For once in my miserable life, allow me to be honest. Allow me to come forward and say that I am far from being a perfect man in almost any sense of the word. I mean, geez, I arrived late to my own birth and it’s been kinda snowballing in that general direction since. But I CAN say, with almost a hearty amount of certainty and trepidation, that I have learned a thing or two about a thing or two in my now thirty-seven years here on Planet Dirtball.

Perhaps one of the most important things I have had the opportunity to discover all by my lonesome is that out of all the things that I could’ve been in the vastness of this here universe, the consolation prize of being human is a steal and then some…for that matter, being ME is more of a bargain than anyone has a right to have access to and I take absolutely no shame in admitting this in public. At least not anymore, anyway.

There was once a time not all that long ago I was of the opinion that as a singular human being in the Void and General Blackness of Space that is sometimes referred to as The Universe, I was, in fact, rather insignificant. I was always preoccupied with the notion that I never fit in anywhere and that perhaps, JUST perhaps, the world and all its denizens would be better off without me. After all, I was an absurdly overweight white male in his 30s, working, I suspect, the most remedial of remedial jobs, skimming across the top of the rippling waters of the national poverty line, no girlfriend, no prospects, very few friends, an old OLD car, and living under the same roof with his parents. Oh, and I had a credit line existing somewhere between subpar and subterranean. And while I am now gainfully unemployed and having just sold my beater of a vehicle, it doesn’t pain me in the least to say that not very much has changed in this Wonderful Wide World of Sports that Google has recently indexed as my Life.

I am still a rather plump and pristine 335 pounds of rumbling man-mountain with an extra quarter of sexy mashed down into one of the pockets of my utility belt somewhere. I am fairly off the grid in terms of financial surplus. My virginity has ostensibly managed to grow back. Out of the 6 or so really close friends I did have, two of them moved in excess of several hundred miles from me, one probably WILL in the next six months or so, one I haven’t seen in actual living human form since around February, another I haven’t seen in nearly 20 years and I only get to IM him when I can remember to wake up around 5AM to catch him online and the other died last year from terminal cancer. He was also my Dad. I live with my mother in her double wide trailer deep, deep , DEEP in the woods of southern fried Virginia (soon to be GRILLED as well, I suppose) looking after her and trying to repay a 30 year old debt of always being there whenever she needs me to be, and I managed to license out my credit information to Dane Cook in hopes of making him a better comedian.

And while it is true that  I am still all of those things, as I sit here at the crux of my 37th year here on Planet Earth, I have come to realize that I am also so much MORE. I am a truly unique being brimming with potentials spiraling down into the deepest microscopic canyons and crevices of my multi-cellular make up because of my capacity to love and imagine and to really and truly use my mind to see what living life on this world in this universe at this particular time is all about. Sure, there are times when I am embattled with the abuse and injustices that today’s world can’t help but to throw my way on what seems to sometimes be an almost daily basis…but even in the midst of something like steering a dead car precariously down an unmarked hillbilly back road in reverse just 300 feet from my own driveway in 120 degree heat, I have learned (or been trained?) to find some perspective, even in that…which, admittedly surprises me.

But I suppose I am a lot stronger than I usually give myself credit. Despite my no-job-having status, I’m doing pretty well. I’m a guy whose lived through an abusive and drunken birth mother selling her son to his father for just enough scratch to swipe a bottle of Johnny Walker for an intimate evening of getting plastered with any number of strange men in the vicinity. I’ve coped with the loss of my birth father, whom time only gave me a briefness with, and I’ve suffered the pain and sadness of losing my dad…not exactly the world’s most affable or friendly guy, but my hero, my rock and my inspiration/guidance for damn near everything I’ve ever done or thought about doing since I was blessed enough to have him in my life in the earliest days as Uncle Jim (which, I think lasted for all of three days before he and my Aunt Donna became cemented as Dad and Mom in this brain of mine).

I’ve dealt with the fact that loved ones have abandoned me, threatened me, and yes, even harbored fatal feelings of the blackest kind toward me, all in the name of money. I’ve seen my mom go through depression and struggle with diabetes and losing the majority of her sight. I’ve seen my friends lose their fathers and try to find there way in the world again without and doing just that. I’ve watched another friend have everything ripped out from under him and have to move away to make a go of it in a fresh and maybe more open-handed locale and he continues to impress me with not just his resilience, but his laughter in the face of what lesser men would consider imminent doom.

I have known the love of women…some barely a memory, a few permanently burnt into my beating heart as the truly great loves of my life. There is one in particular that will always have that special place in my world, regardless of distance, time, or anything else, and I thank her for opening my soul again and for letting me experience something, no matter how fleeting it may have been, that reminds me every day what the good love of a woman can do for even the lowliest of men.

I have found myself in the deep void of death and come out the other side more alive than when I went in. There’s no greater teaching tool than losing it all in the most literal sense of the word, and being granted the opportunity to get another shot at it. True, I’m still fuzzy on the whole Heaven/Hell/God/Devil thing, but I know there’s something beyond our physical sense in this realm…and there’s a little bit of comfort in knowing that it’s not finitely over when the fat lady DOES decide to sing. There’s a whole new thing waiting on the other side…but I’m still not in a big hurry to get there…again.

I have, albeit briefly, known the incredible joy of being a father…surrogate as though it may have been, I can’t really recall a time in my life when I felt more awkward and uncertain and scared and…alive. Granted, I only knew the boy for barely a year, but I got in on some real memorable moments no one can ever take from me. I taught him his first word and helped him learn to walk. No matter where he is in the world or what he does the remainder of his days, every step he takes…every word he utters, is all because of me…and that…..that is something!

And I have been lucky enough to know the love and respect of several good animals during the last 13, 505 days I’ve been around. I’ve always been amazed at how something supposedly without the ability to reason can come to love and trust me with it’s very life in my hands on a day to day basis. I’ve never thought of myself as a pet-owner, but more along the lines of a guy with some furry and feathered friends in his life. I’ve been privy to some remarkable wild kingdom moments in my life as well, my favorite being sailing with schools of dolphins in the early morning waters of the Pacific. There is no equal to the reflection one experiences in that particular moment.

So what’s my point? What’s the old, fat, graying geezer trying to say with all this emotional tripe, you ask. OK, I guess I’ll tell you.

Living is a privilege. Do it however you want but know a something along the way…

Life is not about the money, the job, or even all the crap stuffed into your closets, drawers, garages, or storage units. It’s the inventory in your heart that counts. Because when all those things are gone (and eventually they will be in some form or another) that’s what you have to call your own. It’s the reason we’re all here and do all these crazy things. The right, the wrong, the indifferent, the guesswork…all of it.

It’s the end result of being human.

And, my friends…I don’t think there is a greater prize in ALL the known and unknown universe, than that.

Happy birthday to me.

6-8-09.

DLE

So much for the subtlety of titles.

