WraithRants

Saying goodbye to another friend

2010-03-10T22:17:33Z

Getting tired of writing about death this week, ladies and gentlemen. Earlier in the week it was my good friend and colleague Virginia Wilcox, who we just yesterday said goodbye to in a very moving ceremony. Can't really say I said goodbye, cause I'm still fighting tears today.

Now it's a friend from my childhood in Corey Haim.

Now I never knew Corey Haim, not in the personal sense anyway. I knew him like every kid my age did, from License to Drive and The Lost Boys and whatever other hijinks he and Corey Feldman could get into. Doesn't mean he wasn't a friend. Friends make you laugh, make you forget about how life can suck sometimes, even for a couple hours.

In that they were both very good friends indeed.

I feel badly for Corey Feldman today because even now those two were very close, brothers even. In a statement, he said he was struggling to find a way to tell his very young child that Uncle Corey was gone. It's not hard to tear me up right now, so imagine what that did.

Some may say that he was just another Hollywood guy who OD'ed and doesn't deserve our sympathy. In light of the advice we received yesterday, I choose to look on the positive and say that I'll miss the guy. I hope the Feldmans can find some comfort, and I hope it comes to me as well. I think we both could use some right about now.

Kinda apropos...

2010-03-10T19:12:56Z

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Goodbye, V

2010-03-08T04:04:22Z

This is probably the hardest thing I've ever tried to write. I've been trying to write this for more than a day now, and even though I knew this was coming, it's no easier. My friend Virginia died yesterday after a fight with Cancer. It started suddenly, was allegedly in remission, then bang...it's in her brain, game over.

I'd sad, I'm pissed, I want to punch stuff and I want a hug. Most of all, I want my fucking friend back. Here's some people you may have never heard of:

Karen Dark
Tom Grimball
Sharon Olthof
Cyber
Lovine Moss
Virginia Wilcox

They may not mean anything to you, but these were friends of mine. Friends of my family. Some were closer than that. And one was my cat. You can figure that one out.

These are all people who had a terrible disease and fought the fight. One of them, Lovine, survived. That's 1 out of 6 of my friends who were able to survive, after billions in research and some of the smartest minds on the planet working on it. That's some serious bullshit, my friends.

What makes this one so much worse is that Virginia has a teenaged daughter, the wonderful miss Eliza Wilcox. I've talked to her today and she's devastated, as well she should be. She's thankfully got grandparents to take care of her, and a giant extended family that we'll make damn sure she knows is around. But it's still not right to be that young and have both parents taken away at such an early age. If cancer had a physical form, I'd kick it in the nuts repeatedly until it was a bloody puddle.

Virginia meant a lot to a lot of people. She was a friend to some, a mentor to others. She was that crazy lady that wanted to make beautiful Hollywood actors her personal slave, and certain other men around her as well. This doesn't even scratch the surface of the person she was, the awesome, awesome person who will be missed by many. And dammit she is missed,

Rest in peace wherever you are. You're in everybody's hearts, and you always will be.

DRUM SOLO!!!!

2010-02-25T23:17:46Z

I call Thimble!

2010-02-23T19:15:21Z

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I don't know what he's talking about....

2010-02-15T21:28:23Z

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Awwwww....

2010-02-12T18:28:09Z

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Is 33 too young for a mid-life crisis?

2010-02-12T17:30:09Z

I mean aside from a job I can't stand, physical, mental and emotional problems and a general ennui I'm in a pretty good place. Things could definitely be worse. So why can't I get motivated to do anything? I know the mental stuff has a lot to do with it, the constant anxiety does not help. Why can't I just push through it like everything else? For the first time in my life I know there's several women interested in me, and I definitely am interested back but I can't do anything about it. I know there's a few guys too but sorry, um, not in this life.

I've thought about counseling, or even just getting some mind-adjusters. Not a fan of things that alter my mental state but I'm not sure what else to do. Just need to get past that giant brick wall in my head that convinces me I can't do something. I can sing, can't perform. I can act, just not in a crowd of people I don't know. I can't cold call people sometimes. I just...can't. It's not that I don't want to, I just can't.

The most annoying thing is that I can analyze and recognize all of these things about myself but I can't fix it. And if you know me, you know that annoys the piss out of me.

The urge to delete this is overwhelming. Revealing something about myself to a wide audience. Gasp, choke. Oh well. Get over it.

kekeke...

2010-02-04T19:18:38Z

Seriously, this one had me laughing for a good 2 minutes and still puts a smile on my face. Pure win.

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96 becomes 82

2010-01-29T23:54:20Z

Today we lost 14 people due to job cuts, moves or moving-ons. I am not happy about this.

The place I work is losing its soul. It's not a fun place to be anymore, and it's showing. The people that subscribe to us are unhappy about the new ways of customer service, the loss in quality due to the cuts of the past few years, the new delivery system. The people that work here are unhappy because of the environment they're being put in and having to face said unhappy customers.

