Category: Mechanix

What’s happened here is I’ve been neglecting my guests.

OK, you are virtual guests, but I know you’re there, because you leave pertinent (and impertinent) comments. Things have happened to me lately, and my mind and my emotions have been spinning, and, it turns out, the universe is not entirely under my control. Probably these things would make a gripping story to put in a blog post, but I think not, at this time. Maybe I will figure out some way to tell it in which I am a heroic yet sympathetic yet inspirational figure. Maybe not.

But in this fast-moving world of blogging, each new post sits on top of the previous one and supplants it, and none of you will look at anything other than the top post on anybody’s blog, let alone this one, so, since I have been in a tizzy and haven’t participated in my own Comments section for a while, you’d think I don’t care about you. And nothing could be farther from the truth. (Before I go on, will someone please write and tell me if I should have said “further” instead of “farther?’ And what is the rule governing that usage?) So to dispel all concern, I will now move the previous two Comments sections into this post, and participate. The first five are for the Ketchikan story, and the rest are for “I’m Not Quitting.” Here we go:

theresa said… It’s a good story; brusque and dirty, but rich with honesty and compassion.

Fri Mar 11, 09:01:13 PM 2005

Jones sez… Thank you sweetheart. If only I were dirty and rich.

MPH said… “Cry to Me”, what a great, great song.

Fri Mar 11, 09:45:21 PM 2005

Jones sez… Solomon Burke has a new album, and it’s bithchin’. Who’d a thunk?

HeroineGirl said… Thank you for your comments on my Heroinegirl Blog, the memoirs are the best reading, which are to the right of the blog( at the top)

Thanks for stopping by,
Heroinegirl
XXX

Sun Mar 13, 06:41:42 AM 2005

Jones sez… HeroineGirl’s story is utterly heartbreaking and inspiring. Go read it.

jericmiller said… well told, larry. it does what you want it to do.

Sun Mar 13, 08:18:25 PM 2005

Jones sez… This is the Professor revealing himself. But I am flattered. I owe you a valium.

L said… I tried to comment on this a couple of days ago, but gave up in utter despair. I was going to post something incredibly insightful here today, but promptly forgot what it was after the comment box took so long to come up 🙂 I think Kung Pow Pig is right…

Mon Mar 14, 06:01:37 PM 2005

Jones sez… Glad you got through the Blogger anti-comment firewall.

**And now the “I’m Not Quitting” section**

Kung Pow Pig said… It’s called exit strategy. Do not ask the president, he has no clue how to conceive or implement one.I, on the other hand, do.It’s a strangeness after you let go of something. And I won’t be deleting the blog. I left some things in there I’ll need.Good point on Blogger taking a shit for the last week. I can’t really say that the fiasco had nothing to do with it, but it most likely was the straw that did that thing to the camel.

Be seeing you.
Tue Mar 15, 06:01:30 AM 2005

Jones sez… I’m sad to see Kung Pow Pig leave us. Now he will get way ahead in life, and we’ll be sorry.

theresa said… Thank you for the forewarning. You’ll be missed when the time comes to say goodbye.As for myself, I know that my time in the blogosphere is limited as well. I’ll know when it’s time to go when I’ve discovered my reason for coming here in the first place.

Tue Mar 15, 08:12:00 AM 2005

Jones sez… OK, now I feel better about quitting. I’m just not sure I’ll ever know why I started. (Also – Hahaha — you said “blogosphere.”)

Ron Southern said… In a world where having a blog for a year or more makes you feel like you’re very experienced and where anyone who’s been writing one for 2 years or more is an old-timer, it apparently becomes the thing to do to quit or talk about quitting. It’s a high-octane burn-out environment out here. Probably that’s just the kind of people who are drawn to this self-absorbed form of talk-fest. You’re getting that lemme-outta-here bug up your ass a little early, seems to me, but I guess you’re anticipating the moment more than threatening to jump overboard soon. It can be a terrible thing to be so self-aware or self-conscious. Still, a blog can be a great safety valve, it releases some of the pressure.

