"Awesome!" A Blog.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Happy New Year 2007.

Dear Friend of the Library,

The tree flickers dimly in a disused corner, strung with a garland of peanuts. Large cardboard boxes hold overstock, and are pinned down by dead laser printers, bins of dusty shoes, and backpacks which still contain college lunch receipts. There is no room in the house for 2007, yet we chip away, set the shopping on the oven, and vow to order that second trash can. We put a laundry bin on top of another laundry bin. There is no space in our house for another year, but the world has spun once more, so we tie things to the dog and throw a treat into the yard. Goodbye, super-dense PG Wodehouse biography. Goodbye, bizarre accumulation of 32 silicone spatulas. Enjoy your new life among the eucalyptus leaves and river stones. "Sorry," in a way.

If you are reading this, it is perhaps my one chance to thank you directly for supporting Achewood this year, and I don't mean to waste it. If you're with me so hard that you actually read this "blog" (Internet for "prose that is wholly devalued by its medium"), then stick around. I've got lots of chestnuts up my sleeve.

This was a year of firsts. First time I ever got so mad that I flipped off the dog AND said "fuck you!" First time I ever got myself fired by a vendor. First time I ever said pure, wonderful swear words to a vendor. It was so wonderful to swear at that vendor. It was like heroin, except one of the two people was saying "YOU ARE DONE FUCKING ME." And no needles. Like that, I was fired. It was like finishing a race. Their product was so crappy.

But let's not dwell on the bad stuff. You'll never see it. UPS took it back. My little girl is almost two. Those who are parents know well enough how that feels. The scaffolding of language, the surprise when imagination shows up out of nowhere. Those who aren't parents can sit around in their smoky apartments and drink corporate beer; I won't act better than you. You can wear your pants and talk about cable television shows with your single friends. That's good, that's fine. You're hardcore, you spent $63 on vodka tonics last night. I have a kid, and I walk around in running shoes and jeans. My t-shirt often has the name of her pre-school on the front. Do I look soft? You bet. Am I soft? Charge past me the next time I'm trying to enter a crosswalk with my stroller. I WILL flip your Saab 9-3 like a turtle. You think I care if a car is upside down? Watch me buy a bagel, from your upside-down car. Watch me eat the bagel, and share some with my kid. A guy with a stroller wants nothing more than to flip cars with his bare hands. Bonus if there are people inside. Let's move on. I can also flip your Saab lengthwise if the timing is right.

Back to the holiday cheer — enough of me ruining cars out of anger. Happy holidays to all of you. If this holiday letter makes even one of you stop and wait for a person with a stroller, then it has been a success. If you do not stop for a person with a stroller, and all of a sudden your car is tipped over and the windows are being kicked out by an extremely plain running shoe...nice to meet you.

Best Wishes for 2007,
Chris Onstad
www.achewood.com

Note: Liz, the baby, and the warehouse manager explicitly decline any association with this instrument of good cheer.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Golf Memoir No. 4. The food.

It's commonly known that some think of golf as an upper-crust sort of sport, a few stiff hours spent blabbing on the latest slabs of stock data or gurglings in the bowels of insurance floats. A fellow in between tee shots might try to unload a Rothko, or a horsey daughter who too closely resembles a best-forgotten patch in the lineage. In the coming months I'll champion the alternate angle — that golf is the great equalizer, the plane where the Boston Brahmins and the Venice beach bodybuilders, the dawdling decagenarian diners and the Dominican dishwashers, the Victorian constable-euthanists and the kittens who mewl as their burlap casket is beaten over and over with the side of a helmet — meet glove-to-glove and flip a tee for honors.

But not today. I came here to speak of the vagaries of golf course cuisine, and so it shall go. You will get your penny dreadfuls of 19th-century London flatfoots braining still-blind, squeaking litters of Siamese with their cast-iron "Bobby buckets" on some other day. Shame on you. It is gross what you want. It is sick what you feel is relevant.

Onwards, then! Golfers are largely pigs. They ready two fingers, index and middle, and poke two nostrils into their figurative Play-Doh snouts with every new round. They pucker their bushy, mustachioed pusses as the beverage-and-sandwich cart "girl" appears over the rise of a hillock five hundred yards off. They compare rock-hard fantasies in which the lass (a 58 year-old bar pixie named Meg—short for Margaret, not Megan), using a sharpened Coors Light, eviscerates their old, stone-ridden kidneys, and then produces fresh sets from the Igloo strapped to the rear of the light-service Daihatsu. They yell "high five!" to each other as they lay on their bellies near a yardage marker, two bloody incisions in their lower backs. As their skin grows tacky and their pupils less responsive in the white-hot afternoon rays, Meg pushes the new kidneys into place with the sharp end of a triangle-cut ham on white that's been plastic-wrapped so hard, it's water resistant to three hundred meters. "High...five...," the last to receive the transplant whispers into the fragrant, fresh-cut turf.

That is the long and short of golf course cuisine. You may ask after the fabled "private clubhouse's" filet mignon avec jabot du bacon, but this is largely a fiction created by retirement community literature. More likely than not you'll be choosing between a frankfurter that's been lolling around on metal rollers for the better part of Comet Halley's retreat from earth, and a hamburger patty that was tenderized on the narrow path between the 18th green and the cart shed.

I believe this actually serves to pre-affirm my future over-arching point that, when all the facts are in, golf is the great equalizer. I see, upon re-reading my introduction (this does happen), that I had planned on not making this point. This speaks to the strength of my message, I think. Though I had tried desperately not to make any point at all, it was inescapable, and now it is deposited lightly upon the surface of the busy sea of human discussion, soon to sink beneath a great wave of non-syllabic text messages weighing in on whether or not Britney Spears is fat.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

My heritage changed.

If you were to look at me, you would notice that I suffer from vitiligo, have a woman's nose, and wear a single white sequined glove in a shadowbox around my neck. Just kidding. If you were to look at me, which you can't, because I don't like that sort of thing, you'd probably quickly register the following qualities: White. Glasses. Hair. About as tall as the top of a fast-food restaurant soda dispenser. Bookish, if sedated. White.

