Dead drunk on the brutal concrete floor. Not thinking, as is typical of the species, “Why’d she say that, the rabid dog?”
No, me a lingualist to the last dying synapse, I’m mano-a-mano with the elusive English category: Words what end in ‘id‘, all the better to make her feel really, really bad.
    I do prefer the ‘ending-in’ searches, them-there being less vulnerable to crude dictionary attacks. Which at this point I need  like a retro-virus.
And ‘Rabid’ is too good for her. Implies that even germs find her attractive. So what does that make me?
No, ‘vapid’ is more like it. Something to do with a vacuum, I think. Yeah, I’ll go with that.

 Cuz the chick sucks as a friend. One day hot, the next day, frigid. If I felt like joking, I’d say that on average she was ‘tepid’.
But I don’t. No, I jus wanna die here, nostrils smashed into the solid cement.
I do want to know what makes this horrid woman tick, though. Call it ‘morbid’ curiosity, I care?
I wuz stupid to fall for this Cupid in sheep’s clothes. Pulled the wool over my eyes. She prolly sez the same about me.
“Your coming un-rapid!” she screams, knoweth-ing not what she’s sayeth-ing.
“Am not!” I counter. I will not be called ‘un-lucid’ by by this putrid little arachnid.

    I roll over on the dismal floor-without-pity, seeking my ‘flat’ side, teeth biting into the aggregate. Oh well. It’s been years since I had a million-dollar smile. Nice even teeth I got: 1,3,5,7, and 9 are missing. I lose a cuspid about once a year, and a bi-cuspid ‘bi-annually‘. I
don’t even know what that word means. I’m losing it, is all I know. Pallid, I lie on this insipid floor, in this fetid vocab-id swamp, where even words fail me; sinking forever into the languid, liquid depths.
Yes, I guess it’s over, Friends. I’m defeatid.  (no, your ‘defeated‘(!) -ed)

    Stick this in your Resume, folks. Yeah, it’s probably what got me my new job, you know; seeing that awesome firm‘s name there, and my experience working for the outfit. So feel free to tack it onto your ‘curriculm vitae‘. Lucky me; I won’t be needing it anymore.
    Lots of readers probably think ‘rendering’ has something to do with web pages. Hah, it’s just a stolen use of the term by clueless modern cyborgs who never took a dead cow apart in their life.
But still, I was ready when the Human Services Rep asked me what I’d done there. I tried to explain:
“Well, you know there’s the Head, and the Body, and then of course the Foot?” I said, starting out on the right hoof. I could tell right off that he was buying it. Body language and all that. So I added, “…hey, somebody’s got to make sure they all appear in the right places.”
“And that somebody was you?” he asked.
I tried to look modest: “Well maybe not the first month.”
    The fellow was pretty spiffilly-dressed, compared to the folks I’d worked with; not a spot of  blood or guts on his shirt. Maybe this new outfit can afford free-loaders in the Front Office? I thought, but kept it to myself. He opened a Word-file(?)  on his ‘laptop’ (that’s what they call it?) and started with some questions. I think I handled them ok:
“So how’re you with Java?”
“No Problem. I did that for the guys, every morning, till I farmed it out to another new-hire.”
“And CSS?”
I had to think for a second, not wanting to lie or anything. CSS? Yeah, he probably means the ‘Cadaver Selection Specialist’ title they gave me, half in jest, at the New Year’s party.
“‘CSS‘? That’s kinda my ‘middle name‘, Steve.” I told him, relaxing into the naugahyde.
“Cut and Paste?” he continued down the list, as my confidence only increased.
“Ha, if there’s a critter I ain’t cut, I’d like to meet him.”, then added: “‘Paste‘ now? Yeah,
been there, done that, but the smell, you know?”
Steve looked a tad puzzled, but kept going with the script:
“Drag ‘n Drop?”
I thought for a second, not wanting to risk another wrinkled brow, but then:
“Well, I’ve dragged some fillies from the damndest places. Then dropped ‘em smack in the ‘new location’, bingo.”
“‘Files‘, you mean?”
“Yeah, Stevie boy. A horse by any other name, you know.”
“Browsers?”
This guy was making me a little nervous, but so far so good. It’s just that nobody ever called a
cow a ‘browser’, that I remembered. A ‘grazer’, maybe. They’re technically ‘ruminants’. Got four stomachs, to deal with digesting roughage. You wear a gas mask starting with #2. Still got mine, in the attic somewhere. But finally, I answered:
“Browsers? No prob. Yeah, I know my way around the guts of a browser. Got any hard questions, guy?” I replied, going on the offense.
Steve scrolled down, I guess they call it. Must’ve bumped the bottom of the TV-thingie’s screen. He looked away for a second, as if searching for more bullets.
“Hide?” was all he found on that little trip.
“Well, we didn’t do hides in-house.”, I confessed, “Old George always said ‘Hides, that’s an outside job’.” I laughed, hoping Steve would be similarly amused. He wasn’t, but hey, can’t win ‘em all. Steve picked up my curriculum vitae, scanning it hurridly:
“So how long’s Redner been in business?” he asked.
“Nineteen oh-seven; that makes a hundred years an’ change, right?” I beamed proudly. Steve gaped at me like a man whose butt just fell off:
“A hundred years? That’s like, before I was born!?”
“Righto, puppy. And me too.” I consoled him. But it was too late.
“So what were they doing for the first 80 years, in web-development?” Steve demanded to know. I felt the blood drain into my socks, thought about how much I needed a real gig, you know, and not as some hack chopping up rotting animal carcasses for the Recycling Bin. And somehow, I got my second wind:
“Listen, Stevie, Redner pioneered Broom Solutions to Web Development.” I gushed, on a new roll. “Plus, they’ve always been the greenest of the green. I mean, the grid goes down, your UPS times-out, whadaya do, boss? Righto, You light a f*ckin candle, is what. And where do candles come from?”
“Redner? was all Steve could limply offer.
“Right on, bro. Tallow. Google it sometime.”
And with that wax-job, Steve, either by my sheer personal magnetism or through brow-beating seemed to fold his cards:
“Well, Mr Solberg, I guess we might as well have a quick tour, to show you what your new job entails.”
For some reason, I heard ‘entrails’.