Well, there, fair readers, your friendly neighborhood Purple Tidbit is back and in top form with this latest of rather recent blog entries. For, in the span of a standard day, I have witnessed my once trusty ‘94 Mercury Cougar XR-7 finally gasp what appears to be its last gasp for breath, a long standing pillar of my community’s house burn completely down to the ground and a decent Adam Sandler flick.

But that’s another blog it would seem.

After realizing (and much to my own dismay) that I apparently DO NOT have a copy of the latest User’s Manual for Owning and Operating a Best Friend, it seems that my “best friend” took a damn vacation and completely neglected to tell me about it AT ALL.

I say thee, what the hell?!

I just called the puke yesterday and wished him a Happy Birthday and we conversed a bit…even managing to squeeze in some congratulations for his recent attainment of a BA for Business and made loose ended plans to hang out in the coming days as it’s been FOREVER since either one of us has physically seen the other in a comfortable and somewhat casual setting. There’s been a lot of that going on for the past year or so between him and I, given his and what USED to be my insanely busy work schedule (unemployed has a succinct way of changing that). We manage to do our best staying somewhat in touch through the use of a telephone, the occasional text or messaging one another on Facebook or MySpace.

So, imagine my complete surprise when I happened to be in town today and decided to stop by his place of work and give a shout out, only to be informed by one of his underlings that he is, in fact, on vacation and has been since three o’clock this very day.

Hunh?

Have I grown so totally apart from my crew in these almost self-imposed days of exile since my banishment from the realms of the gainfully employed that I have been reduced to getting news concerning my friend….my BEST friend….through the mouth of some cashier he manages? Or, could it be that I have become so self-involved with my own personal turmoil of late that I just managed to fall out of the loop and bounce haphazardly away from the sacred geometric ellipse that I once considered my very own personal circle of friends?

Whatever the case, my attention has been garnered. Here I was, trying to lay low for a bit but it seems my laying low has turned into something else entirely. I’ve been so pre-occupied with my own life or lack thereof, that I have managed to worm myself out of my friends’ almost entirely!!!

And I’ve given this considerable thought, mind you. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me. I seem to go through periods of “uncommunication” with friends and family for weeks or even months (sometimes years….*groan*) at a time!! The whole time I’m sitting back grumbling and bitching about how shitty my peoples are in relation to keeping in contact with me or simply picking up the telephone and checking up on a fella, I’m further cementing myself as that guy that I didn’t realize I was quickly becoming. You know the one. The guy that rarely calls, visits, or attends really any kind of function outside something pertaining a vested interest of their own. Kinda like a certain House, MD routinely does to Wilson and pretty much everyone else in his life. If there’s a movie playing that I want to see, best believe I am always to instigator to formulating a posse of friends and making all the plans to go see it. But that’s where it ends for me, I’m afraid. Do I just stop by on whim to hang out for a few minutes? Nope. Oh, sure, I have the excuse NOW that money’s tight and while that’s all great and well and perhaps even the most part understandable….it’s still an excuse. Somehow, somewhere, in between a not-too-distant past life of working, and trying to sort things out post-Dad, I have become something of a recluse….damn near a hermit. And with my job gone, a freshly broke down car and next to NO money to burn, I find myself fearing for the worst. Admittedly, I don’t have legions of friends to call my own, but the ones I DO have deserve better from me. I need to get my head out of my ass, friends.

So, many warm and chocolate gooey apologies to you all. I aim to do better at being a bit more proactive in the role of “friend”, even if it’s just sending a quick e-mail or making more phone calls to keep myself in the loop. I am still trying to find a balance for myself with lack of certain things like, money, hi speed internet and now a CAR to maintain a semblance of a social life. I only ask your continued patience if you will….I will prevail.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to tip the waaaaay over-dressed midget at the door. Them eight kids of his gots to eat tonight, y’know?

Catch you on the flipped side.

DLE

5/16/09.

Alas.

Another day, another blog.

Today at the Purple Tidbit homestead, we managed to make the mercury boil over past the 80 degree mark which has reminded me minute by minute of the day that I am truly an Unemployed puke and can no longer afford to run the monster Air Conditioning Unit to the point of Arctic Chill once the temperature whispers above 75. (And you will see that I capitalized Air Conditioning Unit because at this point in my financial and apparent physical distress, it is for all intents and purposes…a proper noun.) It was also another day of blissful nothingness and rising from the depths of my bedding place no sooner than the tolling of the 12 o’clock bell after a 3AM curtain call from attempting not to go suddenly insane whilst using the dial up internet connection to check my Facebook page.

At this point in my blog and life, I would like to go on immediate record as being a HATER of the dial-up internet and the geographical dystopia that I currently am hostage to, thusly allowing me access to nearly zero and none hi speed internet.

It is amazing when one thinks about it (as opposed to TWO thinking about it, I suppose) that there are quite a number of us here in these United States in the year 2009 proper locked down in the confines of dial up internet speeds…and those of us who DO have the utmost privilege (and BTW, how I envy you) of said hi speed internet are fooled into thinking that they are, in fact, the cat’s pajamas, the bee’s knees, and quite possibly, the shiznit because their internet connection is a smoldering 15 MBPS on the broadband side of things. MBPS, for the uninitiated among you, is technical abbreviation for MegaBytes Per Second, which…in the grand scheme of things….is S-L-O-W.

Consider this, my friends. There is a tiny, almost insignificant island over on the other side of the planet we once had a jolly good hoot testing our atomic bombs on when they all got a little too cocky back in the 1940s and laid waste to a certain naval port of ours called Pearl Harbor. These same people, who WE as a nation funneled a considerable amount of our tax dollars into fixing up AFTER dropping said A-bombs for decades upon decades upon decades and probably STILL do, currently enjoy…on average, broadband internet speeds clocking in at over 100 MBPS. I say again….on average. And the best part is, they pay slightly less than we uppity Americans pay for drastically less speeds…and WE’RE supposed to be cutting edge?

Not even close.

As a matter of fact, those kind of speeds are accessible in nearly every corner of every international land mass with only 2 minor exceptions…Antarctica and the United States of America.

So, why do we suck so bad?

I dunno. Why are we STILL a nation of analog signal and television sets when the rest of the world went digital 5 years ago? Why are we a nation….the ONLY nation that I can tell….where medicine is a business and not a public service?

The answer is simple, and I can even tell you where to find it if you’re really interested.

Look in your wallet.

See that green piece of rectangular parchment paper with monetary denominations printed upon it?

Yeah. THAT’S the reason.

Corporate America is so busy making money off our ignorant asses that the advancement of technology for the betterment of mankind as a whole has taken a backseat to the promise of a million dollar bonus and a corporate retreat somewhere in Tahiti. As long as our economic structure thrives around the suffering. misfortunes and the ignorance of the government’s citizens, we will always be at the mercy of the rich kid calling all the shots and sitting in the big seat, driving the car to wherever in the hell he/she wants to go.

Don’t believe me?

Then explain WHY, even though the our government is busy bailing out business after business, there are STILL CEOs of these businesses getting “retention fees” in the millions of dollars using said bail-out money? It’s explained to us, the common everyday citizen, that these members of the corporate universe are far too valuable an asset to let slip in the spoils of this economic downward spiral…that no cost is too high to retain these astounding business men.

