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“Don’t be eyeballin’ me boy, it’s too early for this shit.”

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Thus began, at around 1AM on this day in 1993, my fifteen year adventure with the United States Air Force, which still continues. In the summer of 1992, thoughts about my future consisted solely of dread of having to get up at 3AM the next day to work the part-time breakfast shift at Hardee’s, and looking forward to getting back to my room in Mom’s house so I could light a cigarette and watch TV. I had just graduated High School that spring. After that, in one long graduation party spent underage drinking for a week at Myrtle Beach, I managed to blow every red penny of a fairly significant amount of “starting your adult life” money gifted to me upon graduation.

One day that summer, as I was on my way out to mow the lawn, Mom asked me to sit down for a while and proceeded to give me a fairly long talking to. I’m sure there was a bunch of stuff in there about life, success, ambition, etc. I’m sure a lot of it was suppose to be inspirational or at least encouraging. But that’s not what my 19 year old, long-haired, head banging, heavy metal, rebelling teenage brain heard. It heard something entirely different…

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OK, since I no longer have the inspiration to try to write nice long funny dispatches, I figured I’d just post smaller thoughts and such more often. Fine. I’ll blog. I swore I wouldn’t, but I give up.

So I’m sitting here in an apartment with a very noisy and inconsiderate upstairs neighbor, and while swearing for the 8th time that I’ll never live in an apartment again, I’m flipping to the Home and Garden channel. I’ll be leaving Alaska around this time next year, and I’m planning on buying a house at my next assignment, so I’ve been watching quite a bit of that channel recently. After watching for a couple of weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a neighborhood somewhere with 15-20 houses in it called HGTVille, and all of these HGTV shows simply rotate through the houses over and over again.

You see, in one hour they show these design shows, where some person is dissatisfied with their dining room or kitchen or what not, and in swoop these women or gay men (or more often, both) who cluck endlessly about color swatches, lamp shades and stencil patterns. They try to cram as much “design” into every corner as they can. Then in the next hour they have the “Sell my house!” shows, where people who have bright flashy matching colors, and cute lamp shades and interesting stencil patterns are told by severely dressed real estate professionals that their house will never sell unless they de-clutter and paint everything neutral colors.

So I think that once these “design” shows go through one of the houses in HGTVille, the “Sell my house!” show rolls into the same house and does their thing, and they just keep rotating in and out of the same 15-20 houses over and over again. I think I’m done watching the HGTV channel.