Ok, do check the previous post for how to easily murder that awful Meebo chat-bar, etc on your site. But I do need to post a small WARNING here. Do it at your own risk!
   See nowadays everybody’s linked to everybody. I get an email from MelFamy mentioning Buckminster Fuller and my g-mail is suddenly alive with links for  Fuller Brush Company, plus an outfit who’ll set me up with ‘fuller breasts’, for a price. So no wonder Meebo found out about my treason.

-STAN TANNED NATASHA’S ANTS-

Andy’s reply surprised me:
-NADA. STAN’S A SATAN-
Ok then, I thought to myself, and replied:
-HA!-   …then quickly searched for Stan’s cell#. Great, got it. Sent him a fairly long query; (I’m not big on the old ‘WHASSUP’ even on texting). He responded with a puzzled -??-.
That’s when I realized, mebbe ‘it’s not them it’s me‘?  It’s ‘MY’ phone’s alphabet that Meebo’s dicking with? What to do? I got straight to the point:
-STAN,  Y?-

-SHE NEEDS A HAT- he replied within seconds. ‘A hat’?? I thought, and so I sent him:
-A HAT??-
No reply… and sadly, that’s the last info I have on this formicide investigation. He probably means ‘a tin-foil hat’, but go try to spell that out with a ‘SHATN-DY’ keyboard. My only question is: ‘If I capitulate and put the god-damn Meebo-virus back on my Xanga page, do I get to use the whole alphabet?‘  Only Meebo knoweth, and they ain’t talking…
Like I said folks, consequences. Karma. Step on a crack/ break yer Momma’s back.’. And you won’t even have the letters to say you’re sorry.

    Just Wow! Nothing else I did today can compare to the thrill of seeing Xanga back loading in a split-second, and not having that useless and annoying bar and its balloon blow-buddy filthing up my page. It’s also disappeared from my view at least, of  other victims’ sites.
    Now all I want is like, $30 an hour for the probably days I wasted of my life staring at “waiting for rd.meebo.con” in the task-bar (bottom of browser)
The screen-capture here, (courtesy of www.outspark.com) explains three ways to defeat the Beast. I used the third method and simply added the pest-site’s name to my Hosts file. The browser still tries to call the site (it’s in the page’s source-code after all), but is re-directed harmlessly to 127.1.1.0, which is the web address of my own asshole, or something similar.

“Get thee behind me, Satan!” Oh, and taste leaden death...

