he’s not heavy, he’s my mark maynard

Thank you for all of your kind holiday notes.

And, no, I am not dead.

I’ve just been taking a few days off from the world of the Blog and spending time instead with real, flesh-covered, three-dimensional people. It was nice to interact with real folks for a change (even if they were for the most part my family members), but I think I’m almost ready now to submerse myself again in the world of internet reality, where ugly, middle-aged men pretend they’re hot young women and sad people search for strange and wonderful things like “nude polaroids of Stanley Tucci” and “Olsen twins feet and sock fetish.”

I am hiding in my office as I type this entry, with the doors shut and the curtains drawn. I am doing this because Linette has a flat tire and she has called the auto club to come and change the tire for her. I was set to do it, but she convinced me not to by reminding me that we pay for AAA and never use it. “And,” she said, “you can be inside in your pajamas, writing, while he’s out in the snow, jacking up the car and getting dirty.” That made sense to me, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m embarrassed as hell by the fact that another man is going to be walking into my yard with his tools and changing my wife’s tire. Somewhere, dozens of Maynard men are spinning in their graves.

I don’t want to get too far off-track here, but I want to tell you something about why I’m in this tire situation. Linette ran over a long screw a few weeks ago. She found that out when she went into Sears with her flat tire and asked for them to look at it. They found the screw and patched the tire. There was no charge as the tire was still covered by warrantee. Well, about two days after the tire was patched, we noticed that it was going flat again. That meant another trip to Sears, where they patched the tire for free again. This is now the third time that the tire has gone flat and I’m preparing for a fight at Sears. (If I can’t prove my manhood by changing a tire, I can damn well prove it by yelling and screaming and pounding my fists on the desk of the Sears Auto Center.)

I’m of the opinion that they’ve had two chances to patch it and now we’re entitled to get a new tire. Or, at least, they should pay for part of it. Isn’t that what warrantees are for? I don’t like the idea of Linette driving into Detroit and getting a flat on the side of the highway at night just so that Sears can save a few bucks. I know that this isn’t interest to any of you, but there it is. This is what’s keeping me from working on my little media empire today.

So, we’re back home after spending a few days visiting friends and family in Kentucky.

As I don’t have much time (Linette and I have to leave for Sears once the tire is changed so that we can be back here by 4:00 to meet our friends and what could be our new dog), this may not make much sense. I wanted to mention a few things though, before they skipped my mind completely.

One of the e-mails awaiting me upon my return home was this one:

hi are you mark maynard??? my lost brother who i havent seen since i was 2 was called mark maynard are you him??? sorry if your not

I haven’t checked in a while, but a lot of people come to this site by searching for “mark maynard.” I suspect that very few of them find the Mark Maynard that they’re looking for when they come to my site. Some of those searches are made by other Mark Maynards just wondering what on the web might be written about them, or what other Mark Maynards are up to. Most of these MM-searches, however, are probably done by credit agencies, abandoned children, and/or people who want retribution of some kind.

As for this woman, I don’t think that I’m the Mark Maynard she’s been searching for. I told her, however, that if she could send me more information that I’d run some kind of story here, just in case her Mark Maynard stops by. Or, in case he’s one of the other Mark Maynards that already drops in. (I’ve received notes from two Mark Maynards since this site went live about four months ago.)

The last time I checked the internet and searched for other Mark Maynards, I found that one of us successfully fertilizes corn fields in the Midwest (he’s won an award for it). Another one of us plays drums for a band in a college town. Another is a minister. Another teaches business at Oral Roberts University. If I ever get motivated, I plan to send them all some kind of questionnaire, or ask them each for a short essay on what it means to be a Mark Maynard in today’s world, or what it means to share a name with me.

when a skinner calls
Here’s part of another letter that was waiting for me. This one is from Doug Skinner.

Mark — I hope your holiday went well; I have a sad picture of you sitting in your underwear, eating eggnog out of your can, with Lindsey Hammond’s shrill laughter ringing in your ears.

He said some other stuff too, once he was done teasing me. He told me that he’d given a copy of the most recent issue of Crimewave USA to his friend, the illustrious John Keel (who was just recently portrayed by Richard Gere in the film The Mothman Prophecies) and that he didn’t know what to make of it… I find it a little odd that Keel can somehow wrap his mind around the existence of a giant, flying bug-man, but that the idea of our magazine, Crimewave, gives him trouble.

For what it’s worth, I was drinking a big cup of eggnog and rum when reading Doug’s e-mail, but I was drinking it from a large, glass measuring cup, not a can, and I was fully clothed. As for Lindsay Hammond, I have decided to move on and face the new year without the specter of her looming behind me, questioning and critiquing my every move. From this day forward, I have told myself, I will not allow her to control me.

daughter in law saves lives/carpet
I was my parents’ basement yesterday when my mom yelled down for me to come up and see something. When I got upstairs, I saw my dad on his hands and knees in front of the fireplace, smacking the palm of one hand down fiercely on a brown section of the otherwise white carpeting. When I asked what the hell was going on, they told me that an ember from the fireplace must have jumped over the screen and set the rug, and the carpet beneath it, on fire. He and my mom also told me that it was Linette, who, from the other room, smelled the burning and alerted them so that they could put it out. If it were anyone but Linette, I’d suspect that they set the fire to get into the good graces of my parents, but Linette would never do such a thing. She’s already my parents’ favorite child. What’s more, I know that she’s got a nose like an f’ing bloodhound. She’s always sniffing at me and asking the last time I’d cleaned my shirt. I usually find this to be annoying, but this time, it turned out to be a good thing and my family’s house, and perhaps even our lives, were spared. It’s like a little Christmas miracle.

death, depression and scrabble
Christmas didn’t really feel like Christmas this year. Maybe that’s because it was so close to Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s because it’s been warmer than usual. Maybe it’s because I’ve been working harder at my job. Whatever it was, it just didn’t feel like Christmas. It didn’t help that this was the first Christmas since my uncle, Thom, died. It was sad and strange.