Well, I'd have you fooled. I myself had been fooled, until Thursday, when my dad came around and mentioned that I'm 1/16th...Seneca. Not Seneca "Indian." Not "Native American." I'm 1/16th Seneca Nation, and the other 15/16ths of Chris Onstad had better GET THE HELL OFF MY LAND!

Only joking, of course. I know Native Americans aren't typically yelling things like that. I mean, I don't really know much about Native Americans. Until Thursday, Native Americans were the guys on the cross-country team who could finish the 3-mile varsity course, go home, have a good sweat and maybe a rain dance or two, then come back and half-heartedly cheer as I bumbled across the finish line ("yaaay for Chris"), my sock garters having long since fallen around my ankles. But now that I am a Native American of a legally-actionable level of extraction, I have a vastly different impression of...myself.

You see, an uncle of mine had recently been messing about at Ellis Island or someplace like that, popping down to trace the family heritage in between vast seas of split pea soup at Houlihan's, and he unearthed this data. I'm quickly inclined to believe it, too. The rest of my genealogy is pretty hot stuff: my great-uncle Niels Onstad was the wealthy Norwegian shipping magnate who married Olympic figure skater Sonja Henie in 1956, after all. How about a side dish of hard-ass American Indian, Chris? Yeah, that sounds good. Set it down next to the buttered lutefisk. I'll get to it.

(If you're wondering: no, I'm not wealthy, despite the "shipping magnate family" thing. Apparently my ancestors liked Linie more than they liked staying alive and keeping the business solvent. Note to self: breakfast potatoes should be in the form of hashbrowns, not aquavit.)

So, now that I have this fresh take on myself, I'm going over Seneca history and identifying personal traits that are in keeping with the Seneca character build. Here are some of the more prominent ones:

1) The Seneca diet was based on corn, beans and squash. I love corn and beans (well, beans, mostly), and I identify with my Seneca ancestors who had to choke down slimy, bitter squash until they moved out and got their own teepee with their buddy He Uses Socks For Napkins.

2) The Seneca culture is matriarchal. The men went on long hunting and fishing expeditions while the women kept it together at home. This explains why I don't care about anything and just want to leave my house to have fun most of the time, and why my wife was the one who unsubscribed me from VIBE when a friend jokingly signed me up.

3) The Seneca adopted many of the customs of their white neighbors. So have I: I drive a car instead of a horse or wolf-drawn litter, get most of my food from markets, and will usually finish out an episode of Seinfeld if I happen to come across it while channel-surfing.

4) The Seneca are stereotyped as getting mad when the government tries to keep them from selling tax-free cigarettes on the Internet. eBay shut me down in '01 and I've been enjoined ever since—I may be asked to speak at next year's summit of the Iroquois League, at which I will be selling cigarettes, out of my trunk, no cut for Uncle Sam.

5) Some Senecas spoke Mohawk. Can you imagine anything more raw than cutting a dude down to size in Mohawk? Until now, I've just thought of a "mohawk" as an ass-kicking haircut, but an ass-kicking haircut with its own language? I bet that language has 137 different words for "bruise," and a one-syllable word that means, "let's get some Jäger and make out with sluts until we puke." Onkwehonwehneha sata ti...you cunt.

I have much more to say on the topic, but it just struck me that I ought to get back in touch with Stanford and see if any retroactive scholarship money can be mailed my way. Can you imagine not playing the Native American card when filling out scholarship applications? That would be like folding with a royal flush, hitting on 21, or finding a hunk of gold on a hiking trail and saying "Huh! Neat!" before chucking it down the hillside.

Excuse me.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Golf Memoir No. 3: the short course.

Three years ago, I was invited to golf with my friend John, who lives up in the soft hills of the San Andreas fault line, hills that geologists at cocktail parties like to call "Hell's zipper." The local Elks Lodge maintains a golf club of remarkably token effort up there, and it's one of those "3-par" courses, where each green can be driven with a high-iron tee shot (usually a 60º sand wedge, in most applications) and two-putted. I hadn't been out on the links in a while and hastily accepted the invitation. Not knowing it was a 3-par, I brought my full bag and spikes.

I woke up at my customary quarter-of-seven, put a mile or two on the old legs and, shortly thereafter, still bright and early, I rolled into John's driveway, happy to find him sitting on his front steps with a five-iron and a bottle of Sierra Nevada. I supposed he'd been out knocking pine cones across his lawn, and had comically filled an old beer bottle with his morning coffee. I have known John a great many years, and have always considered him a person who would put nearly anything into a used container.

The course was just a short walk from his abode, so I took my bag out of the trunk and slipped out my spikes.

"You won't need those," he said, pointing at my golf shoes.

"Yeah," I replied, knowingly. "That's a thing now, isn't it? Those courses that don't allow metal spikes?"

"Let's put these in there instead," he suggested, procuring a curiously cold case of Sierra Nevada from the trunk of his BMW and slipping bottles one-by-one into my shoe compartment. "Good call with the bag," he said. "Ready to go?"

He carried his five-iron, his hand in the middle of the shaft, and made off down the driveway. The outline of a single golf ball could be seen in his shorts pocket. His flip-flops flapped pleasantly as he moved.

Before you get the wrong idea about John, I should point out that he majored in something called "Mathematics and Computational Science" at Stanford, can solve equations that seem to have pictures of pasta in the middle, and holds down a job that routinely requires him to travel around the world putting the screws to hard-line Internet nerds. When he's not bitch-slapping some poor eyebrow-pierced Welsh network engineer with a Cisco manual, he tries to relax with a little golf. I'm only too happy to be a part of the healing.

"I have a story about the time I actually penetrated a Glaswegian SysAdmin with the SCE-4500 2U faceplate," I pretend he tells me, as we stroll down a beautifully lit, densely foliaged and canopied mountain lane. Deep gullies run down either side of the worn asphalt street, golden sunlight beams through the arcs and sprays of heavily established blackberry vines, and brown oak leaves crunch beneath our feet. I open a Sierra Nevada with my divot repair tool and do as the Romans.

After a pleasant, lightly beery walk among the timeless climbers and kudzu, we arrive at the tiny course pro shop, where it seems we have virtually no competition for a tee time. The cheery little old lady, who does not literally have a maraschino cherry stuck into her head with a tiny plastic cocktail sword, tells us that we can take scorecards and pencils if we want. We smile and decline, put a few dollars into some sort of container, and walk back out of the shop as she mentions to a glove display that she once rode on an aircraft carrier.

