A quote...

...is sometimes the best post:

"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." ~William Gibson

Yes, now here is an accurate description!

He's more spot on than that newspaper article was! ;-)

We're all doomed, it seems.

"He died of cardiac arrest."

That was the sentence in my local paper today in an article about the death of a pro football player that was a big influence on his team, the Buffalo Bills. There is a big fan base here for the Bills, as their training camp is held here before the start of the NFL season, and Rochester being only one hour east from Buffalo, of course. But that's not what pissed me off. Look at that sentence again:

"He died of cardiac arrest."

How many times have you read that same sentence when it refers to the death of someone in a newspaper, website, etc? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Each and every time I read that similar sentence I want to scream, "ONE DOES NOT DIE FROM CARDIAC ARREST!" Sheesh! I don't know if this is a case of lazy journalism, or simply no one telling them what condition a person had that was the actual cause of their death. It's as though cardiac arrest were a disease unto itself. It's not. It's a condition that results from something else. If it is indeed a disease unto itself, than it is more deadly than AIDS, cancer, or just about anything else combined.

Trust me. I worked as a paramedic for far too many years. I know what cardiac arrest is, and is not. I treated people who went into arrest, by the way, and sometimes it wasn't quite fatal. Rare was the case, but sometimes they would, in the image of Monty Python, be "getting better." How did they get into the condition of cardiac arrest? The causes are varied. It could be a gunshot, a car accident, a heart attack, stroke, or simply having been forced to sit through the newest Keanu Reeves movie by one's significant other. (Okay, The Matrix was good, but the sequels made me want to reach for the defibrillator.)

The point here is this: In the end, we're all going into cardiac arrest. How we get there is open to speculation from both the religious and scientific communities, but you can be absolutely certain we will all suffer from this condition someday. What happens after that is also open to speculation from those same communities, but I can tell you this: If I read an obituary or other article after my death that states I died of cardiac arrest, I'm going to haunt the newspaper that published it, and the reporter that wrote it, until the end of their days.

Yep, in the end, we're all doomed.

The shape of things to come.

A definitely dreary day here, and from what I've noticed so far, a poor fall colors season as well. The leaves you see on the pic below are pretty representative of the fall colors this year, and I suspect all the wet weather we've had is probably the culprit, or at least a big contributor.


My favorite time of year is not so much this time around, and I have a bad feeling is a portent of another bad winter here. Yeah, no use complaining about the weather, especially if one like myself voluntarily moved up to this part of NY state. I think that given the somber weather it might be time to unload about the incredibly hard summer I had, but that will be the next post around.

In short, I lost my best friend of 30 years on Sept. 1. More later.

Yeah, this is what I was referring to in the last post...

Common sense from an uncommon source.

I miss Frank Zappa. Really. While known to many, and misunderstood by just as many, he was a brilliant composer, arranger, guitarist, and life agitator. He made you think. His work was often thought of as crude, but if you really got down to business and paid attention to his words, you'd realized that he carried more common sense in his pinkie than most people had in their entire bodies. He championed the cause to stop censorship of music back in the late 80's. (Anyone remember Tipper Gore and the PMRC?) He could make social commentary through his work just as easily as singing about the girl in the poncho that he did it with until he could do it no more.

People called him crazy. I suspect he was a hero to someone like Steve Jobs. Why? Because he was an innovator. Yes, his work was not for everyone, but where's the fun in that? So the next time you call for a repairman that takes forever to finish a home repair, put on a copy of "The Flakes," and take comfort that you're not in California, where they seem to have the most of them. How do I know? Well, Frank told me so.

The unbearable lightness of my wallet.

So, the time finally came when I was able to purchase a long wanted MacBook Pro. I use to have a MacBook G4 that a friend gave me some time ago, but it bit the dust about 2 years ago, and I was using a loaner PC from him. It gave me the ability to work as well, but it was about six or seven years old, and a bear to work with. Still, I couldn't complain, but the time had come where I had the financial means to get a brand new Mac, and one that I could put Windows on via an emulator, so that I could use it for my work at home job, and use it for my writing and theatre work on the Mac OS side of things. I bought it last Friday, and it didn't take long to remember how Mac works, and to get most of my files transferred over to it.

I am using this as a stepping stone, and inspiration to start blogging regularly again. I feel as thought I have a computer I'm comfortable with again, and believe it or not, it makes a difference. So, here we go, and I'll consider something to write about tomorrow.