I don’t know if it was because Thom was gone, or because I’d recently changed my strategy (after playing a few games with Jad Fair earlier in the fall), but I won every game of Scrabble that I played over Christmas.

As for the new strategy, it’s really obvious though and I can’t believe it hadn’t dawned on me earlier. Basically, it’s this. Scrabble is a game that’s not just about making big, long words that you can be proud of. It’s about taking advantage of the bonus squares and racking up points. Jad plays like he’s at war and playing with him made me realize that Scrabble wasn’t about fun. I guess in a way he kind of ruined it for me. Now I’m a competitive bastard. I’m even thinking about investing in a book of words for Scrabble. (Jad kicked my ass last time because he knew every two and three letter word that was acceptable.)

See, this, and getting tires, are the kinds of thing that are occupying my time now… not writing, not paining, not working of the new MPT record. I feel like shit.

system fall down go boom
I had a friend come over and try to help me set up our home network so that I could access our DSL from my computer. (Now it only works on Linette’s.) In the process, he somehow either fried our line or fried our modem. Since then, I’ve found two more modems and neither of them seem to work either. Basically, this means that even if I wanted to work on this site, I couldn’t do it. The past week, we’ve only been able to connect by way of dial-in and it’s been dropping us every five minutes. It sucks and I’m pissed off. I was hoping to spend this long holiday working on the site, getting PayPal installed, setting up a few Ebay auctions tied to this site, etc. Instead, I’m drinking and watching the DVDs I got for Christmas. (More on my great Christmas presents later on.)

I don’t know if he’ll be able to help, but another friend of ours is coming over this afternoon to take a look at the system and see if he can figure out what’s up. If he can get it up and running, my plan is to keep the coffee brewing and take care of some of this stuff before heading back to work at the end of the week.

x box fear
Last night it occurred to me that having an X-Box in our living room would be like keeping a loaded crack pipe on our coffee table.

david cross synchronicity
Since the new issue of Crimewave came out, we’ve been getting lots of feedback concerning our interview with comedian David Cross and the full-page ad for his record that ran on the back cover. We’ve gotten a surprising number of, “I was listening to his CD in the car when I drove to the post office and found the new issue of CW waiting for me in my mailbox” kind of notes. It’s eerie in a way, and I get the feeling that it’s just starting. It happens every time we publish, but this time it feels somehow more concentrated.

getting drunk with other old heterosexual couples
We had people over last night. Six couples. Two from Chicago. One from Seattle. Three from Michigan.

Two of the women were pregnant.

The plan was to sit around the house and drink a few beers and then to head out to the bar. We ended up staying in and went through a few cases of beer. It was actually a really good time, but I’m paying the price for it this morning. It feels like John Bonham’s bass drum has been shoved up against the back of my right eye.

There were all kinds of great conversations, but, as is often the case, I can’t remember any of the details now… Someone was at a party with Elmore Leonard. From what I could understand, he was doing research on socialites in Michigan. Someone else found a copy of a 1903 Lady’s Home Journal hidden inside the walls of his historic Chicago home, along with a dozen empty whiskey bottles. (Which conjures up images of either a very sad man, or a very sad woman.) Someone else had been on TV recently for flipping a tractor-trailer that he had been driving to Toledo. He stopped traffic for hours. Someone else told us about his little brother, who, although prone to act out in senseless acts of violence, had recently taken up knitting caps and selling them at a local coffee shop. (Which made us ask if it wasn’t more likely that he’d beaten up the kid who had knitted the caps.)

Anyway, it was great to see everyone and to just sit around for a half dozen hours talking about pop culture, home repair, child birth, the cults into which other friends were being sucked (a strange and frightening trend), alternative energy, U.S. foreign policy, and all the rest of it. It was a great time.

princess peace of pumpkin pie
We may end up getting a dog today. We’ve let our friends know that we’re looking and we just got a call from one of them, our friend Monica in Detroit, that she’s got a stray that might be right for us. Monica has describer her as a young Pit Bull — Labrador mix. Her theory is that local kids bred her to sell on the street corner as they often do, but that she got away. She walked her around the neighborhood a few times and asked around a bit and no one claimed her, so she took her to the vet, had her cleaned up, vaccinated and fixed. Now she’s trying to place her. Monica is supposed to bring her by this afternoon.

I’d never really pictured myself as the owner of a Pit Bull. It seems too ferocious for my tastes. I don’t consider myself a Poodle man either though. I always thought I’d have something in between, like Foxie, the Collie – Chow mix that we had up until she passed away a few months ago. But, I’m going to keep an open mind. If we do decide to adopt her though, I’ve got to change the name that Monica’s given her. I know that if I went out in my neighborhood and yelled for “Princess Peace of Pumpkin Pie” that I’d get my big ass kicked all the way from here to the place up the street where people sell their blood plasma for money.

I have to go now and introduce myself to the folks at Sears.