Radio Silence, Inane Chatter, Grumbles

While not having home interweb access for almost three weeks now should serve as ample excuse for not Bumping the Smash, truth be told I have had plenty of opportunity to do so from my desk at work.

Instead, I've been making an attempt to acquaint myself with the finer points of facebook, specifically those points which allow me to accidentally grant facebook access to my hotmail account and email "Check Out My Facebook Profile!" invites to every person I've ever known and/or boned. My actual inbox today: 388 new messages.

Lost somewhere in those emails was a message from Andrew "The Dandy Fop" Gallant linking to an enlightening-for-me/staggeringly-boring-for-you article about a kid name Andrew Ciarfardini (pronounced [sneeze]) I used to live next to in Cincinnati.

Since you, dear reader, presumably did not at any time live anywhere remotely near him, you'd no doubt rather watch NBC's New Year's Day programming than read the full article. Basically, it turns out that while I was busy establishing a career in the always-dignified world of television journalism, he was finding his niche in the Bush White House.

Anyway, since this is my blog and you're avoiding doing something more constructive, I can and will reminisce about Mr. Ciafardini, albeit briefly, and, for that matter: anything, else, of, my, choosing.

Short story shorter: Andrew was, in retrospect, about as big of a vapid Republican shill as you'll ever see in a prepubescent child.* Granted, in those days it didn't take much to get on the collective bad side of me and my other neighbor, one Mikey D. Krumboltz. I based my resentment of Ciafardini solely on the fact that, while he was always welcome to come over and hang out on my family's swing set at his leisure, his family's backyard was surrounded by an enormous Guantanamo-grade steel fence perimeter that required both his and his parents' permission to enter. The swing set therein, however, was the stuff of legend in the neighborhood's 8-year-old boy community and, to my recollection, looked something like this.

In my blossoming, Blue Icee-fueled worldview, anything so awesome (or, in Cincy vernacular, coolsome) was surely best appreciated not by a fascist Ciafardini regime but rather the "cool fort!"-starved huddled masses; namely, me and Krumboltz. Sadly, as our being in the second grade severely limited our access to any handy munitions stockpiles, a violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie usually consisted of carefully deploying whipper snappers underneath the tires of the Ciafardini family station wagon and running home at high speed.

This post got way too long, but in a petty attempt to impugn the entire family, I mention that Andrew's then-4-year-old sister once reprimanded my mother for allowing our bathroom's toilet paper to hang too low from the roll (seriously); so she too, in her own way, is now undoubtedly out there somewhere encouraging the use of hand guns.

*A dick before he grew one.