The Player

Dangerous D's obese sized TV was delivered here the other day. It took two Best Buy employees plus myself to get the box inside the house and unpacked. Total fourty five minute hassle. After he hooked his DVD up to it and powered the set on, he started right in watching movies without checking any of the settings. Since it's a wide screen flat panel model, the extreme edges of the picture seem squished and out of proportion to the rest of the video. For example if a car is moving across the screen from left to right it will appear somewhat shorter and wider, then normal sized in the middle of the screen, and returning to stubby fat again. It's kind of like looking through a fish eyed lens. I mentioned it looked weird but D didn't pay any attention to what I was saying. So when he wasn't around I fiddled with the menu settings and sure enough there was another screen choice for the video. Fixed it up. I don't watch much TV but when I do go to use it I'm going to change the settings and then revert it back to the fucked up one when I'm done. Dangerous D probably won't notice. Maybe it looks normal to him as it is fishbowl style. His retard-vision plus multiple room temperature Coors Light beers might automatically compensate for the screwy screen warping.

This past weekend Autumn came up to stay. We made dinner Saturday night and sat down to watch a film on D's TV. Just as we got past the opening credits all hell broke loose upstairs. From the living room we could clearly hear stupid shit like cow bells, door knocking, and other assorted noises bursting out of the second floor room D and I use as an office. It was like we were listening to sound effects from a Tex Avery cartoon. Over the top of all that racket was Dangerous D choking on a hairball or loudly belching up some food. We stopped the movie and eavesdropped for a few minutes. Autumn started laughing and she asked me what all the noise was. I explained to her that Dangerous D was using an online chat program for dating singles on Yahoo. He had a ton of sound effects activated. When certain conditions were met in the program sound effects triggered. Like when someone sent him a private message a goofy noise blurted out. Shit was going crazy up there so Dangerous D must have been typing his little stunted fingers off.

Earlier in the week Dangerous D mentioned to me he was on Yahoo Personals. He thought I wanted to know everything about it. I didn't ask or care, but he offered the information anyway. Apparently he's got a personal ad up there on Yahoo and according to him the only way to score on the chicks is to chat 'em up. D tells the girls whatever he thinks they want to hear hoping to rope them into a date. Lame. So that's what he spends most of his time doing when he gets home from work every day. He showed me his ad and I read through his profile. The one thing I noticed about it right away was he made absolutely no mention of his disability. When I asked him about that point he didn't say much. I told him I thought he was misrepresenting himself. That's fucked up. There's probably quite a few people like him doing the same thing, completely misrepresenting themselves online.

Before we restarted our movie I walked upstairs and asked Dangerous D to turn the volume on his PC speakers down way low. He was a little pinched about it, but he complied. Autumn and I were able to eat our dinner and watch the film in peace after that.