Archive for September, 2008

Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 11

September 23, 2008
Mr X makes contact – glass is a pain in the ass

The mysterious Mr. X made contact a few days ago saying that his plan was approved by the big cheeses, so we were a go. Now I need to go interview with the people in charge and try to look more cool than I really am so I can get this job! I’m crossing my fingers.. don’t know when the interview is gonna be.. maybe late this week, maybe next week.. I’ll keep you posted if anything interesting happens…

So Jeff and I decided that we’d put our glass kiln in my back yard for the time being because his shop is pretty small and dark, and he finds it kind of gloomy to work in. So until he finds a shop he likes better, my back porch is the glass place. Of course any of you that have been to my back yard know that the porch is half-built, and there is certainly no electricity out there to run a kiln… SO… I spent the weekend digging an 18″ deep trench from my porch to the corner of the house where the main breaker box is. Now.. the porch is not attached to the house, it’s under the pergola in the back corner.. 75 feet away from the junction box.. UG. I’d originally had plans to run a few plugs to other remote areas in the yard for little twinkly lights in the trees and stuff, but after digging that damnable trench, I’ve decided to give up on that dream. Anyway, I feel like an old man, everything aches.. but that part is done.. the conduit and wire are in place, and soon there will be juice out there. Then comes the finishing of the porch. The unemployment checks should just cover it.. haha. I’m going to hell.

Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 10

September 23, 2008
No wonder Government hammers cost 700 dollars

So, yesterday I officially ‘claimed’ my first two weeks of unemployment from whatever branch of the government handles that thing.. they have a web site where you go and register initially, then every two weeks you have to go back on a specific date (monday) to claim each week you didn’t work, then they will send out the moolah. Seems simple enough.

And it would be if there weren’t also 9 bajillion other people out of work in the state of Florida trying to do the very same thing on the very same day. It says right there on the web site.. “due to the high rate of unemployment we are experiencing technical difficulties with our web claiming service, if you are having trouble claiming your weeks with the web based system, call this 800 number….” ok, so after entering my information 5 or 6 times and reaching different points in the chain on the web pages only to be told ‘the system is unavailable please come back later’, I decided to say screw it and call the damned 800 number. Busy. Busy every time I called.. and I called like 10 times in a row before going back to the web system. Finally after another 8 tries I got one of my weeks claimed on the web site.. but no way was it gonna let me do two, it just kept kicking me back out. So I went outside and did some yard work for a couple hours marveling in the technical savvy of the government. I came back in and tried calling the number again.. busy, I went back online and tried the on-line system.. after another 10 or so tries it finally went through.

All in all I’d venture to say I spent an hour at least trying to claim unemployment.. not bad for two weeks of pay from the government. I still feel like a deadbeat claiming unemployment, but not knowing how long I’m going to be out of work, I need all the money I can get!

Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 09

Sept 12, 2008
I’m going nuts – the tale of two Jeffs, kiss my glass

My friend Jeff Blossy told me he had read my blog and he says he fears that I may be going nuts. HAHA. I told him, that I’ve always been nuts, and he doesn’t have anything to worry about! Well at any rate, it’s nice to know that someone actually does read all this crap.

The other night I went to my friend Jeff League’s studio out in Winter Park… He has a cool little warehouse/garage place where he does all of his encaustic wax painting work. It’s pretty cool stuff. He’s had this place for what seems like years, yet I’d never been out to see it. I figured it was time, seeing as I had no other obligations. It took me back to the old old days when I had a similar warehouse space where I tried vainly to restore and paint classic muscle cars. Man did I go broke during that stage of my life. Luckily I didn’t yet have the debt or any children so being flat-ass broke wasn’t quite such a big deal. I believe it was during this time that I signed my name on my very first credit card application, thinking the whole time that in thus doing, I was starting a landslide that I would regret for the rest of my life. I think it must have been manifest destiny because as I look back on that crowning moment now, I can say with some sincerity, that I do in fact regret ever signing that stupid piece of paper.

