The Nameless

So Friday we’re heading to Hamden to see Hedwig live—I’m a bit leery because I can be a bit of a music snob (ok, I can be a huge music snob), and once I’m committed to certain versions of songs I like a lot, hearing them fucked with can wreck my appreciation of a live show. I’m particularly concerned about the quality of guitar playing we’ll hear, but WTF, it’ll be fun.

Here’s hoping we get some good glam rock Friday. And some hot queens.

I watched the last two innings of the ALCS last night just to see the most despicable fans in baseball get fucked. Yankees fans are spoiled, having seen their team go to the WS a zillion times, having won most of those they went to, and now that their carefully crafted (and ridiculously expensive) dynastic fantasy has crumbled again, I can’t help but force myself to care long enough to watch their petulant whining disbelief. I hope the BoSox play Houston, and that the long-suffering BoSox win the whole thing for the first time since 1918. I still remember vividly the Mets final out fiasco, with a dribbled easy grounder slipping through Bill Buckner’s hobbled ankles in 1986, and would like Boston to erase such memories. Of course, the Astros have never won the WS either…but I’m hoping the Sox are an indication that the stars are smiling on Massachusetts, and Kerry can ride the surging combined energies of the NE Patriots and the Beantown baseball fans to the White House.

Saturday morning we’re helping my brother-in-law (The Nameless) move. Usually I like helping people, but The Nameless drives me up a wall. There are few individuals on Earth I can’t force myself to tolerate--and this guy is at the top of the list. We’re talking A1 prime grade prick. I almost decked him at our wedding rehearsal party because he started screaming at Cha: “You have to respect your older brother! You should’ve taken me personally around to meet everyone here! You don’t care about tradition or what’s right! How can I be part of this family if you don’t include me?!� She was crying under his screaming assault, carried out in front of my family and all our friends—only The Hulk wrapping his arms around me prevented what would’ve been a disastrous (but wholly satisfying) rearrangement of The Nameless’s face. He’s the most shameful passive-aggressive manipulator I know, and I know many, and he exacerbates this fact by sometimes erupting into absolute dickheadedness. Two Thanksgivings ago he wanted to use my PC to “check stocks,� and took the liberty of starting a bunch of updates. When I found out what he was doing I explained to him that Windows media and security updates had crashed my computer to fatal failure before—but no, he assured me. “I took a class, I can easily prevent that.� Sure enough, he crashed my system. I told him I would fix it; I knew the procedure, I’d simply wipe the hard drive and start anew, but no, “I took a class, I can do it.� So he managed to wipe clean the cache D drive, with all the system drivers on it, and I’ve never gotten the original modem to work again, or the cable modem, or the sound card. He spent 14 hours at my house that Saturday “fixing� my PC until it was nearly useless, souring our relations even more. This was at a time when I was teaching four classes and taking five, and I had tons of work to do. I told his wife, poor long-suffering lady, that if she didn’t keep him away from me I was going to kill him, so she got him and led him out the door, and he had the fucking nerve to give me a hard time for kicking him out after he “spent so much time trying to fix [my] computer!� Ugh! I was livid. It took me hours the next day to get the thing working, and I had to buy a new external modem for $90. Perhaps I’ll “fix� his dining room set Saturday morning, heh heh. He’s always a victim, always the center of everything, always asking us to go out with him and complaining when we don’t. There’s a reason we don’t include you in our lives, motherfucker. You’re an annoying shithead; don’t use us to make up for the fact you have no friends.

Tonight after work Yahtzee and I are headed to Champions—it’s been months since we played pool (a euphemism for “since he kicked my ass at pool�). Then, tomorrow I’ll be teaching “Gimpel the Fool� and beginning some very early Halloween party prep.