Tue Mar 15, 09:21:22 AM 2005

Jones sez… It releases some pressure, and adds some of its’ own. I can only imagine how real journalists feel. I mean, deadlines! How sick is that?

Steph said… I think a courtesy last post is good blogging etiquette, don’t you? Unless you meet an untimely demise and are physically unable to post. Well Larry, glad to know you’re not quitting yet–you’ve got more blogging left in you, I know it.

Tue Mar 15, 11:53:54 AM 2005

Jones sez… Etiquette, schmetiquette. My Last Post will be for my own aggrandizement.

MPH said… Hmph. Not one mention of my role in this whole blogger comment fiasco.

Tue Mar 15, 03:27:13 PM 2005

Jones sez… I can’t mention it here. That’s what your blog is for, and you’ve covered it admirably.

Brent said… Glad to see that a good blogger is not quitting. Good blogs are rare in this sea of sucktitude.

Tue Mar 15, 04:08:34 PM 2005

Ha! Suckitude. Can I say “Suckitude, Schmuckitude?” It’s you and me against the world, Brent. Where were you when I needed a wingman?

L said… well goodness — take your time 🙂 don’t quit yet!

Tue Mar 15, 09:07:28 PM 2005

Larry Jones said…

L – I think it bears mentioning here that I commented on your
post tonight at exactly the same minute that you commented on mine. Isn’t that some kind of sign? Do you think you and I should run away to Rio together and spend our days drinking daiquiris on the beach at Ipanema and our nights dancing like fools in the city? Or does it mean it’s time to quit blogging, for real?
Tue Mar 15, 09:17:32 PM 2005

Pops said…

Viking funeral. Only way to go. Drink lots of mead, put your computer in a boat and light it on fire as you push it out to sea.

Would make it hard to post pictures of the event subsequently, however. Plus it seems a little harsh, burning and then exiling your whole computer just to be rid of your blog. On second thought, this needs more consideration.

And the post-eating… if you hit PUBLISH and it gives you a PAGE NOT FOUND screen, then you hit BACK and you get a nice, freshly scrubbed CREATE NEW POST screen devoid of your magnum opus. So the anal retentive among us save to a Word file before we PUBLISH.

Tue Mar 15, 10:45:39 PM 2005

Jones sez… This reminds me of my own pathetic Vikings, drinking mead and trying to compete in the NFL, but I like your thinking! Will you say a few words at the ceremony? Can I wear the helmet with the big horns, or will you need it?

SJ said… I know I’m late on this matter, but the best way to find links to your blog is to type your url into www.technorati.com. It will show you all the links here.

Wed Mar 16, 01:34:27 PM 2005

Jones sez… Thank you for this tip. I tried it, and I was deeply disappointed in what I found. I may have reciprocal links on my site for people who never ciprocated in the first place.

I’m grateful to all of you, even those who do not comment, although you should. Speaking of which, it will be a cool warp in the blog universe to use the comment section of a post about comments. So be my guest.

I can hardly write another word without mentioning the Great Blogger Fiasco of 2005.

Especially since it is still going on. At least let us hope it’s the only Blogger fiasco of 2005. First the Comment system went down. For one whole day, clicking on the “Leave a Comment” button led down a spiral of despair, an eternity of waiting and watching for the comment box to appear. And this happened so soon after the Big Improvement! So much promise. Blogger popup comment boxes that looked like Haloscan’s, only with pictures! An easy way of reading the post upon which you were commenting, so you could stay on topic, God damnit. Maybe it was just too cool. Maybe the system got overloaded because millions of lurkers saw the coolness and came out of the woodwork, trying to comment on everything, spewing commentary until the servers could no longer stomach another pun, another clever riposte, not one more bon mot, and crashed, to save themselves.

Whatever the reason, the patient seemed dead.

