Announcement

So I'm gonna be in the T-town area from the 25th to the 29th for T-giving. Then I'm NEVER COMING BACK EVER. If anybody reads this, let's hang and party til we're grandparents.

Gift giving

Shitty day at work. My stories this week are boring, which is my fault, and no one calls back the newspaper on Columbus Day, which isn't exactly my fault. On days like this writing goes especially slow, and I was there for about eleven hours before the office finally closed down completely and I was forced to leave.

On the way home it occurred to me there wasn't much food at the apartment, and I was starved. Rather than acting reasonably (say, buying food at the grocery store), some combination of inertia and self loathing propelled my car into the drive thru line at Wendy's. It was on the way, sort of. I ordered a Crispy Chicken Sandwich, a Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger and fries. None of that sounded especially good by the time the voice asked me for my order, but there were cars in front of me and it seemed a little too late to escape. At the second window I handed a fat guy a $5 bill and he handed me change.

A fairly gloomy thirty seconds passed while I sat in my car waiting for the food. The workday had sucked, prospects for going anywhere at night seemed bleak, and I was watching the sun go down from the front of the Wendy's drive thru line. Jeez. The fat guy, who had curly dark hair and looked about 25 years old, must have been bored and he asked me how I was doing.

"All right, what about you?"
"Good."

Ok, nice to know. Fat guy at Wendy's says he's doing good. Put a check next to that one — finally an accomplishment I felt satisfied with.

But he wasn't done.

"Hey bro, you want a Coke?"
"Um, no. Not really. Thanks."

I didn't order a Coke, mostly because I didn't really want one and it seemed like a waste of money. It seemed odd that he would ask.

"You sure? The lady in front of you ordered a Coke and then changed her mind and said she wanted a Diet Coke. I've got the Coke right here and you can have it."
"Oh...ok. I mean, yeah, I'll drink it, I guess."
"All right, it's on the house."

He handed me a huge plastic cup filled with probably 40 ounces of soda. Somehow I managed to think "Wow, it's nice of this guy to give this huge drink to me" instead of "What kind of stupid bitch orders an XXL Coke and then changes her order so that this nice fat guy has to pour her a new XXL Diet Coke." It was a truly beautiful moment, I think. Somehow, if for only a second, I forgot about tedious news stories and dead imperialist Europeans and about how this guy was really just handing me another menu item that I only sort of wanted. Even though all he did was hand me a drink he was otherwise going to throw away, it seemed like I was witnessing the performance of a genuinely good deed.

Then the fat guy maneuvered his tubby torso back through the window and walked away. I'll probably never see him again. A minute later some high school girl with a lip ring handed me my food and I drove off.

I was thinking about the big soda and the fat guy and work tomorrow and how humanity's not all bad when I accidentally pulled a little too far past a stop sign next to the restaurant. My car was sticking a few feet out at the three-way stop and there were two other cars waiting to go. A woman in one car scowled at me and raised her shoulders — a guy in the other car revved his engine and flipped me off. It kind of irritated me, and while carefully watching the other oncoming traffic, I made a left turn in front of both of them. Yeah, I'm sure they were both REALLY upset.

An hour later, I'm at home drinking a watery soda. And in all seriousness — it's not too hard to tell the difference — I'm almost sure it's a fucking Diet Coke.

I don't usually put "how I'm doing" notes here, but...

During the past several days I've received a handful of texts and emails, the synthesis of the messages being "Hey...are you still alive and doing all right?" Naturally, I don't spend a lot of time wondering about my own status as dead, alive, happy, sad, injured, imprisoned, strangled by drug kingpins, etc., but it's nice that somebody does. Thanks.

I'm fine. Actually, the first week in New Mexico has been really fun, if a little overwhelming. The new job and figuring out a living situation have consumed most of my time, but after quite a while spent screwing around in the Midwest, the distractions are welcome. There have been a few spare hours, which I spent seeing Death Vessel in Santa Fe and taking a day trip to Taos with some people from work. If I can get past the "Jesus Christ, I'm never going to be able to keep up with this all" feeling at work, I'll be set. Except I need some furniture (other than my lawn chair).

