A series of failed posts, tied together

No, not the whole of this blog, smartarse!  Here:

1.  During the football season there was a commercial for some pickup truck, the gist of which always escaped me.  There is a truck in front of a house that has a FOR SALE sign in the yard.  Then an old dude asks a Michael Rapaport lookalike "What do you do?" ( and it sucks, because it was always at this point that I notice the commercial was on, and thus had already missed whether Rapaport dude says "we just bought that house"*) and then there is a montage** where we see the guy doing a bunch of stuff in super- quick clips: singing "Bingo" to his family while he drives, roaring in a masculine manner with a bunch of guys at either a paintball team event or in some sort of military reserve unit, other shit; INCLUDING looking at another old dude across the chess board.  Because this truck driving asshole (I can say this - I drive a truck) is complex.  Among all his other activities, he takes time to play fucking chess with his shawl-collared father-in-law.  Right.  The guy sorta shakes his head in an "aw shucks" manner at the spot's end - how can he sum up all the things he does to this brusque interrogator?  He's COMPLEX.

2. I went looking for this commercial on youtube, so I could at least find out what brand of truck it was, in addition to finally, finally getting a handle on just what the hell is going on here.  This reminded me of how I never ever can tell one brand of car from another.  I do recognize Volvo 240's, but that's something else.

3. I did find that the youtube autofill feature (google as well), um, autofilled when I typed "what do you do truck" to "what do you do truck commercial" which was irksome because some normal dudes somewhere were googling this probably, just to watch it and feel good about themselves..."I'm like that!"  ARGH.

4. That imagined google-searching dude put me in mind of a goddamn Creed Nickelback video I saw I have neglected to mention before that I could not believe I was seeing...the plot was that Fireman Guy gets a call to go be in a forest fire (Canadians!), takes up his uxorial bed, girds his loins in Lee jeans and his wife, who in my mind's eye looks now like the little hamsterish one from Dixie Chicks, stays home and waits.  A BURNING TREE FALLS ON HIM!  Like, three minutes into the video.  What's gonna happen?  Christ!  Oh, shit, here comes the fire truck with his ashen compatriots!  Oh, god, she's crying - what's captain gonna say?  OH!  He's okay.  There he is.  All ashy and hunky - close call!  Meanwhile, Nickelrock plays on endlessly, endlessly.

5. Oh, right, so - chess!  That was the point, way back when!  I read a thing somewhere about how, if one is fending off senility/old brain/atrophy, one should do activities that are outside normal comfort zones.  For instance, if you're great at crossword puzzles, start doing the [awful] Sodoku instead.  To that end, I need to start playing chess.  I will never ever get good enough, even against a trained raccoon, and then there's that whole world of chess problems - just thinking up knotty brainmelters to ruminate on, as practiced by some of the greatest minds of all time (Nabokov, Howard Stern, etc).  So, yeah!  Chess.

* if they didn't just buy it - if, in fact, they are the sellers and this is a going away party, wouldn't the old neighbor already know that this guy is that asshole who always goes around "doin' stuff?"

**"Those who live by the montage die by the montage" - Kenneth Tynan