THE Brian Jones

Jan 25 2012 ∞

Be At Peace (St. Francis de Sales)

Be At Peace.

Do not look forward in fear to the changes of life; rather look to them with full hope as they arise. God, whose very own you are, will deliver you from out of them. He has kept you hitherto, and He will lead you safely through all things; and when you cannot stand it, God will bury you in His arms.

Do not fear what may happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you then and every day. He will either shield you from suffering, or will give you unfailing strength to bear it.

Be at Peace and put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations.

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Dec 19 2011 ∞

Radio commercials

One aspect of my life as a performer and writer is that I get really caught up in the shortcomings of radio and television commercials.

Television commercial shortcomings actually are far fewer and more forgivable than those for radio. It’s rare for a TV commercial to reach the air with some of the demented (to me) amateurism I hear on radio in the few minutes per day that I listen. I think this is because everybody thinks they can go for huge effects in a radio commercial using the people in the office, whereas for TV the pitfalls of this approach quickly become evident. Then they either give up and just do voices over a shot of the product, or go the other way and make it seem like they purposely did a cheesy awful commercial.

But on the radio, you can go and do lots of things right but still come up with a debacle. For instance, there’s a commercial for Autobell auto wash with two utterly disjointed narrative threads — “precociously cliched arguing kids” and “smooth-voiced pitch  man.” The commercial actually has decent production values and rns smoothly. the main travesty is in the copy — it never occurred to anyone that the narrator should at least mention how getting your car cleaned by Autobell could make you forget the two bickering brats in the back seat, or something — justify their existence somehow, Autobell! Plus the kids are THE ABSOLUTE WORST of the breed.

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+ ∞

Breeze Card

I added $40 on my Breeze card the other day (in the morning) and got a convoluted stupid email:

NOTE: Please remember that online purchases are available to load by tapping your Breeze card on a MARTA bus, rail station gate or vending machine 3 hours after the completion of your purchase; Allow a minimum of 12 hours for fare upload for Mobility service.

Actually, I got two copies because you can’t load $40 all at once — so I did two $20’s.

As the afternoon wore on and my credits didn’t appear online, I weighed my confidence in the system* vs. my desire to get home that night, and decided to go to the MARTA rail station vending machine and tap my breeze card. There was *no* selection on the screen for “load an online purchase” so I selected “check breeze card balance.” I tapped my card and the screen blinked & flashed like it was about to reboot and then displayed a message: “$20 has been automatically added to your account.”

Christ.

So I checked my balance again and the $40 was there. I guess it can only send one message at a time so the final $20 message was what I saw. Maybe during that blinking it sent the first message?

But.

Plus, I hope you caught that: “Automatically?” What the hell? I actually had to reread it several times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Really, they might as well have said “magically” for all the word added to my experience.

I mean, it worked and I should STFU right?

No. The designers of this system are idiots.

*Previously, I had loaded the card online and ignored the non-communicative e-mail. I mean I read it but it didn’t really tell me anything about what I needed to do, and the credits appeared on my card almost immediately so I didn’t worry. I was curious about what would happen when I “loaded” the purchase by “tapping” it on the fare box, but when I tapped the card on the fare box that evening, it just subtracted my fare and I went home. I guess I’m lucky I didn’t take the import of the e-mail to mean, I was supposed to do a tap to load. I can easily see scenarios where if I was a slightly more neurotic [HA! — ed.] I would have wound up inadvertently having a fare subtracted as I tried to “load” my purchase by “tapping.”

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Oct 27 2011 ∞

Limerick Battle the Latest (UPDATED!) (FINAL UPDATE)

FINAL UPDATE at bottom. “Milk?”

UPDATE! Scroll down — the first part is in top posted mode, but the rest is bottom posted.

This will take a sec to unwind:

Brother Steve has lunch with his work friends every Friday. I call it his “gay lunch” although in fairness, there’s no reason to suspect gayness on anyone’s part and in fact, Steve has roundly denied it.

Meanwhile, I’ve made my lustful admiration of the adorable Martha Plimpton clear, but he’s not into her (apparently, for some reason other than gayness.)


She's tight

The “Doody” theme to our ongoing battles is already known…

Hence:


From: Brian Jones
Date: Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 10:16 AM
Subject: Re: You ALL are…
To: Steve

The Doody Lunch Club was aflutter
As Steve was sometimes heard to mutter,
“My brother, the simpleton
Just loves Martha Plimpton:
A *woman,* so pardon my shudder.”

B

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Steve Meckleburg wrote:
> Subject: You *all* are

>Message Body:

> …doody heads. You, Lee, and Kevin, the Doody Lunch Club.
>
> Not bitter, just sayin’.
>
> S

UPDATED!

Steve responded with two desperate attempts at smackdown:

Au contraire, mon frer,
To the drawing board thou must repair.
You say she’s a woman
But if closer you zoom in,
You’ll see nads dangling there.

I, on the other hand, know
A woman from a hag on a show.
A woman has heft
And naught in her cleft
But a slot where my peepee can go.

(The last of which, ew.)

