For my money, the greatest opening line to a rock song doesn't come from any of my usual suspects. Rather, it can be found on a classic from about 15 years ago, Motorhead's scorching 1916 album.

Track #2 is called "I'm So Bad (Baby I Don't Care)." Just how bad is Lemmy, and to what extent does he not care? He'll tell you just as the song hits full throttle:

"I make love to mountain lions."

Yeah.

Nothing that was written before or since can top that. Rawk is dead. Long live rawk.

Here's how the rest of the day will pan out.

Barring a stroke or an aneurysm or appendicitis or freak meteor that hits his office and leaves me unscathed - any scenario of which, it should be noted, I am rooting for - Doom will be here the rest of the day to wreak more havoc.

I will get blamed for "losing" a very important document that was last seen in his hands. Poop on me for not just making a copy from the only copy of the document I had before turning it over to him earlier in the month. After 30+ months in this position, you'd think I'd know better, since the fucker can't find his ass with both hands and a map. So, I suck, 40 lashes with a wet noodle, etc. etc. ad infinitum.

I will get called into his office for a "chat." He'll ask if everything is OK, and I'll lie and say that I'm perfectly happy and content and just a little bogged down right now, but it'll all be all right. (He doesn't know I'm trying to flee this shithole like a rat fleeing a burning ship. He'll shit when he finds out. And then I'll get blamed for not having a clean pair of Depends for him on hand, but that's a risk I'm willing to take.)

Then, he will completely overhaul my system of doing things, because he couldn't put his hands on this particular document, and so the system is broken (in his deluded "thinking," which isn't really "thinking" so much as it's pure dumbass instinct, like a pig rooting for truffles, except a pig is classier). He'll call my real boss in, and I'll get talked to like I'm 3 years old and have the mental capacity of such, nevermind my near-genius IQ.

My real boss (who is not Doom and therefore does not suck balls) will reassure me that everything will be OK, just to ride this storm out until it passes. (He knows that I'm trying to flee this shithole. He's trying to stay objective in the matter, but I get the feeling that he can't help but secretly root against me because he knows that he'll have a hell of a time finding someone else who can keep it together here, especially given the environment I'm working in.)

I'll go home, enjoy what little time I have with my wife before she goes to work - her employers put her on stupid nights for about 6 weeks, and this is week 3, which partially explains my comparative lack of blogging as of late. We'll have supper, and I'll bitch about my day and how much I wish Doom would get some sort of painful, terminal disease borne by leeches on his next fishing trip, and she'll tell me to quit if I'm so goddamn unhappy and see if I can just do something from home. As if that's viable.

Then, hopefully, I'll spend the rest of the evening with Son playing outside and then coming in to watch mindless children's television. I have the theme to "Make Way For Noddy" running through my head right now, and the prospect of watching a 15-minute cartoon about Toyland seems so innocent and fun and cheerful, which makes it the exact opposite of AntiChrist's Feces, which was actually the name put on Doom's birth certificate.

"Don't kick a gift horse in the mouth." -- Doom Classic

"That was straight out of left base." -- Doom Classic

"You wanna talk about screwed up. You couldn't be any more screwed up if you tossed it in a 5-gallon bucket and ... what do I say, what do I say." -- Doom, 2:23 pm, 5/18/07

"I don't want to catch holy terror from Sandy." --Doom, 5/21/07, 3:05pm

Still waiting for that magic phone call.

I interviewed last Friday for a financial/project management position that they're creating in our main office. The field is stronger than previously thought, and my confidence level has dipped. The prospect of spending any more time than absolutely necessary in my current position really puts a drag on my outlook.