There are sort of a lot of other things to say about this whole adventure, but that's all I really feel like writing for now. Instead, I'm going to post something I wrote a long time ago documenting a trip Chris and I took to Indianapolis. I meant to post this then, but ended up just telling the story verbally to quite a few people. Here:

The toasted sub sandwiches felt like big rocks in my guts - we'd eaten too much because the food was cheap. I trudged through downtown Indianapolis with Chris as we both tried to walk off that stuffed, sickening feeling. I was an unemployed glutton.

After strolling past what seemed like miles of city parks and elaborate veterans memorials, we stopped to sit at a picnic table and wait it out. There was apparently no exercising (exorcising) the fast food from our systems. About fifteen yards away from us there was a group of a hundred or so yuppy-looking folks in all white — white dresses, white suits, white shoes, white hair, white skin. The postmodern KKK was apparently hosting a gathering. A country band was playing a Patsy Cline song for them while they sat at neatly decorated tables and guzzled champagne. Chris and I sat watching the bizarre festivities while we waited for Eric, who we were visiting in Indianapolis, to call us.

It was about three minutes before one of the bleached partygoers, a fairly inebriated older woman, approached us. "I don't mean to insult you," she began. Clearly she was about to insult us.

She continued: "But would you two like to make a little cash by helping us clean up?"

Ok, better than I expected. She easily distinguished us from her party because we were dressed in T-shirts and jeans, and then guessed from there that we would be up for making some quick cash. Not that insulting. Actually, the worst part of her statement was the suggestion that it would be possible to offend someone simply by asking them if they would help clean a couple tables for a few bucks. But people of her status, I guess, might not take kindly to a request they join the ranks of typical hired help.

Anyway, the answer was yes. Sign me up. I'd been un(der)employed for three and a half months, so any income was welcome. All of these socialites appeared pretty well to do, and I was in the mood for some wealth redistribution. About ten minutes later the cream-colored woman signaled that our help was needed, and we wasted no time getting to work. And by work, I mean we dumped a little leftover champagne into the grass, put some crystal dinnerware into plastic containers and boxed up some tiny candles — for about fifteen minutes. Not a very stressful workday.

Throughout our quarter-hour of labor the aristocracy treated us fairly predictably, awkwardly commenting about Chris's "long arms" and occasionally asking me questions insinuating I was an experienced custodian (I've put in my time scrubbing shitters for minimum wage, but they probably didn't know that).

Maybe because Chris and I are both pretty skinny, several of the women insisted we take home a box of the croissants left over from the meal. And possibly because we were both twenty somethings and dressed casually on a Saturday night, they assumed we would also want two half-full bottles of champagne (sparkling wine, actually). They were "just going to throw them away anyway."

Chris and I ended up accepting the offer to bring home their trash — it would have been a shame to let pride get in the way of free food and drink. We also walked away with about twenty boxes of sparklers (they had been performing some ceremony with them earlier that night — again with the KKK similarities) and a bouquet of white roses that would reek badly in our kitchen for the next few days. That was all in addition to $20 a piece, which was the previously agreed upon rate. So we were basically working for $80 per hour plus someone else's garbage. It was a pretty sweet deal.

During the ten minutes between when the drunk lady approached us and when we started "working," Chris and I did a fair amount of joking about the situation. One stunt Chris suggested was outsourcing our new job to one of the nearby bum-looking dudes, paying them a very low wage, and therefore making a profit without doing any real work. It was pretty easy to dismiss the suggestion as absurd — until I realized that plenty of these wealthy partygoers almost definitely made their fortunes doing that exact thing. Whether they owned businesses or "invested wisely" or whatever, lots of these assholes almost certainly made their fortunes primarily by simply existing in a privileged position — their "work" was manipulating others who worked for cheap.

So they would have been pissed, yes, if we solicited bums to do their dirty work, but surely they would have admired our ingenuity. These rich dicks had thought they were giving a few bucks to a couple squirrely college-age liberals, but they had in fact contributed cash to their soon-to-be rivals, the future of the American upper class. It would have been ethically destitute youngsters like us who would have pushed those fat fucks out of the limelight one day — and we would have been taking the first steps toward that end at their own creepy party. It would have been stunning to watch, I assume.

But of course none of that happened. Instead, Chris and I gratefully accepted their offerings and ran off like thieving raccoons before they could take any of it back. Twenty minutes later we strolled up to Eric's front porch with two open champagne bottles in tow, and set a box of half-day-old bread and several packages of sparklers on the kitchen table. There was a small party going on, and we were very well-received.