Oh, really?

Question: if these assholes were so great to begin with, why in the name of Bill Cosby did their company get to the point of needing to be bailed out in the first place? I mean, seriously, people…I turned off over 700 customers cable service in the greater Virginia area (another blog, believe me) and I got completely sand-bagged for it (granted I WAS doing my job, but still….) and lost my job because the CEO believed my actions might…MIGHT result in the loss of customers which would bring the overall profit margins of the company down for the quarter and might even throw them a little further in the red than they already were. And yet, here we have TENS of THOUSANDS of jobs being wrote out of existence thanks to the actions and extremely BAD decisions of LEGIONS of CEOs and corporate vice-presidents and when all is said and done, the government actually PRINTS THEM OUT a few BILLION dollars of money, which they apparently pocket and use to lay off MORE employees and yet….THEY not only retain their jobs…they get a RAISE!!!

HUNH?!

But, unfortunately, these things are not in the power of the Purple Tidbit to decide, and that alone makes me weep tears of solemn angst every night before my balding head hits the pillow.

Later, peoples…catch ya on the flipped side.

4/26/09.

DLE

This is a rant.

Make no mistake about it, this has been festering for a while now about a great many things and I have decided that this blog entry in particular is gonna be the proverbial stone to bring the big bad Goliath of idiocy currently rampaging throughout our society to its scabby knees.

Question: when did teenage pregnancy become the new cool?

Seriously, people…I want to know. I mean, I know it’s been a while since I’ve watched any MTV (because we all know they are the ones who dictate the ways and means of the ever-changing world of pop culture.) but all the sudden it seems like it’s cool to be a pregnant teenaged girl just so long as you’re in the limelight of celebrity. Now that Jamie Lynn Spears and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate’s daughter are mommies or mommies-to-be, it makes it kind of hard for any self-respecting parent to actively and successfully argue the point of safe sex or the pitfalls of teen pregnancy with their daughters. Now I’m hearing reports of young girls out there in the American world making pacts with each other to get pregnant at a young age so they can reap the financial benefits of their condition and maybe pocket a little extra tax-payer cash to help with their own college education a few years down the road. Hunh? When did that become the new plan? But then again, why am I even surprised? In a world (rest in peace, Don LaFontaine) where it’s easier to make your fortune by taking companies to court than it is to actually win the lottery, this kind of stunted thought processes is almost surely to be the next step in the evolution of the American way of life. Can’t afford to get into college? Mom and dad in debt to their hair follicles because of credit cards or payday loans? No problem. If you’re a girl, have unprotected sex, get pregnant, and live from the hand of the government. If you’re a young guy, clearly the way to go is to denounce your heterosexuality on some reality show, go to California and get married to your best friend and make a fortune selling the rights to the pictures of your test tube pregnancy. I honestly look out into the world just teeming with people who actually think like this and I realize that in 20 or 30 years, they’ll be the ones running the show…and by show, I mean planet. I SO can’t wait to old to see how badly they screw it all up from the safety and security of my fortified bunker in the mountains where the only high speed internet, satellite TV and PayPal can find me.

Question: when did it become alright for people to leave their pets in vehicles with the windows 80% rolled up when it’s at least 90 degrees outside?

It’s no wonder that members of the animal kingdom try to kill us every chance they get. I heard about that Hollywood stunt bear they had to “put down” because it apparently lost its mind and attacked a few humans conveniently standing about. Please. That bear knew what he was doing. For years, he’s been biding his time, building the trust of the idiot humans who think they’re actually home schooling and domesticating this 1200 lb fuzzball of wanton woodland destruction when the whole time, he’s just waiting for the perfect moment to exact some animal street justice for all the heinous acts we’re guilty of committing against his other fuzzy brethren. Personally, I applaud and cheer every time I hear about or see some idiot getting mauled by a fuzzy critter on TV, because, dammit, they ask for it…and then…pending survival…they’re all surprised this happened to them and feel they have to put the animal down because it attacked them, the mighty and important human person. Because it’s so unbelievable that a bear would attack someone traipsing about in the forest wonderland (also known as their living room, dining room and kitchen) or that a shark might find one of us fleshy people thingies tasty when we’re surfboarding or swimming out there in the water, where THEY LIVE. So cue the shocked and half-bitten seventeen year old surfer punk who’s in front of the camera not five minutes after he almost became the equivalent of a number 5 with a side of fries. He’s amazed and upset that there are sharks….in the water….trying to eat him. That’s about the same as walking into a bank and finding out they have money there. Who would’ve expected that? And yet, here we are, broadcasting nuts like this and several thousand others…every DAY…on the TV and inter-webs and wondering why people like al-Queda are trying to kill us. Please, it’s almost like we’re daring them. So consider this a call to arms, oh readers of this blog, any of you see a dog or cat or whatever species of animal locked in a car on a hot day…seek out the operator of said vehicle and commence grand scale ass-whipping. Who knows? You might actually teach someone a lesson and keep a few undercover animal terrorists from seeking out retribution on the latest edition of When Animals Attack.  

Jeez.

It’s late and I’m tired from hammering out all the above….rubbish…on my poor Compaq’s keyboard, but rest assured that we’ll be back, live and in TOP FORM from the peak of Mt. Bloggerifficdom and laying down AT LEAST seven different kinds of smoke for another all-new, all-incredible series of words, phrases, mis-used punctuation and abhorrent misspellings.

Catch you on the flipped side.

4/25/09.

DLE

So, this is my first blog post in like, forever. Yes, it is true that I positively suck for making you all wait so long in between posts, but dammit, things have been happening in my corner of the universe that I completely have had NO control over.

First, my Dad died. He’d been having a LONG battle with cancer and after being in a state of glorified remission for almost 11 years, the big C came back into his life in a big way May the 28th of last year and brought him down for the count exactly 2 months later. For the uninitiated among you (i.e. those poor unfortunate souls who DO NOT know me on a personal basis), my Dad was my mentor and absolute best friend in the whole wide spectrum of the thing we often call the universe. Since his death, my life and I have just not been even close to the same. I’ve gone through a really deep and horrible depression that brought me down a few levels than I’m used to being.

I’ve packed on another 50-some pounds to my ALREADY morbidly obese body, and just recently here, renewed my vows as a card carrying member of the Unemployed. So, in a nutshell, I’ve haven’t exactly been having the time of my life here. And with everything and the world around me in the state of turmoil that it’s presently in, I often find myself slipping back into that particular mindset, Prozac be damned. But I tell you, True Believers, I AM NOT GOING DOWN LIKE THAT!!! I simply refuse to let the socio-economic conformities of this era in time best me on an unlevel playing field…suited, quite clearly, to the home team advantage. I say thee NAY. The Purple Tidbit would have words with thee.

