Disengaged

Okay, the wedding has been downgraded from postponed to officially off. That's right, the man who was engaged twice in one year is now disengaged twice in two! On my current curve, if I were to start dating a new woman I'd propose to her roughly 7 hours into the relationship, the ring would cost $512,000, and I'd actually break things off 3 months prior to meeting her. I know, what a wildly inappropriate thing to say, but let me assure you being able to mock myself about this is the only thing keeping my brain from imploding. We simply decided that planning for marriage wasn't appropriate until we can definitively determine whether Lizett is in fact human or rather some sort of pod person sent here to destroy me. My bet is on human, but if I'm wrong...avenge me.

No, the real (albeit wildly generalized) story is that neither of us are as prepared for the commitment as we supposed. Pretty boring stuff. We're still together though, which means we're living in SIN with no matrimonial end in sight. Scandal! Actually, to be honest, I'm not enormously more comfortable with that arrangement than our parents are, but such is life. I'm there now, and we've got a big kitchen.

Bah-bah-bah BAH-BAH, Bah-bah-bah BAH-BAH!

First off, don't ever watch The Good Shepherd. You must trust me. It was 3 hours long, everyone was whispering the whole time, and there was a piano going DOO-doo-DOO-doo-DOO-doo-DOO-doo in what I can only assume was intended to be a creepy suspense building manner for roughly 70% of the film. It was the first movie since Punch Drunk Love that I have seriously considered quitting on in the middle, and I watched Bubba Ho-Tep less than a year ago.

The new place is pretty fantastic. My only complaint is the estimated 16 Mexicans living in the apartment above us. They are forever doing their traditional hat dance at all hours of the night, yelling "Ariba, ariba! Soy Mexicano!" and sacrificing virgins to Buluc Chabtan. No, they really do stomp a lot, but I have decided to play the part of the horrendously racist white guy since it was revealed, and this is sadly and humiliatingly true, that I can't tell any of the upstairs residents apart. Lizett kept saying things like "Good LORD how many people live in that apartment??" to which I'd smile and nod and privately assume she was losing her mind because I thought all the people walking by were the same two guys.

Now to be fair, I am not widely noted for paying attention to things, and if there had been a bunch of white dudes living upstairs with identical builds, haircuts, and moustaches, I wouldn't have noticed they were distinct individuals either, but I am here to tell you when you are dating a Hispanic woman and it is suddenly revealed that you are unable to detect any difference between your Mexican neighbors, things get real awkward real fast. I had to take off my pants to keep from hyperventilating. Everyone besides the Corby's crew may ignore the previous sentence.

So we finally went up there around 11:30 one night to ask them to tether the horse they clearly had galloping around in their living room, only to be greeted at the door by something much worse: a three year old boy. Suddenly the stomping became abundantly clear. Now this begs the question, what the hell is a 3 year old child doing up at 11:30, and why the hell are his parents letting him jump up and down in the middle of the night in a top floor apartment, but in the moment I can assure you both Lizett and I felt like total chodes. I threw dirt in the child's eyes and we fled into the night.

Finally, LB, since this is my only contact with you, guess who my new neighbor is? ShineCindy. No shit.

A Whole MESS of CAPILATIZED WORDS!

Dude, it was awesome. REAL awesome. Not in that Wow, That Was Way Better Than I Expected way--it was awesome in EXACTLY the way I knew only a Kevin Sorbo direct-to-DVD remake sequel could be.

So this gang of tattooed street toughs is slowly buying up all the property in a small southern town at prices so low they're insane-ane-ane by intimidating the local business owners into selling via such methods as blowing them up with gasoline tankers. BAJOOOM! Someone has to Do Something, and that someone is Kevin Sorbo's dad, a local sheriff with a heart of gold, nads of steal, and jowls of a St. Bernard. He is killed in short order.

Enter KEVIN FREAKING SORBO. It's time for payback! It's time for justice! It's time to WALK TALL. No wait. Kevin Sorbo has decided to run. Justice is unattainable. The system is broken. The town is lost. Kevin Sorbo is a pansy who tells his mother their home is not worth dying for.

In the next scene, Kevin Sorbo is in a bar, and one of the street toughs refuses to pay for his beers. This is the LAST STRAW. You destroyed my hometown, and I fled. You killed my dad, and I looked the other way. But with God as my witness you will pay for those Budweisers! Kevin Freaking Sorbo DESTROYS these guys, along with a large portion of the bar. His change of heart is never explained. Presumably they cut that scene out to pare the film down to it's 88 minute run time.