Anyways, back to Jeff (League). He works at Melinnea gallery during the day, and makes his own cool artwork at night, which he sells more and more of. Either he sells it at the gallery, or at art shows around Florida and other states. He told me he was interested in collaborating on some sculpture pieces using cast glass and metal. Hey, this sounds right up my alley! I told him that I definitely would be interested and we should start right away. So I’ve spent the last few days reading up on different techniques used in glass work. It’s some pretty cool stuff! There’s a high ‘burn-your-face-off’ possibility, and I’m down with anything that can kill you if you screw it up. I think I’m really going to have fun with this stuff. ‘Course this has nothing to do with getting a job, but it will fill in the empty spaces in my day, and give me something creative to focus on. Who knows, maybe we’ll become the next collective Dale Chihuly.

Speaking of creative outlets, we’ve got the Slasher’s Bash coming up on Halloween. My god, it’s less than 2 months away and I haven’t done shit for it yet. Jeff (Blossy) came up with a great poster and logo, now I’m up to get the web site open, and start designing the decorations for the club. Man, I’m sitting here with no real job to go to, and this stuff still makes me feel overwhelmed. Remind me why we do the Halloween party again?

Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 08

September 8, 2008
Dream Big!

So alot of you have heard me talk about leaving the rat race and living on a sailboat in the Caribbean. Sound crazy to you? Probably does. But I’ll tell you something, I’m going to do it. And soon as I can. It’s what I want from life.. and if not permanently than at least long enough for me to get it out of my system. I can’t find any compelling reason to remain living in a city when everything in me tells me I’m not a city person.

I know people who can’t imagine living in a small town, they’d go crazy without immediate access to a starbucks, or a trendy new restaurant, they love people and feel fulfilled by interaction with the hustle and bustle.. these are the people who complain that Orlando has no culture, no arts, no night life, no music scene..etc. Well you know what? MOVE! LOL. All of those things may be true, I’ve been to San Francisco and seen how cool a city can be, and I fell in love with it. But after a week in that city, I was ready to escape back to my small Orlando to get away from the constant frenetic energy. And lack of green. Nothing in the city has any green, unless you go to the park. I get that the big cool cities have big cool central parks, but you have to leave your house and travel to run your feet through the grass. Not for me, thanks.

I don’t even like going to Thornton park and sitting on the sidewalk at a restaurant.. even if the food is good. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a people watcher, so I do enjoy that part of it, I just don’t want to have anything to do with them, I don’t like the culture of living in a condo, walking your dog 4 times a day, jogging in you jogging outfit, having martinis with Buffy and Todd at the corner bistro… living the yuppie wet dream. Christ, where are my people? I have nothing in common with these people. OK, OK, I’m getting off track.

My point is this, I’m definitely one of those people who could be comfortable with little to no contact with society as a whole for extended periods of time. Notice I don’t say PEOPLE. I do like a few folks, and relish my friends that I’ve accumulated over the years. But as a whole, I have a pretty hefty dose of contempt for the corporate rat race, and the people who seem to thrive on it. It’s just not for me.

So hence the dream of living on a boat. Now I’m not thinking we’d be floating in the open sea, I’m definitely thinking anchored in St. Thomas, or the Keys or…. wherever. We’d still be working, just working different kinds of jobs.

It’s been interesting and kind of eye opening for me to hear people’s reactions to this plan. Most of the people I tell have the same response. They say “yeah, that’s a great dream, maybe when you retire” or, “do you know how expensive the keys are?”, or “You’ll go crazy living on a boat”, or just simply “You can’t do that.” You can add your own response to those if you like, it’s not like I haven’t thought of them all myself, and/or heard them all before. I think these responses are the result of the mentality that keeps us all rooted to jobs we hate, working in cities we don’t necessarily like, and married to people we don’t love. Who decided that life has to be so anchored? What is everyone so afraid of? I think culturally we are forced into this system of going to school, getting a great job out of college, meeting the person of our dreams, buying a house, having kids, going into debt, then spending the rest of our lives working a shit-ass job to maintain the towering lifestyle we’ve built. We can’t afford to cut and run because we OWE so many people so much. Monetarily and emotionally.