We get to the first tee and I immediately sense the miniaturized scale of the course. How could I have been so blind? I'm just John's mule for cold beer and the occasional putter! Thirty-yard fairways isn't golf, it's...waste of a morning...bad for the swing...John pulls out another round of Sierra Nevadas, we toast, and we're off. It's not hard to hit a green that you could essentially throw the ball to, and we perform magnificently. His sole club, his five-iron, is one of those brand new high-tech numbers with perimeter weighting, carbon-fiber honeycomb shaft, and peanut allergies, so his shots are given and precise, despite the fact that his swing resembles a man beheading a gopher with an adze. I do all right, managing to work a little more backspin into my lob shots in that sexy, magical way the pros do, where the ball lands, spins furiously in place for a moment, and then starts to roll back toward you, as though in search of revenge.

By the fifth or sixth hole we were doing all the usual stuff they edit out of PGA coverage: peeing while walking sideways down the fairway, aiming at houses, yelling at cats, and flicking coins at each other in mid-swing. Also: teeing off empty bottles of Sierra Nevada, making plans to go pistol shopping together, and promising to open a calzone restaurant together ("...and why the hell not!"). I can't remember if we played all nine holes, or if we just wandered back to his place at a convenient break in the fence. We may have played 23 holes and gone dancing with the old lady; we may actually be Elks now and several years behind on dues. It's hard for me to say. I do remember being at his place later and watching Fargo on his new television set, which was the size of a delivery van (it was delivered using a larger delivery van, and required one wall of his house to be temporarily knocked out, which is not a falsehood borne of the desire to entertain). It is strange but not entirely unpleasant to see Frances McDormand's head blown up so large that you could dance with it (you would hold onto the ears, I suppose).

I have a few other short course stories in me, but not today. That is all the golf I will describe at this sitting. On my "to write" list for the coming months: a treatise on golf course cuisine, golfing with the Hawaiians, golfing with the Germans, bearing the standard for Faldo and Azinger at Pebble Beach, and a youthful descent into crime and sexual madness, as set in motion by golf.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

Golf memoir No. 2

A friend had recently invited me to hit balls at a driving range equidistant between our two homes, so we settled on a place that sits along the San Francisco Bay coast, just a few miles south of that great city. This particular plot of earth is also directly beneath the flight path for SFO, so menacing jumbo jets in all their surreal glory look to be in very real danger of getting pelted by well-struck Callaways. Myself an avid and tireless planespotter, I thought the combination of golf and see-what-the-guy-in-the-window-seat-is-reading views would be worth the price of admission and then some. Also, there was a bar, which I thought could be fun afterwards.

We bought our buckets and approached the large, screened-in range (were it not for the tall screen walls, the high bay winds would no doubt carry off a significant portion of their range ball inventory, comically plonking them down onto the heads of sea lions, who would then feel disinclined to return them). It was one of those double-decker structures, where a second story houses another range of mats and tees. Finding the first story full-up, we climbed the stairs to the next. We located a few neighboring mats, and after some gentle joshing and good-spirited canavery, we selected our warm-up clubs and teed the first ball.

It becomes salient, at this point, to note that the edge of the astroturf mat went right up to the precipice of the second story, so that not twelve inches from my left foot was an unprotected drop of at least fifteen feet. I should also note that a golf swing involves the transfer of a lot of momentum in the direction of that very same left foot. Look at photos of golfers who have just completed their swings: the entire weight of their body rests on the outstep of their left sole. One misstep and I'd tumble off the platform to the ground below, no doubt taking a few 160MPH Maxfli's in the knees and teeth on the way down.

Think: had I taken any missteps in the past, on flat ranges? Dozens of instances sprang to mind, perhaps amplified by my rapidly maturing acrophobia. There was that time in high school, when I'd swung my driver so hard that I came to rest a good ten feet out into the range...the five-iron with the head so heavy it carried me off into the air after my ball...the time I fell over to my left simply because I saw a woman of average beauty. True or not, my mind was beginning to shake on the rails of reason.

Wincing a bit while stepping up to my ball with a fairway wood, I gamely waggled and settled into striking position. How was I going to do this without falling off the structure? One solution might be to swing incredibly slowly, perhaps like a mime in a strong wind, I reasoned. Or maybe a chuck-swing, a 1/4-arc bleck meant to look like you're practicing punching out of trees with a low iron. Okay, I thought. Hold it right there. Nobody punches out of trees with a 3-wood. And regardless of club choice, nobody at the San Mateo Swat & Swill practices odd-looking, unsexy utility shots in front of the other off-shift cell phone salesmen. These are the kind of specialty shots that Nick Faldo might practice once in his career, on the professionally landscaped, heavily-treed Bilbao estate of Seve Ballesteros. The guys at the Swat & Swill? They're trying to crush shots as hard as they can, because (a) they want to show off, and (b) they make a living lying to people who know that they're morons.

I'll just act like I'm deconstructing my swing, I think. I'll swing slowly enough that I can't fall off the structure. No one'll notice me. I wear glasses, for goodness' sake — most guys at cheap public driving ranges already write me off as invisible. I might as well be a successful woman with computer skills.

I draw the club back, twenty-five years' worth of muscle memory guiding my arms. I feel goofy, but I keep the timing in proportion. I cock my wrists at the top and begin the downswing. Don't want to fall, don't want to die. Just got to get the club head through the danger zone and not topple off the building. Swinging real slow, now. Real measured.

The sweet spot of the thirty-year old stiff-shafted persimmon club hits the ball and it flies away with the beautiful, calm clack of one croquet ball striking another. Pay attention to what I just said. This sound does not occur in nature, particularly on golf courses. Modern "woods" are engineered to give off a satisfying metallic TING!, the sort of thing you might hear when a cartoon railway worker drives a spike with his big silver hammer.

The sound was so unusual, in fact, that the fellow in front of me turned around, looked at my club, and then furled his nostrils as though I were standing there in overalls swinging a mattock. The ball landed a respectable 230 yards downfield, an achievement that seemed impossible given my "underwater clown" swing velocity. It was what you might call a breakthrough moment, sort of like when Benjamin Franklin bumped his head on a towel rack and invented the post office.