     Another rain-day, and time for sober reflection. Even gods screw up at times, turns out. I spent last night on the phone with one; he’d created what he thought was a perfectly charming Universe, but had dumbly set it up with four (4) space dimensions. Turned out his life-forms couldn’t even use their cell-phones. Something with signal-strength declining according to the inverse CUBE of distance. Duh! ‘A simple phone call coulda saved your newbie ass, buddy?’
I bought his basket-case World for a nickle on the dollar and parked it out in the Oort Cloud till I get time to dick with it, and let him crash in my now-vacant chicken house, now that my fowl are free to range.

But seriously, folks, I am not blind. I compare my writing here, in criteria such as witty, clever, wise, elegant, original, and tactful, to the Top Blog fare on the sad Front-Page Menu,
and yeah, no question, the Kid’s got the Right Stuff.
Used to be, readers told me that to my face, or at least to my backside, like Moses and that other God, once popular but misunderstood.
But it’s frustrating, (if I can admit to a human emotion), to keep writing killer material (or at least, ‘sickening’) and then to see that the parking lot for bow-down-and-worship-ers is barely half full, While lightweights with their cheap plastic toy-blogs gresham’s-law my ouevre into a forgotten corner.
Silly humans. I forgive them; they ‘know not what they (fail to) do’. I mean, how many times can a busy reader comment “Solberg, you tower above the competing beasts like a giraffe in a circus parade.”
Jeezuz, I may be forced to act ‘mature’. To continue to post, but without any delusions of
xanga-grandeur, granduer, whateveah. Serves me right, in a way. I built this World using a beta
‘String-Theory’ model, in a pinch, even though my Dad told me a thousand times “Ya cain’t push on a string.” The Old Guy’s probably laughing all he way to Alpha Centauri as we speak, watching me try to net “-47 Comments- 29 E-props-” here in my failed project. “If I write it, they will come.” I’d gushed at the time. He looked down at me like Reagan’s famous ‘There you go again’.
Oh well, at least I plowed a nice Field of Dreams. So what if some of the potatoes didn’t sprout.

     Like millions of other similarly obsessed English speakers, this morning over breakfast (Kool-aid and Bar-B-Q chips) I gave the FLA- sound the old acid test and was electrified to discover how much flax I found. Let’s go at once to the handy list I made, for anyone who needs living proof.

Three days later:
Sorry, reader. Looks like I have a problem. But cheerio and all that rot. Back up on the horse:
FLAW:  Often fatal. At times the law is called in for this one.
FLAX:  Yeah, another way to build a shirt. A great replacement garment, especially if you have no skin
FLAY:  Taking the skin off a guy; so he’ll buy a flax shirt
FLAZ:  No idea. Feel free to help me out here

    I was just now on the Blogger site Google forced me into creating in order to comment on posts by a writer here who jumped overboard, abandoning this perfectly sea-worthy Xanga ship for the desolate horse-latitudes somewhere else. Seriously lonely anywhere but Xanga.

     Mixed feelings though. I have a good 200 Subscribers, but receive input here from barely 5 percent of them. What’s an agressive drunk to do?
Well god-dammit, I’ll show them who’s the boss! It’s currently raining like hell outside, so I’ve
got time to kill. I’ll go down the list and each and every stinking derelict who hasn’t found it
in his heart to have anything good or bad to say about my 1000 carefully-composed posts here will get a tactfully-worded (hah) private Message explaining his debt to Xanga-society. While I’m at it, I’ll check when’s the last time they seem to have even looked at their Page. Workers found innocently dead, through no fault of their own, will be respectfully removed from the premises. For those who simply fell asleep, a brief attempt shall be made to awaken them, after which, depending on the results, they may also be escorted to a nearby landfill.
But God be ye Merciful in Heaven, Amen, unto the Condemned who appear to be conducting an active ‘Life as Usual’, but have forgotten or ignored their signed-in-blood Oath to pay me attention. Plenty of rotting fruit in that Vintage where the Grapes of Wrath are stored, and I shall wickedly enjoy tossing it at their blithe heads.

      Approaching two guys on the sidewalk, I hear one of ‘em tell the other: “Hide!”
I quickly scan the scene for anything threatening, and finding nada asked the one who hadn’t fled the area: “A cow’s outside?”
He kept his distance while he dryly answered: “Nah, who’s afraid of a cow? It’s you we gotta watch out for.” and kept walking.
Made me feel real shitty for a hundred yards or so. ‘What have I done? Oh, that?’ I remembered too late having met the fellow. He was working in some auto-parts store, and when his advice saved me mega-shekels fixing my Fiesta’s steering, I’d thanked him… and briefly put my hand on his shoulder, for emphasis. A total stranger. Is this normal?

