These days it is not neccesary to walk down a dark alley on the wrong side of town, or have a breakdown beside a rain-soaked country road, to be murdered. You can just hang out with the people you work with every day.

The news here in Atlanta is that a girl attending my alma mater, Kennesaw State University, was raped and killed in her apartment after attending a rave party with a co-worker. Had she known more about her companion for the evening she might not have elected to rave with him that night, for he was a known raving lunatic!

Laureen Cooper's alleged raper and murderer, Kendrick Ledet, was a former Marine who made international headlines 11 years ago when he and two fellow soldiers went on trial for the rape of a 12-year-old Japanese girl. (He was never charged with rape but was charged with abduction and violence.) It has been reported Cooper and Ledet worked at a restaurant together.

This mirrors another college girl murder story that just came to its denoument a few months ago. Emory University student Shannon Melendi was raped and murdered 11 years ago by a man named Colvin Hinton she worked with at a softball park. She was a scorekeeper and he was an umpire. They were going to a fast food restaurant for lunch. Melendi probably didn't know Colvin had served 15 months in prison for kidnapping a 14-year-old girl in Illinois in 1982. Police have since speculated Melendi's killer may have been a serial killer and could lead them to more bodies.

We make the presumption that the people in our immediate orbit are there because they're very similar to ourselves. When we fill out job applications we give our Social Security Number and two most recent residences, and of course whoever receives these applications carefully checks these things out. Right? RIGHT?

There oughta be a law that if someone comes into your work zone who has a criminal record of any kind -- shoplifting, passing a bad check, whatever -- you should receive a neon-yellow sheet of paper on your desk, in your locker, or on a break room bulletin board, loudly announcing that a person of criminal record is going to be working near you. Calm down, now! He/she has paid their debt to society, and Mr. Boss Man is just sure they've learned their lesson and are completely trustworthy. Right? RIGHT?

I've heard people in my high-brow work space on the Chicago Stock Exchange (okay, I'm B.S.'ing you, I work in a call center) talking about being on parole. A rather humorous-but-scary e-mail went around one Christmas from someone asking that their samurai sword be returned (I didn't see John Belushi in the call center). Sometimes oddball items like picture frames are reported missing ("You can keep the frame, but please return the photo of my son.").

It is in times like these I thank God I don't have a physique that could give a potential murder-rapist a hard on if I should find myself accidentally lunching with them. Right. RIGHT?

A month or two ago I was filing down I-75 on the way to work when I saw a dark red billboard to the left bearing only the words, "I pooted." Maybe someone felt so ashamed to have tooted during a Sunday service that they decided to go beyond the confessional and take out a billboard on the interstate? More likely, though, some sort of commercial product would be announced to go along with "I pooted" in a few weeks, and we would finally know who was so desperate to sell their product, and thought so little of our minds, that rather than sell it on merits they're selling it on methane.


Now moving up Peachtree Industrial I saw a similarly-colored billboard off in the distance that announced "My boogers itch." So now I've got poots for one-half the drive to work, and itching boogers for the other half. Wow, someone's a real whiz. While other people think up catchphrases, expensive product photos, hire models, someone is finally just cutting to the chase and trying to attract us with poots and boogers.

Curiously, everytime a strip club puts up a billboard of a woman in a bikini we have the customary TV news report about the local league of concerned mothers who weep that their kid's school bus drives by there every day, and their children's minds will be soiled when they find out women have breasts and buttocks. But there has been no outcry that the Cartoon Network, who puts up these billboards, is aiming their poots squarely at their children.

Few people over the age of 30 are bigger fans of poots and boogers than me. When I was about 13 my masterpiece drawings were of one of a guy blowing his nose all over his hands under the heading "Boogers," and another guy happily blowing a brown cloud under the heading "Farts." These hung on my bedroom wall next to Eddie Van Halen and U2. But poots and boogers are now mainstream entertainment, and I think it's wrong. It's part of a larger trend that always occurs until it's stopped and a more restrained, or backwards, period sets in, and then the journey starts again.