If my former employer, o they of the Creaky Propeller Dial-Up, wish to afoul me with lies and trickery when it comes to my unemployment benefits review on the 7th of May, then let them play THAT game. But be warned, hounds and servants of Deception….what goes around comes around. And I know a thing or two about a thing or two, so if I were YOU, I’d be slightly more honest than you seem to have been of late. Karma is the second cousin to scorn. Be advised.

Anyway, this is just a quick blog….something to test out the Windows Live Writer that I just downloaded and something to get my mind and my typing fingers back in the game! I have SO much to blog about, kiddies….so MUCH….

See you on the flip side, then.

4/24/09

DLE

Purple Tidbit and the Case of the Tie-Wearing Pirates

Congratulations! You have just broken the law.

I know, I know. You would never do something like that. You're one of the good guys, you go to church on Sunday and call the parents and other assorted relatives whenever some random holiday pops up on the calendar like a good little offspring. But the fact remains, and in a very real technical sense, just by opening up this webpage and clicking onto the link to this bloggy-type thing, you have broken the law…more specifically the Digital Media Copyright Act, or DMCA.

But how can that be? How could you have broken a law that is probably the worst incarnation of any man-made law since they made chewing gum illegal in the Sovereign Nation of Signapore?

Well, fear not, fellow evil doers, for the Purple Tidbit is here to tell you!

First a little something about computers and webpages, and don't worry, I'm not exactly an egghead myself so we'll be using the most essential of bare essential terminology and descriptive terms here.

Whenever a webpage is loaded onto a computer, the computer in question (i.e. yours) likes to copy and save certain aspects of that webpage to the hard drive so it can load faster should you decide to revisit it later. These little nuggets of information are called cookies and the great majorety of them are low in calories (you gotta love diet humor, people!) and relatively safe to the inner workings of your big, fancy, web-page eating rig. I know this because I have been somewhat of an amateur IT guy in my day and have done the cookie dance with the best of them. And then there's the matter of the Windows operating system caching every little thing you do into the registry and into a bunch of hidden folders deep within the almighty C drive for no reason other than it appears to be a whole helluva lot easier to convict perverts who like to download kiddie porn and save the FBI guys some time on the investigative front of things.

The DMCA, while not getting too deep in to the legalese of the thing, simply states that it's illegal for anyone anywhere to copy original creative content and save and/or distribute it without the expressed personal acknowledgement or permission of the content's author. Example: you love my blog so much that you want to print it out and show it to all your friends at the office and have a good yuck at my expense because I misspelled the word "majority" in the preceding paragraph. Ha, ha. That Purple Tidbit blog guy sure is stupid, misspelling a simple 2^nd grade vocabulary word like that! Ha, ha. I bet he wears his socks all funny, too.

Joke's on you, convict. You failed to e-mail me and ask me for permission to save and print (read: copy and/or duplicate my original creative content) out my delightful little blog for all your office-mates to share a guffaw over. Now, I'm well within my rights as a creator of published and copyrighted content (oh, yeah…all creative content is technically automatically copyrighted under the author's name when it is published, regardless of medium as long as it is original and not contested in any form by another creative party!!) to pursue you into a hapless life of attorney fees and cheap frozen dinners while my team of purple-suited midget lawyers rakes you over the coals for said transgression. Now, understand, I would never do such a thing, but thanks to the fine print of the DMCA, I am now empowered with that inalienable right when and if I ever choose to do so.

Boo-yah.

So, technically, whenever you visit any webpage, regardless of name, age, race, creed, color, HTML, XHTML, religion or domain name, your computer automatically makes you a criminal by all technical aspects of the law because it copies and saves all those little bits of information (even the code is considered creative content, people!!) onto your hard drive.

Hope them prison blues look good on ya.

Now onto the reasons behind this blog and the epiphany. Yes, I had an epiphany, and it wasn't as warm and fuzzy like they say it will be in the movies, but it did inspire me to get back on the keyboard and write a blog after three weeks of researching laziness and its inherent effect on the human condition, using, of course, myself as the over-qualified guinea pig.

The MPAA (the movie people) and the RIAA (the music people) have been suing the average citizen for "illegally" downloading their content and sharing files and ripping CDs and DVDs for years. Their plan was to instill fear into the hearts of the consumer by proclaiming that by sharing and downloading all these files, they were causing billions of dollars in damages to their industry and because of this, they—the powers that be—were well within their rights to sue single mothers and disabled Americans and even eighth graders a few hundred thousand dollars at a time because they made the mistake of liking their stuff.

The fact is, and I honestly don't know why nobody else has picked up on this yet, the MPAA and the RIAA and the comic book people and even the software giants are NOT losing any money. In fact, they've already made their money. See, when these guys make new products and go to make deals and what not to ship to the retail outlets, they get paid well in advance of the items ever seeing the light of fluorescent day on a store shelf or rack. All these products are bought in bulk, shipped to the authorized/contracted retail outlets and then the stores slap a slightly higher price on said items of interest so that they can, in turn, recoup their initial costs on the purchase of the products (including shipping, promotion, storage, whatever) and it also enables them to turn a little thing called a profit so they can additionally pay their bills, employees, and keep making their CEOs ba-jillionaires who like to make artificial islands in the Mediterranean as a casual hobby. So the money thing is done before you even know the CD, DVD, comic book, or otherwise outrageously priced piece of software hits the local Wally World. Which means that nothing has been stolen, took, or subsequently ripped off in any way, shape or form.

Enter the "pirate".

This individual, who shall remain nameless and hidden behind thirteen firewalls and a bouncing IP address, uploads a copy… I say again, a copy of the already purchased (by him/her or some other friend of his/hers who might have ripped him/her a copy of the product, or in the case of comics, scanned in the pages) to either a torrent site or some file sharing nerwork or maybe even an FTP with public access, and then several hundred thousand/million copies are made of the same thing and distributed worldwide to those utilizing the services of these sites/networks en masse.

When the internet got mature enough a few years ago for file transfers of this magnitude to be achieved, some accountant somewhere did the numbers just for fun and saw how much money the companies could have been making if they had some sort of control over these downloading pirates scattering across the 4.1 corners of cyber-space. This figure was then brought to the attention of some executive and then the number was then thrust onto a whiteboard and possibly even a pretty magenta and green colored graph for the board of trustees to see and then they reported it to the stockholders who were already upset because the company was taking a dive in the third quarter because word leaked that their "new" operating system sucked.

And then they all went to their lawyers and said "spin this" and the lawyers did just that, turning could have been into did but they stole it and then threw a bunch of money at Congress to make a really BAD law that desperately needs to be fairly amended and quietly bought every judge that came their way.

How can I be so certain?

Simple.

 If they were really losing all this money, they wouldn't continue to pay obscene amounts of money they aren't supposed to have to all these over-paid and outspoken actors. If anyone should be getting 25 million dollars for six months worth a work, it should be my mother, simply for putting up with me for almost thirty years. Nor would they blow tons of dough on all these stupid commercials that only serve to further alienate me from ever wanting to be seen in public with their crappy product/service anyway.