I gulped down nearly a quarter bottle of the wine during the half-hour before the party collectively decided to stab about twenty of the sparklers into the croissants and light them in Eric's front yard. It was a hell of a good idea. There was a beautiful fireworks display for a few seconds, the bread was rendered totally inedible afterwards and at least one person burned himself pretty badly. I will never have money.

A losing battle.

This motherfucking apartment building.

Just now, as I was walking up to my room on the third floor I saw a good-sized cockroach crawling up the white wall along the stairs. It was about 2 a.m. Prime cockroach prowling time. It stopped crawling as I passed it, moving its long brown antennas pretty strangely. Maybe it was anxious - it should have been. I was carrying my bike up the stairs. The past couple days have been a little boring, and I had been riding around the area for an hour or so to kill time and get some exercise.

These fucking roaches have been hanging around here for a couple months. I do the dishes, take out the trash, vacuum every so often, whatever. It doesn't matter. The whole building is infested with them and they keep strolling into my apartment looking for food or other roaches or something. A couple of them were breeding pretty intensely in my shower the other day, so I beat the hell out of them with an old book I've been using as an exterminator. It's just some old, nasty novel from the 1950s. The title is "Space Satellite: The Story of the Man-Made Moon." This book just happened to be the most disgusting weapon-worthy item in my apartment the first time I saw an insect worth terminating earlier this spring.

Tonight, carrying my bike up the stairs, I decided to take my offensive a step further, do a sort of preemptive strike. So I gripped the center of the bicycle's frame, moved the rear tire a few inches back from the wall (and the roach), and then swung the entire bike like a baseball bat. It took a couple hard swings, but I eventually broke the roach in half. The bug didn't actually fall off the wall - its guts seemed to adhere to the paint pretty well. It just stayed there, bent into a V shape and still twitching those gross antennas. I proceeded to carry my bike the final story and a half up to my floor and walk into my apartment.

It was a pretty satisfying kill, but not at all analogous to my relationship with this building (and its bug problem). I'll leave here soon enough, but this place will probably last for at least a couple more decades. The ancestors of these roaches will almost certainly outlast me, my relatives and any of our spawn. We can't get rid of them. Cockroaches were here before us, and I assume they'll be here close to last.

Basically, I need some roach spray and a fly swatter.

Recap/plans.

Saw some really really fucking great bands last week. Drank a little Ten High and tossed a tooth into a field.

Canoe Trip starts Sunday. Might kill me.

See ya.

Blog resurrection erection.

It's been a quiet day so far in Bloomington (came here this weekend to visit Chris), and this seems like an ideal time to resuscitate The Copy Machine. There was no great reason for my failing to post the past couple months — just never got around to it, I guess.

Anyway, about halfway through my four-hour drive here on Thursday afternoon I had an experience that really got me thinking about bringing dead things back to life for no good reason. Just about 8 p.m. I rounded a wide bend on Interstate 70 when suddenly, what appeared directly in front of me — brilliant, tall and vaguely phallic — but a monstrous aluminum cross.

Of course, anyone who lives near Effingham or drives through the area regularly has seen the 198-foot salute to Christian wealth a million times. It's not like it was some big surprise. And pretty much everybody who happens upon it unexpectedly, especially anyone who drives up at night when it's lit up like at a Klan rally, seems to agree it's pretty creepy. So again, no surprise there. But what made this particular meeting with The Cross^TM especially moving was the soundtrack to my drive. Just as it came into view, I was listening to the bridge of a particular Bonnie "Prince" Billy song. The lyrics seemed appropriate:

Now I want the world to see,

Everybody look at me,

I'm a good person and free

and she loves me.

So if you switched "she" to "He," it seems like that part of the song would have worked pretty well to explain the thinking of the pious individuals who spent a million bucks to build The Cross^TM. It would be difficult to really dispute that. And here are some more lyrics from the song, titled "So Everyone."

Oh take it, oh take me, oh take it so easy

Oh make it, oh make me, oh kneel down and please me

Oh lady, oh boy, show how you want me and do it so everyone sees me

Yeah. So that song was pretty obviously written about a public performance of fellatio. It's a pretty strange song, and it's not exactly written as any kind of joke regardless of how ridiculous it sounds (sort of like the cross). 

