Pandemonium

"Is That Thelonious Monk In Your Pants Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?" - Lazarus Jones

"You should seriously consider laying off the pipe Jones, can't you see you're scaring the poor girl?" - T.O. Hob

Sometimes I think Jones and Hob don't run together enough. They'd make one hell of a team.

With Rigby and Kong gone and King deep in hiding it's almost like Lazarus and T.O. are the only friends I've got left.

~

There are so many papers on my desk I can barely see the desk.

My father's only purpose is to ruin others like he ruined himself.

My puppy is sick and I'm a little nervous.

There's a cute girl in the deli but she's probably like sixteen.

~

It's not that this is a busy time at work, it's just that it's always busy for me. I've been coming in pretty late in the morning lately, but staying for hours after everyone leaves. My secretary is shit and I just hired a girl to eventually replace her but I was forced to rush into a decision and I'm not entirely sure I made the right one. We're probably letting one of the managers go because he gets more and more useless every single day. He's slow, overpaid, annoying, and he doesn't do anything right the first time. He makes things harder for everyone else, but he's not a bad guy, so it sucks having to let him go. And even though he doesn't get things right the first time if you keep an eye on him he eventually gets them right. Now that will just be one more thing I have to do by myself. We're going to be short people in September, just like always and that makes me a little pissed off. Every chance I have to fix something gets crushed under my old man's stubborn and ignorant feet.

~

I love my father because he's my father. If he wasn't I would probably just think that he was one of the most miserable human beings to ever walk on the face of the earth. He's stubborn as hell, all Palombas are (myself included), but none can find the exact mix of stubborness and ignorance that my father has. Not having a fucking clue what he's talking about has never stopped him from insisting that he's the absolute authority on the subject. He makes a decision, one that has great potential for disaster, and while we're all generally smart enough to avoid telling him he's wrong we very often try and warn him. Over the years I have become so used to the agitated look on my father's face when he realizes that exactly what everyone was expecting to go wrong has gone wrong, and that everyone knows it, that it doesn't faze me anymore. What still gets to me is the fact that he never, ever, will admit that he was wrong. Or that things didn't go exactly as planned. When I was a kid it never really mattered, I could ignore his decisions because I really didn't have a right to argue with him. When you're eight years old what the fuck do you know about anything? But I'm 25 now, an adult in a lot more ways than I care to admit. I'm smarter then my father, I know more about a lot of things then he does. Not about everything, certainly not about this business. But I know more about what's going on right now, and I know enough to know that things are quite different then they used to be. But he asks me to report everything to him, so I do. But no matter how much I tell him...I just can't make him understand. He likes my damn puppy more than he likes me. I told him the other day how the dog was having a hard time getting used to his leash, making it impossible to walk him, making it difficult to house break him. So my old man asks how long after he eats do you wait before you take him out. I say about 15 to 20 minutes. He says, "That's not enough, wait 25." I chuckle a little at how silly that sounds but figure maybe he knows something I don't. So then he asks how long do I stay outside waiting for the dog to go, I say 25-30 minutes. He says, "That's not enough, you have to wait 35 minutes." He doesn't know why I'm laughing. If I said I waited 14 hours he would have said wait 14 hours and five minutes. That's just how my old man is.

~

I took The Tuck to the vet today, his first trip with me. Turns out he has an ear infection (which wasn't even why I took him there). Every one of the girls at the vet has to come visit the cute puppy, one of the girls even hints that maybe I got the dog because I knew he would get so much attention. I laughed, if I wasn't me I could have gotten some mileage out of that. So they give him a few shots and check him out and then we're on our way. At first Tuck is fine, tired, but fine. But then I get him back to the office and he starts to act a little funny. Won't stand up, kind of wobbling on his side when he lays down. It's making me a bit nervous so I call the Vet, we run through everything and they say he's probably fine. I call the breeder to see if he had any problems or if there were any shots or medication he had that they didn't tell me about because I'm starting to suspect he's having a reaction to something. They swear he didn't but they seem sort of confused. It all made me a little nervous. I've been nervous a lot lately. So unlike me...I've also been spelling nervous with an "e" at the end, which is wrong...also so unlike me.

~

So I've been going into this deli for lunch lately. And the other day there was a girl behind the counter. From the other end of the deli I thought she looked pretty cute (which is something guys notice even when we aren't trying to, it just sort of jumps out at you.) When I get up close I see that she is really cute...but in the really young sort of way. She was probably seventeen. And of course I'm me, so my mind doesn't go the first place most guys minds do. First I do the stories, something I've been doing since I was a little kid. I just make up background stories for people I don't even know. (She must be a young college student working her way through school by making sandwiches at the deli, she must be the owner's young and rebellious daughter reigned in by her job at the family shop but secretly yearning to break free by writing poetry and playing the harmonica, she must be an alien sent to earth to observe the lunch habits of what passes as sentient beings on this planet.) Ok, so really I didn't think of the alien one, but of course there were six thousand others. Then I start to guess how old she is, which is probably a thing most guys do, except that I was doing it because I was trying to gauge exactly how old I think I am. See when you think someone is older then they are it's usually because you're feeling young and when you guess someone is younger then they are it's because you're feeling old. Then I start to think "Oh shit she probably things I'm staring, which means she probably thinks I'm perving on her, and she probably thinks I'm like 40 years old which means she probably thinks I'm some sort of pedophile who is going to be waiting out in the back alley to kidnap her and hide her in my dank dark basement with all the random body parts of my previous victims which means she probably thinks I'm a murderer which means she's probably going to call the cops who will most certainly believe this cute little seventeen year old more than they'll believe me and then they'll find that unpaid speeding ticket in my glovebox which means I'm probably going to jail...oh shit what will my mother think." Which all made me sort of nervouse which was compounded by the fact that now I was staring...and she definitely noticed. But then she sort of smiled in that "I clearly pity you so don't get any ideas" sort of way which made me pretty sure she probably wasn't calling the cops...but I didn't waste any time leaving just in case.

~

"I feel like I've jumped off a bridge and forgotten where the ground was." - Palomba

"Don't worry buddy, just keep on falling and it will find you." - T.O. Hob