It's not Christian of me to say so, but I hate Doom with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, hate being pushed around and in a position where I can't really do anything about it because it will show up on my performance eval (and contractors don't have the same protections as federal employees), hate not being able to get into a groove in my day-to-day chores here because I'm constantly being called into his office for stupid shit, whether it's to watch him peck letters out on his keyboard to compose one of his dumbass e-mails or being asked to do something that he *just asked* someone else to do also. His management style sucks, his interpersonal skills are non-existent, and I'm just tired of being on constant red alert for whatever new crisis crosses his desk. I can't handle it anymore, which is too bad, because one of the reasons that I was such a perfect fit for the job in the first place was my ability to handle assholes and A-type personalities and colossal dickwads like him.

So I wait. Wait for the magic phone call I alluded to in the opening of this post that will whisk me away to - well, if not greener pastures, per se, at least not so shit-riddled. And if that doesn't work ... hell, I'll just poop in his bag. Hasn't seemed to harm Randy Orton's career.

If you haven't heard it, it's new to you!

I decided a couple of weeks ago to take another music club plunge. The seven "free" CDs at the start of the deal should have been a lot easier to select than they were, but contemporary music is in such a sorry state that I couldn't even find seven that I wanted in their catalog (and yes, I checked what was available online). So I fleshed it out with four CDs that my wife wanted - some Trace Adkins, some Big and Rich, that Celtic Women album with the four hot Celtic chicks on the front and the one kinda ugly one, and a Josh Groban disc (I don't know who that is, but she had it circled).

My selections - because historically, I have been about 5-7 years behind as far as being on the cutting edge of cool music goes - were Morcheeba's Charango, Belle & Sebastian's Dear Catastrophe Waitress - because I'm a fan of both bands - and I took a flyer on Norah Jones' Come Away With Me. Right now, I'm most impressed with the latter - the B&S is, after 1/4 of a listen, just weird, and I had a little more than half of Charango through (legal, officer!) downloading, so there aren't really any surprises on it. (I do like that song they do with Kurt Wagner from Lambchop.)

But the Norah Jones is probably a bit of a curveball to those of you who know me. Really, it's more of a nice change of pace from the constant diet of GbV/Bad Religion/Pollard/Sloan/etc. (The Captain can attest to my reluctance to take chances on bands or singers I haven't heard before.) Regardless, I dig it.

"I'd be much more of a people person if it weren't for people," so goes the old adage. The same applies to journalists also – I'd be much more of a fan of journalism as a profession if it weren't for the people who deal in it. (The old joke about lawyers can also apply. You know: "What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the Potomac? A good start.")

It used to be an admirable profession, journalism. But as biases and agendas become more transparent in this age of … well, transparency, I find myself feeling dirtier and dirtier for ever wanting to be a part of organized journalism. So, just like the "spiritual" person who is turned off by organized religion, I prefer to express my love for the written word in my own ways. So I blog.

Perhaps it's not journalism itself that's going down the tubes, but rather the newspaper industry in general. Not to veer off into an anti-corporate screed, because I love capitalism, but as more and more corporations who have no business being in the news business get into the news business, the local conversation gets trumped in the name of cost-cutting and a .001 percent increase in the profit margin. Which, if the reports of newspapers bleeding money are true, is like putting a Band-Aid on a half-amputated leg.

And so I raise a glass to James Lileks, who, thanks to some incredible short-sightedness by the paper's ownership, has penned his last Quirk for Minneapolis' Star-Tribune. On the bright side, he'll still be writing "straight local news stories." This is not unlike asking Albert Pujols to sell popcorn at Busch Stadium.

Fortunately, even though I'm talking about him like he's dead, lileks.com will still thrive. So his talent won't go completely wasted. Still, I can't help but wonder how the loss of reader goodwill stemming directly from the Quirk's deletion from the Strib couldn't possibly bite the paper's owners in the ass. Idiots.

When children's TV goes bad.

My inner Butt-head completely lost it when Papa Bear (of the Berenstain Bears) asked, "But what causes my diaphragm to get irritated in the first place?"

... where we use all of the horse so that none is wasted!

I like both types of music: country and western.

It may shock you to learn that we still use that antiquated payment device known as a check. But we do.

