You know SJ there's a pretty good chance this doesn't end well, so don't do it.

1) Have a drink.
2) That was good. You know what, I'll just drink a little bit during the X-Mas/New Year, then I'll stop again. Just a little.
3) This is fun. I'm in complete control. I can have a few more without anything going wrong.
4) Plastered.
5) Back to where I was.

At the end of the day, your life, your choice. Do what you want. But you openly admit you have a problem and you have a temptation there you can get rid of.

I was concerned when you wrote about 'faking' drinks at the holiday get-together, instead of just telling those folks that you don't drink any more.

Agree with others on the wine issue. From what you've written before, sounds like a bad plan.

You must know someone who likes wine and would be glad to take them.

Best wishes.

Also that Coppola wine ain’t that great.

I appreciate the sentiments, and everyone's advice here is very sound--on paper--but you guys are nuts. I wasn't going to throw out 3 good bottles of wine from one of my favorite directors. Good Lord no.

Anyways, it's done. The wine is gone into my belly and back out again. I woke up today feeling fine, with no compunction to go out and buy more. The next inflection point will be Christmas. My current plan is to politely decline any offers of a drink from family members, and when asked why, act like I don't have to explain why. "I'd rather have a soda/water/juice," is going to be it for explanations.

I was a pack-a-day man for almost 30 years. I was physically addicted to the point where I would wear a patch on flights, so I didn't have to feel like I was going to die from not smoking for a few hours.

I hated cigarettes because once I was hooked, there was no buzz outside of an occasional fleeting headrush--which itself wasn't particularly enjoyable. The 'buzz' of smoking was temporarily not feeling terrible from the lack of smoking.

So I was determined to quit. It took me a half-dozen tries, and the successful one involved switching to vaping for 3 months, then switching to successively smaller patches for 2 months, and then quitting--even then I still had occasional cravings for more than a year.

I've been quit for 8 years now, with no cravings in a very long time. I smoked a cigar a couple of years back, and it made me slightly nauseous, so I will attest that I am an ex-smoker and not a "recovering" smoker.

I've been holding up all right, and dry, since my defeat at the Battle of the Three Wines. And I quit another addiction this week: this one involving my phone.

I mentioned a while back that I was playing a stylized version of solitaire on my phone, one that is free-to-play but pay-to-win, in the tradition of Candy Crush and similar titles whose mechanism is in-game currency and power-ups and boosters, making all these good things available to the player for a little cash, or not-so-readily available for the expenditure of a lot of time and effort.

I chose the time and effort route...always. I never paid a dime for the game. I shouldn't be smug about that because I did, however, play the game every day for 850 consecutive days. I know that because the game rewarded me for it, every 50 days or so, with increasing amounts of in-game goodies.

Thus we come to the aphorism that if you're not paying for the product, then you are the product. In this case me as the product was my labor in watching ads. I played the game seven days a week for a little over two hours a day, a span interrupted regularly by ads, which added up to about a half an hour out of the two hour session--so I watched around three and a half hours of in-game ads every week.

I also participated in helping others stay hooked on the game by being part of a player team that earned perks through meeting daily team goals, and separate to that, I had 30 "friends"--the maximum allowed--with whom I would give and receive in-game currency as often as every 4 hours.

It was through a near-GTO strat of ad-watching, team participation and friend management that I never came close to running out of the in-game currency that's required to keep playing the game. But actually...



the game developers had me where they wanted me. Playing several hours a day and watching ads.

The hardest part about quitting was the prospect of disappointing my team and my "friends." I actually made an announcement to my team that I was retiring from the game, before I uninstalled it. As for my friends: the game doesn't let us contact each other. All they know is that I've stopped playing.

Some of them were with me for more than two years, and after a certain number of days, they'll have to conclude that I'm gone forever, and they'll have to unfriend me and reach out and find someone else to take my place, which in that game is a process that is rife with rejection, as most players tend to carry the max complement of friends.

I am now making 30 people go through that process. This feeling of being a disappointment is entirely game developer-generated, of course, but no less real for that.

Anyways, the good thing about this is that I'll have two more hours a day to do something more useful.

Two weeks ago I read an advice column piece in which a husband complained about his wife because she had broken her promise to forgo her work as a part-time novelist to spend that time taking care of their infant child. He was mad because without telling him, she had spent her lunch hour every day at her full-time job working on a new novel. After a year or so of this, she'd finished the book and turned it over to her publisher, and for this she picked up a $100,000 advance.

And the husband was ****ing mad about it. He felt betrayed that she didn't skip her lunch and come home to the baby an hour early every day. And after brooding about it for quite a while, I started to suspect that the piece might be a fake, generated by the advice columnist for clicks. I was too perfectly outraged by the thought that a man would be mad at his wife for making them $100k by writing for an hour a day.

Good job to the columnist in either case: either choosing the missive or making it up. That's a bit of art right there, that is.

But it's the idea of writing a book for an hour a day that goes on to make six figures...that idea has stayed with me. I've probably averaged much less than an hour a day typing in this thread, and after three years I would wager that my contribution here is at least book length by now.