The comment system has been returning to health over the past couple of days, although it still feels like it takes longer for the comment box to arrive than it used to, and whenever the delay is more than 10 seconds (it really shouldn’t be even that long, I don’t care if it is a free service), I am tempted to click on another blog, or even another site completely outside the blogosphere. And thanks for asking, yes, that word still cracks me up.

And now I am reading that Blogger is eating your posts! I’m not sure of the exact manner in which this particular technoabomination is occurring, because so far it hasn’t happened to me, but several of my bloggin’ buddies are writing that Blogger has eaten their posts. I assume this means that carefully researched and constructed gems of journalism are written in the little “Create Post” boxes, only to vanish irretrievably at some point after clicking the “Publish” button. Of course, this could just be the blog writer’s excuse for publishing bad or plagiarized writing. I don’t believe that for a second about anyone that I read, but I’m just saying, you know, it could happen.

Or maybe Blogger really is eating your posts. As I said, It hasn’t happened to me, so I can’t complain, or confirm the glitch, but I would certainly be able to feel the pain, the heartbreak of crafting the perfect post, and then to have it disappear, with no backup. The humanity.

Whatever, the effect seems to be that some blog writers are simply quitting. I don’t mean they just can’t cope with the technical failures. If there’s one thing that almost everyone knows by this stage of the Information Age, it’s that computers crash, and information is lost. We all know how to cope. Go get coffee. Reorganize your desk. Make phone calls (unless you are using a computer-based phone system). Smile apologetically at your customer and wiggle the mouse real fast for a few seconds and say “Gee, the system sure is slow today,” as you look at a screen completely filled with gibberish.

No, it’s not the inability to cope. It’s probably that some writers have been feeling guilty about all the time they are devoting to their blogs. Time that, by any normal measure, is completely wasted. The time spent putting together their posts, thinking about their posts, checking their stats, replying to comments, commenting on other blogs, returning to those to see if their comments have been replied to, or even referred to, looking upon everything that happens in your life as a potential blog topic.

A few days of the system not working right, and these folks are outta here.

Frankly, I don’t blame them. This is an entertaining pasttime at first. I know, I know, it’s a writing excercise. OK, I’ll give you that. But you could write longhand at a park bench, or even on a computer at a park bench, and not post it on the internet. If you’re posting what you did on Friday night after your last final exam, you are probably not practicing your writing technique. You are probably entertaining yourself. The bloggers I read are entertaining me, of course, and maybe a lot of others. But if you find yourself getting sucked into Blogging Madness, all but abandoning your job and your family and traveling the path of solitary obsession, well, hey, welcome to my world.

A break in the action, so to speak, is just what a lot of blog writers must have needed to come out of the ether and make another grab for that elusive je ne sais quoi that we call reality. OK, I’m getting all tangled up trying to be clever here, but what I’m saying is just that some of those whom I have come to think of as “bloggin’ buddies” (only because I read their blogs, and I think they read mine) are stopping their blogs. It’s none of my business why they are doing this, but since I have let then into my mind and heart over the past several months I can’t help feeling a little pang of regret with each one who writes that final post: “Dear friends, I can’t do this any more. You have seen the last of me here. I go now to other things, where you don’t get to follow.” I prefer Holly’s method. She just stopped writing, and didn’t even delete her blog.

But now that I’ve started thinking about it, the Final Post seems like an irresistible grand gesture. How many actors work all their lives for the chance to make an exit speech? To leave the scene and be truly missed (one imagines), while at the same time summing up the meaning of life for all who remain? What glory! I am starting my final post tonight. It may take a long time to finish, and in the meantime I will continue putting up frequent but lesser essays here, especially the always popular “What If You Were Tied Spreadeagle to the Bed?” variety. But all the time in the background I will be working feverishly on my Grand Gesture, the Final Post to end all Final Posts. Or at least this blog.

Don’t hold your breath. These things take time.

I’m doing a little behind-the-scenes fixing up.

