Grandparents vs Modern Technology

Its been a lovely week in the house hold that I currently call home base. This is the week that the BIG digital conversion happens in tv, meaning that the analog signal goes bye bye and we usher in a new age of DIGITAL!..

So my grandparents,




both in their early 80's, like many people their age, Don't have cable or satellite TV. My grandmother records TV shows on basic TV like a crack head needing a fix. There are literally 200 recordable VHS tapes sitting in 4 different piles in their massive home. Since they don't "WORK" anymore, they'll watch one show when it airs, and then, go back and watch a show on tape that they recorded roughly 5 months prior!

This has been their routine since I was just a wee lad still in my feety pajamas and they were real heavy into shows like LA LAW and HUNTER!

So, with this new DIGITAL conversion happening, a stereotype like a black loving Grape Soda, they're old, and had to buy the digital converter boxes. And guess who gets to help hook them up!

This guy.



...aka me!

Now, to get an idea of the last 2 days of getting these things set up properly, (which is as easy as plugging a hair dryer into the wall outlet) consider this:

My grandparents have been married for 59 years. My grandfather reminds me of Clint Eastwood's character from Grand Torino, and my grandmother is a hybrid of Ethel Murtz and Lucy Ricardo! Constantly looking for some sort of entertaining stimulation with Ethel's looks! Combined that, and woo! Just a cornucopia of colorful language!

We finally get the damn boxes up and running, and with things like these, it takes my grandfather a day or so to get use to it. Grandmother, it'll be another 4 years before she figures out what channel the things need to be on just to watch TV.

Now, for the big kicker. With these digital boxes, its like a cable box. There's a separate remote and the box changes the channel, not the TV or VCR. Which means... that the Timer Recorder on the VCR is now rendered USELESS! It took them 5 months to properly grasp the concept of DVDs when my aunt bought them a DVD player for Christmas 3 years ago. But they didn't understand it when I told them that VHS was basically dead, and, at the time, in a few years that they're tape collection will be useless. Well, that day came yesterday.

They went in to full on denial mode like a army general when he finds out his first born son is a flaming homosexual!

My grandfather insist that the company that produced these boxes wouldn't make them that you couldn't TIMER RECORD off your TV. I told them that they can still "RECORD" but it has to be what they're currently watching, and if you set a channel on the VCR that's not the channel set to the Converter box, they're just going to record fuzz. My grandmother insist that she's successfully recorded a bunch of shows in the last 2 days. In review, nothing but fuzz.

This has led to the resumed talk of getting cable finally. I've been pushing the idea since I've moved in for several reasons.

A) DVR: With our satellite service, my mom's place gets free DVR and 100 hours of recording. No more tapes. I tell them that they would be like kids in a candy store, hopped up on crank! It would make life so much easier!
B) I would have cable at their place, and I would be able to stop hanging out at my moms place and dealing with her shit every day.
C) I buy most of the stuff that comes on the Discovery Channel. They love Deadliest Catch. I tell them that they would be able to watch this stuff WHEN IT AIRS! Not only that but cable TV has so many superior shows than regular TV that they wouldn't know where to start!

This has enticed my grandmother, who lives vicariously through everyone else in the family, thus driving them nuts, and give her something to do during the day! She's real Gun ho for it. My grandfather, not so much. He's always been big on not paying for TV. He's very adamant about not spending $80 a month

So for now, at least the time being, I come home to the ramblings of two people in a loving, hate filled marriage over TV. I then go upstairs, grab some films (that haven't been pillaged by them or my brother) and go to my moms place, where I can at least talk back when I'm getting bitched at.

I'm currently recruiting the rest of the family to get behind my call to arms to get my grandparents to break down and finally get cable TV.. Life would be so much easier then.. just for once!

Dead Man's Party

Before I begin, let me make one statement.

FUCK ARIZONA!

It'll be a cold day in hell and the devils piss will freeze mid stream before I go back there again.

I spent this weekend out in Lake Havasu. Not a place that I had a lot of motivation to visit, but this was an extreme circumstance. I'm not going to go deep into it, but my friends mom had suddenly passed away, and the funeral was in Havasu. Again, it would take something of that importance to get me to go out there.

So, after driving 4 hours across the god forsaken desert, my travel companions and I arrive in Havasu, only to get lost from the shit poor street structuring and giant looping design of the place. There were no less than 6 different Lake Havasu streets: Lake Havasu st, Lake Havasu dr, Lake Havasu cir ect. ALL RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER!!!!! It was maddening to the point that I wanted to go to the grave of the man who founded the town, dig up his bones and urinate in his skull!

We finally find my buddies place, plop down after some food, and I get a few hours of sleep and we head off to the funeral home.

I like to claim that a lot of things don't get to me. I've watched my fair share of perverted acts of sexual debauchery and seen people get maimed and killed online. Graveyards are kinda fascinating to me in a weird way, but not in that Goth-y, lets fuck on a persons grave while we recite Danzig lyrics. But there are two major places in which I can't explain my self in. 1) Hospitals. Something about the sanitized smell of death puts me on edge like cat who's fur is being petted the wrong way. 2) Funerals.

