Go the F**k to Sleep

If this is OK, we're OK

NEWS FLASH: the #1 selling book on Amazon as of this writing is Go the F**k to Sleep.

Kind of amazing, ain't it?


The book (which title I asterisked not out of squeamishness but so nannyware wouldn't needlessly block this post) is a tongue-in-cheek piece for adults very cleverly--or maybe no so cleverly--designed to look and feel and read like a children's bedtime story. But this post isn't a review of the book; that's been  covered very well elsewhere. No, rather I bring it up as its publication and popularity have tremendous--okay, perhaps not tremendous, but at least profound--meaning on what we're doing here.

The number one book being pushed by Checkered Path is the A**hole's Handbook, a handy-dandy guide to being a complete jerk in everything you do. And there was talk for a while--worry, really, handwringing--as to whether a book with such an "obscenity" in the title would be welcome in the world of readers.

Those concerns were, obviously, misplaced.

With GTFTS's success, we are now completely certain that the A**holes Handbook will be a runaway success as well. Or at the very least it will be allowed passed censors everywhere.

NOTE: I've been working with several other people for the past month or so prepping a site I mentioned earlier--Shred of Truth--for wider release. We've added tons of content, including a growing handful of original editorials written by Yours Truly. I eventually plan to cull the "best" of those editorials and release them as a book here. That's a long way down the road, however, so if you want to read my political rants, be sure to visit that site often. And now that it's stabilized, I'll be back here a bit more frequently.

At least that's the plan.

We're getting there...

Thank you

We've had a few setbacks time-wise lately, so we still don't have If It's Over up and running just yet; I plan on making that this weekend's project. I also need to make a programming change to I Want Some Proof, plus add another chapter to Hard-Way Lessons, plus tear down and rebuild A**holes Handbook from the ground up. Lots to do.

But before I even get to that, we've teamed up with another local web dude for the creation of another handful of sites, so that's been a bit of a time drain this week. The first two sites below are ones he's had up and running for a few years, but the last one just went live this week (and he and I will be telling you a lot more about it as time goes by):

• Green Energy Help - a site with news and information about ways to help us break our expensive and destructive addiction to oil, coal, and nuclear.
• The Xtreme Weather - A site for lovers of the planet's most extreme weather: tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards& the like. Many of the site's members are active storm chasers, so there's often live coverage available for current major weather events.
• Shred of Truth - A fully political site featuring in-depth insight intended to help cut through some of the lies and obfuscation seen and heard elsewhere.

As I said: lots to do. But we appreciate your patience!

About those jobs...

My career metaphorized

In my prior post, I alluded to the many jobs I've held. Now, many of you have worked in numerous places, and doing many different things. But when I say I've held a lot of jobs, I'm not just talking about a half-dozen or a dozen or even two dozen.

No, it's quite a few more than that, actually:over a hundred.

No, seriously. And I'm not talking about day jobs where I was just hired on the spot to do manual labor; I mean actual jobs where I had to fill out an application and sit down for an interview and everything. A minor sampling (and in no particular chronological order):

• Taxi driver
• Truck driver
• Plumber
• Restaurant line cook
• TV newsman
• Radio DJ
• House painter
• Roofer
• Bartender
• Auto mechanic
• Software developer
• IT manager
• Construction supervisor
• Pizza delivery driver
• Carnival laborer
• Cowboy

...and many, many others. (Of course, they'd make more sense if I gave them to you in their true chronological order, but what fun would that be?) The point is, I've managed to land any number of jobs, so I can speak with a little authority when it comes down to discussing how to get a job. There are some tricks to it, of course--and those will be shared in an upcoming book.

And with that taken care of, I'm out. I'll be back in a day or two.

Truly a Checkered Path...

Browsing the intertubes this morning, I was struck again by how piss-poor I can be at making some of Life's Big Decisions. (I won't even get into my love life; I'm talking simply career choices.)

Ibisworld, the "world's largest independent publisher of U.S. industry research" (read: they know what they're talking about) just released it's list of 10 key industries that are declining, and will continue to do so even if the economy turns around now. And, as it turns out, I have worked in precisely nine of those ten. Yes, really. Here's the list (along with, in parentheses, where I worked in that industry).

10) Video post-production services (Double-Vision Video Services, Lake City, FL)
9) Formal wear and costume rental (Linda's Costumes & Formals, Gainesville, FL)
8) DVD, game, and video rental (Blockbuster, Ft. Lauderdale, FL)
7) Newspaper publishing (Mansfield News Journal, Mansfield, OH)
6) Mills (Gould, Inc., Minneapolis, MN)
5) Wired telecommunication carriers (Pacific Bell, Los Angeles, CA)
4) Photofinishing - Nope
3) Manufactured home dealers (Nobility Homes, Ocala, FL)
2) Record stores (Camelot Music, Ft. Myers, FL)
1) Apparel manufacturing (PPWE, Lander, WY)

Now, that's a pretty good--or bad, depending on how you choose to see it--indication of several thing. First, I'm lousy at picking careers. Second, I'm great at getting hired. Third, I sure do like to move a lot.

Now, to be fair, I actually tried to work in photofinishing (#4 on the list above), but the manager at the Fotomat didn't like twenty-two year old me for some reason, so I missed out on the sweep after he told me, "Dude, we're not hiring," and tossed my application into the tiny wastebasket in his tiny little yellow hut in the middle of that Kroger parking lot in northwest Houston off of Antoine. (I should look him up and send him a thank you card, no?)

