Das Stiver

The day after I met Stiver I awoke next to him in the bed of a man named Patrick, with precious little memory of the night before.  Except the Rum, I remembered the rum.  The next few moments were crucial.

Adam Jones:  Hey Opie,* we didn't... do anything, did we?

Stiver:  I don't think so.  No, definitely not... You hungry?

Adam Jones:  Yeah.

Stiver:  You want to go to Olive Garden?

Adam Jones:  Hell yeah.

We've been close ever since.  In fact, we are so close that I once wrote and recorded a song for him when I was T-Pain.  It is not remotely appropriate for a work environment.  Please listen, if you would like.

 P.H.M.L.
(This is the song.)

Together we have had many fine adventures, drank Beer Shakes, and each separately caught someone burgling our apartment.

The reason I'm telling you this now is because, like me, he has decided to try to carve out his own little space on the internet.  He's been getting it ready, and he's now ready to share it with the public.**  So here it is:

I Am Stiver

I hope that you enjoy it.  If you don't, let him know.  He appreciates constructive criticism more than anyone I've ever known.***

P.S. If you are J.T. Stiver, I hope you don't mind me mentioning the waking up in bed with you story.  I thought it would be funny.  Please don't be mad.  At least I didn't talk about the Virginia Incident.****

*That's what we called him back then.
**Also, he works in the office next to mine, so I feel obligated to mention it.
***That's a lie.  He's fairly sensitive, but he tries really hard not to be.
****Yet.

And So It's Christmas - Part 1

This morning I woke up well rested from an overall relaxing Thanksgiving weekend and drove to work listening to Christmas carols on one of Atlanta's pop stations.  I let the beginnings of Christmas Cheer wash over me.  However, before I let go of Thanksgiving completely, there are a few things on which I would like to touch:

1.     I am fully aware that Haters must hate, but likewise, I must protest.  We get it.  Slaughtering an indigenous people and conquering their land is wrong.  Lesson learned (this is not a commentary on modern strife).  No one is supporting this.  Okay, I shouldn't say no one.  There's an evil twin to Rule #34, it states "If it exists, someone hates it.  No exceptions."  So, I'm willing to acknowledge that someone out there hates Native Americans so bad that they feel that small pox was too good for them, but ya know what?  They are the vast minority.  The rest of us get it.   That's not what it's about anymore.  It never really was, but people get fixated.  The holiday has transcended its origins, get over it.

2.     Family and friends are important every day of the year, but people are dumb.  We have short memories.  We need to remind ourselves about the best things in our lives, or we will take them for granted.  Unless you happen to be a saint, then good for you.

Your health.  Even if you're sick, you're alive.  As long as you're alive you can do something important for someone.

Your family.  I'm beginning to learn that no matter what your differences may be, your family will always give you valuable insight into your self, and that is priceless.

Your friends.  They say that friends are the family you pick yourself.  I believe that with all of me.  Every one of my friends are the parts of me that I need more of.  Without them, I am less.

Me.  You're welcome.

3.     Now that we've exhausted ourselves being thankful for all the greatest things in our lives, I want you to take the last few moments of Thanksgiving and appreciate the small things.  The TV shows that make you smile.  The books that take you somewhere else when you need to be.  The music that sounds like you feel.  Late night coffee.  Spontaneous shopping trips.  Tight hugs and long Autumn days.* ** Whatever it is that adds that color to your life; That lustrous glue that fills the gaps and makes your life a little more solid.

So basically what I'm saying here is:

Shut up and enjoy yourself.  There's no one stopping you.



*Also, the crazy-hot Latina that lives next door... with the short shorts and the tall boots... yeah, that one.

[Edit]
** And sports.  People like those things.

Gotta Show Your Math.

So I pretty much have the best sister ever.  She left me a comment on one of my earlier posts questioning how I would calculate how many dead whores I could fit in the back of a dump truck.  This is my answer:


Standard volume for a mid-sized dump truck is 6 cubic yards.
And because we're going to need this later, let's go ahead and convert this into  4.58732 cubic meters.

The U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration released a document called the Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight (CTS&W) Study, in which they release that the average load for a dump truck is 34,760 lbs..

Let's assume that the fatties, the crack-whores, and the hotties all average out to be an average American woman's weight each.  Because on some level they're people right?  Well that would make them about 74.4 kg (164.0 lb).

Well, average human density is 1010 kg/cubic meter.

Which means that we can cram about 4,633.1932 kg, or 10,214.442 lbs. of human flesh into a mid-sized dump truck. That's well within its weight limit.  This makes sense, as it is designed to carry things a lot more dense than your average whore.

