white ninja at the drive thru

dls

screws are tools

I recently took a flight from Albany, and I was (as usual) given the extra screening, where they look through your luggage for guns and drugs, or confessions that you lead a secret terrorist life, and then take away your nail clippers. This time they took away my lighter and a screw they found in my backpack. I can understand the lighter, I guess -- I might have lit my neighbor's hair on fire while they slept, or perhaps I could poop in a barf bag and light it in the aisle, and the poor flight attendants would come rushing to stomp it out, only to discover (hee hee!) that there was poo all over their shoe! But my screw! It wasn't even a POINTY screw -- it was a flat one, and it was an inch long. This I could not believe, so I asked them why they would need to take away my screw, and the lady in latex gloves replied that a screw was a tool.

A tool! Heaven forbid I use that one screw to construct a secret weapon! They foiled my plan -- I had a gun cleverly broken into two pieces, but without that crucial screw, I had no guns, and two gun-halves. Never mind that I didn't even have a screwdriver -- the screw was evidence enough of terrorist activity. It was a tool, for God's sake -- a tool of the Devil. I could channel Satan himself through it's length, and imbued with the powers of Hell, I could bring down aircraft. Yes, my fellow passengers were pretty lucky that my entire plot rested on a single non-pointy screw, and that the airport security folks so cleverly foiled the plan.

Aw, God dammit. Who am I kidding? I'm no fucking Macgyver. What, with a lighter, my screw, two packages of peanuts, and a plastic cup of club soda, I was going to construct a dirty bomb that rendered New York uninhabitable for a thousand years? I was planning to sleep on the plane, not blow it up. If I tried poking someone with that screw, they'd just ring their flight attendant button. I can't believe they took it away -- I even named him. Jim. The Screw. He was my little buddy, and we had so many adventures together. I'll miss the little guy, and I'll always remember the time we almost took down a plane, parachuted into the Atlantic, and then swam to Cuba and freedom.

dls

cell phone ring tones

I'm really worried that the world is changing in subtle ways that can never be reversed. Pretty soon we'll be living in the futuristic world of Logan's Run, but it won't be retro-cool, like "Hey look, we recreated Logan's Run, that old show that was inexplicably popular in the Old United States!" It'll actually just be Logan's Run, and we'll think the costumes are something acceptable to wear in public.

Why am I afraid? Because I realized that my cell phone ring tone is an old phone ringing. You know, "Ring, ring!" like phones used to do, not crappy Muzak remixes of popular songs. I did it because I miss hearing a "real" phone ring, but now people are like, "Oh cool, how retro!" And I don't want to be retro-cool, but really now, I think I can say that the ring has been slowly eliminated from our consciousness. Sure, the phone rings at work, and at our parents' houses, but how long before they give in to the new technology, and we've got Lawrence Welk ring tones blazing from the old folks' homes? And children are growing up without ringing phones! Pretty soon, I'll be some crotchety old man who remembers the days when you couldn't choose what sounds your phone made, and what a cool cartoon Ghostbusters was back before The Millennium (I mean the awesome Ghostbusters based on the movie, not the one with a fucking gorilla as an actual member of a ghost-fighting team, and certainly not that PC-overboard, all inclusive crap Ghostbusters with a Hispanic girl, black guy, and goddamn cripple in a wheelchair).

Please don't label me with that retro label just because I loved Ghostbusters the cartoon. I am not trying to be cool by naming an obscure 80's phenomenon that would be cool to be obsessed with (although does anybody remember Go-Bots, the poor man's Transformers? I loved that too), I just really liked Ghostbusters. Seriously, I remember not being able to tell time, and watching TV all day just because I could not be sure when Ghostbusters came on. Or asking my dad to wake me up from my nap so I wouldn't miss Ghostbusters. Anyway, we didn't have cable, so fuck all you Nickelodeon-watching, Ren-and-Stimpy-Thundercats-humping bastards. I had Ghostbusters dammit.

dls