Where is that from?!?

At some point in the distant past, there was a commercial, or a TV show, or music video, or something, where a guy ends saying “Word to your mother,” and then his mom comes on and says “That’s me. I’m his mother. Word to me.”

I can’t remember where it’s from, and for some reason it’s driving me nuts. The Googles do nothing.

Is this what Generation X senility is going to look like?

I’m going to write about this on the internet, since I didn’t get to complain about it to anybody today:

Despite all my best intentions, I’m a habitually tardy person. (Tardy as in not punctual, in case it means something else to the kids these days. But I probably qualify as that, too). I try to get to places on time, but then everything starts working against me, from insomnia to just plain cruel fate.

I had a meeting this morning for work, and I got about four hours of sleep last night. Which is why I was as stunned that I managed to get up in plenty of time to make it in. Sweet. It gave me an excuse to putter around in the morning for once, and still with time to spare. Hell, I could even sit back and have my Georgia boy’s breakfast in a real grown-up person’s glass instead of grabbing a can to swill down in the car.

I checked out the window, and a car was blocking my driveway. Hey, no problem! It’s kind of annoying how often it happens, but this would give me a few minutes before I had to get dressed and all that. I wouldn’t be early, but I wasn’t in danger of being late.

So then I sit back to leisurely check my e-mail, and I knock the glass off the desk. And I’ve got wood floors, so it doesn’t just break; it shatters. Actually, even “shatters” is under-selling it. You usually don’t see glass breaking like this unless it’s in slow motion and somebody is jumping through it firing two guns at once. It was epic.

For some reason, my first thought wasn’t “I better put some shoes on and clean this up,” but “I better clean this up before the cat steps on it.” I’m only mentioning that because I’m hoping my concern for my pet will somehow make me sound better when I explain the parade of idiocy that followed.

I jump up to get the vacuum cleaner — step right on a piece of glass. Hurts, but nothing too serious. I pick it out, think, “that was kind of dumb of me,” and then commence to picking up the bigger pieces.

And stepped on pieces two and three while I was doing that. That’s when I start to realize this was more serious than it looked — there was glass everywhere.

So I finally get the big stuff squared away, and take the long way around to the kitchen to get the vacuum — step on piece four. That’s the one that really hurt. It’s also the one I can’t explain — I’m going to have to commission a sophisticated computer simulation to figure out how a glass breaking can send a shard flying behind the direction of impact to end up behind a doorjamb and lie in wait for me to come walking on it.

I limp over to the kitchen and get the vacuum, then clean up all the visible pieces, and the surrounding area for good measure. I found pieces in my living room, a good 15 feet away from where the glass broke.

At no point in this process did it occur to me to put on my shoes.

Meanwhile, the cat’s waiting just outside the blast radius, looking at me like I’m an idiot. When I was putting the vacuum away, a bucket fell on my head, and then I stepped on a rake.

I get it all squared away, and I’m standing in my bedroom in my underwear, limping and bleeding, when I look at the clock and see that my meeting starts in two minutes.

Finally I was able to stop cussing and get ready for work, picked pieces of glass out of my backpack (12 feet away from ground zero), and was able to leave this cursed apartment. The person blocking my driveway had long since left, incidentally — I’m guessing the screaming coming from my apartment scared them away.

So that’s the kind of thing I mean when I say that the universe is conspiring to keep me late for things.

After the ComicCon left me beaten and senseless last year, I was looking forward to the more low-key WonderCon this year. Low-key is what I got.

The little of WALL-E I saw looked good, but at this point, advertising for Pixar movies is kind of like advertising oxygen.

I learned from the Shutter panel that ghost photography has been around since the 1800s or the 18th century, whichever came first.

I learned that panels like the one about the new “X-Files” movie are a lot more enjoyable when the panelists haven’t been drug out of bed after a full night of filming, and instead seem like they really want to be there. I also learned that celebrities really are a different class of human, because they handled awkward questions from people dressed as Link with a lot more grace than normal people would’ve been able to on 15 minutes of sleep.

I finally got my copy of Mage: The Hero Discovered autographed by Matt Wagner, and a copy of the new issue of B.P.R.D.: 1946 (which is awesome, incidentally) signed by Mike Mignola. I’m hoping that neither guy was looking forward to conversation more interesting than “Could you sign this?” because I’m not that good at conversations with strangers anyway, much less in an artificially awkward situation like a comic book convention.