The next five dozen balls went much the same way, up and down the irons and woods, swinging so slowly that at any given moment you could have stuck your face into the path of my swing, blocked my clubhead with the surface of your open eye, and closed your eyelid around it so as to keep me from easily pulling the club back. A magnificent feeling reared its golden-coiffed head within me as ball after ball soared straight and true over the grass.

Once in a great while I will allow myself to think that I have achieved something remarkable (the last time being that late, late drug- and alcohol-fueled night in 1998 when I noticed the little arrow hidden in the FedEx logo). Upon the depletion of our buckets, my friend and I trotted back down the steps to the bar. In my giddiness, I peeled a twenty out of my wallet, handed it to him, and grinned a nearly inaudible "Hiiii!" He was on the case immediately, and before long we were mulling things over a couple of draft beers and a bowl of used popcorn. I pulled off my cap and smoothed my sweat-soaked hair. It seemed like I was onto something. Was it too late to join the tour? I'm pretty much tour-quality, I reasoned. I can hit the ball straight, I'm used to high levels of stress (thanks to my job of drawing unemployed cats whenever I feel like it), and on more than one occasion I've had gin while waiting for the morning paper to arrive.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

A brief statement on the position that golf occupies in my life.

If you're like me, you more or less grew up on a golf course. I don't mean a place with lush grass, zippy carts, and people named Brent, or Brad, or even Bob. My nines were mangy red-dirt places in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, where you paid five dollars to the blind old lady at the counter in the "clubhouse" (a rickety wooden shack where one presumed that, after dark, they moved aside the ancient picnic table and began filming the mule-sex videos) for the all-day rights to go out and lose your ball down rattler holes. If the other players on the course even had names, they were likely Bodie, Bud, or the haunting, telltale "Junior," a moniker that, in those parts, implied an entire family's wholesale dismissal of written language. [Cut to "ma," washing clothing in a tub on a sagging porch, discussing the alphabet with the off-screen documentary journalist: "Ain't need no alphabet what ta tell Junior he's gon' die by skeeter bites he keeps stickin' his willie in that mule come twilight, that's when they come out, don'tcha ken."]

My main course, a place that went by the name of Sierra Pines, is now a series of fallow, untended apple orchards. In its heyday, which I'll casually define as the time when I played there — since I seem to have been the only guy who ever replaced his divots — there were a couple cranky gas carts that tourists used, a pretty horrid looking groundskeeper (read: cirrhosis on a rider-mower) and a wizened club "pro" who exhibited neither professionalism nor any real understanding of the game. To wit: the time he held the blind old lady hostage in a drunken rage, and the police shot him in the arms. Unerringly in-character for Sierra Pines, the pro went back to work alongside the blind lady a few months later, albeit in a diminished teaching capacity, as his arms now bore a striking resemblance to driftwood. In true foothills fashion, I actually took a lesson from him after he'd been shot to pieces (not money well spent, as I'll tell you soon).

Like most golfers, my extreme emotional problems lead me to swing too hard at the ball. In my case, this leads to a strong slice (when a struck ball shoots out, then curves off to the right). At one point, perhaps around age fifteen, I'd hit a wall in working on this problem, and my dad, sick of watching me not listen to anything he was saying, decided to buy me a lesson with the "pro" one day. It should have been telling that on the clubhouse price board, a half-hour lesson was the same price as a gin & tonic.

I stood waiting at the driving range, five-iron in hand, bucket of balls at my feet. "Destroyed Cochlea Mel," let's call him, came shuffling down the pine-needle strewn path. "ORZENBLATT? ORZENBLATT?" he called. Figuring he was looking for me, and not the pot-bellied six year old swapping at pine cones with a switch of cedar, I waved him over.

I was somewhat surprised that his "lesson" was actually less about the mechanics of a good swing, and more about how life will betray you, and steal the game you love from you, and featured several grotesque demonstrations (using my own clubs) of how he couldn't even "swing a god-damned nine-iron" [it was a five iron, as I have mentioned elsewhere] anymore. He was right: the sloppily repaired tendons and muscles in his arms afforded no range of motion befitting a traditional swing. It was kind of like watching...A GOLF SWING, BY DAVID LYNCH.

My father is an excellent golfer. He grew up playing the munis — the cheap municipal courses — in Oakland in the sixties. He's not fazed by a forty-five degree downhill lie to a green sixty yards away and he brought his one iron instead of his lob wedge. He probably practiced that combo fifty thousand times as a teenager, while avoiding going home to his four sisters. He'll get it within six feet of the pin, and one-putt. He put his all into teaching me to play, but for the most part I was a C student. Giving me golf instructions was probably a lot like shaking a Magic 8-Ball: "Can you please break your left wrist earlier in your downswing?" "REPLY UNCERTAIN, DAD. I MOSTLY TAKE AFTER MOM?"

The clubs I use now were the clubs he treated himself to the year I was born, 1975. (The year my daughter was born, I treated myself to a brewery tour and a banjo. Say what, Junior? More Testors? Yeah, it's premium, but you get what you pay for, brahhh.) They're ancient Wilson-Staffs with ancient engineering. There's no perimeter weighting, personally adjustable counterbalancing (what in the name of all that is holy is TaylorMade up to?!) or FancyShaft technology. I think the shafts are filled with Cutty Sark, and the heads of the woods are actual wood, made from wood, with, like, a knothole as a sweet spot, and a small tap at the rear of the hosel.

I will be the first to admit that I am annoying about not playing with modern clubs. You ever watch that America's Test Kitchen cooking show, with Christopher Kimball, where he wears a bow tie and acts like he is angry that no one cooks pancakes like Abraham Lincoln anymore? And he always spent the weekend helping a neighbor pull an old red tractor out of mud? That is how I am about my golf clubs. I struggled hard to learn how to get the ball down the fairway, and now here's this generation of two-lesson junior Chrysler salesmen with silver drivers the size of chowder-in-a-sourdough-bowl slapping three hundred yard tee shots without so much as taking off their beer helmets and bluetooth earpieces. These guys swing at the ball like they were trying to kill a mouse with a broom, and their Titleist flies straight and true. Pretty soon all we're going to have to do is pull up to the pro shop, punch a button that says "9 HOLES," insert fifty bucks, and the machine will spit out a card that reads, "YOU SHOT PAR! GOOD JOB. 25% OFF CHICKEN WINGS AND ALL BIG BERTHA MERCHANDISE!"