For instance, the cell phone company I work at sells ringtones. When a customer calls in to complain about the $150 download bill their 11 year old has ran up I'm amazed at some of the song titles, and that you don't have to go through a "click here if you're 18 and up to enter" box or anything. Now back in my day, when we had rotary-dial phones and at least one 8-track in easy reach, there was a single dealer in this kind of music and that was Luke Skywalker and 2 Live Crew. And a Luke Skywalker tape was contraband; one guy got the tape and made copies for other people. There was even a phone number inside to book Luke for your house party! Shortly after Luke's appearance they started putting 17-and-up stickers on things and you had to show ID to even buy it. Now, Luke Skywalker's lyrical stylings are the norm, except when the song is about shooting someone dead or smacking your bitch.

Likewise I can remember sitting in the rumbleseat eating moon pies and listening to Eddie Murphy comedy cassettes. Eddie Murphy was the king of the dirty comedy hill, and we tittered at routines like "Faggots" and "Doodoo." If you had a Eddie Murphy cassette, or in my case copied one from your friend with more lax parents, you had something forbidden, bold, on the edge. The same applied a generation earlier to George Carlin. (I've got a 2-CD set of Carlin's `70's material and for all its blue reputation he says "shit" and "fuck" maybe once in an hour's time. I was so disappointed I contemplated returning it for a refund.)

But when HBO and Showtime started running away with the ratings the networks have had to start catching up on edginess, and now my mom said she even heard Rachel Ray, a cooking show host, say, "After you put this in the pot you don't want to fuck with it." Uncensored, on a cooking show!

So am I just an old prude who can't get with the times? I'll bet you my last jar of Pomade I'm not! I firmly believe in the right of 12 year old boys to blast their poots into tape recorders, laugh at the latest nasty comedian and sneak peeks inside Penthouse at the book store. However, I believe they also should have as much trouble getting to these things as I did. Because at least a corner of the appeal was that it was the unknown, the beyond. Your every day life was a plain poundcake and seeing Apollonia's boobs in Purple Rain was the delicious frosting that was hidden behind signs and stickers saying "must be 17 or accompanied by an adult." And because hearing Eddie Murphy talk about his dream that, "I went to Hollywood and found out Mr. T was a faggot!" was over-the-top in my mind, I am not on oxycontin today.

The "my boogers itch" billboard points to something more profound than that adolescent boys have easy access to fart humor. It means we're truly approaching our end as a prominent civilization. Greek civilization, the Roman Empire, progressed and progressed until they had such wealth and leisure that it took more and more unusual pursuits to entertain them. Then here came the barbarian German tribes to level it all and we were plunged into hundreds of years of darkness, stunted intellectual growth. The flower blossomed, wilted and fell to the ground only to re-grow, taking eons to burrow back up through the dirt towards the light.

So it is with our civilization. Maybe history will record that before the Arabs toppled us and plunged us into hundreds of years of hiding ourselves under togas, wasting our days chanting to Allah, we rode our fiberglass-adorned chariots past billboards that said, "I pooted."

During my Web travels of late I've come across a few things that I thought were really interesting. Here's a compendium for like-minded people:

1.) Hot Mariah Carey photos - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution site ran this slideshow of pictures from Mariah Carey's appearance at Philips Arena last week. I would recommend a box of Kleenex and a small jar of Vaseline before clicking that link.

2.) Led Zeppelin boots - On Dime A Dozen.org a guy going by Big Bad Bill has been posting tons of great Zeppelin bootlegs. I've collected a 4/27/69 soundboard from the Fillmore West that sounds virtually as good as an official release! Also Memphis `70, Bath Festival `70 (UK, where they first became heros back home), Berkley `71 and Belfast `71 (first public performances of "Black Dog," "Stariway" "Going to California" and "Rock n' Roll"). The guy is real nice and replied that he would try to fill one of my special requests!

Unrelated to this, I shall also soon receive a copy of the 4/28/95 Page-Plant show at the Omni that I was at. The show was actually kinda flaccid but I was still foolish to erase the cassette I made off of Z-93's broadcast 11 years ago. Now I'll have it on CD!