And what about the prices on these things? Why in 's name would I ever pay upwards of $20.00 for a CD with 12 so-so songs on it when I can buy a blank CD for less than a nickel, throw almost 30 CD sized songs on a disc that I know will rock, and barely spend a dollar to do it? Better yet, I get over 200 MP3 sized diddies on the same disc for the same amount of time and money, and I don't even contribute to global warming by buying a petroleum-based plastic case with crappy liner notes printed on non-Earth friendly ink on paper from prematurely dead trees that really ought to be standing in the forest somewhere and helping to replenish our oxygen supply.

Man, I am feeling really good about myself right now…despite the fact that I am a criminal.

Yes. I am guilty, your honor. I download music and movies and comics and programs and I use them all to enrich my life and creativity and sometimes even like the original content enough to inspire myself to go out and maybe even buy something the next time they put a something out. But the truth is, fair peoples of the internet, we are far from being the first pirates of the multi-media age.

Ever hear of the cassette tape? How about the video cassette recorder, or by its more affectionate name of the VCR? You, your Mom, your Dad, even your Grandparents are guilty of violating the terms and conditions of the DMCA, and are therefore a bunch of no account scuzz-bag criminal types.

But yet, we aren't the actual pirates, my friends. The real pirates, they're the ones wearing ties and taking us to court and telling consumer reporters, news agencies and congress that they're being ripped off to the annual tune of 4 billion plus, when they all have accountants who hire accountants just to count all the money they're hired to keep track of for these people.

Question: If downloading and sharing music and movies is so heinous and inherently disastrous to the artists and venues and agencies and the like that are involved, how is it they all still live lives of multi-millionaire bliss? How is it that we've have yet to hear of any kind of layoff or shutdown of music companies, or movie studios because they simply don't have enough money to keep the joint up and running?

Makes you think for a little bit, doesn't it?

I download for a multitude of reasons. There's the whole price thing. Honestly, if these people were to actually price their products fairly and then impose a cap on product pricing, I'd be a little more cavalier with occasionally opening my wallet up in the malls and other shopping outlets and letting the moths out for a bit of air.

Mainly, though, it's my location. I live about a hundred miles in every direction from any semblance of civilization, and at $3.00 a gallon for gas in a car that gets maybe 15 miles to the gallon, it's just not economically sane for me to run into the local Best Buy 30 towns, 8 small villages and an IHOP away just to pick up the new Insane Clown Posse CD with a whopping 11 tracks on it that I've been waiting a year for and then realize I'd been better off donating that $17.89  to my local kerosene fuel provider so I can stay warm for about 7 seconds come December. Oh, wait. It is December.

Simply put, here's what should happen. Congress needs to amend the DMCA to read roughly as follows:

"Thou shalt not copy original creative content and save and/or distribute it without the expressed personal acknowledgement or permission of the content's author with the intent to re-sell or to counterfeit into selling said media."

In other words, copy all day long like your daddy's VCR and download as much as you want to your heart's content. Just don't make the mistake of trying to sell it to anybody or try to pass it off as the original deal. If you do, we will hunt you down more successfully than our lame attempts at finding Osama bin Laden and pelt you to death with empty CD cases from the early 90s (the thicker ones that actually leave nice-sized welts).

Like Nixon said, my fellow eye-patch wearing, purple people cloning tidbits, I'm not a crook, and nobody likes to be ostrisized for doing a little downloading…and that's a Don Edwards fact.

That said, I have some Eagles of Death Metal I've been dying to listen to that I downloaded off LimeWire the other day.

La fin

12/1/07. DLE

PURPLE TIDBIT AND THE PROM QUEEN THAT WOULDN’T PUT OUT

People are stupid.

Not exactly a newsflash, especially where the purple tidbit is concerned, but I’m sorry to report that it seems you’re all getting more and more retarded as the days pass on.

I just saw a nice little piece on the news tonight about the manic episodes and meltdowns parents and the like are having over baby bottles made with some kind of hard plastic that, according to the FDA (and there’s a bunch of clueless bastards if ever there were some), while it doesn’t appear to be absorbed into the liquids and such the actual plastic is containing, that there is evidence in the 20 or so years we’ve all been using these materials that it causes cancer later on in lab rats…but whatever, it’s OK for us people-types to feed our little helpless offspring from.

Hmmm…let’s think about that for a minute, shall we?

I’m no Wikipedia, but I’m pretty sure rats don’t generally live past the 3 year mark, if that long. So with that knowledge in mind, it would mean that the Feds have gone through an astonishing amount of lab rats (6 generations worth, at least) where the end result would be all or a great number of the unfortunate little bastards wind up getting cancer of the innards in the golden years of their trite lives. Being that humans are significantly more biologically complicated than rats or something equally clinically-sounding to that, I’m guessing that if the Feds were to conduct the same experiments on the average Tom, Dick and Harry, at least one of them would contract cancer by the time they hit 45. Not bad, right? One guy out of three contracts cancer because his parents fed him from a government-approved bottle made out of kinda-sorta toxic plastic.

Now multiply that number by a few hundred.

That’s only the number of new human beings born in a day’s time, sunrise to sunset…Jack Bauer time.

Now multiply by a hundred thousand.

That’s a rough guesstimate of new human beings that might contract cancer from this same happenstance that were born in the last month.

Now go by a few hundred million.

That oughta sum up the last 20 years or so since the plastic has been in circulation.

Assuming, of course, that the “experts” in charge of performing the study actually know what they are talking about, or are even reporting the truth unbiased in any way from cash injections from rival corporations or government kickbacks, this is a pretty scaring number and by no means should be considered “acceptable” by the self-proclaimed fuck-nuts of lore.

So how do we ,as a people, know who or what to believe?

We don’t.

And while I’m going out on a limb and run the risk of sounding all conspiratorist (if that isn’t a word, it damn well should be), that’s exactly how they want it to be. And by “they”, I don’t mean the snotty little bitches over at the Wal-Mart customer service desk that absolutely refuse to reimburse you for that scratched up copy of the Menudo DVD pack that you may or may not have bought for your girlfriend thinking it was a Cheech and Chong movie.

I mean the government.

All you X-Files fans can relax…we’re not getting into the Mulder and Scully stuff just yet. But isn’t it funny these days how whenever someone says the word “government” everybody gets a little preconceived notion as to where the conversation’s heading next?

Well, that’s another blog.

The best way to think about our government is to think about running a business, which, as fate would have it, is exactly what the nation of the United States of America has become over the span of the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution. The President is the figurehead guy. The CEO. The guy that everybody else in the company can point a finger at and admire what a complete and utter fuck up he is. The guy in the mansion with the butler and the sex-scandals and the camera a n osehair away from breaking the story about the oddly-shaped peanut found in his or her latest turd. Why in the hell any forward thinking man, woman, or child in this country would ever want to be the president is something I still have a hard time understanding. The president has no power. Sure, he can veto all the bills and start all the wars he wants. Bully for him. But it’s the Congress, the fucking Board of Supervisors of the red, white and blue that says what color his ass is gonna be when he gets done wiping. That’s power you can’t buy with any amount of money, my friend. That’s power ya fear. And the people always fear what they don’t understand.