First let me say thank you to those who have put revision99 on the links list of their sites and blogs. I want to reciprocate, and I have done so in my list over there on the right sidebar, headed “Bloggin’ Buddies.” [UPDATE: The name of the list has been changed to “Reciprocity.”] I installed the “Who Links Here?” javascript on this site, trying to find out exactly who does link here, and it half-way worked once or twice, but now it doesn’t work at all. I have tried it on different computers, with my firewall disabled, at different times of day, and I get Bad Information.

So if you are linking here and you’re not on the Bloggin’ Buddies list (and you want to be), email me or leave a comment, and I’ll get right on it. The Bloggin’ Buddies list is in no particular order, so don’t get your panties in a twist if you’re not as high up as you think you should be — I add you on as you add me on. I will entertain arguments about moving your link up, especially if accompanied by bribes or sexual favors.

And speaking of comments, you should know that I am notified automatically by email when anyone comments on any post anywhere on this weblog. This means if you find an old post that you have something to say about, you can comment there and be certain that I will see it.

Oh, yeah: My new banner has been up for a week and no one has mentioned it. What do you think? Where is the love, people?

So that’s it for now. You know I love you all.

Music is the theme this week.
The blogs I read are all about it. They are going to concerts, gloating about their new theme songs, planning to get back to it, getting ready to jump into it, worrying if their taste is hip enough – some bloggin’ buddies are even sharing songs with me, all totally legally, of course. [Update, March 3: Even the fabulous Breakup Babe has joined a band!]

I am a fallen-away musician myself. I used to do it for a living, but the living wasn’t that easy, and after a long time, I gave it up in order to make money. The money hasn’t completely satisfied me however, and for the past few months I have been jonesin’ for a jam.

The universe must have noticed this, because in recent days I have had no fewer than three offers to sit in at local jam sessions. I have actually gone and done this twice, and it is as good as sex (if I remember sex accurately). God, I had almost forgotten the glory of electric guitar! And now, playing just for fun, it seems better than ever. All pressure is off, and only the joy remains.

I do miss the ritual Wearing of the Tight Pants, however (see photo), and the sensation that the whole world is dancing just for me. But for now rippin’ a few good licks with like-minded players is positively transporting.

Also, this moves the Michael Jackson post down out of sight. I am deeply sorry about that one.

Holy shit!

I just left a comment at Kung Pow Pig regarding the Trampoline of Death. You should read that post, but the real shit is that Blogger has improved the commenting section. I’m still not sure exactly what all is new, but one of the biggies is that you, oh Anonymous One, can now sign your comments without signing up for Blogger. You know who you are. Click on “Thoughts on this rubbish” at the bottom of this post, and see what I mean. I’d love to hear from you, and you know you have a lot to say to me.

But it looks like if you are a Blogger member, your picture appears with your comment! Is that cool or what?! I have been saying “more pictures” for months (OK, mostly just to myself, but once or twice here and in comments), and now there will be tons more pix. Those of you who don’t post pictures of yourself in your profile: what are you hiding? Are you a high public official who must maintain the strictest propriety? Are you afraid your stalker will find you (I recently discovered these are referred to as “ex-bf’s”)? Are you just flat out butt ugly? These are not good excuses, people. OK, if you’re afraid, post something clever in place of your mug, like this guy did. But blogs need more pix, folks, and I think you know it’s not going to happen unless you make it happen!

Put a comment here to see how the new comment thing works. This is not a trick to get as many comments as I possibly can going here. It’s not.
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UPDATE: The new commenting system also allows me to make the comments appear in a popup window. This means there will be no further use for Haloscan. Seriously. Click on my comment link. Really, just do it.

Geek Alert: This is a Geeky Post!

The things we can do with internet technology. I had this blog for a few months (before I became obsessed with it), and since I read way more blogs than I write, I started to notice that people — some people, anyway — were blogging about their blogs. Their own blogs. I suppose this is inevitable. This kind of thing is so new, a lot of us are still going “Wow! I can’t believe I just thought up something and now someone in New Fucking Zealand is reading it and talking about it.” Anyway, inevitable , and totally OK with me. Just as enjoyable reading, actually, as stories about their pets or their vacations.

