In Which My Electronics Conspire Against Me
My guitar amp told me I had a “bad attitude” once. Scared the absolute piss out of me, mostly because it was right.
This was the 90s, so cordless phone technology and an unshielded practice amp conspiring to talk shit was not a huge shock conceptually, but a very loud voice saying “you’ve got a bad attitude” while I was playing along with Iron Maiden’s Live at Donnington was surprising enough that I immediately shut the amp off and jumped to the other side of the room. Not sure what either of those actions would have accomplished in a poltergeist situation, but I was prepared to go down fleeing.
If this situation was not a stinging rebuke on the shoddy craftsmanship of sub-$100 Crate solid-state practice amplifiers but was indeed an admonishment from beyond the veil, I regret to inform you that it had little to no impact on my actual attitude, which to this day is often referred to as “bad”.
In my defense, things are often shit.
In counterargument, there are a few family members who feel my attitude–particularly towards cystic fibrosis–has improved over the last decade or so. This is because I stopped telling them about how much it sucks.
The best case scenario for any complaint is a solution to the problem. This type of resolution is rare enough that the only example I can some up with off the top of my head would be if your meal was a little cold and you got someone to put it in the microwave for half a minute.
There were multiple years that my insurance coverage teetered on a cliff. I desperately wanted it to take just one giant step back from the edge and give me a barely livable set of parameters with which I could run out the clock while still maintaining a proper supply of prescriptions. It was the worst time in my life.
I’m nearly two decades removed from it now, though it still comes up a lot because a.) I’m two to three mistakes from being right back in it and b.) it sucked. But a funny thing has happened in the ensuing years. Someone who was there and absolutely heard a lot about it at the time—a parent, though I won’t tell you which one to protect their SEO—said “why didn’t you ask for help? We could have figured it out.”
A younger me would have went batshit at that, but time has given me the strength to simply explain that I did ask and no help was coming. Perhaps that’s a point in the “improved attitude” column.
To be clear, I’m not sure there was anything that anyone could do to fix the problem. We actually did visit a lawyer to see if disability was on the table and I did apply, but the decision was essentially “this wheezing, 130 pound tank of a man? Any help we give him would only hold him back!”.
Being the weasel that I am, I did eventually figure something out, though it required a tremendous set of doors to appear before me and I had to run through them before anyone noticed. My situation now is best described as “perturbed, but stable” which means everyone can look back at the bad times and say “it was tough, but you did it!” or re-litigate decisions that were made or even pretend that they could have assembled a war room to make these problems disappear. None of which I’m all that interested in, because I have a bad attitude.
The one mocking comfort here is that after all these years, after the housing crisis and COVID and the other housing crisis, I can see that I was/am not alone. No help is coming for anyone. Well, anyone with less than a $100 billion market cap anyway.
The people who do not know this always seem to learn it too late, after having stood in the way because things were going well for them. But the body always fails and the price of that failure is steep and it might be neat to make literally any decision that could relieve some of that burden, but it also might be neat if my dog starting shitting solid gold, but I just don’t see that happening.
In Which My Bad Attitude Tries to Get Me to Kick a Chair
We leased a car this weekend and I’m furious about it. There’s a low thrum of anger that has accompanied me since the day I was born and it can still roar on occasion, but it’s a controlled roar. Be it the wisdom or numbness of age, it’s been years since I felt the switch flip and my heart race as every cell in my body told me I needed to kick something and storm out. That counter reset itself on Sunday.
We had a deal in place at one dealership, but the market being what it is, it wasn’t a great deal, so I thought I’d do the right thing and get a second opinion. With literal hours left in the month and minutes left in the workweek, we got a very aggressive deal from a competing dealership and I did the right thing and thanked the original dealership for their time, but told them we had to take this new offer.
And we did take the new offer, though it was still a little higher than I’d like, that’s just the nature of everything right now. I felt a little bad for having to back out of the previous deal, but I’m looking to save everywhere I can and sell as little of my stuff as possible.
So we sat down to finalize everything with the finance manager and our monthly price magically jumped up $25. I did the wrong thing and did not walk out.
They played us perfectly on this. It had been about 90 minutes of waiting and it was about an hour past closing time for the dealership. We were hungry and ready to be done with the process. The finance manager explained why the deal changed, but I did not hear him, as my ears had already started ringing. It was suddenly very hot in the room and I could feel the blood in my face. I should have left. I stayed. And I cannot stop thinking about it, to the point that my chest is still a little tight and my blood a little hot as I type this.
I can sit here and type to you that I’m overreacting, but I do not believe it. I can sit here and tell you that I don’t know why it made me so angry, but that’s a lie too. I know exactly why: they won. I came so close to getting an okay deal on a mid-range Volkswagen, then shit myself at the 1 yard line. I got the “thank you so much for the pleasure of meeting” email from the sales person and immediately started looking up how to get out of a lease. It’s one thing to win, but another to gloat. The email also said they’d be looking forward to my Google review, but I don’t think that’s true.
There’s nothing I can do about the money at this point and I’m sure the extra $725 they got out of me is worth a couple of stars off some shitty internet review, but like pissing in the ocean, I may not be able to change the current, but I can make myself feel better until the moment passes and I’m standing in a cloud of my own rapidly cooling piss.
In any case, I’ll walk to my doctor’s appointments on my bloody exposed ankle bones before I ever set foot in that dealership again.
Please Buy Some Cassettes
The limited edition cassette run of the new All Hallow’s Evil album Coven has arrived. It’s very funny to me that at 15 years old I was desperate to release an album on something other than cassette and now I’m closing in on 40 and very excited to be back in the tape game. I just think they’re neat! Even if I am currently at war with a boombox I bought on eBay and a deck got from Goodwill.
Get the tapes here: https://allhallowsevil.bandcamp.com
Things I Like
I filled in a gap in my cinema knowledge and saw Brian DePalma’s Blow Out for the first time. I found it to be a pretty good 80s Hitchcock film with some tremendous camera work. Then the ending happened and it jumped into a whole new tier. The ending is just an incredible piece of ice cold work. It’s sad, it’s dark, it’s a little funny and it’s perfect.
I’ve also been playing the 2010 Dante’s Inferno game for the Xbox360. After playing the Ninja Gaiden games, I’ve grown a real taste for third person melee action and I also like things that take place in Hell. I have to say it’s legitimately one of the funniest games I’ve ever played. I laughed for 5 minutes when I damned Pontius Pilate and even though I knew they were coming, fighting an army of “unbaptized” babies still made me laugh. Some of the platforming loses me and the combat isn’t quite as good as Ninja Gaiden II, but what is?