The Blogsabbath

[aggienaut]

   As you know we like to keep the blogsabbath here and post only inanities on sunday. As such you'll have to wait until monday to hear about the five hours stuck in the mud in the forest that was my workday on friday.
   Anyway I need to find my camera for the photographic evidence.

   So my weekend:

   I actually went to bed at the ungodly early hour of 9 something pm friday night. I know, I'm wild.
   Despite this I woke up at eight something feeling totally unawake. I think maybe I slept too long. Headed out the door to go volunteer at the local tallships. Was getting on the freeway when I realized I'd forgotten my camera, which irritated me because there are often opportune photo moments. Thought about turning back but was already running late
   Was about halfway there when I realized I'd forgotten my climbing harness. Oh HELLS no I'm not going down there without the ability to climb the masts!! I got off at the next exit and headed home for harness + camera.
   Couldn't find my camera at all, which instantly put me in a really bad mood because I do not like losing my camera. Usually it's on me at all times, the only reason it was possible to forget it was that it'd been out for repair for awhile recently so I had grown accustomed to it not being in my pocket.
   And as if my morning hadn't been going badly enough already then I couldn't find the keys which I had just used to drive halfway to Dana Point and back and get in the house. Finally they were in like the fifth place I looked.


   Other than that my weekend has been pretty unnoteworthy. I suspect my camera is in the work truck so I'm going to have to head over there today to liberate it. If it's not there I'll probably, you know, hyperventilate. In a very hardboiled manner.


On Being a Private Investigator
   Speaking of being hardboiled, you know that last LJI entry I wrote, the fanfic style detective story? It didn't actually occur to me as relevant until after, but I thought you might be interested to know I actually did apply to be a private investigator once.
   I'd been cruising craigslist looking for adventuresome jobs, which as you may have gathered are the only jobs I consider worth doing, when I came across a posting for private investigators. I applied and was invited to come in for an interview.
   Company had some name like a law firm (ie something like "Hodges, Levy, & Dreslinski LLC" or something), the inside was distinctly not black and white, full of smoke, dimly lit with ragged blinds in the window, and the man himself did not sit with his feet on his desk smoking a cigar. Nope it was warmly lit and altogether way to well decorated. Like it was a model home or something.
   The company owner fellow looked to be of vaguely persian extraction. He WAS kind of gritty and hard boiled I guess. He asked if I knew what they did and I mentioned that there had often been reports from private investigators in the files when I worked at a law firm that did family (ie divorce) law. His response was "I don't give a fuck who's fucking who!!" (and really, being as California is a "no fault" divorce state, it really doesn't make a lick of difference who is fucking who. Okay it had a funny effect on a "loss of consortium" claim once, but mostly they're just brought into divorce cases out of sheer spite)
   The short of it is basically that a private investigator does "everything it takes to put a case together that lawyers don't do themselves." Ie, the lawyers do all the legal research and put together arguments, but all the ground work is done by private investigators. Sounds like its a lot of snapping shots of the scene, interviewing random people who might know something pertinent. Probably not at all as glamorous as it seems on TV.
   Still I thought it sounded like a larf. When I didn't get the position (I blame the time Hughes & Sullivan LLC set me up to take a fall) I proceeded to look up private investigator positions in several other major cities .. nothing panned out though.

   Also relating to that LJI entry, I realized it's not the first time I wrote a fan fic style entry. Last year there was the Sarah Palin Slash-Fic in which Sarah Palin has an amorous encounter with superhappytime in the form of a moose.


Sax Rohmer #1
Fog lifts from the harbor, dawn goes down to day
An agent crests the shadows of the nearby alleyway
Piles of broken bricks, sign posts on the path
Every moment points towards the aaaaftermath
Yeah

Sailors straggle back, from their nights out on the town
Hopeless urchins from the city gaather round
Spies from imperial China, wash in with the tide!
Every battle heads toward, surrender towards both sides!