There are some people here, myself included, who have not had a raise in over 2 years. In fact the pay was scaled back.

More and more of us are having to split our attentions between here and another site. In my case, the entire region. It all just seems to be going in the wrong direction.

I hope for everyone's sake there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not an oncoming train.

174 to 96

2010-01-14T22:20:44Z

Nope, that's not the latest lopsided High School Basketball score or misguided NBC game show. That's the number of people that worked here 10 years ago vs the number working here today. Actually I should subtract 2 since one person was let go and another is retiring in a couple weeks. We have 80 less people working here today versus 10 years ago and counting.

Maybe I should back up a sec. I was back in the break room looking at the yearly collage of old New Year's pages when something struck me: the photos were much bigger than normal and there were much less of them. I started counting the 2000 page vs the 2010 page and sure enough, 174 employees in 2000, 96 now-ish.

That didn't seem possible back then. Sure there were rumblings back then "oh, newspapers are in decline, there won't be any in 20 years, it'll all be online or some other form we don't know about...". OK so some of that was completely warranted but did I think back then in 10 years we wouldn't be printing here, we'd have nearly half the staff and we'd be in bed with TCO? No fucking way. It boggles the mind.

Also boggling are the amount of long-timers still around. Some have retired or expired since 2000, some outright quit and/or were fired. I guess I have to count myself in that number since I've been here for 12 years now(even tho the caption on the New Year's page says 13, it's 12 in 2 weeks. Seems longer). Also interesting to me is how they skew older. The advertising and production side by far have the longest-tenured people left here. News tends to skew younger with the exception of sports cause hey, getting to sit around and report on ballgames(occasionally live) and talk sports all day seems like a pretty sweet job. If I did that I'd probably stay in it as long as I could too. Actually I kinda do with MMA recaps which I will get back to doing soon but I digress.

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I guess you never know what could happen. Industries die, small island nations have disasters that destroy entire cities, crackpot right-wingers say stupid, stupid, STUPID shit about said disaster(looking at YOU, Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh you disgusting pig). The South has 3 solid weeks of freezing weather. These are all things you would put in the "very unlikely to happen" files and yet....

Except for the Robertson and Limbaugh thing. Totally expected from 2 of the biggest pieces of shit on the planet. Die in a fire. Please.

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Speaking of people that should DIAF, Jay Leno and Jeff Zucker(President, NBC) have not only destroyed NBC's ratings but are now about to take Conan O'Brien off of The Tonight Show because of said ratings collapse. Conan has been a gentleman in these proceedings as far as I can tell, and has far more to lose. He moved his entire family, band, staff, writers to California and they are all now looking at the prospect of not having a job. This is an asshole move by NBC no matter how you look at it. I wish Conan the best, and I'm proud to be on Team Coco.

Teh funnies

2010-01-14T17:59:12Z

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CVS is pissing me off...

2010-01-12T17:23:52Z

I don't know if this is a national trend or something with our local store but the CVS pharmacy I've been going to for years has been in a steady decline. I have almost always been able to put in a prescription and pick it up the same day. In the past year I have had to wait several days to get some things like insulin.

On top of that just yesterday, after being told on Friday that I would need to come back for a fairly common prescription, that they had lost the card I had given them to get the medication at a severe discount. They offered to give me 3 days worth but I declined. I paid the full insurance price just to get out of there. I had spent 10 minutes in there earlier in the day without getting helped. Just wasn't in the mood.

Being forced to get my insulin over mail order is suddenly not seeming like such a bad thing...

Deep Thoughts....

2010-01-08T22:59:22Z

I guess one danger of ripping your entire music library and sticking it on random play is forgetting some of the things you've collected over the years. Nothing like rocking out to Queensryche then shifting over to The Lion King soundtrack. Oh our teeth and ambitions are bared...BE PREPARED!

Blah-g

2010-01-07T23:47:58Z

So it's been awhile since I wrote anything meaningful here. With the heraldonline experiment being an utter failure I figure I may as well do something with my space again. No not myspace, I don't go there other than Dark Horse Presents. I am on Facebook and Twitter, as you can see from all the tweets that are on this site. It started as a way to track a sick friend and ended up being something I use daily. Go fig.

I'm @evilwraith on Twitter, easy enough to find on Facebook. Just like on here I screen everything so if I don't friend you, don't be too offended.

Just updated the site to the new MT yesterday and they've completely redone the backend. Lots of bells and whistles to it now. It looks for context clues in what you're writing to search for pictures to use and ideas for what to write next. Kinda neat I guess but what I write is a bit stream of consciousness so I don't know how much that would help me out. Seems like a distraction really.

No witty way to end so I'll just say peace. And I'm out.