I’m sick and tired of walking into the restroom needing to vacate some bowels and find evidence of your presence splashed in little gold dots across the toilet seat. There are two urinals. If you can’t use them, at a bare minimum, lift the toilet seat in the stall.

Because, seriously, I’m a pretty low-key guy. Run over me with a car, “Hey, no big.” Punch me in the face, “Let’s be friends!” But when I’m cleaning your piss off a toilet seat, I WANT TO RIP YOUR DICK OFF AND SHOVE IT DOWN YOUR THROAT. But that won’t work either, because no doubt your penis is tiny and shriveled, and you’ll swallow it before you choke to death on it.

I guess I could just drown you in the toilet bowl. It’ll be particularly unpleasant for you because you don’t flush either.

God damn I need this weekend.

It was very nice.

Thankfully, I don’t have to wait that long for my next days off (yes, plural): I just submitted a PTO request form for Thursday at the Office, and Friday is a Federal holiday (and we follow the Federal schedule). In addition, due to shortened Bookstore hours on Saturday, I have the day off (no point in them scheduling me from 4-6pm, I guess). My Thursday night is now covered by a coworker, which leaves me only with the challenge of getting off Friday night — I had requested off for the 3rd waaay back on June 6th, but my request was ignored. I have high hopes for a three-day weekend.

I plan to spend all three days vegging out on my couch watching re-runs of the Golden Girls and imagining the uses of Betty White’s tongue.

Well, no.

Truthfully, I have a lot of things I need to get done, stuff I just keep putting off and off. Like, for one, I still have my Maryland driver’s license, despite the fact that I’ve been living in DC for over a year. My plan is to get up at my usual time Friday morning and make the trek down to the DMV in Georgetown to correct this (you might ask, “Why bother?” Well, here’s why: my license expires in August and I do still drive on occasion). In addition, my apartment could use a really good cleaning. Like the one I did back at New Year’s, except with maybe some bleach on the kitchen and bathroom tiles.

But it won’t all be laundry and closet organizing and book reshelving, no! Because I’m also planning on doing a museum and monument crawl on the National Mall on Thursday. I think it’ll be a good day for it: hopefully, the tourists won’t be out in force, and most people in DC will be distracted by their last day before the extended holiday.

I also hope to catch up on some summer films: Public Enemies is a sure thing, I very much want to see it on the big screen, and even though Johnny Depp is no Sean Connery, and Christian Bale trumps Kevin Costner, I will still probably unfavorably compare it to The Untouchables. As for Transformers 2, while I enjoyed the first movie enough to want to see the sequel on the big screen, the reviews of a nonsense plot, and my own see-saw opinion on Michael Bays’ films will probably keep me from spending my hard earned cash on it. I mean, if the biggest draw is Meghan Fox, can’t I just watch the first one again?

Here’s a random fact: Metro train platforms are 600 feet long. You know what else is 600 feet? The Washington Monument. (Okay, it’s few feet short of 600, but it’s still close).

Meanwhile, I’m off tonight from the Bookstore. Although I do need to do laundry (apparently I failed to shut one of my dresser’s drawers, so most of my boxers and socks are now decorated with cat fur — thanks, Guy), I’m thinking I’m going to take a nice long stroll through the Zoo. It’s been a while since I’ve been, and I want to make baby noises at various big cats and see if they growl at me.

Back to Alice Hoffman. Via the Book Maven:

Such was the case today with famous novelist Alice Hoffman, whose latest book, The Story Sisters, received a negative review from well-credentialed critic and novelist Roberta Silman in The Boston Globe Books section.

I tell you all this, as I said, to put what Hoffman did today in context. She published Roberta Silman’s private phone number and email address and told her “readers” that “If you want to tell Roberta Silman off,” to contact her at phone or email and “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

Obviously, many people will disagree with me on any number of points here. What I wish I could write instead has already been written for me (not to mention tweeted, by author Julie Klam) by Virginia Woolf, an artist, novelist, critic, and essayist greater than anybody else around these parts:

“Criticism, whether praise or blame, should be accepted in silence as the legitimate comment which the act of publication invites.”

You can read the review for yourself here. I don’t get Hoffman’s characterization of it as “hateful” at all … because it isn’t. Silman starts her review by stating that Alice Hoffman is the author of one of Silman’s favorite books! And even though the review is generally negative of the book, but calling the book “coy and contrived” does not strike me as hateful, no matter what Hoffman claims in her tweets (which you can read here.) And it certainly does not justify publishing Silman’s phone number and calling for people to “tell her off.”

One of her tweets on the subject was this: “And we writers don’t have to say nothing when someone tries to destroy us.”