But one category of writing about one’s own blog had my curiosity up more than certain others, and that is writing about who is visiting your site. People were talking about BlogPatrol and Sitemeter and other such tracking services. I had only a vague idea what these were, and I thought “If they’re free, they must be bogus.” I decided not to bother with them, a decision that lasted until about a month ago. First I signed up for BlogPatrol. I was horrified.

I found that I could look up IP addresses of visitors to this blog and correlate the time stamp with comments they had left and figure out who was who and when they visited at other times and didn’t leave a comment. The amount of information available stops just short of physical measurements, and I think I could get those for a small additional charge. Shocked and revolted, I added Sitemeter to my blog.

Even more info. This time charts showing entry and exit pages, and duration of visits. Quick links back to the home pages of visitors’ ISP’s, where I could sometimes figure out approximate geographical location (Do not look out your window. That is not me out there in the rented Malibu.)

After each session with one of these “services,” I felt like I had just been to a cheap whorehouse. I needed a shower. Damn this weasel-like spying! Could I ever be clean again? But I kept going back. I told myself that I was just doing research, trying to determine the best-liked posts, so that, as a public service I could focus more on those types of stories. But in the end I had to admit to myself, as I now must admit to you, that it was just plain nosy prying.

So, ashamed of myself and with eyes averted, here now is My Pledge to you: I will never try to figure out who you are, where you live or when you visit my blog. (The real question, anyway, is why you visit my blog.) I will always respect your privacy and your personal space. No further effort will be made at tracking anybody here. You will not be stalked just for visiting this blog, unless you ask me to stalk you. Then we’ll talk.

Which brings me to Firefox. You may think these topics are unrelated, but stay with me for a moment.

Firefox is a web browser. It’s freely available here. I use it because the number one browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer, has a lot of security holes in it, and it is targeted by hackers, who use it to install Trojans, keyloggers, password stealers and viruses on your computer. For those of you who don’t know, Internet Explorer (IE) has the ability to use what Microsoft calls ActiveX Controls. Just the name sounds scary, doesn’t it? Without going into all the details, this is a harmless technology that can be used either to greatly enhance your internet experience, or to take over your computer.

So several months ago I downloaded a beta version of Firefox, which was called Firebird at that time but I guess they couldn’t keep the name because of Pontiac or something. I installed it and started using it instead of IE, although I kept IE on my system because some web pages are designed in such a way that they only work with Internet Explorer (this is also known as Bad Web Design). Long story short, I was delighted with it. It has a built-in popup blocker and a password manager. It automatically imports all your settings from IE when you install it, so switching is no hassle. It is impervious to ActiveX exploits. And it has tabbed browsing.

Tabbed browsing works like this: You can open multiple web pages, and Firefox creates a row of tabs along the top. Click on a tab to view an already-open web page. Hold the Ctrl key and click on a link on a page you are viewing, and that link opens in a new tab. Switch to the new tab when you’re ready, and switch back to the original page if you’d like. You can even save a group of sites as bookmarks or favorites, and open them all at the same time in separate tabs, and here is how this connects to the first part of this post.

I have a group of blogs (yes, your blogs) saved as bookmarks in one folder, and when I want to read all my favorite blogs, I can open them all with one click. Then I start at one end of the panel of tabs and read all the blogs and write comments, if I think of any. Along the way I answer the phone, drink coffee, pet the cat, write emails and generally live my life. By the time I get half way through this procedure, some of these blogs have been open, sight unseen by me, in their own tabbed windows, for a long damned time. Hours, maybe.

Do you see where this is going? When I open all these blogs at the same time, the BlogPatrol and Sitemeter clocks start running on all of them at the same time. So to the owners of the ones near the end, when they review their site statistics, it must look like someone is obsessed with their blogs and lingering on them for hours. They could be proud and honored, of course, but most likely they will just get the heebie jeebies, thinking some creep is paying way too much attention to their semi-private musings.