That was certainly what I did. I got married when I was too young, because I was in a hurry to get the rest of my life underway.. house, job, car, kids.. you name it. I believed that going down this path it would make me a valid individual. Social pressure leads us to believe that you must do these things to be a ‘grown up’. Well, I’ve learned after trying to do these things and failing at them miserably that being a grown up isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

So here I stand surrounded by the detritus of the past 20 years – a blown up marriage, and the consequent divorce, 13 years of part-time single parenting (the only truly GOOD thing to come from all this), mounds of credit card debt, a job I didnt really belong in and eventually got laid off from, and I can tell you this: I’m not going to make those mistakes again, I’m going to do things the way I wanted to do them all along. If living on a boat makes all of you nervous, that’s fine. you don’t have to do it. I understand that most if not all of you are comfortable and reasonably happy working your 9 to 5 jobs, being married, and raising children, going to PTA meetings and little league games, mowing the lawn.. all that domestic bliss stuff. I’m certainly not going to tell any of you that you are wrong, because that is for you to decide. I just chose to wish for something different, and not just wish for it, to actually make it happen.. now, while I can still truly enjoy it.

Let’s face it, I’m never going to get rich enough in corporate America to save enough money to buy a yacht and sail to the Caribbean to retire. I need to deconstruct my towering life and learn to live like a native islander, making a meager profit doing honest work, coming home tired, cracking a beer on the deck, and watching the sun go down over the naked native girls chasing each other around with squirt guns filled with tequila on the sandy beach off the port bow. Now that’s a dream I can buy into.

Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 07

September 6, 2008
It’s the Weekend! Mid-Morning ramblings about attraction

I recently watched (quite unintentionally) a video on the the theory of attraction and how we are constantly attracting to us the things which we spend the most time thinking about – good or bad. Fully expecting this downloaded file to be a David Duchovney move by the same title, I was a little bit like ‘oh for fucks sake, not some dumbass self-help video!’ It was the first week I’d been home after the layoff, and I was in a strange place mentally. I had gotten a few minutes into it and was resisting the urge to vomit because I absolutely abhor self-help neo-existentialist bullshit. But then I realized all of a sudden, that it had grabbed me, and sucked me in.. maybe I was in a vulnerable mental state for something like this, or maybe the universe had sent it to me instead of my David Duchovney film to give me a message. I don’t know, but I’ve since watched it a couple more times, and I think maybe there’s something to it. I’m not going to spiel it here, or tell you that it’s life-changing, and all that BS, I’ll simply tell you that it made me think about myself and the things I think about and what that means.

Essentially it has a simple message when you boil it down; that when you think positively, you experience better things. If you spend all of your time pissed off at all that debt you have, and you are thinking about it all the time, that’s what you’re mental energy is drawing to you.. basically what you think about is what you get, whether you think good things about it, or bad things about it. Interesting. I had spent an awful lot of time during the past months convinced that I was going to get laid off, worrying about it, obsessing about it. Well guess what, I got laid off. It could be that I subconsciously no longer wanted to wallow in the misery of that job, who knows, but I truly believe one way or another, I made that happen. I spend a huge amount of time worrying about my debt situation, yet it seems to just get larger and larger.

I’ve always had this sort of magical ability to float through situations in life that to me seem to just ‘happen’. I’ve watched everyone else around me struggle with things that I just seem to ‘get’. Things seem to just fall into my lap right when I need them, it’s always been that way, and I can’t explain it but, that I do know one thing.. it happened whenever I just expected that something like that would happen, I just would trust that things were going to work out, and they did. I’m pretty sure these things came to me because I was thinking positively about them.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that everything is great, there are things that I worry about.. money, debt, my health – and those are the areas in my life that I seem to have the biggest issues with. Hmm. I’m beginning to see a pattern here. These are the things that worry me, and by thinking and worrying about them constantly, I’m drawing more of it to me.

The basic premise of this concept is when you visualize your dreams, and spend a little time each day really thinking about it, and how it would make you feel to be in that situation, it will eventually come to you. Hokey, I know.. but I think if you don’t start trying to spend alot of time analyzing the how of it, and just trust that your dreams will take you where you want to go, then you’re halfway there. Religious fanatics will tell you that God is listening to your prayers, existentialists will tell you that your mind is creating your reality to suit your wishes.. people will call it what they will, and they would probably all be right. Either way, I’ve decided to spend more time thinking positively and stop worrying so much, I think worrying and stress more than anything else make your life more difficult.