I got a copy of the new edition of Surfin’ the Highway signed by Steve Purcell. There was a good long line of people waiting for signatures.

Speaking of awkward situations, I also interrupted more important and knowledgeable panelists and spoke too much at a panel about the Sam & Max games. But it was very cool seeing and hearing a room full of people laughing at the right moments. (Surprisingly good turnout, by the way, considering that a woman from “Firefly” and the new “Terminator” show was appearing in another room in the same building).

And I started to wait in line to get Bill Willingham to sign my copy of Fables: Animal Farm and Darwyn Cooke my copy of New Frontier, but decided a twenty-minute wait for an awkward “hello” and an autograph weren’t worth it, as much as I love both books.

I think the best way to sum up my reaction to WonderCon: the best thing that I saw all weekend was this commercial for Jack in the Box. (Second place was Kristen Wiig’s hot-air balloon ad on “Saturday Night Live,” but NBC’s stupid site doesn’t have that video online.)

Seems like I can remember being laid low with the illness not so long ago — why, as a matter of fact, this very blog tells me it was just over a month ago.

Seriously, what the Hell, cosmos? I thought we had an arrangement: in exchange for your staying out of my business for most of the year while I continue to make what are generally considered “unhealthy” lifestyle choices, I agree to one (1) incident of cold and/or flu each cold & flu season, which will consist of no more than three (3) days of abject misery. I’m not supposed to get sick twice in the same winter!

Especially with whatever Umbrella Corporation-engineered Super-virus I’ve got this time. So far it’s been a week, and even today I’d upgrade my condition not to “Well,” but “Sick and Most Likely Still Infectious” at best.

Sunday night was miserable.

Monday I went into work, since I’d taken Friday off and was still unwilling to accept that I could be getting sick twice in two months, and unwittingly exposing all my co-workers.

I don’t remember Tuesday. I’m pretty sure it happened on schedule, or else I’d have heard something about it, but as far as I’m concerned, it didn’t exist.

Wednesday, I must’ve had at least an hour or so of being semi-lucid. All I can really remember is lying in bed under the covers with all my clothes on, shivering and wondering how much fluid can drain from a person’s head before it implodes. I had a complex series of fever dreams incorporating the work I’ve got to get done and an episode of “Kolchak the Night Stalker” I’d seen; all I remember is the disappointing stupid and unoriginal idea of an evil multinational corporation run by somebody named Haywood Jablowmie.

After a dismal but semi-lucid Thursday, I decided to pull out the big guns and launch an all-out offensive on the site formerly known as “my respiratory system.” I’ve heard varying reports, and I’m still not sure whether NyQuil works from its combination of drugs, or simply because it puts me into a coma for 12-14 hours. In either case, today is the first day all week that I woke up feeling like my brain and body were part of the same unit, and that I haven’t seen the Grim Reaper hovering just outside the corner of my field of vision.

And for the record: Mucinex doesn’t work for shit. That’s what I get for being so easily distracted by a slick ad campaign with CG mucus.

I’m still wandering around in a bewildered daze, due to leaving work today when it was still light outside. I wandered directionless around San Rafael for a little bit, probably looking like a recently-returned alien abductee. Eventually I made it back home and finally emptied the past two weeks’ worth of trash, washed the mountain of dishes in my sink, and began to take back crucial pieces of apartment territory that my cat had claimed as his own. Even more interesting than that, I just sat and stared for about a half hour, then watched two episodes of “Monk” that I’d already seen but still felt proud of myself for figuring out the case.

To paraphrase Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies: I’m starting to feel that my advanced years have hindered my job performance. There was a brief period back in my 20s when I could actually do an all-nighter; I don’t know if my work was actually any good, but I know I sure felt like I was being as much of a bad-ass as Indiana Jones.

Nowadays, the flesh is willing but the brain is so very weak. I’ll start looking on wikipedia for quick verification I’ve got a reference correct, and then come to my senses 45 minutes later having followed a chain of weblinks all the way to an article about how to build your own home stop-motion animation studio or something else that I couldn’t care less about normally, but suddenly seems like the best idea ever. And of course, distractions just start the cycle of unproductivity going, where perfectly reasonable schedules turn into all-nighters.

