Well, I had a nice father’s day, my dad and I went on a hike out in the Sandy River Delta area, took the dogs, got lost. Saw a bunch of flowers, a snake, lots of different dragonflies. Lots of people out with lots of dogs. The river was either way higher than it has been before, or way lower, it’s tough to tell since I don’t go out there very often. Either way it was a beautiful way to spend the day, and have a lot of low key, but civil, conversation with my dad.

It sounds like he’s starting to come out of his latest depressive plunge, which is a good thing. He actually talked about getting in touch with the probate lawyer and taking care of Grandma’s stuff, which is something he should have done months ago. He also talked about whether or not he was going to need to get a new car, which is a subject that had long not been broached. It was nice to be able to just kind of talk about problems, without fearing that he was going to flip out and yell at me. Of course, we steered wiiiide of The War and The Economy and The Presidential Election. That shit is a little too heavy for me during exercise time anyway, but the last three or four times we’ve “gone there”, it’s not ended up working out. Lots of emotion tied into it for him, and when Dad gets emotional, he gets argumentative. And when I say argumentative, don’t think for a moment that I’m talking about the sort of argumentative that goes on when Hannity and Colmes talk about Iraq; Instead imagine the sort of argumentative that went on in the mid 90’s when a blood and a crip had a discussion about the ownership of a car.

Of course, this is not the only weird emotional response Dad has. When he thinks his kids are in danger, he gets angry at them. Weird, but true. When the neighbors indicated that my sister had several boys in her room, and that they had held her out the window (which is apparently not true), he screamed and yelled at her, grounded her, not listening to anything she had to say. When I rode my big wheel down the street and he didn’t remember where I was? He spanked me. When I got arrested and wrongly accused of sexual assault, he treated me as if I had done it. Very exciting.

I see this in myself from time to time, the backwards responses, the screeching chaos behind my eyelids, and I have to wonder if he experiences all of the same crazy things I do. Does he not really trust anyone? Does he live a life that merely spans the moments between elaborate, violent revenge fantasies? When he sees happiness in others, does it disgust him? Does he feel like the smile on his face has been glued there to distract everyone else? I wonder.

There’s your new slogan, Comcast. It’s either that or “Beats the shit out of me!”. After being told that there was no “date” assigned to my autopay and that it probably wouldn’t take place until next month, I checked my bank account today and noticed that they extracted their $112. I signed into my Comcast account and it still shows that I owe $186 ($74 for a previous bill that I paid over the phone the first time I called to complain my autopay wasn’t going through, plus $112 for the current months service). It also still shows that the autopay will go in on the 11th (just as it did before, though previously it showed such strange dates as the 26th of May and the 4th of October). Presumably, I now have a $20 credit on my account, but the account page will likely never update to reflect that.

Is it this hard to bill for a service in this day and age? What is their billing department running on, some type of hammer-and-chisel driven system of gears and pulleys, that jockey decrepit accountants from one position on a great granite cliff face to another, carefully crossing out accounts receivable when payments are made? Fuck me, man.

So, in my last post, I decided my hate-on for Octalink 1 v2 cranks was supreme, and that I would go ahead and get some square taper cranks and sell off the BB. Instead, I went back to Citybikes and found another set of Octalink 1 v2 cranks (this time in the “touring” gears, 28-38-48) that seems to be in better repair. It was the cheaper option ($25, versus $25 for cranks and $20 for a new BB), and hey, it’s gotta work OK this time, right? I even got some washers to install between the pedal and the crank, and lubed the threads of the pedal when I put it in. Now that the weather is getting nicer (Fuck you cloudy skies on the weekend, this shit needs to stop), I’ll take her out for some grocery runs and whatnot. Still need a new fork, if only so I can adjust the frickin’ stem up some, but that is another dollar for another day.

So, I’m not sure why, but it appears that I have been banned from Craigslist. I’d like to say it was because of a clever interstate confidence scam that netted a tidy profit, or because I was so clever and conniving in the personals ads that I started a fat girl on skinny girl flame war, or even because I posted some “hate speech” in the rants and raves section, but alas, it’s not true. As far as I’m able to tell, it’s because I have a blue wingback chair and some metal halide fixtures that are insufficiently tangible or whatever to give away in the free section. When I post an ad, it gets deleted by Craigslist staff in approximately 4 minutes, regardless of if I’ve even gotten the confirmation email to post it or not. I assume that I am different from the folks who are posting the C.I.4l.IS 4 FUCKN ads in every category because their wingback chairs are more tastefully upholstered, and their light fixtures are high pressure sodium, which everyone knows is better.

Nobody ever posts looking for a chunky white guy with a small dick for NSA fun.