Anyway, that brings me to another point, and perhaps the main one of this site. One of the ebooks CheckeredPath will be publishing this fall concerns how to get a job. Now, there are a million--maybe two million--books out there that'll tell you how to get hired. And some of them may actually help. But this book will be different. I can't give away much at this moment, but I'll tell you this much: in a world where many companies don't show much respect, loyalty, or appreciation to their employees, isn't it silly for employees to grovel? It's a dog eat dog world, friend; this book will tell you how to start eating.

No, God. No.

Well, after eight whopping hours or so of intense work--punctuated by my desire/need to finish off a 12-pack of Harp (Irish lager from Guiness. Good stuff.)--the main "No, God. No." site is up and running. I strived diligently to make it as offensive as possible to as many people as possible, while still maintaining the inconsistent design for which I've become known. I hope you'll agree that I accomplished my goals. With several dozen type faces combined with several dozen color schemes, along with several hundred dynamic elements presented in a completely random order, the site is guaranteed to never look exactly the same way twice no matter how many visits one makes, so confusion is certain to reign supreme.

Just the way I like it.

Seriously, though--yes, really--I owe a few special thanks. First, to Google, for their wonderful and wonderfully easy to use font API, without which I'd have been stuck with the oh-so-pedestrian Helvetica and Tahoma fonts instead of beautifully rendered ones with names like "Mountains of Christmas", "Cherry Cream Soda", and "Yanone Kaffeesatz". If you're a web page designer, you likely already know about Google's font API. If you don't, I urge you to check it out. Second, thanks to Adobe for it's pretty damn cool Kuler application; coming up with those dozens of legible color schemes would've taken me days that I don't have. And, finally, thanks to Wikipedia; without that project, this one wouldn't exist. Or, at least, it wouldn't be so cool.

Anyway, please check out the site. Have a look around. Click the Facebook and Twitter buttons. Read the blog. Tell your friends and family. Piss everyone off. Then come back and let me know what you think.

TGIF (Well, in just five days)

It's going to be a hectic week here at Checkered Path. More updates to all the existing CP family members--Hard-Way Lessons, A**holes Handbook, I Want Some Proof, and, of course, this site (Checkered Path) itself--plus a couple of new members you'll be sure to want to see. (Heck, maybe even three new members, if I'm feeling particularly productive.) One is sure to make my religious friends unhappy; the other should make everyone happy, if not a little melancholy.

Understandably, I'm still feeling a little hungover from last weekend's mini adventure. I had to pause several times this week to take a deep breath and remind myself that not so many miles away is an oak-shaded, grass-covered beach next to a deep and lazy river, a place where even if I can't physically go at that moment, my mind can return and relax while the alligators bask and the fish jump and the herons call and the day spins out into evening...

Gotta Get Away

Japan in wet ruins, a runaway quartet of nuclear reactors threatening to irradiate the Pacific basin, the Mideast going nuts, American-led multinational forces trying to make Qadaffi blink first--too much, it is, so I did what all good people do: I ran away.

I didn't run far, of course, nor for long--my current family and business situation won't allow for more than that. But I did manage to get out of town and quite blissfully do something I haven't done since the late 1990s: unplug. Completely. I threw some camping gear into my pickup, picked a spot on the map, and headed out of town on Friday. I took no phone, no iPad, no Blackberry, no laptop. Nothing electronic. Just a tent, a sleeping bag, a small kayak, a 12-pack of beer, a couple of books, and a little food.

It was awesome. Incredible. Though Florida is a highly-populated state, the lion's share of those people are jammed in at the coasts; everyone wants to be by the sea. Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Tampa, Pensacola--all of them by the ocean, meaning that the interior is relatively free of human clutter in some places, and if you know where to look you can find areas that seem pretty much unchanged from how they must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago; I found one such area this past weekend.

Wish you were here

I set up my tent on the banks of the Peace River--and how's that for a name?--hard against a stand of thick and ancient oak trees that were still bent and broken in places from the passage of Hurricane Charley back in 2004. Alligators crept along the opposite shore, slow and ponderous in the hot afternoon sun; blue herons stood in the shallow waters in the mornings waiting for unlucky fish to swim by; raccoons and other little critters scampered through the underbrush at night, and I'd find their hungry little footprints outside my tent when I awoke. The moon was huge and bright, bright enough to read (and I know, because I tried). I rested in the evening and watched as the first wispy tendrils of river fog rose from the slow waters of the Peace as if conjured from a jinni's bottle; I sat in the morning drinking hot campfire coffee and counting the mist devils as they danced across the waters, backlit in golden sunlight. I paddled my kayak lazily up and down the river, occasionally beaching myself to spend a few moments resting on the bank in the hot sun of midday, my feet in the cool waters while minnows tickled my toes, and all too soon it was time to go.

That was the worst part. Isn't it always?

On the drive home, I'll admit that I was curious what had happened to the world while I was away, but I'd be lying if I said I had an overwhelming urge to plug back into the matrix to catch up. I had been fine without the world; I was sure the world was fine without me. Today came soon enough, and I was back online, with the numerous interruptions that brings with it. The familiar flooded back in, but I looked upon it with a new perspective, and new distance. And that was good.

I promise myself to do this again. Soon. I wish everyone would.