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

The Internet is crazy for cat schlong!

Wow, what a crazy ride! Late Saturday, I posted this comic. I awoke on Sunday, took a look at it, and wasn't entirely sure that I liked the big rigid schlong in the last panel. I didn't think it was necessary. So, I changed it. I gave Pat a smooth, Ken doll pubis. He still had on assless chaps, sported a Freddie Mercury mustache, and was aggressively involved in the consumption of delicious meat products. "No one who hasn't seen the original will care," I reasoned.

My inbox immediately began to fill with angry reader mail. "Why did you censor out Pat's d%$#?" one fellow wrote. "Dude it was way better with the cack," wrote another, this time a young female, apparently from New England. All in all, I received hundreds of emails more or less insisting that I reinstate the version of the strip which you see today.

As a working artist, I'm perpetually torn between the desire to put forth what I think is my pure vision for Achewood, and the desire to satisfy the reader's craving for rock-hard cat cock. I don't like to compromise, but in cases like this, it seems to serve the greater good. To this day, I receive email thanking me for going back to the original. I have even toyed with the idea of offering a mousepad or coffee mug that features the phrase, "ROCK-HARD CAT COCK." Perhaps in blue, with underlining, to look like a hyperlink.

TRIVIA THAT I SHOULD THINK ABOUT: Did you know that Achewood has shown over three penises but never so much as a woman's naked breast?

Anyhow, that's my blog for today. I'm also in the market for a jogging stroller, but I don't know which brands are good. How about that for an ending point of overwhelming mediocrity.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Yeah, I bought the biggest one. It's nice.

After coveting it for somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five years, I finally felt I'd earned it. I kept finding myself in situations where it would have been handy, where I would have looked smart for owning it. I kept finding myself on eBay, looking at it. Finally, on Friday, I pulled the trigger, and now I have it. What is it, you ask?

Oh, the Victorinox SwissChamp XLT. Yeah, it's got the most features of any Swiss Army knife they make. It's got a magnifying glass. It's got a pen. It's got a set of hex wrenches. Yeah, it's got a couple blades. But that doesn't even begin to cover it.

The thing is deeply, deeply satisfying to own. The tools snap in and out of place with a crisp, Swiss precision. It's the size of a cell phone, and weighs as much as a roll of quarters. If I come across a fish, I can scale it. If I'm lost in the woods and need to repair some nice leather brogues, it came with a booklet that shows me how.

It showed up at about 1:47pm today. I was in the middle of one of those phone calls I always seem to be in lately, where someone is explaining that my web server is down, and I'm saying "I know that, but it's in Seattle on a rack right behind you, can you do anything?" and they're saying, "the guy you need to talk to is in a staff meeting about customer satisfaction, he can take a look at it in forty-five minutes," and I'm saying, "I have just received a tool that has a hook disgorger that I'd like to shove into my monthly invoice and yank out a few zeroes."

The call eventually ended with me slamming the open handset directly against my forehead until it, too, crashed, at which point I opened the knife's shipping box on the way to the train station (I was meeting the wife and tot, who had been at some sort of toddler play group). I had barely gotten the thing unpacked when they disembarked, so I quickly shoved it back in my pocket and gave everyone a "big hug" and "did kisses" and subsequently "got bitch-slapped really hard on the eye" by someone I won't name but who is less than three feet tall and really needed a nap.

On the way back to the Onstad home, I quizzed my wife:

- + -

ME: Guess what I bought!

LIZ: Did your Paypal knife show up today?

ME: You saw the transaction?

LIZ: I run your business. Your business is made out of Paypal.

ME: Yes! It did! Want to see it? [reaches into pocket]

LIZ: [acting more like my mom than my wife, at this point] Sure, honey. Show me what you bought.

ME: [holds out knife] Ah-haaa!

LIZ: That thing's huge! You're going to lose it.

ME: I'm not going to lose it! This isn't yours! You don't get to complain about it!

LIZ: Can we get a move on? If you hadn't noticed, I'm covered in yogurt.

ME: [notices that clothes of tot and wife are covered in dried yogurt] Oh. I thought I smelled something. That stuff goes bad pretty quick when it's 100 degrees out, doesn't it.

LIZ: Quit fanning out all the blades to look like the photograph. You're going to trip and fall on that thing.

ME: What?

LIZ: Put that away until we get home.

ME: Oh, sorry. No.

- + -

So far, I've used it to file my nails, clean under them, shave a little hair off my forearm — and the pièce de résistance is the top of this soda can that I punctured with the chisel so that it looks like a weird happy face. Man, how I wish you could see it. It's like a weird cartoon fish from the 30s. It's really good. Oh, wait! I just did a bunch of things and now I have a picture of it, with the knife:

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

How My Birthday Went

Many of you may not know how I spent my 31st birthday. In this brief summary, I aim to rectify this awkward lack of information. If you could, please help me get this information into the larger news channels, so that it can serve more people.

- - - - - - - June 14, 2006 - - - - - - -

7:00am
Wake up, anxious: why isn't the dog awake? Why isn't she bothering me? Did she actually die this time? [What I mean by "this time" unclear; after brief inspection dog seems to be asleep on pad next to bed and breathing normally]

7:01am
Oh dear God, why do you do it to a man, why do you not give him two bladders, one a day bladder of modest volume, and one a night bladder equal in size to a basketball, which is engaged only when the body is prostrate.

7:05am
The pain and anxiety are too much. I limp off to the can (have you ever voided so much liquid that the toilet actually flushed itself?), then manually open the dog's eyes to make sure they respond to light.

8:00am
Finally drift back into sleep as bladder, like a post-delivery uterus, finishes shrinking back down to regulation size.

8:20am
Time to get up! We have to go register for the IRS auction of things that were seized from our favorite restaurant. [Our favorite restaurant was run by an Italian man who wore so much cologne that his brain went crazy and he didn't pay any taxes for ten years.] We hope to get a well-seasoned pan, a few sets of shelves, a set of tongs and ladles, and heck, maybe even a real deep-fryer.

