Vlog the Inhaler, or The Occasional Video Blog Musings of Jim Thornton

Forgive the provocative title of today's vlog, but I need to drive some traffic to my little corner of the swimming world, and for some reason, my depressive ruminations don't seem to be doing it.

Thus I will go back to my "Court of Last Resort" topic to drive viewership: the Comings and Goings of Our Favorite CreamPuff.

I probably wouldn't have thought to do this were it not for an email I received this evening, from the Puffster herself, with a link to a YouTube movie depicting a race she recently had. The message itself indicated that she thought someone had "hacked" the footage, so I watched it with a very keen eye, expecting a Great White Shark or some such to leap from the pool water just as she is finishing the race, embrace her comely young body in its voracious jowls, shake violently a couple times so that her suit falls off, and then chomp her in half.

I am not joking.

I really did expect something like this. I daresay I was looking forward to it.

But such obvious hackery never materializes. What does materialize, I suspect, is not hackery at all, but rather an honest depiction of True Grit CreamPuff style as she Jason Lezaks some chick in the adjacent lane.

It crossed my mind that I should post the link to see what others thought, but then I realized that the dear shy girl had sent me the link in private, more or less, and that to do so would be a breach of trust.

Then I thought a bit more about it, and I realized that CreamPuff knows I am always looking for visually interesting video material with which to counterbalance my (all too frequent of late) depressive bummerganzas of financial and hypochondriacal laments (the latest of which, by the way, is the resumption of fluish illness in the corpus of yours truly, which has, in turn, lead to a form of complaining for which I have been forced to coin a new term: swhining.)

It occurred to me that not only would CreamPuff not mind me posting the movie of her victory, she is no doubt counting on it.

This, in turn, raised yet another question in my swine-flu-riddled swhininess: Is CreamPuff using me?

I suppose it doesn't matter. Bill Withers, when faced with a similar dilemma, sang the following lyrics:

My friends feel it's their appointed duty
They keep trying to tell me all you want to do is use me
But my answer yeah to all that use me stuff
Is I wanna spread the news that if it feels this good getting used
Oh you just keep on using me until you use me up
Until you use me up

My brother sit me right down and he talked to me
He told me that I ought not to let you just walk on me
And I'm sure he meant well yeah but when our talk was through
I said brother if you only knew you'd wish that you were in my shoes
You just keep on using me until you use me up
Until you use me up

Oh sometimes yeah it's true you really do abuse me
You get in a crowd of high class people and then you act real rude to me
But oh baby baby baby baby when you love me I can't get enough
I and I wanna spread the news that if it feels this good getting used
Oh you just keep on using me until you use me up
Until you use me up

Talking about you using me but it all depends on what you do
It ain't too bad the way you're using me
Cause I sure am using you to do the things you do
Ah ha to do the things you do

At this point, I will post two movies: Bill singing "Use me up" and CreamPuff racing the 100 m free in Charlotte (there is musical accompaniment here, too, but of a different nature.)

You can watch these any way you want, or ignore them altogether. But my advice is this:

Turn on Bill Withers first, adjust the volume of the song. Then turn on CreamPuff and turn the sound down altogether.

Watch her, listen to Bill, and all the while think about me: the person who is being used here, but would not mind being used till she uses me up.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3hBYTkI-sE"]YouTube - Bill Withers - use me[/ame]

Bill Withers: start this one first, turn up the volume


[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ndptCjX4pY"]YouTube - 100 free charlotte 2009[/ame]

CreamPuff: start this one second, turn off the volume and watch while listening to Bill above