My response, a desperate attempt to make peace and why can’t we both be right:

Is there room in that flint of a heart
For more forms of womanly art?
While Martha lacks girth
She’s real down-to-earth
And her teats, though scanty, are tart.

Alas, peace was not to be found, as Steve responded:

Aye, some room I can make
For things in the form of pancake.
But I like mine best
Not served on a chest,
But hot and buttery, on a plate.

Well, so be it:

Steve, you odious twat
You can see for yourself, she’s not flat.
So your favorite hookers
Are all sporting bazookas.
Those’re nice! So are her snub-nose gats.

FINAL UPDATE

I’ll give Steve the final word. Well, maybe.

Good luck getting some milk
From wizened founts of that ilk.
If I wanted erasers
I’d buy Eberhard-Fabers
Not grope within Martha’s silk.

(“Milk?”)

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Oct 20 2011 ∞

Calling Card II

Oh, and another thing, I mentioned to Tasha, she should limit how much she’s going to spend on calling cards, so that he can call her or his scumbag friends, but you’ll only be paying so much for that. She shot back, “He can only call one number on the calling card, and that’s mine.”

I find that difficult to believe. I need to look into it.

Last night we were watching “Damages” Season 3 and Ellen confronted her addict sister about the drugs Ellen found in the sister’s purse. The sister immediately and without appearing to think about it gave Ellen the smoothest line of obvious bullshit you ever saw. Boy did that look familiar.

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Oct 19 2011 ∞

Calling Card

Will calls Tasha multiple times per day & night. Tasha keeps telling him to stop calling, but also keeps taking the calls. Last night she was really upset about this.

“Why am I so mean?” she wailed.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Didn’t you hear me telling him, ‘Stop calling me! Stop calling me!’”

I asked permission to butt in and then told her, “You should tell him when you’ll take his calls, then stop taking the calls at other times.”

She looked panicked. I told her, “You have a right to set boundaries and expect them to be respected. You also have the right to enforce the boundaries if no respect is forthcoming.”

I was saying this for our daughter’s sake as much as for Tasha’s. I hope they all heard it.

Tasha habitually spends upwards of $75 per month on calling cards when Will is in jail. What a racket!

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Oct 17 2011 ∞

Taken

Will got himself picked up Friday morning.

This breaks all our hearts as we want him to be better yet we know right now this is where he belongs. He was on 10 years’ probation for felony burglary; he was picked up for possession of a Class IV controlled substance (apparently, some Xanax he’d stolen) and criminal trespass (squatting in a vacant foreclosed home.) So I don’t know if this means he’ll do time for the felony burglary as well as the two new offenses, or what. We haven’t heard anything about a hearing for him.

Meanwhile, we’re transforming his old bedroom into a music room. I wanted to do that so my wife would be used to the idea of him not being around and not associate an empty bedroom with him. I’ll also use it as an office on days when I work from home.

Pray for us sinners!

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Oct 12 2011 ∞

Hmm…(Oct 5) (Keeping it real)

Can’t help but wonder what time of day it was that I posted on Oct. 5, because a terrible thing happened that day which I didn’t mention. I’ll probably use this space to go into it in more detail, because I’m finally ready to go public with this information.

Sometime during the day on Oct. 5, 2011, my son Will Jones entered my house and stole my laptop. Sometime after that, I don’t know just when, he sold it for $100. Fortunately it was password protected and I haven’t seen any evidence that anybody got past the password protection.

We had evicted Will from our home on Saturday, Oct. 1, due to his failure to pay rent, drug use, and other behaviors we had told him were unacceptable. The final straw was when my wife returned from a ride with her mother in her mother’s car to see Will pulling up in my wife’s car. No permission sought or given, he was out riding in her car. (No driver’s license either.)

My son has now been in juvenile detention, jail, drug rehab, and other programs for most of the last few years. He is now homeless, living in vacant houses around the neighborhood. When he got out of jail early this year, he basically talked his way out of jail and back home. Never again.

The laptop is really the last of it. It’s what it represents, as a marker of what he’s become, that is priceless. He can return to my presence when he brings me a new laptop, along with a receipt demonstrating that it was not stolen, and a testimonial from a reputable employer that the money was not obtained through criminal means.

I would prefer that he was in jail right now. He was on ten years’ probation when he was released from jail — he has certainly not lived up to the terms of his probation. The freeing moment for me came early on when I realized that it was not his probation officer’s job to protect me from Will’s predations. A laptop is a small price to pay for the unvarnished truth of what he really is — a predator, a thief, a user, a scumbag.

Of course it hurts to say that of my own son. Maybe the language will soften as time goes by, but the determination remains steely and sure: he will never talk his way into my trust again.

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Oct 05 2011 ∞

Workouts, Practice

I started week 9 of podrunner intervals!

I practiced going up & down the neck — slowly, clumsily — in A Minor pentatonic!

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Sep 25 2011 ∞

Practice and workout, 9/24/11

Good day yesterday.

Played through “Blackbird” slowly while downloading stuff to PS3. Also got through Hanon in G enouragingly quickly.

Did my final week 7 run. It was easy and my leg is feeling better.

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