9:00am
Got plenty of cash from the ATM, for the auction. Although I don't notice it at the time, I leave my card in the machine.

10:00am
A local restaurateur bought all the restaurant equipment for a flat price and everybody else went home from the auction without anything.

11:30am
The morning's hopes dashed, we walk back into town for a proper taqueria lunch. After we sit down at a sidewalk table, some little kid on a skateboard comes really close to getting killed by a truck, and then I start to think about my own kid, and I can't enjoy my enchiladas.

12:50pm
My grandpa calls and tells me that he cut his thumb pretty bad and had to get stitches.

1:30pm
The mail's here! Maybe there will be a card or two. Hm. Water bill, something from a local political candidate...and something called "Complex" magazine. Complex is like a rap magazine with Eminem on the cover, and lots of puffy shoe ads, and some butts in tiny shorts...it's like something Ray would read. Who subscribed me to this? It came to my home address, which I don't publicize...is someone trying to tell me that they know where I live, and that they know I don't like rap? Am I being harassed? I can't tell. It's frustrating.

7:06pm
Ugh. Why did I eat this many french fries? Am I crazy, or just an idiot? I must have had fifty french fries. Fifty french fries could easily be arranged to spell WWWWHYYYYYYY

11:13pm
I think someone just shot a gun at my house. I need to move to a better neighborhood.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

A story with a medium ending.

We, the family of three, were tooling about in the car this weekend when the idea struck us to comparison shop for gourmet cookies (we have also rolled through a variety of trailer parks, gated communities, and done a multi-city sampling of McDonald's fries). As the tot was sleeping, I dropped Liz off at a few different upscale grocery stores and rolled around, waiting for the call that would tell me she had paid and was ready for pickup. I looked at many fine houses I could not afford, and saw rich men jogging with computers on their arms. What they were scowling about is anyone's guess. My car was clean and fairly new, and I had shaved.

I figure we gathered around three dozen pastries in all: fancily frosted sugar cookies, bags of chocolate-dipped tuiles, madeleines, petits-fours, that kind of thing. We put them all in a big grocery bag when we debarked, along with half of my driving sandwich (always have a sandwich while driving — it eases the mind and occupies the jaw), which I was saving for later.

On returning home, some friends called, asking if we could come down for dinner at their new place. There would be thick grilled steaks, Roquefort dressings, imported buffalo mozzarella and the season's first tomatoes. There would be cold south American beer with limes, and wines, and our children would play together on an idyllic expanse of grass the size of a 4-par while we laughed and toasted their every little squeak or toddle. It was hard to resist this invitation, so we did not. After all, our own house is small, noisy, and reeks of pickle brine.

Three pleasant hours later we were back at home, ready to start the Sunday night that is the Monday morning that is Achewood. We dropped our bags, checked our email, and put dinner out for the dog, a dachshund named Olive. In an uncharacteristic display of not inhaling the food and then licking the floor around the bowl three feet in every direction, she acted nervous and trotted in a few circles before click-clacking out of the room.

The righter-seeing of us, being the distaff, noticed that the grocery bag which held the cookies had been emptied and crushed in a far corner of the living room. The dog, who has been climbing on tables and stealing food ever since the baby learned to crawl and slap at her water dish, was the immediate suspect. I went to the corner of the back lawn and found empty wrappers for about three pounds' worth of expensive sweets, while Liz dialed the emergency pet hospital (why is it pets always pull their most dangerous stunts on holidays or weekends? Do they get this from "Jackass"?). I looked at the dog: upon closer inspection, she did resemble a cookie-pregnant moron. Wait now...instructions from the emergency vet operator...

Find a turkey baster and squirt one tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide down her throat to induce vomiting? Okay, will-do. Yes, it sounded wrong to me too, but I'm no emergency vet. One quick, sweaty, tire-screeching trip to the grocery store later, I had the 88-cent bottle of hydrogen peroxide and was force-feeding it to the dog. For good measure, I grabbed her around the ribcage and spun us both in circles about six times until I, full of steak, lime-dressed beer, and fatty cheese, nearly lost my own nutrition. The dog slunk off to the ivy patch and urped up enough white foam to fill a boot. I collected myself and considered changing into more comfortable clothing.

Watching for warning signs of shaking, "eye-movement," and general death, we passed the evening. After about an hour I was convinced that the dog was just a big greedy pig-dog who deserved her stomach-ache, and went about my business. Over the past few days she's lightened up a bit, committed a few intestinal felonies on the back lawn, and generally been really unpopular with me. I did pet her a bunch tonight, but my hidden agenda was to check and see if her stomach was swollen with doggie-diabetes (which she deserves). If the devil makes her go to hell for being so greedy and gluttonous, you will read about it here, and hopefully there will be pictures (red satin weiner-dog costume, satin horns, plaintive expression).

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Into the Memory Box

In celebration of the centennial of the San Francisco earthquake, my mom apparently spent the day clearing their garage of flammable materials. Chief among them were, of course, my old grade-school papers and "1982-83 2nd Grade Spelling Bee" trophy. I won't show you the trophy, because it is small and depressing, but here are a few choice samples from my early career in academic publishing, which are now in my garage.

Computer Programming in BASIC

Need help programming that computer to create a mad-lib? Then just consult my manual, which was largely written by looking at the manual that came with our Apple //c. I think this dates to 1986, and the motivation to publish it was that I had a shiny sticker I could put on the cover.



Thomas Alva Edison

"Thomas Alva Edison," my senior honors thesis at Stanford, was widely reviled by the department for my argument that most, if not all, of Edison's inventions had been copies of inventions by Francis Bacon.

Actually, I think I wrote this in the fourth grade. There's a juicy bit of reasoning in the detail below the cover:

I suppose one could argue that dependence on massive power grids that draw heavily on nonrenewable natural resources for their energy isn't technically "practical," but then one wouldn't be in the fourth grade, would one? Nope, it's "go with the flow" for this kid. I've got light bulbs, I've heard that candles cause fires, and oil lamps look pretty corny. Light bulbs for me, ten times out of ten, please.

I've got stacks of these things, including a series of illustrated, informational books about Alaska, Colorado, Norway, and the Early Explorers of California. In one, a teacher chides me for hyphenating a one-syllable word in order to make it wrap. If you're lucky, I'll have the patience to scan them before I think better of using my time this way.