3.) Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey chatting backstage, VIDEO! - Hearing all that old Led Zeppelin got me surfing around reading about them again, and a site called Stryder.de has a fantastic multimedia page that includes this candid video of Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey chatting backstage discussing acoustic guitars! Curiously I put this on the Telecaster forum and no one seemed to give a shit. Oh, well. My two favorite singers and rock legends hanging out shooting the breeze...wow.

Another interesting thing on that same page is Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones accepting their Grammy Lifetime Achievement award. I think the camera catches them snickering at Lynrd Skynrd, or maybe it's just me. All well worth looking at.

My mom was going through a stack of papers that had been stashed inside an endtable back when a relative was about to visit a couple of decades ago. She just presented me with a few things that were from my school days back in 1983, so I was 12. If the world was as it should be a scholar or mercenary publisher would be finding these things and making them public, but instead I have to excavate them myself. Here's something I dashed off for school as a seventh grader.

Herbie was a god with nothing but a shiny bald head. Everyone in Herbie's time had no hair. Also, everybody in Herbie's time was a man.

One day, a shiny light erupted from the darkness. It grew and grew. It became so hot the men needed no overcoats, but just a pair of shorts.

The sky exploded! And out of it came a flock of beings unknown to man! Not only where they unknown, but they were also much prettier. One person was inclined to say, "Whoa, man!"

Another man decided, "That's it! We'll call them woman!"

With all of their physical differences, one was shocking. They had hair!

Herbie, a short little man said, "Do teach us to grow hair like yours!"

One woman, the prettiest one named Brunette, touched Herbie's head and the others, and hair of brown grew down to their collars.

"Oh, wow! This is most incredible! I could just die!"

All of the men ran their fingers through their brand new hair. All but one.

Herbie picked up a broken stick and brushed. His hair stuck back in wings. One of the women floated down from the sky to Herbie and kissed him long and hard. Herbie screamed with excitement! "AAAAAHHHHGGG!," were his exact words.

All of them got sticks and made their hair into wings which encouraged the women to love forever on the earth.

And there you have it. A literary prodigy, no doubt about it. More to come.

Let's head into the weekend with my first guest blogger ever, Brian Clark. By permission here's a reprint of his entry, Crap You Spout to Get a Job. He displays such a mastery of buzzwords and lingo here that it's no wonder he's won the big bucks in reality.

WHY APPLY?

I am ready for more responsibility. This is a result of personal growth and progression, and it's important to me for my own personal satisfaction. I want to know up front the expectations that a company has for its employees and how to go about meeting and exceeding those expectations to progress up the corporate ladder. This would make me happy, and I believe that a happy employee works harder, smarter and better than an unhappy, unfulfilled one.

PAY SCALE

I have no set aspirations about money and reward. If I am selected for this position, I know I will contribute and add value to the organization. Generally, increased reward follows. I believe you get out what you put in.

STRENGTHS

Speaking in generalities, my strengths are that I am organized, dependable, and willing to contribute ideas and go the extra step to ensure that my job gets done thoroughly expeditiously, while keeping in mind the company's goals and profitability as well. I also am a great peer coach. My co-workers frequently come to me for guidance on how to solve problems and ask what methods I use to complete my assignments as well as I do. I also have a knack for saving business relationships that have been soured by poor performance on the part of the company. I have a stack of compliments that I would like to share with you that underscore this ability. I realized a long time ago that the company I work for may have 5,000 employees, but when I speak to a customer, I am the entire company to that customer. The impression that customer comes away with is directly related to how well I do my job. I don't take that responsibility lightly.

WEAKNESSES

There are some things I'm not so good at, but I'd never say these are weaknesses, because I consider weakness to imply vulnerability, and I don't consider myself vulnerable. I have difficulty working with people who don't pull their weight. I have high standards for my work and I expect others to have high standards too. I'm learning to speak up and request that others contribute more completely long before I start getting angry about a situation that is unequal. I also can't understand people who have a chronic problem getting to work on time.