…..

Sorry, that sometimes happens when I get rolling on a rant like that. I sometimes hear Tom Wilkinson’s little soliloquy from Batman Begins and I just go numb and let the words write themselves. Goddamn I LOVE that fuckin’ movie, man!! Love it!!

Ummm…..anyway, the Congress are the pimps of the nation (apologies to Bob Ritchie).  They get paid no matter what, they have all the goddamn money, and if any of us little bitch ass employees be ackin’ up (to so paraphrase Green Daddy Diligence from 2^nd and Main around 2AM on a Tuesday morning downtown) the shit be on. Say what you want about the old crusty bastards on Capitol Hill, but you don’t keep going to the same job for 20, 30, 50 years a stretch to make sure the constituents get heard. You go because not only do you get all the money lobbyists, special interest groups, and about a billion other companies and rich folk throw your way every year simply to sway (not even secure) your vote for whatever bullshit item it is that stands to make them (and by association, YOU) significantly richer in the long run, but all those little high school and college girl interns from all over the country want to do your old crusty ass (and for free, I might add!!) because of all the leftover crumbs of power and privilege  that reside in your dirty little cash-lined pockets that just might find its way onto them.

 Welcome to America the Incorporated.

Meanwhile, it’s up to Human Resources (take any of the thousand or so executive “departments” of this and that) to keep us working, paid and just happy enough to keep us from unionizing and figuring out that not only are we busting our asses for chump change, but the guys in the Boardroom are embezzling our retirement funds and, um, security pensions that’s going to leave us all flat broke and having to keep right on slaving away for the Corporation right up until the day we drop dead on the assembly line because we won’t be able to afford to live if we don’t.

When you start to rationalize the whole she-bang as what it really is, a business, you quickly start to figure a few things out for yourself and in a hurry.

1.       That whole electoral college thing? Bullshit. Why in the hell do I even need to vote if there’s going to be the “real” deciding vote of the fucking elections held coming from a group of assholes that a.) I didn’t ask/nominate/bribe to represent my fucking vote and b.) you never hear anything about and c.) I have never met. The electoral college is another way of saying that the actual vote was bought and paid for about three months ago and we just set up all those insanely-easy-to-hack-into voting machines come election day to give all you plebs something to keep yourselves busy while we count lobbyist money.

2.       The assholes running the show only give a shit about 2 things on a day to day basis: a.) not you and b.) how much money they can make by supporting causes, claims, and companies that are trying very hard to kill us all in our sleep while making themselves rich and giving a purple tidbit sized donation to the parties in question every now and then to keep them from raising too much hell or starting an investigation into their clearly corrupt business practices.

3.       When these investigations actually do occur, it’s generally because the investigating official did not get the right amount or anyGod, or suffer the wrath of the horny, uptight, (and probably gay) Protestant dude with glasses. Or move to Canada where despite you can keep all the money you stole from your stockholders and enjoy state-of-the-art FREE health care!!! of the money or the sex they wanted to make the investigation go away in the first place. You want to keep your multi-national energy-selling firm up and running?? Let the queer little guy in the Senate have his way with your kid, pay his ass off in increments of

4.       The experts don’t know shit. If they knew anything at all, they would keep their fucking mouths shut and not offer their opinions on anything and let us all die by ingesting billions of contaminated French fries, thereby surviving the melee (because as experts, they naturally knew better) and inheriting the planet for themselves. Either way, they’re not smart enough to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart, thereby contributing to a mass-merchandising agent of death and Chinese lead-based things on shelves where small children and midgets over the age of 30 can put them in their mouths and further along the decline of Western civilization. So fuck ’em.

5.       It doesn’t matter what you do, City Hall is going to win and the prom queen is never going to fuck you under the bleachers. But you might be able to get the prom queen her own website, film her fucking someone in City Hall and stand to make at least a little bit of money on the side to make up for all the years or torture, teasing and neglect in high school.

6.       The Writer’s Strike should not be capitalized or the main story of each and every news day forever and ever amen. It’s stupid that it had to progress to an actual strike because the assholes in charge of things in Hollywood are too fucking greedy to pay the writers their just desserts for, oh, I dunno…creating the shows and creative properties that make them all that retarded amounts of God money in the first place. You think out of everyone involved in this, the Jews would understand what it’s like to have to fight for what you got coming to you. You are all assholes of the highest denomination and I hereby salute you with a brain-eating amoeba straight up your asses. Why? Because, duh…it’s obvious that’s where alla yer brains are, fuckers!!! Big up to all my fellow writers!! The Purple Tidbit walks the lines with you in spirit!!

…and that, my picket line walkin’ fellow Purple Tidbit playa hatahs, is yet another Don Edwards fact.

Ya daaaaaaaamn right.

La fin

11/19/07.

DLE

PURPLE TIDBIT AND THE CASE OF THE WHISTLING BEAVER SCHPHINCTER

No, fair readers, I have not taken my leave of you...yet.

Surprisingly, I’ve actually had a few e-mails and messages sent me over the last month wanting to know if the Purple Tidbit had bitten the big one, or maybe been snuffed out by the ever-growing Bastard that is soon to be known as Big Brother (George Orwell was right on the money with the concept, it would seem, he was only about 20-30 years too early.).

Well, people, I am hear to say that I’m still alive and kicking, and eager to get back to an active blog-style. The reason for my somewhat self-imposed exile was nothing more than a motherfucker of a sinus infection, which is the direct descendant of  some other nasty kind of infection, all of course, attributed to my wonderful wisdom tooth which has been slowly driving me mad for about 3 years and despite the fact that it is MY body and I really should be the one to have control over it, has poisoned my blood with a sparkling bacterial infection that isn’t as cool as all those brain-damaged pussies on Jackass would have you to believe, but, you’ll all be pleased to know that I manned up to the fullest of my ability and did the dentist thing. A quick check up and a thorough cleaning later, I’m back in business and happily doctored up on medications for pain and swelling until the 15^th, which, no doubt, will be the most unpleasant day of what is known as my life, as I am launched into the finest accommodations the International Space Station has to offer and an international team of oil drillers starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck flies a shuttle into my mouth and drills out the deep impacted wisdom tooth and assorted cavities that threatens to eradicate mankind from all existence, or at the very least, Rhode Island.

But that isn’t what’s bothering me. Well, I mean, having to go the dentist bothers me and the fact that the company I happen to work for isn’t at all sure if we do or don’t have a functioning dental plan as I’m in the midst of all this bothers me, but suffice it to say, it’s not reason I dusted off the ole lappity-top to hammer out a blog.

What bothers me is Daylight Savings Time (referred hereto as DST).

If ever there was a bad idea that should never have been implemented, it was DST.

Usually, this blog would’ve have been posted a full calendar week ago, but once again the senile old bastards in the nation’s capital made a ruling that no one was aware of until twenty minutes ago, citing that while they thought about doing away with the whole debacle known as DST, they were going to fuck with everyone’s normally fucked up time jump schedules and make DST a full calendar week later than what the American public has been practicing for every bit of fifty years.