Whatever the case, I’m done with a big chunk of work now, and should be able to gradually readjust to life as a normal productive member of a society. I’ll still be wandering around confused, hairy, and bleary-eyed, but out of choice instead of cause I can’t do no better.

I’ll say this, though: this is the first job I’ve ever had where all I had to do was write. And that breeds a kind of frustration that’s unlike anything else I’ve ever tried to do: putting a ton of (excess) thought into something that ends up being so small on a page (and breezed through in 30 seconds), and watching other better-organized people have to come in and pick up the slack. I’m pleased with the end result, but I can also finally understand why you frequently hear so many people bitching and moaning about how writing is so hard and aren’t I a tortured artist because I have to sit and type words all day.

I still think it’s a pretty silly complaint, but at least I understand a little better where the complaint comes from: the fact that it seems like it should be so trivially easy bounces around the synapses and then snowballs until all you can think is “I put all that effort into this?” and then you can understand why so many real writers became alcoholics.

I usually make fun of the Bay Area for going into a panic whenever there’s a light drizzle outside, but today’s storm shut me up pretty quick.

I left for work thinking nothing unusual was going on, and things just got progressively worse. Stoplights were out on Fulton street, but they had crossing guards keeping everything moving. Traffic was pretty tolerable on the Golden Gate Bridge, but then as soon as you passed through the tunnel, you started to see more and more tree debris on the freeway. Power was out in the entire shopping center at Marin City, forcing me to go to a McDonald’s for breakfast (intolerable! Call the National Guard!)

Most of it was this weird juxtaposition of normal day-to-day activity in self-absorbed Marin, with the occasional bit of weirdness like an entire tree lying on a freeway on-ramp. Nothing worthy of an Irwin Allen movie, but still eerie for a morning commute. I think what made it even creepier was that I had my iPod on shuffle, and both the Royal Crown Revue and the Pixies version of “Stormy Weather” came on.

I’d reached the exit for work when traffic on 101 ground to a halt. I got a message that power was out at the office, so I should turn around and head home, but by that point it was too late. I was stuck at the San Anselmo exit for an hour and a half. I had to give up that route and pull off into a shopping center with no power, to use their facilities in the dark (which is itself a nerve-wracking experience).

When I eventually made it back to 101 South, traffic was moving more quickly, which brought its own set of unnerving incidents. Even going 35 mph, the car kept hydroplaning, and then a gust of wind would come up and threaten to blow me into the next late. Driving through the headlands, you could see huge branches fall off the trees and start rolling down the hills towards the freeway.

And getting back on the Golden Gate bridge was something I don’t want to do again — it was like driving through an automatic car wash. There was a solid gray wall on either side of the bridge, and the wind sounded like it was coming from every direction. Everyone was driving slowly enough not to get blown into each other’s lanes, but it was still impossible not to get that image of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse out of my head.

Back in the city, stoplights were still out along Park Presidio, and I saw a car that’d been parked on one of the side streets had its roof and windshield crushed by a fallen tree branch. And of course, ten minutes after I get back home, I see on the news that they’ve shut down 101 between the GG Bridge and Sonoma County, asking everyone to avoid going to Marin. Now they tell me.

Considering that I’ve still got power and even my satellite reception is unaffected, I think it’s a good day to stay inside. And remind me never to give the power and roads workers any grief anymore; those guys were out all over the place, in the worst of it, guiding traffic, repairing power lines, and clearing roads. They get this kind of stuff completely cleared away while I’m still in bed.

Since I failed miserably at every single resolution I made last year, I’m going to take it simpler in 2008, and only choose one.

Someone on a message board announced he’s challenging himself to read a book a week this year; I read too slowly and am too easily distracted for that, so I’m aiming for 26 books, or one every two weeks. So I declare 2008 to be The Year of Reading an Unremarkable Amount, Which Is Still Going to Be Quite Challenging For Me. Mark your calendars.

My ongoing resolutions — lose weight, and stop smoking — are still in effect, but I’m going to stop pretending that those are to-do list items I can check off. I’ll keep them in the “necessary life transition” category. I should probably throw “spend less time at work and get more accomplished in the hours I do work” in there somewhere.

The first book for the year is Getting Things Done by David Allen. I’ll get around to it sooner or later.

Some people have accused me of being wishy-washy, or a push-over. I prefer to think of myself as being like a willow tree: kind of droopy, and my wood isn’t used very often.