Next, I would like to review Apocalypse Now, one of my favorite movies. If I'm feeling frisky, then I might bring in Natural Born Killers--another favorite--for comparison and contrast

Congrats on letting go of that mobile game. I know all too well how tempting it is to try and "keep your streak".

"The big obstacle atm is the research. I still have to find out how to deejay. I'm pretty sure that searching around on the Internet for a couple of hours will give me an idea, or maybe even open a connection with a helpful deejay who will answer some questions, once I know which questions to ask."

Given how wonderfully warped your sense of humour is, could the search, by your main character, for information about how to DJ, be a chapter in itself?

The 100k advance story sounds fishy.

Looking forward to the Apocalypse Now review.

Feels good, man. Except that I've turned around and dumped most of that free time into my main video game console. Baby steps, I guess.

I'm playing Fallout 3 for the nth time. On this run, I'm limiting myself to explosives and flaming shishkebab sword only, and I'm going around the Capital Wasteland trying to blow up every one of several hundred cars, trucks and buses in the land, as their 200-year-old mini-nuke engines make for a satisfying controller-rattling kaboom when they go up, along with forming a little 10 meter mushroom cloud.

Welcome back, mendicant loafer! I hope the world is treating you well. I like the idea! For me, there's always a temptation to go meta with the narrative, so much so that I often have to make a conscious effort to tamp it down, so the story doesn't turn into an Ouroboros and eat itself.

Thanks Phat Mack! Review will be soon. But not now.

Budding Agoraphobia: Part I

A few months ago I moved into my apartment. Among my possessions were several weeks' worth of clean clothes. Well, sort of: I only had 4 pairs of jeans, but jeans, when carefully rotated and only worn in public, can be stretched out over several weeks before needing a wash.

Several weeks later, I set out to wash my clothes...a simple task, really. My apartment complex has 4 buildings, with 8 units in each building. The laundry is in the cellar of the building next to mine. I don't like that. I'd much prefer the laundry room to be in a separate shed or shack with a common access point, but it isn't. I have to key into someone else's building to clean my clothes.

I steeled myself with alcohol--though at that time I would have had a buzz on regardless of the circumstances--I grabbed my roll of quarters and my laundry and my Tide pod, and I stumbled over to the basement of the other building in the middle of the night, so as not to have to see anyone.

And I was confronted with this.



Pay with my phone? Go **** yourself. My addictive phone game took up all of my phone's free memory and I had neither the space nor the inkling to download a laundry app. I grabbed my dirty laundry and stumbled back to my apartment.

A week later, I went to the laundromat up the center of town.



I was somewhat smart and only lost a quarter each on two defunct washing machines before I found a third that worked. I found a working dryer on the first try, but I think I was just running good on that dryers that day. Also, there were two unrelated creepy guys hanging out there, not washing clothes from what I could tell, due to this laundromat being the type of public space where creeps aren't asked to move along.

That was my last trip to the laundromat. And that began a long cycle of carefully rotating through dirty clothes, and agonizing about how I was going to get them washed. Now, my elderly mother lives nearby, and she would be happy to wash my clothes for me. But I am a middle aged man, and I have my pride, so that is not an option.

Inevitably, my clothes began to stink. Mind you I have around 20 pairs of underwear and 20 pairs of socks, so I can go for quite a while rotating through these before there's an issue, but I did in fact go for quite a while...months. As for the jeans: I bought more jeans. Problem solved, temporarily, but that was also done weeks ago.

Now, if I can smell myself, you can only imagine how bad I smell to others. Every day at work, the dread of having someone finally confront me with it has loomed up larger and closer.

Today, Christmas Day, I have to go and sit with my family, with me in stinky clothes. Will they say something? In any case, they certainly won't enjoy it, and they don't deserve it.

I will be getting new clothes as presents, but I can't exactly run to the bathroom and change right then and there. Or can I?

I'm leaving to go there soon, so I'll have to finish this when I come back.

Not sure, but I don't think the symbol on your apartment's machine means only pay by phone. Doesn't it mean you can tap your chipped CC too?

Merry Christmas SJ and his followers!
The story gets more and more fascinating, but I somehow wishes that it becomes boring, if you know what I mean.

Not exactly, but you're on to something.

Merry Christmas uberkuber!

Budding Agoraphobia: Part II


If you think about the origin of the picture of the dryer you'll soon realize that my will he/won't he Stink for Christmas cliffhanger was a bit of staged melodrama, thrown into the blog at the last second for a cheap thrill.

I went back to my apartment's laundry room for a second look...this morning around 6:30 AM, so as not to run into anyone. I had room on my phone from recently uninstalling a memory-hogging game, room for a laundry app if necessary.

We'd had freezing rain all last night, and the steps and parking lot were a skating rink. I threw deicer on my steps before proceeding across the parking lot very carefully--walking like a penguin, alternately like an early '00s down-pantsed gangsta wannabe, with my weight always perpendicular to the ground.

