To the End,

I wrote a query letter for a short story I wrote this week. For some strange reason the next couple of days I would have a moment where I would wonder if I would get a response. Then I would remember it was only a first draft and I didn't even mail it yet. It seems like I've been waiting for a lot of things that don't happen lately.

Anyways this is the end of Jontown. This is my last post. I feel it has run it course. Maybe this will just be a sabbatical, but right now I doubt it. As Cris Coopers character said in Adaptation, "Fuck fish!"

Thanks for reading. Cheers!

(I wrote this a few weeks back, but took some time to think about it. Somewhat surprisingly I had no regrets and got a bit anxious to end this. I will leave the site up as long as blogspot lets me, but will take my name off it.)

January 23 2006- November 26 2007
348 posts

One for the road,

I came across this blog on C&L; Hot chicks with douchebags.

Reread,

I reread Into the Wild last week. I was reading literary journals and wasn't really enjoying that, I just feel I should. Anyway for reasons that are much longer than interesting, I decided to reread Into the Wild. One reason was I wanted to see how close the book followed the movie. The movie defiantly was a fictional account with events slightly altered, but it stayed pretty true to the written words.

Anyways as I was reading about the travels of Alexander Supertramp, I was reminded of a trip I took to New Orleans quite a few years ago. The last night we were sitting in a bar that me and my companions took to. I was a little tired and was kind of spacing out. I started listening to the people sitting next to me. It was a guy and a girl who seemed to be more acquainted with each other than actually friends. They were talking about hard drugs with the casualness that I talk about alcohol. After a little while the guy said he had a car and was trying to get money together to go to some city far away (I want to say San Fransisco, but it was a long time ago) he wanted her to come with him. He wanted to go that night, just like that. The whole conversation blew my mind that people lived like that. Of course there was never a mention of Chris McCandless using drugs and his drinking came across as purely social, but there was something about it that didn't seem all that different to me.

Stained Teeth,

I drank a bottle of Madeira wine last night. This comes from reading too many books about our founding fathers and their fondness of the wine. I was a bit surprised at the cost of the wine. I was sort of expecting high end, but when your choices are between $3 and $2 why not go cheap. As I was drinking it all I could think was Jefferson with his "Madeira stained teeth" was one ghetto dude.

Some Links,

Back in April I wrote;

I know who Curveball is, but started wondering how many other people do.

I am quite pleased that 60 Minutes caught up to Jontown and did a piece on him last night. I was giddy with delight as a coworker brought up it up at lunch today.

Here and here are some of the boring clips of Fred Thompson I wrote about in the previous post. (I'm sure everyone is dying to watch the interview I called "duller than baseball.")

And while I'm at it SNL

Front Runners,

I watched Fred Thompson on Meet the Press this morning. That guy is duller than baseball. Luckily Edwards was on This Week so I only had to watch an old man babble for a half hour.

Assuming Giuliani and Clinton are the front runners (I know that is a big assumption especially for Rudy, but he is always ahead in the polls and I'll get to Clinton later) something that surprises me that hasn't come out is Rudy can't win his home state. This always seemed to be a big deal in the past and considering Rudy's platform is "I'm the only one who can beat Clinton" it would seem that his opponents would pounce on that, but I haven't heard it brought up once (that's not saying no one has, it just hasn't predominately been brought up). This might have something to do with Romney's home state some what up in the air. He was governor of Massachusetts and obviously can't win that state. He announced his presidential run in Michigan where he was born and probably doesn't stand much of a chance there, but better than the dark blue Massachusetts. But I would think that one of the other candidates would bring up this major point by now.

Anyways on to Clinton. She had pretty much cemented her front runner status last month. So Obama announced he was going after her a lot stronger than he had before. I kind of wanted to actually watch that debate to see what would happen, but I have ghetto cable and don't get MSN. From the what I've read and heard about it, it sounded like Edwards did more attacking and projected himself back into the mix that he had kind of fell out of. Clinton made a couple of mistakes seemingly switching positions, mostly on immigrant driver license, but I think her biggest mistake was her, did you see those mean boys picking on this little girl, response after the event. Which I think made her look really weak and feed into all the negative stereotypes that she carries with her. Not to mention it made her sound like she wasn't the front runner which has always been her main strength. Who knows what the masses will do, we shall see in a couple of weeks, but in this bloggers opinion her front runner status is a little more shaky than it was a week ago. Hopefully I'm right.

Radio,

They are banning smoking on the whole complex that I'm working on. Not just in the building, but the whole complex, you have to cross the street to smoke (actually cross the street, walk through a little park and cross another street). Construction worker smokers tend to be a little harder to change than other people, so to compensate for it the general is "laxing it's radio ban." This seems kind of funny to me; "Man I really need a smoke, turn up the radio... Ahhh."

The only thing that surprised me about the ban is that it didn't already exist. When I worked at a hospital down in Racine last year, they already had the ban in place. I when I drive by the hospital by me I see people standing across the street smoking, so I assume they have the ban. I would of thought the major complex I'm at now would be one of the first to put it in place instead of one of the last.

But anyway, a coworker was sent down to work by me. He had just brought a radio in. He says, "95.7 is already playing Christmas carols." I looked at him and said, "your not going to play Christmas carols are you?" Luckily the answer was no. However we did listen to channel the next day when they switched their programing back. They were also playing some of the negative calls they got and assured the audience they would hold off. They must of got a lot of calls. Personally Christmas carols are fine when I'm doing holiday stuff, but I really don't want to listen to them all day, that would be too much like working in the mall. Anyways it was kind of refreshing to see a company realize they made a mistake so quickly, make the change back right away and basically say sorry we fucked up.

To Far,

On Friday we found out that a couple of fitters got laid off. Or so it seemed. Later in the day I found out that the fitter who started the whole vicious circle thing made this up also. Apparently one fitter took off Friday to go up north and one left early Friday. This fitter thought it would be funny to convince an apprentice that they got laid off instead, most of the sheet metal workers were left out of his twisted little unfunny joke. This is going way too far. Joking about getting laid off in the trade is very taboo. Last year I watched a burley journeyman read a pre apprentice the riot act for making an off handed joke about lay offs. Even though this is an excepted, and unfortunate part of our line of work, getting laid off always sucks. And on this job we all know it's coming sooner rather than later. So here we all are with our necks on the chopping block and this asshole is making jokes of it.