Some stuff happens. The street toughs wreck people, and Kevin Sorbo tries to rally the townsfolk. Nothing doing. If you want something done, you have to do it yourself, so Kevin FREAKING Sorbo, I swear to God, jumps on a HORSE and rides to the outlaws hideout like "I'm HERCULES, bitch!" for the Final Showdown. As he rides off, his attractive female FBI agent buddy, who has no function in the movie whatsoever, shouts "Don't do this! You're a cop!", which is OUTSTANDING because Kevin Sorbo's character is not a cop. I have no idea how this made it past editing. Anyway, Kevin Sorbo stalks around the dimly lit complex while his horse manages to provide key distractions by creepily scampering past the bad guys a la the ventilation scene in Aliens, and then he shoots everyone.

Or DOES he?

Hercules

I rented Walking Tall: The Payback last night. It's not the one with The Rock, it's the direct-to-DVD sequel starring Kevin Sorbo. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet but I am looking forward to it more than I can express.

I'm Back

I'm back in sunny Austin after a week home in Columbus with the folks. My dad died on Tuesday. At first I thought this wouldn't be an appropriate place to mention that because the tone of this blog tends to be so flippant and...wildly insincere, but then I thought, why not? I write about everything else that's happening in my life. It's not a secret.

It was sudden. He had a massive stroke last weekend and his body gave out a couple days later. The stroke destroyed his higher brain function instantly so none of us had a chance to talk to him again and say goodbye, but honestly that's better. Not better for us but better for him. In all likelihood it was completely painless. There was no time to be frightened, or to worry about my mother or the rest of the family--no time, knowing my father, to wonder if the gas tank in the Accord had dipped below 2/3, or who would maintain his tools (which he hadn't used in years) after he was gone. We mourned in the Schreiber way, which mostly consisted of stuffing our faces and laughing about his quirks. That's the way we do it. There's no hugs or I love you's or long tearful talks about how much we'll miss him in my family. They're really not necessary, we all know.

His obituary says he enjoyed photography, woodworking, and spending time with his grandchildren, which of course aside from being wildly incomplete is a huge understatement. It has to be, you only have a few sentences to sum someone up in those things--but to say he enjoyed these things doesn't acknowledge the magnitude of his operations. He used to put up this kind of winter wonderland of Dickens Village porcelain houses every Christmas, a HUGE one with dozens of pieces that literally took over our entire dining room on tier after tier of tables constructed specifically for the purpose. It was truly impressive and it would be impossible to describe the attention to detail that went into it to someone who hasn't seen it. Anyway, every year before he took it down, he'd take pictures from every angle to document exactly how things were that year. These were inanimate houses, snapshots would have sufficed, but my dad got out the tripod, the flash diffuser, he manually focused every frame, and filled God knows how many rolls of film with shots upon shots that he would likely never look at. He just liked taking the pictures.

As for spending time with his grandkids, that one was pretty obvious. My dad didn't get outwardly excited about much. Everything was "decent" or "not bad", but he was pretty open about his affection for the little ones. I remember one time Gwen got it in her head that Grandpa shouldn't be watching TV right now, and she kept running up and turning off the set while he was watching the evening news. This, if you knew my father, is madness. In anyone else this would be suicidal behavior, but he just laughed every time she did it. Generally when I called home it'd just be smalltalk before he passed me on to my mom, but if I got him on the grandkids he'd talk for a good long while. He obviously really enjoyed being a grandfather and I'm glad he had the chance to have babies living in his house again.

The woodworking is probably what I will remember most, and definitely most frequently, but it wasn't really just woodworking. He knew how to do just about everything. When it was time to fix the roof he didn't hire a roofer, he just bought some shingles and did it himself. He repainted the entire exterior of our old house on his own. He retiled our hallway. He replaced the upstairs toilet. When we were growing up we had three bedrooms, one for my parents, one for my sister, and one for the four boys. When the boys got too big to fit in one room, he just went to the basement and built a new one. Studs, drywall, wiring, ventilation, painting, carpeting, everything from scratch. He had tools for everything. This Christmas Eve I was putting together a little shopping cart for Gwen and I accidentally nailed a pronged spacer washer onto the axle...on the wrong side of the wheel. There was no removing it, and her present wasn't going to work right, but my dad said don't worry, I've got just the tool to pull that right off. Of course! Of course he would have a tool to pull a pronged washer off of a metal dowel! Comes up all the time! But fixing mistakes is the exception, for the most part I do things like that right the first time. Measure twice, cut once is the old adage, and lots of people give the advice, but my dad actually showed me. Any job worth doing is worth doing right is another standard, and I can assure you it means much more when you see it than when you hear it. No one could ever accuse my dad of not being careful, or prepared, or mind-bendingly thorough. 800 years ago when I was engaged to Kelly we bought a condo together. It was a real shit hole. Some athletes lived there before us and they had torn the place to shreds. I worked hours every day after work to fill in all the holes and dents, rehang the doors, reinstall the closet shelves, replace the bad sockets, mount the new blinds, repaint every single surface in the place, and quite frankly when I was done it looked great, even professional. Because it wasn't the first time I'd done all that stuff. My dad had already shown me how to do it right.