowled numerous games. I actually scored 100 in one game (the second best game I've ever played, after my beginner's luck first game back in the mid-80s), surprising even myself, but it was all downhill from there. I didn't have the necessary "focus" and gutterballs came in waves.
    "Focus," by the way, is one of the Human Development terms that pervades the newspeak in my workplace. There's something in me that wants to systematically root out all such language and replace it with the way I used to talk, but it's become a matter of habit already.
Like the other programmers, I bowl like a programmer. Sadly, I fear that I might also program like a bowler.
We ate lots of greasy food and drank numerous beers, all paid for by the company. Kevin the DBA never let me go too long without a Budweiser. It was an unusual backdrop for getting drunk, but that's what was happening. At 5:30 the bowling leaguers (mostly elderly working-class types) came in and rudely supplanted us, so we moved on to pool, then pinball. A fun time was had by all.
Back in Ocean Beach, Kim was just about to make an errand to pick up a quarter ounce of dope when I came in the door. So I joined her and even ended up funding the purchase. We smoked up with two long-haired gentlemen about our age and one of Kim's younger somatics school classmates, the one who moonlights as a stripper. Most of the time we were at the marijuana-smoking house, Kim and the stripper girl were applying a variety of experimental body work techniques to one of the long-haired pot-smoking gentlemen. The stripper girl had a number of glass bulbs which she would fill with fire for a moment and then apply to the gentleman's back. As the gasses in the bulb shrunk, they sucked up skin, leaving a big red mark much like a hicky. I don't know what the therapeutic point of all this was, but I must admit that it was kind of a dramatic performance.
Kim and I drove the stripper girl and her boyfriend to Newport Street and we all went into a bar near the beach to drink pitchers of beer and shoot pool. Sophie the Miniature Schnauzer had been cooped up in the apartment for most of the day so Kim had brought her along in the Volvo. But Sophie wasn't happy with being left in the car. She has a sense of when Kim feels like an bad "dog mom," so when Sophie feels she's being dealt an injustice, she raises a major fuss of barking and intense eye contact, shaking her head as if to say "I will not tolerate this treatment!" Kim usually caves in to this sort of resistance, especially since Sophie usually accepts justifiable separation without compaint. Tonight when Kim acceded to Sophie's demands, she tied her up just outside the bar to be fussed over by the ID checker and several bums who happened along.
Kim and I only stayed out until about 10:30pm. When we came home, Kim and I chowed down on a late night munchfest of stone ground wheat crackers and pesto.

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