Today is my last day of work and therefore my last day online for a little while as I pack it up and move to Philadelphia. I'm not exactly sad. I mean, I like the people I work with a lot, but I'm not overly fond of my job, and I get to bitch about online after I'm done (I'm too paranoid to do it while I work here after stories about getting fired, like Dooce.com). Also, I am moving out of New York where I have lived for nearly 6 years. That's the longest I've lived anywhere since high school. This length has lead to a massive accumulation of stuff. This is compounded with the addition of my wife's stuff, plus the wedding gift stuff. In the words of George Carlin: "Have ya' ever noticed that other people's stuff is shit, and your shit is stuff? Hey, move your shit, so I can put down my stuff!" Needless to say, in terms of quantity of stuff, this is by far the largest move I have ever embarked on. And, after moving all the time through my college and early twenties, I did a lot of paring down then, so now the stuff I have I want. In order to limit the stress and frantic last minute craziness of packing, we began packing at a liesurely rate in early May. I'm not sure this had the desired stress relieving effect that we had intended. Now we have been living with boxes for several weeks. It has now reached a seriously insane leve and "God Dammit! The cats are really not happy about it!" But Saturday is the big day, and we are moving into a four bedroom house so we have more than enough room. I mean, one bedroom New York apartment... four bedroom house. You do the math. We bit the proverbial bullet and hired movers on both ends. In New York it's "Man With Van" style $15 per hour per person to help move stuff from the apartment into the truck. In Philly it's some movers my Dad knows. Unfortunateluy, in Philly, our street, as I think I mentioned previously, (quick peruse of posts... no mention... damn)... So we are moving onto that block from The Sixth Sense where the kid lived that has no traffic, just a big garden running down the middle of the block... ie: you can't drive up to the front door. There is a back alley, but I am not convinced you can get a moving truck down that alley. So the move on that end will be difficult, to say the least. But I am super excited to be in Philly. Also, pathetically, I am excited to give the cats a big house with lots of sunny windows to play in. It's really pathetic to see them rush to grab the twenty minutes of direct sunlight from the shaft our apartment gets. Anyway, ya'll come back now, ya' hear...
My high school had an extensive system of catacombs that students would sometimes peruse. Upon first arrival at High School, you would hear mention of the catacombs, but as I was desperately trying to be savy freshperson, I quickly wrote them off as a myth perpetrated by upperclassman to make freshpeople look stupid. Kind of like the pool on the 5th floor (there were only 4 floors). Later I discovered the catacombs were real, and did some minore exploring. Some people, like my brother, did some major exploring. He even kept a flashlight in his locker. But coming out of them dirty, and once with a black eye from running into a pipe in the dark, he realized the possible risk of being nailed was too great. Anyway, back to MY experiences with these illustrious out of bounds secrets... There used to be an entrance from the outside of the school if you dropped down one of the window wells that let light into the basement by the intersection of the South and South East Lawns (The school had three lawns (the fourth was a parking lot), some divided into sub regions, that were very distinctive in their character. The North Lawn was for Ultimate Frisbee players, The East Lawn was for Guidos from South Philly. The South East Lawn was for really trendy art students and other people who listened to Depeche Mode. The South Lawn was for wanna be punks, metal hedz, misfits, and assholes). You couldn't really see the entrance from ground level, unless you knew it was there. You dropped down and climbed under a half shut metal garage style door. You could get into the boiler room and a huge room under the auditorium this way. You could also participate in some illegal activities. Or at least that's what the other guys told me... you know, that they did. This huge room under the auditorium was way cool. The auditorium was your standard large high school auditorium. There were these mushroom shaped vents under many of the seats. These were actually for this (courtesy my pal lbn). But anyway, under the auditorium was this huge room, as big as the auditorium, for acoustical purposes. But the school, at some point had started storing crap in there. There was another set of catacombs between the 3rd and 4th floors that I never went into. All in all, sort of a weird phenomenon for a high school.
All right, alright... I hung out on the South Lawn.
Why Ozzy Osbourne Is (Unintentionally) Brilliant -
In reality, I'm not sure how smart the guy is. Not that he's stupid, but he's no Stephen Hawking either. I'm thinking more along the lines of Beastie Boys brilliant. Kind of like stumbling onto something in a most flailing fashion, only to discover how great it is, even if maybe at first you thought it sucked. Let's take a lok at the long and sordid history of Ozzy. He was a petty theif in high school, and then joined some band called Black Sabbath, who were hugely popular but critically assaulted, all the while playing pretty dark and extremely heavy music that would make Tipper Gore absolutely poop her pants (by the way, they are really good if you've never checked them out). He was summarily kicked out of Black Sabbath in like 1979 for partying too hard, which makes you wonder what the hell he must have been doing to get kicked out of a Heavy Metal band in 1979. So, then he met Sharon Arden, the daughter of the manager who'd been ripping Black Sabbath off all through the Seventies, who he hired as his new manager, and they slowly rebuilt Ozzy's carrer as a more Eighties version of the PMRC's worst nightmare, also releasing some classic Heavy Metal records. His career had ups and downs. Particularly when he was sued twice because people claimed his song Suicide Solution caused their children to commit suicide, even though they failed to mention that their own family lives were frickin' crazy. He was banned from the Alamo for pissing on it. In Decline of the Western Civilization Part 2 he is totally trashed and fried as he tries to make his own breakfast. All in all, a glorious career, but possibly the global opposite of FAMILY VALUES. Suddenly, after a season of acting like, well, Ozzy on TV every week, and being hillarious while doing it, the guy has a star on the walk of fame and he's being invited to the White House where the president welcomes him in his speech specifically. Ozzy must be laughing his ass off. Yeah... laughing all the way to the bank. And frankly, I can't really begrudge him a second of it.