Having read the review, it’s a far, far cry from someone trying to “destroy” her. And also? Alice Hoffman, you’re doing a far better job of destroying yourself than anyone possibly could have. When some parents asks for a recommendation for her kid, guess who the very last author I’m going to suggest will now be? Because I don’t to have to warn the parent, “If your kid posts that she didn’t like the book, Alice Hoffman might trash them on the internet.”

Some weeknights, when I get home from the Bookstore, I turn on the TV. Lately, I’ve been engrossed in Discovery’s Pitchmen, which follows Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan as they “do what they do”, which is to say, pitching products over the television. You know Billy Mays (even if you think you don’t) as the guy who screams “OXICLEAN!” into the TV, and Anthony Sullivan as the guy with the Australian accent pimping the weird crap you’ll see in the store with an “AS SEEN ON TV” sticker on it.

And when I say “engrossed”? I mean that I won’t go out of my way to watch an episode, but if it’s on when I turn on the television (is it even appropriate to refer to them as “boob tubes” anymore?), I’ll watch it until the end.

Anyway … Billy Mays is dead.

Apparently he was on an airplane which suffered a blown-tire on landing in Florida yesterday. “All of a sudden as we hit you know it was just the hardest hit, all the things from the ceiling started dropping. It hit me on the head, but I got a hard head.” This morning he was found dead in his home.

The sad thing is, of course, that one would’ve thought that the death of Natasha Richardson had risen awareness of the dangerous of head injuries. She fell on the slope, was lucid, and then died — the scientific term is epidural hematoma, and of course, there’s no way (as of now) to know whether this is the cause of Mays’ death — he was a big guy, he could’ve died of a heart attack, or a blood clot.

I’m thinking the cause of his death, however, will be epidural hematoma. (Hey, it’s a big pair of words — I’m going to use it a few times!)

Basically, it’s what happens when a zookeeper paints an elephant to look like a panda. Some might call it clever, or neat, but I’m having trouble expressing myself in words (I’m doing a lot of frothing at my desk, however), so for my take, click here.

HT: LiLu via Twitter.

Well, except it isn’t a rumor: the King of Pop is dead and gone.

Gotta be honest here: I don’t care. Obviously, I feel sympathy for his family and loved ones, but Michael Jackson’s death is not going to result in my curled up in a ball on my bed playing all his albums over and over while I cry into my pillow. I think there are only two musicians that I’ll miss when they’re dead, one is John Williams, and the other is Freddie Mercury, and too bad for Mr. Mercury, I didn’t realize Queen was my favorite band of all time until he was long since buried.

As far as Michael Jackson, his death largely didn’t affect me — well, except in the case that as soon as the story found wide exposure, the phones started ringing off the hook from customers looking for copies of his CDs. If you happen to know the Bookstore I work at, and you were hoping to stop in for one of his CDs tomorrow, don’t bother: we didn’t have many, and what we didn’t sell tonight is on reserve (and, no, no Thriller).

On the ride home, I checked Twitter. There were a lot of tweets about Michael Jackson (and an odd rumor claiming Jeff Goldblum had died). While most were very affectionate about the man’s music, a few made crude jokes (not that I’m criticizing, I joked with my boss that Jackson had probably been choked to death by a child he was “playing” with) and referenced the assorted controversies which surrounded the latter portion of his life.

So, here’s how I feel: I think that Michael Jackson was probably, objectively, a fantastic musician who left an indelible mark on music and pop culture. That said, no amount of artistic brilliance allows a person the license to break the law, and while he was never convicted, the rumors and accusations surrounding his private life cannot easily be dismissed. That said, I feel a great amount of sorrow for Michael — pressed into stardom at the age of 11, did he really ever have the chance to be just a kid? And when he had all the money a person could ever want, were his actions indicative of a pedophile, or a lonely man looking for the childhood he never had? It doesn’t matter, when it comes to molesting children, motivation should only be important in understanding how to break the cycle (if such a cycle exists, where pedophile creates pedophile ad naseum).

I feel sorry for Michael Jackson. He was clearly a man with demons, and I hope he rests in peace free of them.

You’re asking a bald guy where a barber is?

Because barbers cut hair, and bald people don’t have hair.

Granted, my (usually but not always) smooth-as-a-baby’s-ass head is part nature, part choice. Bald dude at a blogger happy hour at The Reef two weeks ago remarked on it this way: “I choose not to decorate my head with hair.” And hair really is a pain in the ass (especially if, like me, you actually have a hairy ass — sweaty ass hair? No fun).

Last fall, aware that I was losing quite a bit of hair on the top of my head, I began cutting my hair very close: like, imagine a skin-tight buzz cut. Like that. Shortly thereafter, I just began shaving my head altogether. For me, the decision was pretty easy: I am losing my hair, hence, I will embrace my baldness.

Men in my family have a history of hair loss. My grandfather was completely bald by the time he was twenty-five (or so I understand, I wasn’t actually around to see this). I’d been aware that my hair was thinning for quite some time — particularly when I cut my hair very short (as I would tend to do in the summer), people would tease me about a receding hair line.