BIGGEST FAILURE

I generally don't fail because I plan and manage accordingly. But if a process or procedure isn't working well, then I'll change it until it does. The important thing is to put the necessary checks and contingencies in place that enable me to see if things aren't going to plan, and to make changes when and if necessary.

FIVE YEARS FROM NOW...

Five years from now I see myself continuing to work hard and doing the best possible job I can, and making a more significant contribution to whatever organization I'm working for.Long term, I want to make the most of my abilities and build a serious career, but in this day and age nothing is certain or guaranteed. I'll do my best and believe that opportunities will arise which will enable me to keep contributing, increasing my worth, and developing my ability in a way that benefits the organization and me.In five years, I will have also developed new skills and abilities, and I will be even better qualified in whatever way suits the situation and opportunities I have. I will be well-regarded by my peers and respected and trusted by my superiors as someone who continuously increases the value and scale of what he does for the company.

WHAT WILL I BRING TO THE JOB?

I will bring a steady, balanced work ethic to the team. I believe in getting the job done while forging trust and respect with my co-workers.

JUGGLING PRIORITIES

I have those "juggling" situations almost every day. There's no real secret to handling these things, I just prioritize the assignments by how urgent each situation is. In general, I put out the hottest fire first and work my way down from there.Also, knowing where the fires are likely to erupt and preventing said eruption is just as important as putting out the ones already burning. This is an area where my experience is extremely valuable. I've been working long enough to know the consequences of getting the priorities out of order.

HANDLING STRESS

Stress is detrimental to being successful in any situation, and while it is sometimes unavoidable, it can be minimized. I find that keeping perspective on the task at hand and visualizing its completion can greatly reduce stress.Deadlines are different. I look at deadlines as similar to checkpoints in a race. Each checkpoint has to be met within a certain time frame to remain competitive. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment each time I meet one of those checkpoints.

Because I joined the Democratic Party and support labor unions some of my readers may have the incorrect perception that I'm "liberal" on everything. Not so! And a leading example would be the occupation of parenting.

Today at the call center some lady called in ranting about her aging father's cell phone bill. "I have to do everything for him," she was telling me. Her dad was 65 and she said he had just recently recently gotten off drugs and moved to Florida from New York. So perhaps his problem in handling his personal affairs wasn't the onset of Alzheimer's, but a lifelong case of stupidity.

Discussing this with the lady as I worked on her bill I said that the example of my older cousins had probably kept me on the straight-and-narrow. Though I've told you, my reader, about my cousins who are stars of the football field and legal world, chemical engineers, etc., there's a couple of ne'er-do-wells I've deliberately skipped.

The leading example is my cousin who was unfortunately judged to be borderline retarded at birth. She went on to form a cocaine addiction and eventually snorted so much nose candy that she had a stroke and wound up paralyzed in a wheelchair. She spent her last years in a housing project using her government checks to coke up (or had she moved to the more budget-minded meth by then?) before eventually succeeding on her third or fourth OD/suicide attempt in her early 40's. The O.D. only happened in about `04 or `05, but even in the early `80's if I brought home a bad report card I would hear, "YA WANNA TURN OUT LIKE YOUR COUSIN?!"

This caller was absolutely on the same page with me. "Yeah, it's like our son wants to try pot --"

WHOOT! Hold on. Your son tells you he wants to try pot? That should be a secret in the deepest recesses of his mind! He shares this with you?!

"...and you know, it's only pot, and my husband says he just doesn't want him trying it here at home..."

Well, well...Parents of the Year. I had to step outside my lame-o telephone servant mode and say, "Look, let me pull a Dr. Phil on you -- don't do that. As a teenager he wants to do something outside the boundaries you set for him. So if you tell him, 'Well, it's only pot,' then he's going to have to shoot heroin to feel like he's going outside your rules and being naughty. What you should do is forbid him to drink caffeinated beverages, and that way if he drinks even a single can of Old Milwaukee he'll feel like he's really done something."