So we are restricted by volume, not weight.

Which leaves us room for no more than 62 whole dead hookers.  That's a little over 5 tons of prostitute.

Thank you.

Inappropriate Haiku #1

You did it!  Last night as I lay slumbering, you guys gave me my first milestone:  50 Followers! (On my Facebook fan page)

Sure, maybe in some grand scheme fifty followers aren't that much, but in my Grand Scheme you fifty followers are the foundation upon which I shall build my empire!  You hear that?  Fame and fortune, and it all starts with you.  To show my gratitude, I am sharing with you one of my greatest treasures.  Below is the first of my beloved Inappropriate Haiku.  Please enjoy.

Inappropriate Haiku #1

Gentle and loving

Your eyes reflect the starlight

Now get on my cock

P.S.  I know I've been posting a lot this last week.  It's that new blog smell, I have trouble staying away.  I'll calm down here soon and post something with a little more substance.

Dear That One Guy in South Korea,

Hey. I see you there.

I'm not sure what happened to cause our paths to cross, but I'm glad it did. Was it the ham post? I bet it was.  Everybody loves it. I hope that you enjoyed your time here. Come back whenever you get the chance, okay?

I miss you.

Social Conditioning

So I was up late on The Facebooks and the posts refreshed.  A friend of mine had just posted about how a stranger just called her fat.

I was all like: "Nah, you're beautiful."

And then she was all like: "Yeah, I know, which is why it was so weird that they said it."*

And I became shocked into enlightenment, like some zen koan.  I had completely missed the point.  She wasn't saying it because the comment had begun to jab into her confidence and she needed affirmation.  She was saying it because she thought it was strange for a stranger to say such a thing unprovoked.

I've spent so much time around people with low self-esteem that I've been conditioned to have a knee-jerk response to counter any negative comment.  Like some Pavlovian Complement Dog.  I say things just because I think it's the expected response, like:

"Marco."
     "Polo."

"You remind me of a babe."
     "What babe?"

"And the void would be calling."
     "Oh Riff Raff!"

"They think I'm fat."
     "Nah, you're beautiful."

It doesn't matter that it's true;  I don't like to speak without thinking.  It's a contributor to mob mentality.

Well no more!  From now on I maintain conscious awareness of every word.  No more auto-pilot.  No more call and response method of conversation.  I vow to say what I mean, and mean what I say.

This will last right up until I absentmindedly walk by a coworker and they say "S'up?" and I respond "Good."

*That's not quite how it went down, I was just paraphrasing and over-simplifying... parasimplifying?... yeah, I was parasimplifying for the sake of expediency.  Which has now been negated by the over-phrasing.

Yeah, About That

Sorry for the last post.

Not really, but yeah.

I just needed to establish, mostly to myself, that this was going to be a place where I could talk about anything. Not that I'm going to be trying to push some sort of envelope all of the time, I just need the freedom to talk about the things that are important to me, no matter how awkward they may be.

I am continually moved by people who speak out with such frank openness about deeply personal issues.  I need to believe that one day I'll be able to do that, too.

I refer to my genitalia as "The Command Center."

Why I Have a Problem With Sex

It's not that I have an ethical or moral problem with sex.  I like the idea of it, I just have difficulty with the physical completion of the act.

See, due to low self esteem, poor body image, and a complete lack of understanding of how to interact with people in a romantic capacity*, I remained a virgin until my late twenties.  Even then... it did not go well.

I should mention that from the ages of eighteen to twenty-one I worked at a porn store.  A jack-shack, to be specific.  It was my job to sell a minimum of three dollars worth of tokens to whoever stumbled in.  They would then go sit in a booth, feed it the tokens, select from a choice of thirty-two movies that were playing in an endless loop, and do what men locked in booths with porn do.

I knew that sex was nothing like it was in the porns, but I also knew that it was what people wanted it to be.  In their deepest, id-iest parts... They may love their spouses, and love making love to them, but sooner or later that urge for a tranny midget gang bang hits, and you're back in Lowest Common Denominator Land.

It's okay.  I don't judge.

The point is, eventually it got ingrained in me that sex is something that two or more porn stars do to each other.  Or the guys do to each other in the back of the 'shack.  Or, given enough money, perverts do to the nice ladies on the corner.  Or sluts did with whoever happened to be around at those parties to which I always regretted going.  Or assholes did with whoever would let them, and sometimes even that wouldn't stop them.

It wasn't something that respectable people did.

Orgasms were something you had where no one could see you, behind locked doors, in the dark, as quietly as possible.  It wasn't something you did in the presence of a lady, and certainly not inside her... The very notion seemed dreadfully inappropriate.