Saturday, April 08, 2006

I learned how to play the Lottery.

So, like I said, I'm about thirty and up until last week I didn't know how to play the Lottery. I assumed it was easy, but there are about seven options when you go in to buy a ticket, and I didn't want to look like a rube. How is the novice gambler expected to choose between:

1) Scratchers
2) Super-Lotto
3) Mega Millions
4) Fantasy 5
5) Daily Derby (twice daily)
6) Mega Scratchers
7) Paul DeLillio's Fantasy Scratchers

What finally got me over the hump and into the liquor store? We were out on our morning walk, and I saw a Lotto sign in the window that said something like, "$43 million!" I thought, "that'd put a dent in the car payment. Let's give it a whirl." Mind made up, I bravely asked my wife how to play the Lottery. She gave me that one-eye-squint look she gives to me when I ask how to do basic life functions, and then said to give the man at the liquor store five dollars and ask for five Quick Picks (these are Super Lotto terms, I discovered).

Armed with this Lottery terminology, I walked into the liquor store. It was sort of dry-feeling, and smelled dusty, though there was no visible dust. Interesting place. I handed the five-dollar bill to the man behind the counter, and before I could speak he pressed a button on a proprietary-looking green machine and handed me a small orange "Super Lotto" sheet with a matrix of numbers on it, five rows tall. How did he know I wasn't there to buy $5 worth of Mega Scratchers? Or $5 worth of "Leg Show," for that matter? Do liquor stores still sell remaindered copies of Leg Show by the pound? I'm proud to say I no longer know.

That done, I held the winning ticket (what I called it, at the time) all the way home in my hand. "How easy it is to win the Lottery!" I mused.

Later that evening I checked the Lottery website and I had gotten none of the numbers. The winning set was something like 1, 2, 3, 4, 46. Ridiculous! Not even a machine would pick that kind of spread. Oh well, at least California public schools had gotten 36% of my investment (about 54% went to Abe Padrascus of Tarzana, CA, who said he planned on using my portion of the pool, as well as the rest of his $43 million, to "not get a Rolls Royce but maybe just a Lexus, that's good enough for [him]". What the hell does Abe Padrascus know about cars? Is he worried that the Rolls won't have a trailer hitch for his Ski-Doo? Jesus. Talk about a guy who pulls his testicles away from his body with both hands.)

That soured me pretty well on the whole Lottery experience. From now on, when I go into the liquor store, I'm going to try to find something else to spend my $5 on. Maybe they'll have a fancy ziggurat-shaped bottle of something called UNFAIR MESOPOTAMIAN GOD.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

It has been ten years since college.

I used to be a guy who did not have a baby, a wife, or even a blog. I don't know what I did with those days. I had a kite, I remember, and I helped this one group of French people find an address that was a couple houses down from mine...but what of the rest of the years? It has been an incredible amount of time since I was the guy outside the bar with the two chained-together mountain bikes whose friend had made off with some chick and therefore had to convince a Spanish-speaking bread truck driver into toting some fool with two "bicicletas! mine! honéstia!" three miles down El Camino at 3am. It has been pretty much exactly that same increment of time since my friend showed up at my doorstep the next morning, pretending that he had been looking for me for hours, and wished that I could have partaken in the big crazy sex thing he had done after he gave up.

It has been nearly ten years since I drove my car into a huge puddle of water while trying to get to a stupid temp job where I would sit and wonder for eight straight hours why my computer wasn't networked. The car stalled, and I had to roll up some fancy wool pants I inherited from my uncle so that they would not get wet. The cuff was all nipped away by my bike chain.

It has been almost ten years since I thought that spending an entire day's pay on a 100-CD Case Logic CD-holder was a fine investment. It has been five years since that Case Logic, sitting on the backseat of my wife's car, containing my Descendents cd AND my Mr. Mister cds (13 copies of Welcome To The Real World, which I got for a penny from Columbia House under a false name) , was stolen by a guy who thought he was only getting a snowboarding jacket.

I don't even snowboard. My wife won it on a radio call-in show, because she is good at trivia. It was draped over the Case Logic. She knows who the Hittites were. I had $234 worth of Mr. Mister stolen from me. I can't snowboard because one of my eyes is basically fake and I only keep it around to make me look friendly in Christmas photos.

Ten years, boy-whoo. The ten years between twenty and thirty. If you are twenty, do what I should have done: start Google. I swear, there was this one day at college where I was equidistant between the Communication department and the Computer Science department, and it was the day I had to choose my major, and this guy sitting outside of the Communication building was eating this great-looking sandwich. Like I said, man—decisions. Think about them.

I did, but not until this year.

— C.T.O.

PS: Maybe spell it G00gle, with two zeroes instead of o's.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Maybe I'll get back into web design.

I'm thinking of getting back into web design. It's been a few years, and the kids probably know a few more tricks than I do, but I have one thing they don't: I could not possibly care less about web design.

That's right. You want your logo to spin in a circle and twist itself inside-out for twenty seconds before people can get to your splash page? How about this instead: bgcolor=#CCCCCC. That is "portable across platforms."

You think it would be great to have a Flash movie play in the center of your splash page, and "maybe have a guy do kind of a 'Matrix'-thing?" This is the sound of me stapling a picture of Keanu Reeves to my invoice. I made you a table where border=5.

Actually, I copied the code from somebody else.

You want the navigation buttons to change color when the mouse rolls over them? And maybe make a little "plink" sound? That's called Javascript. I have no idea how it works. I made your buttons out of blue underlined text. The "Contact" one is actually a "mailto" command. On the house, compadre.

Look, I didn't go to college for this. You couldn't, when I was in college. We would spend hours, hunched over our NeXT boxes, trying to figure out why BRs would behave as Ps in certain TDs. We learned nothing and were paid nothing. Excite was still called Architext. I know this because I used to get stoned with one of the founders. I said hi to him at the mall last week and he looked at me like I was crazy.

Hm, a "chat room." Yes, I think that everybody who comes to your model railroad website will want to sit around alone in your chat room. One thing I could also do, though, is design a link to "Yahoo Chat: Small Trains." For the link, I can create little right-arrows using two "greater-than" signs. Or maybe I will use the guillemot right ASCII character. That's a premium character, and rather volatile cross-platform, but breathtaking when executed correctly.