Hip-and-with-it parents are a true blight upon our society, I've come to realize as I've gotten older. Forget blaming John Kerry, or the government, or your local school system for why your kid can't cut it. How about looking in the mirror? Maybe the problem is you. Parents who toke up with the kids, put on keg parties for the young'uns, even that dad who escorts his son to the Iron Maiden concert and rocks out alongside him...they're a large part of the reason our society is increasingly glutted with dimbulb functional illiterates who have no sense of right, wrong, good, bad, hot, cold, up, down, paper, plastic, night or day. "I'll never forget when I was 15 and my dad lit my bong as Slayer took the stage. We stopped at a whore house in Talapoosa later that night and received BJ's from two Vietnamese girls dressed in bear costumes." Where do you go from there?

Let go of your need to be considered cool by 15 year olds and try adjusting yourself and your kids to the hardcore fundamentals of reality. If we are ever to acheive a stupidity-free society, it's up to you.

Austin, Texas

"Don't stay in the same town you grew up in!," a girl once told me, "You'll stagnate!"

I've been in this same town 35 years now and sure enough, I believe I've stagnated. Tomorrow it's back to the ol' call center to hear the same old complaints. I'll weather that for five days until next weekend, when I'll sit in front of this computer looking for bootlegs, checking the latest scuttlebutt on the guitar forums and climaxing it all with my weekly walk around the Marietta Square. Stagnant, indeed. Is a change of venue needed?

One evening the Food Network's Rachel Ray was doing a segment on Austin, Texas. Austin immediately impressed me as perhaps a place for me. It's long on quirkiness and artsiness; they even print T-shirts that say "Keep Austin Weird." It's considered the hippest college/music town in the country, hosting the SXSW (South by Southwest) festival every year. And according to a recent HGTV episode on the city you can get a really nice house there for below the national average. Thanks to those shows I'm sure a mini-boom is about to take hold.

Atlanta certainly has it's good points: lots of pine trees; abundant malls and shopping centers; warm, mostly rain-free weather. However in the past I've also likened trying to start a life or get a career going here to striking a book of wet matches. Despite the influx of people from around the country and, particularly in the past few years, from around the world, Atlanta remains a very staid, corporate, back-and-forth-to-work, throw-frisbee-with-your-kids-on-the-weekend kind of place. Of course, worst of all it's a when-is-our-next-opportunity-to-vote-for-a-Bush? kind of place.

Of course Los Angeles is the city I was always truly enamored with but as my storyboarding pal pointed out, it's really a Ricky Martin kind of town. I'm not a Ricky Martin type. No highlighted hair or capped teeth for me, please. Plus, I don't have $500,000 to toss on a one-bedroom, one-bathroom house right now. And mudslides and forest fires could really ruin a summer.

So...hmm...what do you think? Should I schedule some vacation time and check out Austin? Anybody been? Hmm?

Over on Rankin' Blog the question was raised if Mel Gibson's movie career would suffer reprecussions due to his anti-Jewish comments upon being arrested for drunk driving in Malibu. Thinking it over I realized I have a lot to say on this topic, and why I think not a lot will happen to Mel Gibson.

First, Mel Gibson is an industry. There are managers, secretaries, maids, accountants, independent film crews and, not least of all, publicists who depend on the continued popularity of the Mel Gibson brand for their meals. Already those publicists have won a pardon from the Anti-Defamation League, and I'm sure either low-key apologies or "that got blown out of proportion by the media who have a problem with my conservative views" explanations are forthcoming everywhere from The Tonight Show to Hannity & Colmes. Entertainment Tonight can know they'll still have at least two minutes of showtime filled with Mel Gibson.