I'll often say that I am of three minds on everything.  Usually I consider it one of my greatest strengths.  Two tend to hold polar opposite opinions, and the third typically tries to find some sort of compromise.  I'll pick one to act with, but on some level I believe them all.

Mind One believes as I explained above, that sex is for pervs and I'm wrong for wanting it.
Mind Two understands that sex can be a perfectly healthy act between two people who care about and respect each other... but has never really heard of it happening (because the people that do it don't talk about it).
Mind Three thinks that sex is complicated and I should go drink something alcoholic.

It's difficult to get out of my own head and get into the moment.  It's difficult to take any of it seriously, and the only alternatives seem to be comedic sex, and ironic sex... which is also difficult for me, because the concept of irony completely eludes me... but that's an entirely different post.

* Which are all largely much better now, likely due to sex.

Ham Madness

I work for a specialty ham company.  I would mention the name, but apparently the first rule of Specialty Ham Company is don't talk about Specialty Ham Company.  Once, years ago, I mentioned it by name in my personal blog.  The next day I was called up to the V.P. of Human Resources' office.  I had mentioned the company favorably, because I love it.  However, later in that post I may have mentioned something about wondering how many dead prostitutes can fit in the back of a garbage truck.

Apparently the Christian based, family value oriented, specialty ham company does not like its employees associating its name with theoretical truckloads of deceased whores.

Go fig.

Thing is, people love ham.  They need it.  I concede that there are a handful of vegetarian Jews out there that have transcended this basic human requirement, but the rest of  us live day to day, trying to figure out how we're going to get that next ham.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, that need starts getting desperate.  The ham sellers build forts, trying to satisfy the hungry masses as best they can.  Sooner or later, they fail.  Their shipments come up late, a customer swears they ordered twice as many hams as they did, or one of their registers fails.  The latter is where I come in.

I do technical ham support.

When there's a ham riot, the consumers assault the hammeries.  The clerks work the best they can, but if a register goes down, there's nothing they can do.  They don't know what a USB cable is.  They don't know that the monitor isn't the computer.  Why should they?  They sell hams.  They're in a panic, because they're about to get stabbed by crazed ham enthusiasts, and they need their equipment fixed now.  "Do you know how busy it is?  Do you know the kind of people I have to deal with?"  Yes, I really do, and I sympathize.  I'm trying to help, but they won't let me.  They interrupt, try to correct me, put me on hold for twenty minutes, or just plain lie.  Everybody lies.  House taught me that, as well as life.  It wasn't until this job that I realized quite how much everybody lies.  They try not to.  They try to be decent people, but the stress is too much.  It's too late.

They've fallen to the Ham Madness.

Oh, and just so you know, the really inappropriate stuff is going to be starting soon.  Just giving you a heads up.

Face on a Shirt

So my good friend Erin is a very talented and very lovely actress.  So it is easy for me to understand that someone would want to cast her as a walking mass of rotting flesh.  People seem to be liking The Walking Dead, so we're all very happy for her.

She has her face on a shirt.

That's her in the middle.

And, of course, we're all very happy for her.  I'll be buying one soon.  But here's the rub...

I'm jealous as hell.

So I promise you this:  The moment I get a merch section up, I'm getting a T-Shirt with my face on it.  Then we can all have a t-shirt with my face on it.  Or Erin's.  Hell, we can all get our own face shirts and wear each others faces on our chests.

...Not in a weird Ed Gein kind of way, though.  I think that would be counter-productive.

The Most Portentous Clover Ever - Part 2

When I got home from finding the first four-leaf clover that I had in years, I sliced a bit of my thumb off.  Sadly, there is no good story to go along with this.  I was cutting onions.  I was improperly using a slicing device and paid the price with my flesh.  I was in such a panic that I just put the missing bit back on and put a Band-Aid on it, hoping that it would just decid to latch back on.  I was beginning to feel quite distraught and betrayed by my clover, until I remembered that my friend K.T. lost half her thumb in a metal shop accident (which is bad-ass).  So who knows, if it weren't for the clover, I could be missing a lot more thumb.

There's... a lot to cover, so I'm going to start summing up.

Caught in thunderstorm, super late to work, got stick caught in my car, thought I had a flat tire, but didn't.  It was the stick... it would make sense if I explained it... but no.

On Devil's Night an old friend I hadn't heard from in ages called me out of the blue to tell me she was going to be at the same party as me, and that I should keep an eye out for her.  I had planned to be alone in my living room, in my pajamas.  Instead I decided to go to this party, of which I had never heard.  It was at a seedy warehouse in the middle of nowhere and she was two and a half hours late.  It turns out the good party was at a different seedy warehouse further down the alley.  God I hate the scene.