What? You want your website to automatically play a 2kb MIDI of "Oh My Darling Clementine" when it loads, and for the background to be a tiled animated GIF of an American flag? And for the header to be H1 size? Okay, I think I have that template. I may have to "back it up" off of an old hard drive. I charge $150/hr, and I don't have a phone number.

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Computer crisis SOLVED!

For the last little while, my computer has been shutting itself down for no reason, often in the middle of booting up. This had me a bit concerned, but I could usually manage to get the machine up and running after a few restarts, so I figured that was an acceptable level of service. I'd built the thing myself, after all. Then finally today the machine wouldn't beep and whir for more than a few seconds after I hit the "on" button. It'd just go "HRRRrrrrrr" and die. It's hard to pop a CD into the drive and back everything up when the computer is acting this way.

Thoroughly agitated, I sat and considered the thing from the business end of a Campari and soda. It seemed to me that the variable nature of the timing of the crashes meant it wasn't one of those nasty spy-ware programs that you get when you go to the bikini websites. No, this was further down in the guts of the thing. I unplugged 568 USB devices from the CPU, plopped it on the desk, and took a good, long look inside. Easy to do, since I never bother putting the sidewalls on my machines.

No microchips were dangling loose, so I wiggled the "RAM" card. Hard to wiggle. Definitely "seated" correctly. Hm. Maybe step back and try to get a vibe from the whole.

The insides were coated in a fine dust, sort of like a small computery moon, so I went to get one of those cans of compressed air that people are always using to blow hand-dander out of their keyboards. I gave the motherboard what-for and it spruced up nicely.

Then, between the blades of the fan that sits over the processor, I saw something amiss. It looked as though James Bond Rat had been tricked by his nemesis into falling on the thing, and the subsequent carnage had covered the processor's heat sink with a thick, felty layer of gray must. About enough to make a new Homburg, if I remember correctly.

"That's not right," I reasoned. "That thing should be a gleaming set of aluminum spikes."

"Also," I continued, "if it is covered in a thick, insulating layer of gray botrytis, the thermal dissipation task of the heat sink may be significantly hampered."

I thought back to a time in my life—a simpler time—when, in a hot room, a computer had repeatedly shut itself down. I knew what I had to do.

I steadied my grip on the compressed air and took aim at the heat sink. The next five seconds seemed to last an eternity.

Later that afternoon, after we had opened all the windows and doors, wiped our faces of dust, and sedated the dog, I plugged the computer back in and booted it up. It zipped through its little startup routine in record time. Adobe Illustrator, which had been taking upwards of six and a half hours to launch, popped open in seconds. I even ventured to burn a CD. Flawless.

I sit here now with that incredible feeling of having overcome a computer problem. It's invigorating, and empowering. Maybe I'll hook the digital video camera up and try to see if Microsoft has any native video editing software. Maybe I'll type up some of my favorite recipes. Maybe I'll use a WYSIWYG editor to make a web page, only to delete it because I don't need it.

Computers, you once had me scared. You had me angry. You knew you could hurt me. But now, I have a new thing. A message I can relate to the world. A message of cleaning you off. A message that there probably isn't spy-ware on your funny-acting machine. Spy-ware is probably just a fake idea created by software companies, to keep the canned air companies down. I can live in that world, now that I know the truth. I can find my way in this war zone that man has created.

Sunday, January 01, 2006

My Cell Phone Died!

Can you believe it. Can you JUST believe it. I pay like a hundred bucks for the thing not three years ago, and last Friday it just craps up and dies! Sure, I may have been the last guy on earth using a phone with a monochromatic screen and the inability to play "Perphect House Daddy — Tha Killa Protein Moleculezz" MP3 clips when my "badass Mom" is calling, but it worked fine and it had all my numbers stored in it. I had even used the little melody composer to compose a custom ring that sounded, to me, like a crazy bumblebee who thought he was an electron-hummingbird (a hummingbird that disappears from one spot and reappears in another without any perceptible passage of time). Now that is all lost!

I had left the unit in the car overnight, and when I went to fetch it the next morning I noticed the battery had died. A few seconds after plugging it into its charger, it blipped into life and the screen said, "SYSTEM FAILURE - CONTACT SERVICE PROVIDER." It also said "SOS" above one of the multipurpose menu keys, so I pressed "SOS," figuring it would send a distress-type call to my service provider, who would then happily explain that I needed to stick a paperclip into a particular nook or cranny in order to rejuvenate the thing.

ME: Oh, I guess I should press on the "SOS" button. That's what the phone seems to want.

ME: [presses on "SOS" button, waits, thinks, "Oh, I should do this later. I'm about to go on vacation." Hangs up on "SOS."]

ME: Honey, did we get the dog medicine? Are we ready to go?

WIFE: I need to write back to a couple people. Can you hang on a minute?

ME: [sensing chance to call "SOS" and straighten everything out] Oh, no problem! Great.

ME: [Calls "SOS" again]

SOS: This is 9-1-1. What is your emergency?

ME: Oh, my cell phone must be broken. It said to call "SOS" and had this button, but it connected me to you.

WIFE: You idiot! When cell phones crash, they're required to still be able to call 911. That's what SOS is.

ME: No, "SOS" is an international distress signal made famous by ships.

SOS: Thank you. [hangs up]

WIFE: Nice going.

ME: I did what the phone said. You want to yell at somebody, yell at my phone.

WIFE: I'm not going to yell at your phone.

ME: Well, I am. YOU SUCK, PHONE! YOU COST MONEY AND YOU MAKE ME SAD!

WIFE: [leaves]

ME: Oh well, I'll call my brother who used to sell cell phones. He'll tell me what to do.

ME: Oh wait, I can't. [Looks out window] Hey, there's a police car blocking our driveway! Those guys think they can park anywhere. What if he's still there when we try to go on vacation? I'll need to—

DOG: chris i am dying

Long story short, I swapped my phone's "SIM" card (?) into an even older, crappier unit that we had found in a vodka screwdriver the day after my 30th birthday party, so if you call me and all you can hear are gummy staticky sounds, that is what it's like to talk to a dead cocktail.