Really, though, it was a guy on the shuttle who pushed me over the edge to deciding to shave my head. I don’t know his name, I’ve never heard him speak. We both board the bus at the same Metro station, and we get off at the same stop for office buildings across the street from each other. He looks to be my age (early 30s), and his hair is thick and spiky.

Let me clarify: his hair looks thick and spiky. Then he gets close and you see the truth: his hair is thick … on the sides. His hair is spiky … on the top, where he styles his hair to stand up, apparently in the belief that vertical hair equals quantity of hair. And this is perhaps true in the sense that the male ego is a fragile thing which sees what it wants reflected back in the mirror. As a disinterested observer, however, what I could see was that his hair is noticeably thinner on the top of his head, like, to the point where spiking his hair actually draws more attention to his pattern baldness.

When I made this realization, I remembered a comment a coworker had made not long before: “Your hair is noticeably thinning.” And, look, I tended to go months and months without a haircut. And I wondered, “Do people see me having all this hair as a compensation for starting to lose it?” Freed of my own fragile ego in that hairpiphany, it didn’t take me long to go bald.

I think men usually fall into two categories: men who embrace their baldness, and men who refuse to accept it.

Of course, sometimes you get folks like this guy, who at the same happy hour at The Reef, was trying to convince me that he was balding, like to the point where our hands were together combing through his hair* while he tried to identify his supposed bald-spots. So gay. Also, his hair’s like a fucking shag carpet, which is completely disgusting in and of itself (the carpet, not the hair), but really? Dude, chill, you’ve got hair for a good long while (unless you were wearing a wig?). He is clearly category number three: men who have thick luxurious hair, but who know they will lose their hair and just want to get it over with.

Here’s some advice when and if you decide your hair loss (real or imagined) is cause enough for a shaving:

1. Electric trimmers? Y’know, the ones barbers use? They’re good if you’ve got areas of thick hair, but for the detail stuff? For actually getting your scalp smooth? They will not work. If you’ve got male pattern baldness (like me), I used an electric trimmer to clear the bulk of my hair as best as possible, then a razor to clear the stumps. Basically, you want to use something with a blade: actually, use something with multiple blades. I use a four blade disposable razor.

2. Forget mirrors — while they’re good for checking some easily-missed areas (the ears, your forward scalp), use your hands to feel the smoothness of your head.

3. You don’t have to shave your head every night, but you should at a minimum do it every third night. If you shave your head too much, you damage your skin (or so I’m told). If you wait too long, your hair (what little you have left), becomes too thick for the razor and you have to grab an electric razor to trim it down. Also, infrequent head shavings can mean the difference between spending two minutes in the bathroom, and spending twenty.

3A. Wait, did I say at night? Yes, shave your head at night. Y’know how your face feels raw when you shave, and if, say, you sweat that morning on your way to work after shaving it stings? Imagine that sensation all over your head. Ow. Shave, sleep, let yourself heal. You’ll thank yourself on the way to your office on a July morning.

4. If you’ve got a day or two’s worth of stubble on your head, check yourself in the mirror after dressing to ensure you have no random bits of lint holding on for the ride. Seriously, the stubble has the tendency to act like velcro.

*He claims not to remember this, and in fairness I was drinking, so it might’ve been mine and another man’s hands combing through his hair. Also, so gay.

I did. Owned one, I mean. A ‘98 Wrangler, which I lovingly cared for and beat the ever-loving crap out of from 1999 until 2003. Killed upwards of half-a-dozen deer in that thing, too, but I’d just like to point out that they jumped in front of me. Suicide by Jeep. It’s a crying shame.

My coworkers drive me crazy with their Wrangler stories: my boss at the Bookstore owns one, she’s never taken the doors off and admits to not being comfortable taking the windows out. “What happens if I’m driving and it starts raining?” Well, deary, you’ll get wet, but that’s why towels were invented. 66% of the IT staff at the Office owns Jeeps (in fairness, our IT staff is 3 people), and I catch a ride from them as often as possible. My boss at the Indy, good old Gary, had a big nice ‘04 Unlimited, which he promptly took off-road in his spacious backyard and banged into trees. “It’s not a Jeep without a dent,” although I don’t think Dawn was so happy he’d taken their kids for the ride.

There are things I miss about owning a Jeep: I miss waving to other Wrangler owners. I miss taking the doors off and the top down on nice (or not so nice) days for a long drive. I miss not caring about whether I’d left the windows down in a freak thunderstorm because, oh yeah, thing’s waterproof and has drain plugs. I miss driving straight for a muddy puddle, or just pulling into a car wash, taking the top down, and hosing out the interior.