So here are the morals: 1.) Get Firefox. Your computer will be less likely to pick up a nasty virus and transmit it to me, and 2.) if, at bedtime you notice that Jones has been on your site since 8:30 in the morning, don’t worry — I just haven’t gotten to your tab yet.

I’ve only been a blogger for a short time, and I am finding that I enjoy reading blogs more than I do writing them.

Maybe it’s because I am not as clever as I thought I was, and when I re-read my posts I am usually disappointed. Either it’s not funny when I thought it was, or I wandered off the point somewhere in the middle and never got back to it, thus making the whole thing look like a 7th-grade essay, or I just didn’t find the words to say what I meant. I used to have a great vocabulary, but I lost it gradually after coming to the realization that a lot of people had no idea what I was talking about. I started speaking in plain English, and gradually forgot all the big words. See, I don’t even have a big word meaning “big words.” But I used to.

Now that I’m writing on the internet — I should say now that there IS an internet — plain English is not that important. People can look up anything they want — even get it translated from some other language into English. Plain English, if they want. So I don’t have to talk down. I could use all the polysyllabic verbiage and circumlocutory constructions I wanted. But now plain is the only way I can talk. So my blogging is a little, um, boring.

On the other hand, I have read hundreds of other peoples’ blogs, and they are funny, intelligent, well-researched AND they freely use big words that I understand but can never think of when I want to. They are also poetic, god damn them, and dirty, god bless them. Yes, sex blogging: How I love it. The filthy details of randy midwestern housewives’ masturbatory fantasies, and how they become my masturbatory fantasies.

I have noticed that all blogs are written by 30-year-old women. This, I suppose, should not surprise anyone. Who writes diaries? Who are the diarists in your life? Girls, then later women. Enter blogging. Wow! Diaries that others can read, but they are just as private as any journal under lock and key because no one knows who you really are!! So you can keep your secrets while you reveal them. And you can lie about your exciting life and your dates with Brad Pitt or Gwyneth Paltrow and hey — it might be true.

But back to 30-year-old women. OK, they aren’t the only bloggers, but they might be half of all bloggers. When do they find the time to put together these witty, sexy, smart rants? It takes me a week to write five paragraphs, and they are knocking out daily posts, while they raise three children alone, hold down a full-time job, attend law school, read voraciously and pursue two or three potential boyfriends, all of which activity shows up instantly in their blogs. I am ready to submit. Women are truly superior beings. I get it. I humbly request to serve at your feet.

And now, because I read more than I write, I feel like I have all these new acquaintances, people who know me, and I know them, and we chat a little every few days, and we get each others’ jokes, and we are concerned for each others’ emotional and physical health. If someone posts pictures I study them as if they are of my sister’s wedding, and comment on them as if anyone gives a shit what I think of them. Some of the 30-year-old women have man-trouble, and I am right there with my wise advice, which is about as useful as tits on a bull, and I fervently hope no one takes it seriously, or I could have some real liability, but I feel like it’s OK to give advice and if I have a breakthrough maybe I will even ask for some, too, because, you know, I feel like you are all my pals.

Except that you’re not my pals, really, and we really don’t know each other, and I only think I know who I am dealing with because I have — in many cases — accepted more or less at face value who each of my blogging buddies says (s)he is. And this makes me pathetic, I guess. Not that I don’t have any friends in real life. I have lots. Ok, two. But still, I know they would go to the mat for me. How many of you would do that? All right, then.

UPDATE, February 20, 2006: The “extremely well-written blog” referred to in this post is gone, like so may others, but I’ll never forget the girl.
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I don’t have the hang of being part of an “online community,”

which is odd because only a tiny fraction of today’s internet users have been doing it longer than me, and from the very beginning I saw it as a way to connect with other people. Before American Business got on board I had a vanity site and prowled the web for other such sites, because I guess I was touched by the beautiful need in people, myself included, to touch others, to reveal our secret selves, to reach out to the world. This, I thought, will change everything.