I had my load of laundry in tow, trying not to swing it back and forth as I shuffled, as that would tend to propel me in a chaotic direction at an unwanted velocity. I also had a Tide pod with me, tucked into my flannel shirt pocket, worrying the whole time that I would fall onto the ice and smoosh it.

But I safely reached the steps of the apartment building with the cellar laundry and I hit those steps with the deicer as well. So far so good.

Downstairs and into the laundry room. Empty. Good. Now I saw a machine that I'd missed the last time (because I was drunk). That machine takes cash, and for cash it issued me a card that could be read by the washing and drying machines.

I'd brought what I thought was one load, but in practice it took up two of the washing machines. I dumped my one Tide pod into one machine and started both machines. Then I schlepped back through the freezing rain to my room for a second Tide pod.

Arriving back, I soon found that I was not allowed to open the one Tide pod-less washing machine while it was running. It was locked until the cycle ended, and I couldn't stop the cycle.

I opened up a little shelf where you dump in liquid detergent and was immediately confronted with a sign that said "Do Not Put Tide Pods in Here." I took out my key and pierced the Tide pod, and that move made more than half of the liquid inside squirt all over my hand and my keys. Only a bit of the Tide pod liquid actually made it into the detergent shelf.

I decided to go back to my apartment, wash my hands and keys, and come back at the end of the cycle with two fresh Tide pods, and to just do another wash cycle.

Why do two loads for second time when I really only needed to do one? Ah, well one dryer happens to be big enough to take both wash loads, so I didn't want to pay to dry the two wash loads separately, and I didn't want to leave one wash load just sitting there waiting while I ran the Tide pod-less one for a second time. There are only three washers for the whole apartment complex, and I didn't want to leave wet, inactive clothes in one while I washed in another.

So after 4o minutes I came back with two fresh Tide pods, but they were stuck together. When I tried to pull them apart, they both opened up and spilled their liquids all over my hands and the floor.

I decided to forgo a second wash cycle after all, and hope that the small amount of Tide pod liquid would be enough to clean my stinky, months' dirty clothes in washer #2.

I loaded up the dryer and shuffled across the skating rink parking lot again, to return across it 50 minutes later. And to find two other people in the laundry room, loading up the washers. Both of them were wearing masks. I'd forgotten mine. I hadn't even thought about it, to be honest.

I had two minutes left on my dryer, and those were the longest two minutes I've run across in a very long time. That's when I took the picture of the dryer. It was something to do while my selfish maskless ass waited two century minutes for my clothes to finish drying.

I'm not sure when I'm going to get up the gumption to do another load.

Back on the sauce or is this historic writings?

A+ SJ writing, loving the laundry saga. Especially if not on the juice.

Thanks Da_Nit!

I did the laundry sober, with only my natural neuroses to keep me company. I had 3 beers at the family gathering, the first alcohol since the three gift wines earlier in the month.

We have no family gatherings scheduled until Easter, and none of my friends drink, and I have no intention of buying any of my own, so I'm looking forward to a few dry months coming up.

Well good job SJ, we’re routing for you. Your writing is as good, if not better off the booze.

Thanks brother!

Happy New Year! Here's to better luck next year.

Apocalypse Now: Some Brief Preliminaries

I had my conceit well-prepared for a long review of one of my all-time favorite movies. It revolved around two very different people: the writer: John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, Dillinger, and two Dirty Harry movies),



and the director: Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now, the Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, The Outsiders.)


The idea was that I would contrast the conservativism of one, and the liberalism of the other; the hawkishness of one, and the dovishness of the other, and I would then labor to show how the two disparate elements worked together to forge a strong and lasting alloy, a masterpiece of cinema, something that--like any good alloy--came out greater than the sum of its parts.

But today I ran across this interview--Coppola interviewing Milius for 49 minutes, and things changed.



I realized that my initial perspective was too pat, too simplistic, too cut and dry. (By the way, I don't expect any of you to spend 49 minutes watching a YouTube video--that's my job.) And after watching this fantastic interview, I've concluded that I'll have to reread Conrad's Heart of Darkness--the basis of Apocalypse Now--for the first time in 30 years before I can start in on the review of the film. So that's next for me. I'll get to the bookstore this week.

This morning it occurred to me that Conrad's Heart of Darkness is old enough to be in the public domain; therefore I could likely read it online without stepping on anyone's toes.

Project Gutenberg's Heart of Darkness

I'll start in on that today. Why is Heart of Darkness important? In the interview above, John Milius said that he had read the novella years before and had had it in mind when he wrote Apocalypse Now, but he'd avoided going back and rereading it while writing the screenplay; he had just relied upon his vague memories and impressions.

Coppola, on the other hand, replied that he'd carried Heart of Darkness in his back pocket the entire time he directed Apocalypse Now, and he'd referred to it constantly while shooting.

So there might be some key to analyzing this movie match-up within Heart of Darkness. I read it many years ago and don't remember being terribly impressed by it. I remember being confused and not being able to concentrate on the story much, but that's all I remember. Let's see what 30 years and the context provided above have done for it.

I just got around to watching the Milius interview this morning. This could be interesting.

which version of Apocalypse Now are you planning to review?