Since we have about three checks left in the checkbook and none in reserve, it's long past time to order a new box, so today I placed an online order for the same style of checks that we've had for the last five years. After my order was confirmed and I logged out, I checked out one of the ads on Deluxe's main page. "View NASCAR checks," it said.

Hey, since Ricky Rudd drives for Yates again, maybe they'll have some checks with his likeness on it or something, I thought. (During his days with the Wood Brothers, you pretty much had to order Rudd paraphernelia directly from rickyrudd.com or NASCAR.com, as Wal-Mart tends to not stock merchandise for any driver who doesn't drive for Hendrick, Roush, Yates, Gibbs or DEI. Morgan Shepherd fans, if any still exist, have been SOL in that regard for years.)

So I clicked on the ad.

"Select your favorite NASCAR driver from the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series," the page read.

And below that, the offerings were:

Dale Earnhardt. (Who's been dead for 6 years.)

And Dale Earnhardt Jr.

And that's it.

This sucks.

Many days, after I pick up Son from daycare, I take him on what I like to call the Choo-Choo World Tour. Because he loves trains and railroad tracks, and there are no crossings between the daycare and home, I'll drive through Odon, across as many crossings as I have the patience for. Up one street and down the next we'll go, maybe crossing the tracks about four times total before heading home. It's a bit of an indulgence, especially in our era of $3 gas, but no matter.

Last week, we were heading south down Spring Street in Odon, having crossed the railroad crossing there, making our way toward Cooper and the park before heading back north on Grove. At the corner of Spring and Cooper, a little girl on a bike rode out into the street. I saw her and slowed down, and she still kept zig-zagging toward me in my lane. I veered all the way out to the opposite side of the street and slammed on my brakes, doing everything in my power to keep from hitting her. She passed safely, and I couldn't believe what I'd just seen - I was too flabbergasted to honk or stop to give her the what-for.

This seemingly inconsequential moment was soon forgotten; I didn't even tell my wife about it. We lament enough the general state of kids today without overselling the point.

Why do I bring it up now, then?

Yesterday afternoon, at what I think is that exact spot, a man was backing out of the driveway in his truck, looked both ways, didn't see anything, continued backing up and hit a little 5-year-old girl on a bike. She later died.

Was it the same little girl that rode her bike out into my lane last week? I don't know, but the news has haunted me ever since I heard about it.

What if that little girl was the same one? And what if I'd gotten out last week and told her that she could have been hurt, and she needs to pay a little more attention? Or what if I'd asked her where her parents were, and told them about it?

Instead, I did nothing. And now it weighs very heavily on my mind, little Darcy's death. Even if it wasn't the same girl.

It's not really my responsibility to help raise other folks' kids - I don't buy into that whole "it takes a village" cliche - but I think about if the shoe were on the other foot, and my son was playing in the street, not really paying attention. Would I want someone to tell me that my child was mindlessly putting himself into danger?

Yes.

Would you? Or would you prefer that the rest of the world mind its own business and not tell you how to raise your child? Because there are people out there like that, you know.

What would you have done? Not the hero you. The real you. Be honest.

Bunny update.

While trimming along the house yesterday afternoon, I flushed out another baby bunny that, to my surprise, was just as full of life and vim and vigor as when I inadvertantly destroyed its home and shredded two of its siblings on Sunday. I caught it and put it in a box for Son to observe. He eventually wanted to get it out, and asked me to put it in his Jeep.

So I did.

"WHAT THE FUCK, MAN? I MEAN, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?"

Afterwards, I asked Son to get me a towel out of the house so I could brush off the bulk of the grass that had accumulated on my legs from running the trimmer. Instead, Son brought me a sheet of stickers, and wanted to affix one to the bunny before we sent it off.

Me: "....... OK!"

If you're a rabbit hunter, and a couple of years from now you kill a rabbit that has a sticker on it that says "Good Work!", well ... good work!