Why?

Who the hell knows? But I’m sure that the fact that it’s an election year has something to do with it on even the tiniest of levels.

So why does DST bother me?

Mainly because there’s honestly no need for it, and because it takes me the entire cycle of DST to get my body adjusted to the new light/dark cycle and then when I do finally get myself in sync with it all, we get to go back to the other time again.

Years ago, I was a soldier in the American military and serving with something a little less than pride overseas in South Korea. If any of you get the opportunity to lay irradiated waste to a small Asian country of your choosing, then South Korea is the choice of such endeavors. The people over there hate us for invading their shitty country 60 years ago and keeping them from falling under the iron curtain. And it is also the 3^rd largest concentration of sexually transmitted diseases in all of planet Earth. Fortunately, I was forewarned of that little tidbit of information before departing to said small Asian country and promptly went out and purchased every last piece of porn I could find within a fifty mile raadius, sealed it all in a false bottomed trunk (because shipping porn is apparently illegal) and carried it with me on the 22 hour plane ride to my new home.

Of course, when I got there, I was made aware that the place was surprisingly nothing like MASH (for you younger people, it was a TV show) and I not only didn’t have to resort to living in a tent for two years, but there was actually a ton of horny American servicewomen in the same barracks (or, as I learned my first night there, across the hall!!) as I.

Anyway, during my two and half years there, never once did we implement the heinous act of maddening stupidity that is Daylight Savings Time. Imagine my surprise when we not only didn’t fall off the face of the planet, but our clocks and watches didn’t explode in a sudden pop of uncontrollable backlash from a ruptured space/time continuum.

So why do we do this? Why in the wide world of sports do we continuously fuck with our perception of time twice every year?

Does it help, somehow, with getting mail quicker? Because the idiot mailman I have now never even tries to get the mail to the box at the end of the driveway until after the 6 o’clock news has already fucked up the headlines of the local paper and blown any chance of surprising information we might have experienced if the local post office hired according to competence and not hunting buddies.

Well, OK. Maybe it helps with shipping on some level…I mean, if an UPS truck left point A at 6PM during Daylight Savings Time and a FedEx truck left point B at 6:15PM during standard time, surely a wormhole opens up in the middle of I95 and helps them to deliver my free gift from Fingerhut all the more merrier, right?

No?

So maybe it’s the economy. Maybe, by winding our clocks ahead or back a whole hour, the Dow-Jones won’t notice that we’re still getting  raped like a Vietnamese garden hoe by OPEC as gas prices climb ever steadily toward the hundred dollar mark. It could be that by throwing that hour hand ahead one number, my taxes will shrink to a more manageable percentage and allow me to actually live like an American should instead of forking over 26% of my bottom line to help finance a war I don’t believe in and make the same old white farts that’s been in office since I was fucking born even richer than when I was a dirty thought in my old man’s imagination. Sure. And by skipping ahead an hour, I’ll feel better about automatically sacrificing yet even more of my pay for a Social Security check that I probably won’t get when I turn 105 (the new retire date by the time I DO turn 65) because…well, golly , Mr. Tidbit, we’re fresh out of giving a damn about your crusty old ass.

Might it have something to do with our health? By advancing an hour in time, might we all suddenly forget that American food companies are killing every last one of our fat asses off by injecting so many additives and preservatives and Christ knows what all else into the shit they market with gusto and a celebrity on the label. Hell, I might welcome to chance to slap my gums around a hamburger at some fast food joint where they fry a featured chemical from the periodic table(this week, I’m especially hyped at the chance to digest a metric ton of selenium!!) every week into the vat of bubbling orange shit that they cook everything else in and call it a Value Meal.

Perhaps by setting my watch ahead precisely one hour and clicking my heels together in the middle of the frozen food section at WalMart, I’ll forget that a few million immigrants steal their way into my fucked up country every year and find a way to take the jobs out of American hands because the employers can get away with paying them only a dollar an hour that they do not have to pay a cent of taxes on. Maybe I won’t even get mad the next time I have to drive my beat up (but paid for!!) weapon of mass destruction to the local laundry mat because of the on-going drought and see fifteen fucking Mexicans using shiny new quarters in the machines and taking their Downy Fresh clothes out to the pickup truck (that’s somehow better than my car!)they just paid cash for and talking on a cell phone that I can’t get because I’m a tax-paying American with a little bit of bad credit.

Hmmmm. Yeah, probably not.

…..

…..

Well, at least I managed to get an extra hour’s sleep. That’s gotta be worth somethin’, right?

Right?

…..

And that, my watch dial spinning fellow Purple Tidbit turban-haters…….is a Don Edwards fact.

That’ll do ‘er.

La fin

11/4/07.

DLE

Purple Tidbit and the Return of the No-Pulp OJ

I hereby disown the human race.

Effective immediately, Don Edwards will no longer be a part of race viler and more villainous than anything you could come across at the Mos Eisley spaceport.

Granted, this decision has only been made easier with a rash of recent events in the past few years like a needless war, mindless shootings at local universities, the sudden surge of disappearing women and children in these here United States and my personal favorite, OJ getting caught red-handed and getting let go…again. (And then there was the whole flying of commercial airliners into the twin towers by the government in an effort to lay blame to some non-existent terrorist figurehead in an effort to go back to war with the world's second highest oil producing country in order to jack up oil prices and gas prices to make a certain former Texas rodeo clown and his friends richer and to implement a state of fear and loathing in the confines of a free and open U. S. of A. in order to more easily pass an act to all but abolish the freedoms and regards for privacy that has made this country so awesome for so long…all with the consent of the American population….but that's another blog.)

As a science fiction buff, I have often wondered why it was that there were thousands of reported sightings of UFOs every year since the very first one allllll the way back to like, oh, I dunno, 1938 or something…but these guys never bothered to land and make with the communications. Well, now I know the answer after watching any given news channel for longer than an hour.

The human race are a crazy lot of wild-eyed bastards who would just assume kill everything that moved if it meant controlled inventory of a fossil fuel that was proven to slowly be destroying their own planet, which, coincidentally, will be given to the last retard standing after a phone vote poll of a billion chain-smoking Britney Spears shaving their heads and professing their untainted virginity and pop-star love for the exchange of stolen sports memorabilia from some aging pasteurized breakfast drink that may or not have done it (but if he did, there's a book for sale detailing it step by step).

Even if I had the power of a fully operational (OK, maybe just 99.99% operational) Death Star at my disposal, I'd leave human beings completely the hell alone. You all scare the bejesus outta me!!!

Not to mention the rampant stupidity…

Case in point:

I happen to work as a Warehouse Manager for Disable Cable, which was recently bought out from under the evil clutches of SuddenSuck Cable with promises to make everything all better without even a hint of an ouch-less band-aid. Part of Disable Cable's plan for multimedia pseudo-domination is the incorporation of a blatant rip-off of the AdjacentTV satellite company's handy dandy little programming menu and guide interface that is supposed to accurately inform the viewer of what he/she or it may or may not be watching at any particular point in the day with a simple pushing of a button.

