I know, I know. “About damn time!” you’re saying. Followed quickly by, “What took you so long?” Well there are many, many reasons why I haven’t updated my site, and almost all of them are totally lame. For example, one of the biggest reasons I haven’t posted an update, is that I’ve been trying to think up really good excuses of why I haven’t posted an update. Here are some un-lame excuses:

One reason is I’ve been practicing with my new electronic drum set. Playing these drums… have led to startling revelations about myself. I now realize that I’m a schizophrenic drummer. I have two personalities. One personality is a drumming God. He has the earphones on with various music playing and comes up with the most amazing beats, grooves, fills and transitions ever, and is drowned in the applause and adulation of his screaming fans. The second personality is apparently a retarded monkey with one arm. He only appears when the “record” light is lit on my computer. He reacts the same when confronted with a “record” light, as he does when confronted with leering zoo visitors… and that reaction consists of a lot of screaming and throwing of feces. Once I clean up all of the crap and kill the monkey, I’ll get some recordings up so you can have a listen.

Another thing that has taken up a lot of my time, is trying to make a decent piece of toast in this apartment.

Golden brown is how most people like their toast, or so I gather. It’s how I like mine, and just as my toast is reaching the perfect level of golden brownness… the fire alarm goes off. Now this isn’t your typical loud beeping like you find with your store bought smoke detectors. This fire alarm goes off in every room of my apartment and drowns out all other sound with a series of eye blurringly loud tones that are not in key with each other. So not only are you induced into panic from the noise, but you also instantly become very annoyed at the off-key racket. In the middle of this cacophony, is a calm female voice saying, “Fire, fire… Fire, fire…” That strikes me as odd, because everything else about the fire alarm is telling me to panic and take a running header off of the balcony. This calm voice in the middle of it all might cause one to hesitate in confusion, and that could be the difference between life and death in a toast induced fire. I think we’d be better served by a female voice going, “OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!! IT BURNS!! IT BURNS!! WHERE’S FLUFFY?!? OH MY GOD SOMEONE SAVE FLUFFY!!” Most folks would simply set their toaster to a lighter setting, but the urge for perfect toast is strong in me. Strong enough to tempt fate and risk bleeding ears every time for that delicious golden brown perfection.

A dozen Air Force’s latest and greatest fighter jets arrived here at Elmendorf for an exercise. They dragged one out on the ramp for all of us rabble to gawk at and pose in front of like we actually fly the damn thing. It’s a sexy, sexy bird, there’s no doubt about it. However, I don’t like it. Not one single car alarm was set off when those things took off. It’s because they don’t take off with afterburner because of their new-fangled “Supercruise,” which sounds like something out of a Top Gun sequel. No sir, fighters are suppose to shake the ground, screw up your heart rhythms, make conversation impossible, cause every briefer and instructor on base to pause and stare at the people in front of them uncomfortably for a few moments, and make everyone outside near the flightline stop, turn, watch and listen in awe, and with a little bit of fear, as the predators launch for the hunt. F-22′s don’t intimidate me when they take off.

Tags: Alaska, F-22, Frontier Gazette, Toast

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 24th, 2006 at 06:29 and is filed under Frontier Gazette. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.