And I am coooooming hooooome to you
With my own bloood in my mooouuuth
And I am cooooming to you
If it’s the last thing that I do

Bells ring in the tower, wolves howl in the hills
Chalk marks show up, on a few high windowsills
And a rabbit gives up somewhere, and a dozen hawks descend
Every moment leads toward its own sad end
Yeah

Ships loosed from their moorings, capsize and then they’re gone
Sailors with no captains watch awhile and then move on
And an agent crests the shadows, and I head in her direction
All roads lead toward, the same bloocked intersection

I am cooooming hooooome to you
With my owwwwwn blooooood inn myyy moooooouth
And I am cooooming hooome to you
If it’s the last thing that I do

   I just love the imagery in this song. I have no idea what the title (Sax Rohmer #1) means or the chelk marks in windowsills.
   Also I just realized the music video is kind of fun.


And Last But Not Least
   Having spent countless hours reading through that "Problem Sleuth!" webcomic (which is awesome and metaphysical!), I have now dug into the most recent creation by that author. Here is a recent frame which I thought was neat:



(or check out this one. neat!)

Comments

[superhappytime.livejournal.com]

Private Investigator on craigslist? So you're just stealing your ideas for life from Jonathan Ames now?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes I am. ...but who is jonathan ames?

[joeymichaels.livejournal.com]

You would be an awesome PI.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I would INVESTIGATE THE SHIT OUT OF SHIT!


Or at least find a way to be a throwback to detective cliches and be hardboiled and gritty as I make extremely mundane reports about people's property damage insurance claims.

[joeymichaels.livejournal.com]

Midnight. At least it was last night. Right now, its 4:25.

I was working the poorly laid foundation beat when she walked in. Legs up to her armpits which meant her ass cleavage and breast cleavage were mirror images of each other on either side of her spine.

She was just a fellow PI dropping off another pile of papers. We had nothing to say to each other, so I went back to looking for signs of termite damage in the photos.

Nothing. Damn.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha.

"I'd been working all day on this case. Well at least when I wasn't wasting time on facebook. I still had several more leads to investigate. Well really I had been procrastinating investigating any of them. Which would conveniently give me a way to look busy if the boss came in, but it would probably be better to have this wrapped up before he noticed. So I faced a tough decision, investigat the file room down the hall or the depths of the stack of papers on my desk. I thought a few more minutes about THE CASE OF THE MISSPLACED FILE and decided to make another hardboiled facebook status update instead."

[joeymichaels.livejournal.com]

That's the sort of detective story I could get into.

[beeker121.livejournal.com]

I am enjoying that thunderstorm. Given the current state of the rehearsal I'm in I may make it my happy place and just stare at it cycling for the next hour or so.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

(: it is a lovely thunderstorm. I think on the website itself it even comes with the sound of rain.

Detective Stories ...

[abe-lincoln666.livejournal.com]

If you enjoy detective stories (especially 40s-noir-type-stuff), then you might want to check out Jim Thompson. Thompson was sort of a poor man's Dashiell Hammet, who wrote scores of tawdry "Pulp" books about murder, mayhem and psychosis.

Many of Thompson's books have been made into movies, including recently "The Getaway", "The Grifters" and "After Dark My Sweet", but his greatest (i.e., "most disturbing") books could never be made into movies without chopping the soul out of them in order to avoid an X rating. Thompson's true classics, are books like "The Killer Inside Me" (a small town sherrif who hides his secret life as a sexual/sadistic killer), "Pop. 1280" (another small town sherrif, who in this case will do just about anything to avoid work and get re-elected,) "Savage Night" (concerning a midget hit man, a girl with a mutant leg, and a washed up mob informer,) and "The Golden Gizmo" (a plot involving nazis, a talking dog, drugs and a freelance gold buyer.)

Much of Thompson's work is so bleak, that it makes camus look like Walt Disney. But he also worked with Stanely Kubrick on the script for "The Killing" and "Paths of Glory" and in his fading years, he wrote scripts for the old "Ironsides" series.

I usually hate it when people recommend books to me, so I try to avoid doing it myself whenever possible. But Thompson is one of those authors who I just can't keep myself from recommending; he's an overlooked jewel in the rough, hard to find, engaging to read and totally original.

Re: Detective Stories ...

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Pop 1280 sounds funny. I'm assuming by "just about anything" you mean he'll actually kill people to avoid work or something? I hope that's what you mean because that sounds like a really amusing read. :D