Forget global warming. Forget The Muppets.

This is the time when something great is happening from my childhood.

They seem to be making a sequel to Robocop. In this case, I am an optimist: it will be great. It has to be. Unlike Robocop 3. Seriously – they have gone to ask Darren Aronofsky, who directed Pi and Requiem for a Dream – OH GOD.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3ifcce08ba05c71072018830821bb10d71

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCop#2010_film

Maybe it is the fact that my father showed me this movie at a key age. How old was I, 5? 7? This key age is when something gets implanted into your mind and takes over the remaining 70 years of your life in a very reserved spot in your head.

ROBO! Greatest cast, twisted humor, lines, EVER! Can’t wait to see you again, buddy.

And now some quotes that remain at the forefront of my memory 24/7:

“Don’t worry Lois, we’re only human”

“Oy, mack, *blast* *blast* *blast*, thank you… for not smoking”

“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.” [...] “Dead dead”

“I don’t like cops, so cops don’t like me.”

“They made this… to honor him. Your husband is dead. I don’t know you.”

“Can you do that dad!”

I’ll stop now.

Working as a fire alarm technician with a company that does an amazing 100-mile radius for service calls leads to my eyes being exposed to a ton of sights and adventures – both lovingly good and giant-naked-lady bad. I have tons of stories and supporting pictures to share with over 6 years of working in the good and the bad.

This week’s journey leads me to a Thursday night (day 2 of 3) in Caldwell, TX. I am doing fire alarm inspections for four local schools that are pretty huge and thusly I am hanging out at the Sunset Inn for 3 days. This means that I get paid to torture the summer cheerleading camps and office ladies with blaring fire alarm sirens all day long.

And just so you know, in the picture on the front page of my hotel’s (Sunset Inn’s) website, there is a huge Walmart sign right there looming in the background for your nightly dose of subliminal Caldwell advertising – it’s like a bad smell that you can’t help but keep smelling.

Caldwell TX is about 25 miles south of College Station. So everywhere I turn, I see AGGIE COUNTRY signs and all sorts of aggie references. Nothing new here, just overloaded with it. THIS IS AGGIE LAND!!!

Last night, Katie and I were hanging low with the locals at the Texan Lounge about 0.8 miles away from my hotel room. Everything was typical Texas – maybe so insanely Texan that it was just… normal. A sign on the wall said – IF YOU AIN’T OILFIELD, THEN YOU AIN’T SHIT. And I didn’t even want to ask the bartender and get shmacked in the head nor do I even want to Google it. Just let it coexist within my mind, alone and peaceful.

Now to the media: Yesterday, when inspecting the local high school’s fire alarm and deafening the occupants to their demise (and my pleasure), I came across this room (it was actually in the faculty “work room”). Hmm, my school didn’t have one of these:

Smoking bans in Houston bars, smoking rooms in high school faculty lounges, I see the real truth now.

Next up, in the bathroom reserved for only the staff and faculty to do their dirty handywork, located smack in the center of the building amongst the hallways, where surely a middle school student could take wafts of their biology teacher’s deuce:

Thanks Caldwell schools for keeping my teachers clean and freaked out by psychadelic super graphics from space!

And finally, the local schools are plastered with reminders and motivational messages from Aristotle, Einstein, and other great thinkers. But this one particularly caught my eye; they sure do want to remind us of something here.. what is it? Oh yeah!:

I can’t make this stuff up folks. I love it. This job gives me random input from all angles that I never see coming. Good pay, good travel, good summer work. And great timing! – I am definitely getting my Texas fix in before I leave this great state in 20 days.

After working until 8:30 pm tonight, I only had the energy to visit the Brookshire Brothers about 400 feet from my hotel and gather some resources for my last night here: cold beers, a TV dinner, a banana, and a bear claw for breakfast in the morn. During my checkout process, the grocery sacker told me about six and a half times how cool it would be if “you could buy beer when you were 15 years old.” He was about 2.5 times larger than me. Noted.

Thanks Caldwell. Seriously, I love your offerings, no jokes. And here’s to tomorrow. I <3 you Texas.

P.S. Thanks to Sunset Inn for making this blog post all possible with a $35 dollar room with free Wifi! Ahh America!

Wordle.net says that if you took my public brain so far and blended it into oblivion, it would look something like this. Looks about right to me!

This summer, I have been working in the sticky Houston heat as a fire alarm and security technician once again, because, well, it pays quite a bit more bucks than UHD did for being a lab assistant. And, thanks to my low income over the years of chasing my passions, I need as much cash as I can get ahold of before the big move in three weeks.

The cool part is that I used to work for the same company for 6 years, so jumping right back into the groove after being away for 22 months took all of half a a day to happen. Most of the customers that I were meeting up by commuting all over the city to I had actually visited years before. And even more odd to me, somehow all of the old knowledge was still stuck in my brain, waiting to be used. I’m talking about weird, minute stuff like remembering city code and station IDs (06 3D) or IP addresses (192.168.1.254) of customers that I hadn’t physically been to in over three years. Oddly intriguing how our brains are wired, isn’t it?.

Well, the focus of this post is to present a glimpse of the diverse set of people, minds, and environments that I run across during the regular work week (and you know how much I like diversity of mental inputs and daily stimulation of the senses).

These particular photos are from an adult care home in southwest Houston, in which this tenant was not present at the time, and I can only imagine what is running through her thoughts these days. The organization of the photos and thoughts seem to reflect raw categorization patterns of the mind. And the daily routine list with 14 steps to follow each and every day make me wonder how Josi is doing with her version of time management and self progression in her own version of the world.

It really serves to remind me that relativism is one of the most important concpets for us to wrap our heads around in the world. Relativism as a basis of thought and experiences makes way for a much better, hands-on understanding of forgiveness, happiness, and it also raises our awareness of expectations in the modern connected world.

Well, enjoy the pictures (link to full album) and take a moment to think of what it would be like to live in this room for years and years to come, with your only possessions being these posters and a toy tool bench set placed in the corner of the otherwise bland, white room.

Your sanity would be optional.

Link to full photo album