I've been to 3 so far in my life time, and I know that there will be more, but there is something in the atmosphere that makes me uneasy and paranoid. And it's not the fact that there's some one DEAD in a box across from where I'm sitting. I don't know, something just unnerves me.

The service goes off, and its sad, like funerals are. But at the end of the service, after everyone has said their peace, the Reverend gave us a couple psalms, and everyone had some what held it together, they play a video. What a bad idea.

Personally, I think that home video is the greatest BOON to the death industry. This was prime example. See the funeral started out with a touching song that was played over the PA system. It got every one's water works going. But the video, a montage of my friend's mother (who I knew very well, and was a wonderful woman) was just a gut punch after a terrible beating had just went down. The photos and stock footage of the things she loved played to a sad song had just about everyone in the place a massive heap. I thought to myself at this moment "WHAT DIRTY RAT BASTARD THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA AT THIS MOMENT!"

It was at this point that I started thinking, as I normally do.

I started thinking about my Funeral. Morbid I know. But let me elaborate..

It was a HELLBLAZER issue,


in which John Constantine was dying of cancer (much like in the movie) and he had just left the doctors office and was having an ALAN MOORE monologue to himself. He put it "A lot of people don't think about dying, but its something that the should" (I'm butchering the quote, as I don't have the issue handy at the moment) but it's something that's always stuck with me.

I'm constantly up in my own head, going over scenarios and other things, that's why I write on here. My own demise is one of the things that I'm constantly obsessed about. I joke about it from time to time, and its part of the reason I don't go to the beach at night. (I had a recurring dream that I would buy it in a massive tidal wave at the beach at night.. never seeing the thing coming till it was too late) but its something that I can't get out of my head. No, its not emo ish thoughts of suicide either, its the opposite. Where I get paranoid some times about doing things that I think might end it all. I've gotten over a lot of it in the last few years after doing some soul searching, but there are still little things that put me back in that mind set.

But, my funeral is something that I rarely think about. At this moment though, it was something that I starting going over in my head.

I decided on several things.

A) No cremation. Unless I pop off in a chemical fire, or I'm ravaged by a new contagious disease, I want my body in tact. My perfect situation would to be like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, and freeze myself till science can revive me. Preferably as s cyborg, but I'll take ravenous bio beast too! If that cant be done, I would like to be Entombed, like the mighty Pharaohs or fallen hero's of history. And if that's the way it has to be, I want some taxidermy done on me like Lenin did.





B) No sad music. I don't want fucking Green Day's Time of your life, the fucking song from the Breakfast club, any thing by fucking Coldplay or anything with a down beat! What I want is something WAY over the line and inappropriate. I want the service to start with me in the casket, propped up against the wall, not lying down! I want to adorn in armour with a battle ax in one hand and a sycle in the other, and WHITE AND NERDY by Weird Al to kick things off. Then when it seems like things are going to settle down after the initial shock of Weird Al playing, I want a few words spoken, and for the usher to play DEAD MAN'S PARTY by Oingo Boingo if tears start rolling. If a video is to be played, I want a montage of the WORST PICTURES OF ME THAT ANYONE CAN FIND with Dennis Leary's I"M AN ASSHOLE played over it, but that's only if there MUST BE a video played. Finally, after the last respects are played, I want to be hauled out to Akira Ikafube's Godzila's Theme. If not, I will come back as a ghost and poltergeist the fuck out of everyone.

C) There must be the following figures around my coffin: A bandai Godzilla, preferably the late 90s one. A dicast Voltron, an Iron Hide from Transformers, A Pumpkinhead figure, a large T-Rex, don't care from what, He-Man and Skeletor, a Delorian from Back to the Future 2 and a Proton pack!

D)I want two women dressed as Japanese Gothic Lolita girls to hand out the little pamphlet that gives a person the stats of the dead's funeral. And I want something along the lines of Royal Tennenbam's DIED HEROICALLY SAVING HIS FAMILY FROM A SINKING SHIP as the reason for my demise. Just a blatant lie! Maybe died saving a school bus of children from a pack of ravenous Kodiak bears in the Alaskan wilderness! And, there must be a midget dressed as Toad from Super Mario Brothers to greet everyone coming in.

E) I want a picture of Hunter S Thompson hung behind me, and a poster of Billy D Williams whoring Colt 45 beside me.

F) Finally, I want a Frank Frazetta esq painting of me, slaying a two headed dragon with a broken sword on top a pile of bones as 5 nude and chained women look on in sexual terror!

Basically, what Jim Henson had for his funeral.

Much like UP did for me last week, this weekend just got me thinking more about what I'm doing with my life. I've always been one to push that you could pop off at any time, so don't waste the time that you have, but I've been hard to take my own medicine sometimes. As long as I don't kill over, David Carridean style, I think that things will be fine.

OH, and still, FUCK ARIZONA!