However (.com), this new and improved way of telling me what I already know comes at a price…the new guide may cause the 1000s of cable boxes already in perfect working order…I say again, in perfect working order…to spontaneously erupt into an explosive debacle that would make Michael Bay verdant-hued with possible penis envy. Not to be dissuaded by such things, Disable Cable decides to err on the side of caution and sends the affected customer base a pretty little post card informing them of their impending digital doom and refers them to all locations except for the one directly responsible for the cosmic breaking of their innocent little cable box from the programming and guide gods that, collectively, we will call SMITES.

But, there is a problem. You see, the ever-incompetent VICE PRESIDENT OF MENTAL RETARDATION has either inaccurately filled out the request form to provide this service from SMITES or he has just not done it at all. No one is sure of the answer, not even the aforementioned VP himself, but that may be because we are asking these questions waaaay before an hour previous to quitting time, which apparently, is the beginning of the work cycle for incredibly retarded VPs in any wannabe business environment.

Regardless, myself and the Not Getting Paid for it Assistant to the Non-Functioning or Present Permanent Placement Authority-type Figure do not despair when presented by such obstacles and proceed with getting done of things despite SMITES' inability to discern the difference between physical pieces of paper and e-mail. Three days a few mutilated TV remotes later, the request is received at cable god HQ and the SMITE is thusly sent to the golden TEST BOX of which no one man can look directly upon. The ancient and magic numbers sync and the new guide appears onto us….

….thirty-seven minutes later….

….and it's completely and utterly fucking WRONG.

Now I know a lot of you are out there wondering what the hell all this has to do with almost anything, and clearly it has no resonance in the confines of the normal working world…the keyword being "normal". It is a shining example of a typical day-to-day transaction in just one of a million different companies the world over. It's a demonstration of lack of communication from "higher" echelon to the lowly worker bees of the company infrastructure; an example of the incompetence and poor customer service of any and all third party businesses that may be involved in the direct operation of some other business; and it's also an example of just plain stupidity on the part of a business feeling the need to completely flush away the remnants of the company they bought with unnecessary and costly "fixes" that's going to further serve to irritate the already pissed off customer.

So….

Yeah, I think I'm just going to go ahead and tender my resignation from the human race and maybe get into my T-16 and shoot up a coupla three womprats, join the Rebellion and maybe try to bag my long-lost twin sister who, incidentally, is super hot in slave get-up.

…and that my fellow non-actual paper e-readin' and mailin' Purple Tidbit mofos of the bizness world oh-gee, triple oh-gee gangsta fact. (respect.)…is a Don Edwards fact.

Word, up, down and six degrees of low-fat Kevin Bacon.

Boo-yahs!

-la fin

10/01/07.

DLEWarehouse

Purple Tidbit and Massive Brain Hemorrhaging Garage Sale

So it’s 5:00PM and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down all day and I decided that now would be a good time to work on my blog for the week.

Before I get to the usual Don-Edwards-hates-the-world rant, I wanted to allow you all to bask in the excellence that is me and inform you that this fat man has lost yet another 2 unsightly pounds from the body mass, thus reducing my weight a total of 18LBS and allowing me to complete and accomplish my first goal of the Plan…to get under 320. For those of you playing along at home, I haven’t been under 320 in almost a year. Today is a special day. Today is the day I realized that I really can lost weight if I try hard enough and that…perhaps for the first time in my short life here on planet Dirtball, I have met a goal that I set for myself (aside from banging that cute blonde chick that time in San Diego…but she has pretty hammered and was hardly a challenge. Keeping the air in her…now that was the challenge, but I digress.).

Bask.

Bask, I say.

Anybody want to take a stab at how I celebrated this little milestone?

Bueller?

Bueller?

…..

Bueller?

Anyone?

I cleaned.

I cleaned all the crap from outta my house, my studio, my shed, and my car that had been accumulating for months…and in some cases, years.

And not just run of the mill crap either, mind you…personal crap. Shit that I used to think I would need at a later date and thought I just couldn’t live without.

Like that old photo I had of an ex-flame that I just kept holding onto all these years because she had written some sentimental words on it and left a phone number for me to fawn after and torture myself over, never knowing if I should call it or not.

Trash!

Like an entire box full of old ass sketches and half started stories from back in the day. Shit that I will never go back and finish or restart, but held onto just because I couldn’t bear the thought of something so personal to me just cast aside into the dumpster.

Guess where it is now?

And there were other things. A watch here, a receipt there. A ticket stub that was so worn out, the only reason I knew it was a movie ticket was the barely-there faint blue watermark of a film reel next to the time of 2:10 in the afternoon a million Saturdays ago.

Yet still, there was more: old ashcans of comics I’d happened upon and never referred to again. Phone numbers and business cards of people I’d only seen once and didn’t know or even care if they were in a state of living or dying. There were even some old Playboys and Swanks that found their way into the round file of Doom in my tossing of the garbage.

So what’s the point?

The point is that I’m on a new path in my life. I see things differently now and have changed so much since the days when those things had a place in my life. They no longer fit, so they had to go. No offense to the makers of the things I tossed, or to the people who may or may not have given them to me for whatever reason or occasion they might have been given. Life is about change, I think. Even the most brain-addled among us on this world grow and change on their journey to understanding their own human condition. It’s not the same for everyone, though. Some of us find our way on our own, others have to have it thrust upon them, and others…well, some of us just actually find a different path than what we desire, and we just make due.

So before I close off on this…incredibly short blog…there is one more thing I have left to throw away…but not because it doesn’t fit in my life anymore, but because as with any knowledge, it is the responsibility of the learned to release said knowledge into the wild and let it breathe in the air and go forth and multiply, if you will.

I wrote this down years ago, back at a particularly bad spot on the road to here. I don’t know what it means, all I know is that it’s kept me up a lot of nights wondering. And because I’m such a darned-tootin’ nice feller…I reckon I’ll pass this little tidbit on to you, the masses:

The world is a darkened stage and the lives we live, a paltry act in a play where the ending is never scripted for our rehearsal. Treasure the starring role while you can and know this: The secret to life is that there is no secret.

There are no reasons as to why we are here, we just are. The purpose of existence is simply to exist, no more, no less.

God is a phantom of our imaginations, a creation of a hope that there is more to something of which we all know there is not.

Time travel will never be achieved for time itself does not actually exist…time is nothing more than a unit of measure brought forth into creation by our own inability to accept our natural surroundings, limitations, and perceptions of control.

There are no aliens. We are the beginnings of all the future civilizations the universe will know a billion years from now. We are the progenitors. It all starts with us.

Or does it end with us?

So there ya go.  Be careful, because it does fuck with you. A lot.

And that, my spaced out, blubber losin’, fellow freaky purple tidbits of humanity and the cosmos beyond…is a Don Edwards fact.

Groovy, ain’t it?

-la fin!

9/23/07.

DLE

Purple Tidbit and the Flaming Death by Microwave Popcorn Syndrome