“This probably involves yer Mom.” suggests the pre-occupied shrink.
“Yeah, probably…” I reply. and turn away. No hand for this guy.
But does he have a point? What kind of pathetic parenting during childhood could’ve created such a late-onset touchy-feely monster 50 years later?
Well, it turns out that the auto-parts guys was just being funny. Something about fearing me
motoring down the sidewalk, even on foot, with my front feet disconnected from the steering
wheel, which was the case when we’d briefly met.
But damn, I sure am paranoid. I truly wonder how many folks have silently wondered: “What’s this dude’s thing with contact?”
I can quit anytime I want, I tell myself. Keep my hands clasped behind my back, for example. But I’m sure then they’d talk about that.
‘So doctor, what’s a guy to do? And what are those handcuffs for?’

     I remember giving the guy a dumb look. I mean, what does getting all of your runaway marbles back into the box, in order, have to do with causing felines pain? But I didn’t say anything out loud. No, picking apart someone’s strained metaphor, and in public, can set the guy’s emotional development back ten years. I know this well, having seen my own share of blank stares.
    Anyway, I thought of this ‘duh’ moment while composing my Terms of Service Form for prospective stray cats. Yeah, I made fifty copies. Ever since I transformed 10 acres of junkyard into an organic Garden of Eden, new cats have arrived here daily, eyeing up the opportunities for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of a warm place to poop.
    Now I don’t have to remind anyone that there is a wide range of feline behavior patterns, ranging from ‘I want to have your kittens, gorgeous!’ all the way down to ‘Shoot you on sight’.
So I thought that if I’d create a tactful Sign-up sheet, it might spare me rude surprises, and also hard feelings among the Great Furry Unwashed. Here’s the current version:

Ok, like with most bureaucratic documents, the bad apples rush to find a way to cheat. Some cats brazenly lie about relevant details, a minority albeit, but enough to force me to ‘take measures’. Yes, like ‘how large should a cat-trap be?‘ I made mine 55 X 65 cm. Roomy enough for the trip ‘out-a-heah’. And yesterday I ‘relocated’ my first incorrigible criminal. His sins were as follows:
1) Makes no attempt to demonstrate friendliness whatsoever
2) Runs into the house the second I open the door, then proceeds to hide in the cavernous interior, waiting until after I have to leave to eat anything, everything, on any shelf, and destroying any semblance or order in the process.
3) Totally takes over the cat-dish from civilized specimens, gobbles food in a drunken frenzy, then turns around and pukes it all up. (Must have read too many of Xanga Top-100′s lower ranks, the eating-disorder crowd)
4) Chases chickens, just to see them cry.
5) Always digs poop-holes where they destroy as many newly-transplanted seedlingsas possible
6) Somehow causes the rest of the cats to adopt his evil behavior. His success in this regard was astonishing, speedy, and dramatic.

A cat of this evil bent needs to be shown the door pronto. It took me about four hours to build the basic cage/trap, but then I wracked my brains trying to invent a successful triggering mechanism.
 (The cat needs to be happily eating the bait, in roughly the center of the collapsing roof). But then all of a sudden it dawned on me that I need only to attach a string to the bamboo spreader and wait for the criminal cat, then pull the cord! The only problem, of course, is first putting all my innocent cats into some temporary constrained place. Like, in the house. And here’s the rub: Trying to herd cats into the house is kinda like gathering up a bunch of runaway marbles….
Wait a minute! Didn’t someone say that on the other side of the record?

    First of all, re-set your bookmark/favorites to point to the simple www.xanga.com/jsolberg generic entry page. This way you won’t have to click your way from that 2009 post you use/read  in order to get to something current.
    Second, you may be unaware of the fact that I see reports here twice a day of your  navigational progress. Yes, this is a totally public website, but perhaps you could find a way to identify yourself. If you have a Xanga site, a quick comment explaining your interest will suffice. I believe there is still a provision for anonymous comments in place too, although I need to check that. And if you have my email address, {solberg73 at gmail} what better than to send me a short letter demystifying your nightly readingss. I myself am not sure whether to feel flattered or uneasy, and a word to the confused should be sufficient.

And finally, yes, at times our relationship here reminds me of a date-rape scene, but in which the perpetrator fails to find the victim…oh...interesting. Secrets, such as they are, are heavily veiled. Try Audio, I’m suggesting. Tons of original songs there, each with its own juicy meal. In four-part harmony, some of ‘em recorded in Conestoga.
No, I’m not angry, not at all. Just perplexed/ js