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crazy, industrious little
Tuesday, October 19 1999
It's that time of year again. I notice it in the tears that stream down my cheeks from the cold air of the morning commute. There's very little that changes through the seasons in San Diego, but for half the year (or more), the mornings carry the unmistakable nip of winter. That nip is back; I'm wearing a jacket again, even if it's just a burden for the rest of the day.
At work today all of us employees received a long rambling email from the Grand Pooh Bah in which he expressed his outrage and frustration that a bit of text advertising supposed to change every day had in fact been constant for many days. Using obscene language, he reminded us that our company is only as strong as its weakest link and would the "95 percenters" please do us all a favour and quit before we have to fire them.
Between this email and his casual weekend request for an Artificial Intelligence Database Administer, I think the Grand Pooh Bah might just be losing it. He definitely fits a type that is rare but notorious in humanity: the crazy, industrious little guy out to take over the world. Guys with this complex have been shaking things up and going down in flames since the dawn of time: Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, the artist formerly known as Prince, Michæl J. Fox, the list goes on.
I came home to find that Kim had gone on something of a CD-buying shopping spree. Among the oddest addition to our music collection was three Type O Negative CDs which Kim got for cheap. The last I heard of Type O Negative was back in 1995 when they came through Charlottesville, Virginia on tour and Sara and Jessika made self-righteous fun of the lesbian-depicting posters advertising the show at Trax. The only Type O Negative song with which I'm familiar is the one called "I Know You're Fucking Someone Else." I remember that song being a favourite back in 1991 on the heavy metal show "Over the Edge" on WXJM, the 300 watt student station broadcasting from Harrisonburg, Virginia. To make it playable on the air, that song had so many bleeped-out lyrics that it was never more than just a novelty, sort of like a Weird Al Yankovich number. I remember when, during a heavy metal battle of the bands, "I Know You're Fucking Someone Else" was put up against the then little-known "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana. I remember at the time being agnostic about which song was better, but the audience was far more decisive; Nirvana kicked Type O Negative's ass. That was a little foreshadowing, I suppose, of what Nirvana was about to do to pop music generally, the artist formerly known as Prince included.
So now Kim is playing Type O Negative's 1993 album Bloody Kisses on repeat. It's the same old Type O Negative I remember, usually singing dark angry songs about untrustworthy yet desirably death-obsessed women. The guitars are all distorted in that characteristic Type O Negative way. They're played like heavy metal but there's something about the production that leaves them sounding more robotic than crunchy. There's a detectable amount of cheese in there too, but perhaps that's just an artifact of their self-identification with the deliberately phony goth scene.
In the evening Kim and I had another one of our huge fights. The only thing that was good about it was that it gave me the courage to tell her a few things that have been bothering me about our relationship.
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