The reprecussions will also be negligible because we've become used to looking around our entertainer's foibiles and focusing on the entertainment they bring us. For instance, I'm 92% certain my teenage hero Pete Townshend did pull his pants down and polished his monkey to the sight of little boys' wee-wees. Does that stop me from wanting to leap around the room when I hear "Bargain"? Unfortunately no, and I still love Live at Leeds. Woody Allen married his adopted daughter, yet as Howard Stern humorously pointed out you wouldn't hear anyone in Hollywood calling him out on it, and in fact they all continued to gush how they would love to be directed by Woody Allen. Halle Berry was charged with hit and run, Wynonna Ryder was convicted of shoplifting, Johnny Carson's first wife said he socked her in front of onlookers at a Hollywood party, Eddie Murphy and Danny Bonaduce have both been caught with transsexuals. The list goes on and on. We're a culture driven by commodities, not idealism, so we sweep it all under the mental rug in deference to our need to be titilated.

Thirdly, historically anti-Semitism doesn't seem to have hurt the careers of Wagner, Ford or Nietzche, either. Composer Richard Wagner is reputed to have said a few things that Mel might have nodded his head at on that Malibu roadside, and "The Ring" is even thought to have particularly inspired Hitler.

Henry Ford went much further than ranting on a roadside and put his thoughts in print, both in book and newspaper form. He aired his anti-Jewish ideas in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Interestingly I had a Jewish boss who was bitching how he didn't like the Ford Town Car he had recently bought and when I said, "Why don't you get a Mercedes?" he said, "I'm a Jew! I don't drive German cars!" He was then happy to return the Town Car and get yet another Ford Crown Victoria. Henry is still generally thought to be a American icon and this aspect of his life was given very cursory mention in the few televised biographies I've seen.

Last but not least we can't forget Friedrich Nietzche, who went so far as to formulate a philosophy of slave and master morality, the slave morality having been conceived by Jewish slaves as a form of defense from their masters, so Nietzche wrote. The Will to Power was essential reading in Nazi and SS circles. Today Nietzche is probably the best-known name in philosophy outside Socrates, Aristotle and Plato.

So right or wrong, if Mel Gibson's next movie Apocalypto is entertaining, an audience will be there.

Hey, if you thought that last post was boring, wait until you get a load o' this one!

Yeah, so a couple of weeks ago I got to assist with training the new customer service recruits as they were coming out of training and taking their first calls. As I've said before, being hunkered down in my cubicle trying to keep my statistics in safe territory while also weathering every kind of customer personality and sorting out every shape and form of billing debacle usually encroaches on my ability to scope out what my fellow phone drones are doing. But surveying this last group was an eye opener on the deplorable state of the work force.

If a customer has a particularly complex issue that we have to call them back on, that's called a "commitment," which we enter into the computer. If we don't execute the commitment on time an alert e-mail goes out to all the managers at the call center. This one girl, who's name was something like Akira (I know because it was tattooed on her arm) had such a situation. I told her to make the commitment. She said, "We're not allowed to make those in training." That was horseshit, I was sure, and sure enough the next day she was working on the commitment. While working on it she asked me, "So what happens if I don't do my commitment?" Mind you she's not even out of training!

I said, "If you miss it an alert goes out to your manager, the area manager and the call center director and they'll all be at your desk wanting to know what happened. The next thing we know you're working at Verizon where the same scene starts all over again, so you may as well do this one."

She gave me a "you gotta be kiddin'" look and said, "If I miss just one commitment?"

I wasn't feeling impressed by this recruit's spunk.

Then another guy had a customer who had gotten a bunch of invalid charges for downloads. He had about a dozen of them on the screen and I said, "Yeah, you just go through there and click all of those 'cancel and refund' buttons and just paste in your explanation."

"You mean I gotta click all dem muthafuckas?!"

In the late `60's-early `70's there was a cartoon called The Jetsons. It posited the comical idea that one day we would make our livings sitting in padded chairs in air conditioned buildings just pressing buttons all day. It was thought a dream too good to be true in 1970. Now the dream is upon us, and someone has the temerity to say, "You mean I gotta click all dem muthafuckas?"

"Jetson?! George Jetson, get down here now!"

"What is it, Mr. Spacely?"

"We have some buttons that have gone un-pushed! Were those your buttons to push, Jetson?"

"Mr. Spacely...you mean I gotta click all dem muthafuckas?!"

Jetson, you're fired!