There was a guy, up in Towson when I first attended, who had a ‘97 or a ‘98 Wrangler, dark navy blue, with an ox’s horns bolted to the top of the windshield. I’m not going to say it was cool, but it was totally unforgettable.

And that’s the kind of modification you should do to a Wrangler, because, look, let’s be honest here: Wranglers are not cars. The doors come off. The window folds down. It’s designed to be rained in. When you modify your Wrangler, you should draw attention to the fact that this is a machine designed to, y’know, go over mountains and stuff, not fields of flowers.

Speaking of Wranglers and flowers:

Via Alice’s Wonderland come this horrifying photo of a Wrangler gone very very very wrong.

I’m sorry, but that’s a Wrangler FAIL. At the very least, I hope it’s a stick-shift, because the only reason a person should buy an automatic transmission Wrangler is if they are missing the requisite limbs to operate a manual transmission.

I don’t think I knew Jeanice McMillan.

Jeanice McMillan so looked forward to work each morning that she would meticulously iron her Metro uniform the night before. When driving a bus route in Northern Virginia in recent years, she would tell friends how much she enjoyed interacting with passengers.

McMillan, 42, of Springfield, died yesterday at the helm of her Red Line Metro train, which hurtled into the back of another train that had stopped between the Takoma and Fort Totten stations during the evening rush.

Metro said today that McMillan began working as a train operator on Dec. 8.

One neighbor who knew her well said today that McMillan would have done “anything in her power” to prevent the accident.

“She was so proud of her job, and she truly loved her passengers,” said Joanne Harrison, who has lived across the hall from McMillan’s apartment for five years and became a close friend. “If she had survived, she would have gone to each and every one of those people who were hurt, and the families of those who died, and she would have hugged them and cried with them.”

I say that in the sense that, of course, if I did know her — if she was one of the nameless people I encounter every day, one of those familiar faces I see every morning on my commute out to the ‘burbs, or in the afternoon back into the heart of DC — I did not know it was her, in the same way that I probably pass a dozen DC bloggers a day without either of us knowing each other (not that I kid myself that that many DC bloggers read my blog).

Did I step off my train, one afternoon, and turn, and as she leaned out the cabin window to check if people were clear of door, did I say, “Thank you” to her? (I do that when I’ve ridden in the first train of a car.)

I think I’m going to have to amend that today and from now on: “Thank you, be safe.”

Maybe it’s a meaningless act, a throw-away phrase from one stranger to another: the ‘thank you’, ‘how are you?’, ‘have a good night’ that we encounter on a daily basis. Maybe.

Y’know — a lot of what gets posted on sites like UnsuckDCMetro and iMetro are individual stories of WMATA employees who are rude or inattentive to Metro riders. I wonder what stories are traded in employee break-rooms and vehicles, stories of rude Metro customers. I know, working in retail as I do, how one customer being rude can throw off my game — that saying? Sticks and stones? Totally untrue, because of course, whereas a stick may cut our skin, and a stone may crack a bone, it’s the words that wound our spirit.

I would hate to think that McMillan’s last customer interaction was someone angry that the air conditioning on the train wasn’t working properly, or that the train took longer than expected arriving at a station. I hope her last customer interaction was nice.

Twitter is awash with tweets about people’s experiences on the Metro system today. If you’re curious, follow @unsuckdcmetro for re-tweets, and check his and iMetro’s blogs for more.

However, I just want to draw attention to something I mentioned in my post on the accident yesterday, and which one of my colleagues at the Bookstore researched a tad more and posted to Facebook:

Consider this: According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2007 (the latest year that figures were provided for), 1,534 people were killed in vehicle accidents in DC, MD, and VA combined. The number of people killed in Metro accidents in 33 years: 15*.

Ironically, accounts of Twitter indicate that the roads are jam packed as people avoid the Metro system. Because, clearly, with a death rate of 3 people per day, the roads are a safer place to be then the Metro — which only has a fatality, on average, once every two years.

On their latest blog post, Unsuck DC Metro says that Metro has “seen fit to provide us third rate mass transit system”, which “kills its passengers.” Well, maybe they’re right. But y’know what? It’s usually the bad apples that we remember, isn’t it? We remember the guy who scowled, and not the one who smiled, we remember the train that jerked to a stop, and not the ones that came smoothly to an end, we remember the engineer who never announced stops and forget about the ones who did and welcomed us aboard.

I don’t believe Metro is a third rate system. I don’t know how you’d judge that — do you compare it to other systems? And on what measure, fatalities? Delays? I’ll say this: Metro is still the safest way to travel in the greater metropolitan area of the District of Columbia.

*He actually had the number of fatalities at 12, but judging from Wikipedia’s DC Metro page, I believe 15 is correct. Although his twitter earlier had the count at 14, Michael Dresser’s blog identifies a count of 15 as well.