On Halloween I went to see my bff Mareta at her Haunted House.  She had been doing make-up effects, but I hadn't gone to see.  It was good, then her husband and I went to go have coffee.  We talked for hours about a constant trend of the older generation of any age scorning the social change brought on by the younger generation, and other stuff... which was weird, cause we never really talk.

And my mother's husband didn't have lung cancer, as it turns out.  Just Sarcoidosis.  Which in itself isn't great, but it beats lung cancer.

I was dating a girl in Chicago, from Atlanta.  That wasn't working out well, so we ended things in Wisconsin.

A gorgeous woman caught my fly down, and The Most Interesting Man in the World covered for me. (Seriously, Google this dude.  It is ridiculous.)

One of the most bad-ass women on the planet didn't seem to mind when she found out that I have a huge crush on her.  Also, she kissed me.

My flight home got delayed, and when I went to sleep that night, the frame above my bed fell on my head.

I bought a new jacket.  Okay, I get that this one may not seem weird to anyone.  I get that.  But trust me, that is bizarre.  Like woah.

Stiver and I went to a diner to get coffee.  We got tired of the place, so we walked down the street to the Waffle House to get coffee.  On the way there was a donation bin with the most bad-ass poster ever.

I call it "Two Moon Panther."

(My wall isn't yellow, it's just weird light.)

Can you believe that someone was getting rid of that?  It is now on my dining room wall.

Thing is, after several straight weeks of strangeness, I thought "I have got to tell someone about this."  Then I corrected myself  "No, I have got to tell everyone about this."

So here it is.  MeetAdamJones.com.  Inspired by a clover, and built solely so I can tell you about the weird shit in my life.

...

And help satisfy my enormous ego.

The Most Portentous Clover Ever - Part 1

When I was a child, I was mad talented at finding four-leaf clovers.  I could look at a clover patch and find one within two minutes.  There was a period of a few months were I found dozens.  I thought I was the luckiest boy alive.  Eventually those around be became less and less enthused by my discoveries, and even my mother adopted her "Oh, that's nice Dear" response.  I suspected then, as I do now, that they were all jealous;  So in an effort to spare their feelings, I stopped looking.

A few weeks ago I considered myself in need of some luck.  Things were not awful, but I was in a terrible rut, also I had been slacking off on my fitness routine for a few weeks.  I was about to walk up Stone Mountain, a local mountain in the Atlanta area.  It is made of stone.  We are creative here.  I had been going up once a week for months, and the week was almost over.  I was not going to miss it.  I walked to the foot of the mountain and caught a patch of clover out of the corner of my eye.  This seemed like an opportune moment to get back in the habit of luck finding.  I poured over the patch, and sure enough, less than two minutes later I found this beauty:

That's when things got weird.  The following few weeks were packed with bizarre happenings and strange luck.  I will now proceed to scratch the surface of the tip of the iceberg.

I've always considered finding a four-leaf clover to be good luck, but picking it to be bad, at least for the clover.  So I moved along.

On the way up the mountain I saw a woman that looked just like an Ex of mine.  She was identical from the back.  Same body type, hair, and clothes style.  I looked around and gestured like "Is anybody else seeing this?" knowing full well that there was no one else around, and that even if there were, they wouldn't likely be able to make a comparison.  When I looked back, she was gone.  For just a second I considered the state of my sanity, but then she popped up from behind a rock.  I sped up to pass her, so I could leave that awkward reminder of my past behind me, but it was too late.  I was thinking about her.

I hadn't thought about her in a while.  Things had ended poorly between us, and I dislike poking wounds.  If I had a stick, and there were a wounded dinosaur, I wouldn't poke it.  Especially a brontosaurus, because they don't exist.  I realized I missed her quite a lot.  Not romantically, but we had been friends for many years before anything romantic happened, and we hadn't spoken since.  I missed her friendship.  It didn't really seem appropriate to just send her an unsolicited email and hope for the best.  So I tried my best to make peace with the fact that this was likely one of those sad losses that a person must simply carry through life.

The next day my email got hacked and everyone I knew was sent a link for discount Viagra.  Everyone, including that Ex.  She's a smart lady, I was sure she'd realize I didn't mean to send it to her.  There's those few seconds though, the ones between where she sees she got an email from me, and when she sees that it was an automated boner-selling spam-bot.  I guess those few seconds were enough, because she replied, and we started cautiously trading emails.  So... lucky.