I mostly gave up on the concept as the web turned into television on your computer, and many of us became sort of desk potatoes. Sometime around 1998 it started to seem impossible for everyman (and me) to produce anything worth looking at on the web. I mean, how could I compete with all the chat rooms, news feeds, reverse phone directories, shopping services, celebrity gossip and gardening tips on Yahoo or MSN?

Then a funny thing happened. Just when the commercial web should have put out the lights once and for all on personal expression on the internet, Blogger and other services are reviving it! This blog, like 4.8 million others, is easy to create and update. I can post to it from anywhere in the world, and no matter how fuzzy my thinking or vacuous my writing it will always have a clean professional look, and anyone who feels like it can respond to anything I write. Not having to think much about design has turned the focus back toward communicating. With each other. In ways that were just not possible ten years ago. Maybe this will change everything!

I now prowl these blogs when I need a lift, and some stranger invariably steps up and gives me one. And I hope some day someone gets a lift from my thoughts here, even if I am not always upbeat.

So you’d think, given my history and all my theorizing that I’d be a natural here in the blogosphere. But, as I say, I don’t seem to have the hang of being part of things. Like I just can’t say or write “blogosphere” with a straight face. And yesterday I read a terrific post on an extremely well-written blog, clever, insightful and moving. I wrote a comment which was intended to be a compliment, but judging from the blogger’s answer I see that I have somehow managed to get my virtual foot into my digital mouth, a condition I am familiar with here in meatspace.

As my sainted Irish mother told me many times, “Tomorrow is another day.” I hope so, Mom.

It has occurred to me that I shouldn’t use my real name here. I don’t imagine this will be read by a large number of people. Maybe no one will ever see it, but maybe, hypothetically let’s say I mention something about someone I know, and let’s further hypothesize that it’s not totally flattering, and that this person’s identity is readily decipherable. Possibly there is some I Love Lucy scenario in which that person might get wind of what I have written about them, and maybe they get offended. Maybe they confront me in person, or maybe they just harbor resentment about it secretly, forever. Sticky social situation. Or maybe The Corporation hears about something I have written, and I get my ass fired. Actually, now that I think of it this might not be too bad, but if it happens I want to plan it and exceute it myself, and not have them sneak up on me, the bastards.

So, not as an act of cowardice, but one of courtesy and discretion (OK, cowardice if you like), I’ll go with Larry Jones, and just so you know, Larry might or might not be my real name. Jones is definitely not, although we’ve been together for a long time and we are feeling quite comfortable with one another. I tried to update my profile yesterday so that my posts are not signed by Spider Jones (who, it turns out, is someone else), but it didn’t take, even though I was sure I had done it right. There doesn’t seem to be any way to discover how this post will be auto-signed by the Blogger system without actually posting it, so here goes, and no matter what it says at the end of this, I remain…

Yours truly,
Larry Jones

Spider Jones is not my real name. It’s my rock’n’roll name, and I started using it over twenty years ago. Some people only know me as Spider Jones, and in some circles, “Jones!” is still the preferred greeting, even among those who do remember who I really am.

The Jones part of it was partially in honor of Brian Jones, the first guitar player in the Rolling Stones to drop out, so to speak. I always felt he would have taken the band in a different, perhaps more musical, direction. If you listen to the old records, there is no doubt that the sound changed dramatically as soon as Brian was gone. The word “jones” also has at least one other meaning, which was both descriptive at the time, and prophetic. Possibly because of the side effects of this second meaning, I am unable to recall why I picked “Spider” as my first name.

And now I find out that there is a real guy named Spider Jones. What’s more he has a web site, he has written a book, he seems to have been a boxer at one time, and he has an inspiring story, which he will tell to your group in the form of a motivational speech. He also has a radio program and he co-hosts a television show about boxing.

He looks older than I am, so maybe he’s been Spider Jones longer than I have, although I don’t believe it’s his real name, either. Certainly he must be more famous than I, even if I never heard of him. Also he does not look like anybody I want to mess with. In any case, I don’t want to fight over this. I’ll pick a new name.