Laziness wasn't a problem for all of the recruits. Some were perfectly determined. Unfortunately their hand-eye skills were not on par with their aspirations. This one kind, 50-something woman wanted to discuss a customer's issue with me. Unfortunately it took her a full 10 minutes just to log into the billing system. I think there could be a space for me to teach remedial cut-paste-and-scroll mouse classes at the community college. There was a temptation, while watching a senior employee struggle to master highlighting a single line of text, to grab the mouse and say, "You know what? Here, give me this. Scoot over." And a few times in desperation I did, but this is not conducive to learning.

Our state's employers say the skill they most prize in new employee is the ability to read and speak well. My opinion diverges; I think we need more people with an ability to infer. For instance a woman said her customer had a problem with her RAZR phone. I said, "Go to the manufacturer's site and download a manual."

"Okay. What's the site?"

Let's see...the phone is a Motorola, so, hmm...maybe it's Motorola.com? I'm just pulling that out of my ass. Oh, that's it?! Lucky guess!

"Okay. Now where do I go?"

HOW THE FUCK DO I KNOW?! I DON'T WORK AT MOTOROLA! POKE AROUND THE SITE UNTIL YOU FIND IT! (United States->Products->Mobile phones->Model->Support->Manuals->Download.)

As I say, an ability to infer is key. Another young man had a customer having a problem with the microchip in the back of their phone. "Have them take it out, wipe it for fingerprints and dust and put it back in the phone," I instructed.

"What should she wipe it with?"

100-grit sandpaper, and use plenty of elbow grease. Something soft and lint-free, of course, ya dipshit!

I would make a great trainer.

In my previous post I took the chance of looking like a insufferable egomaniac in an effort to counteract previous posts that made me sound like a terminal loser. While I may have sounded ridiculously full of myself, there are plenty of other people in the world who exhibit quite opposite qualities, and I'm not sure they're any more attractive.

At the merry ol' call center I was talking to one of the new recruits and she mentioned she and her husband had recently moved to Atlanta from Los Angeles. I'm always mystified when I meet people who've moved here from Los Angeles and New York because through most of my life I've firmly believed the Party, the Action, the Next Big Thing was brewing in those cities, certainly not here in Sleepyville. So I asked her why in the world she would abandon the home of Show Business to work here in a call center.

"Oh, Hollywood's no big deal. After you've seen one celebrity you've seen them all."

Then a couple of days ago on the phone I ran into another lady who said she had recently moved here from Los Angeles, "born and raised in the San Fernando Valley." She said she would never go back and just loved Georgia. Why in the hell would she move here and abandon the Seat of World Wide Show Business? "Once you've seen one celebrity you've seen them all. I mean if you're a plain person who doesn't care about that stuff..."

Take note that in both exchanges the ladies' assumption was that I want to be in Hollywood to look at celebrities. I could care less about seeing Brad Pitt -- I want Brad Pitt to see ME! I want him to stop in his tracks on the sidewalk and say, "Holy shit, there he goes! I'll tell my friends I was just feet away from him!" Also take note of the phrase "plain people". Yes, there are people out there, more than a few, who are self-described plain people!

"Johnson, we'd really like to bring you aboard with our company. But first, how would you sum yourself up in one word?"

"Um...well...hmm...I uh...well...."

"Yes?"

"How about...plain?"

If nothing else, thank God I've really never thought of myself as a plain person. In high school I recall being agape when we had to turn in papers about what we wanted to be one day, and people were turning in such mundane professions. So many people seemed to have no expectations, no deeply-held belief they could one day be anything but plain. I don't recall what I wrote but I'm sure it was somewhere between Eddie Van Halen and David Letterman, something spectacular.

"Most people aren't particularly good at anything," George Carlin wisely wrote in Mind Droppings. "It's particularly interesting when you can see them from an airplane. The houses, like the people, all the same. The streets, like their lives, going nowhere. 'Not a Through Street.'" My life may not be a through-street, but I like to think the arhitecture of my "house" is apart from the norm, anyhow.

But you wouldn't care about any of this if you're a plain person.