So yeah, there was something about those lyrics playing as I drove through Effingham County that really struck me as funny (even though the cross is a very old, very tired joke by now) and surprisingly appropriate (even though it's also incredibly easy to point out the cross's absurdity).

And it made me want to write here again. All right. 

Clown craze.

There was a time when every Christmas gift I gave was purchased at the dollar store in the Village Square Mall. Starting when I was probably six or seven, my parents would leave the three kids there for a half hour or so, just long enough for us to annoy the hell out of whatever poor bastard was earning minimum wage behind the counter. One year we bought our dad a tiny screwdriver. Pretty cute, I know.

At some point, my brother and sister and I were informed of our Aunt Eva's collection of toy clowns. So each Christmas we ventured into the breakable aisle and chose a different $1 tiny statue of a makeup-caked jokester to send her in the mail. We assumed she displayed them somewhere, next to her other clowns, I guess. She probably did. She lived a thousand miles away, so we really had no idea.

This next memory is a little foggy, but I'm relatively sure that one year, after several straight clown presents, my dad encouraged us to pick a new theme for Eva's gifts. Basically: "Stop sending her a goddamed clown every year. She used to like having a couple of clowns, sure, but now she's got a million, and she doesn't even like clowns that goddamned much, and frankly, having a huge collection of miniature clowns is a little fucking creepy. A couple was OK, but now she's getting weirded out every time she looks in the corner with all those clowns."

It wasn't exactly that, but close.

I have no idea what we got her the next year. It was undoubtedly more dull than all those baby Bozos.

I was reminded of the X-mas gifts this morning when I came upon these terrifying photos of Ronald McDonald. Even when I was a kid, Ronald slightly disturbed me. Those VERY red lips were/are too much.

Apparently that didn't enter my brain at the dollar store.

Happy Ash Wednesday.

Midnight economics lesson.

The woman standing in front of me in the "12 items or less" line at Schnucks tonight had seven items. They were: five 24 oz. cans of Milwaukee's Best Light and two bottles of Jack Daniel's Downhome Punch. Her total was $9.43. Without doing any basic math, I can be fairly sure that this person is not doing the most with her money.

I see this happen all the time at this particular Schnucks location (which several of my coworkers have informed me is too ghetto [they are too snooty] to frequent) — customers buy the equivalent of a 12-pack, or even a 24-pack, of beer in 24 oz. cans. Not too economical.

Clearly it's glamorous to sip a fine lager, such as Milwaukee's Best Light, from a 24 oz. aluminum can while sitting on your porch overlooking three dumpsters and a couple stray cats fucking under a busted street light. But how about a little compromise? It's the year two thousand and nine and we're in a god damned recession.

Just buy the smaller cans, save yourself a dollar, and spend that extra money on a toothbrush (what I bought at the grocery store tonight). You need one. I looked. It's gross.

I walked home about 50 yards behind this woman. She lives pretty close. She doesn't seem to know a lot about how to skimp on money when you're buying bottom-of-the-barrel booze. Maybe I should have said something, because I think I do. I didn't though.

But then again, maybe those extra couple of beers would have just made her more drunk, and she would have accidentally slept in tomorrow. She might have missed work, been fired and then she wouldn't have the cash to buy even one tall boy tomorrow night.

I don't understand economics.

Post Presidents Day cornbread.

Yesterday was truly a day of rest and reflection.

I spent upwards of a half hour laying on my bed, curled up in my American flag sheets and John Wayne-themed comforter, hoping for death and contemplating the lives of the past leaders of the United States. It was SO refreshing.

At some point I started typing up a blog entry about Abraham Lincoln. It was partly inspired by a book I recently read about all the supposed myths about the "Great Emancipator" — about how he was really a racist and a dictator and a war monger, blah, blah, blah. After about four sentences I realized I was not a historian and the post sucked.

Here's the abortion:

Thanks to the nationally-celebrated Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Bash last week and Barack Obama's persistent mentioning of his own parallels with the 16th president, I've already had my fill of Lincoln worship recently. If it was a normal year, I would have been completely satisfied to flip on the television today, make myself a heaping bullshit-flavored ice cream cone (three scoops!) and take in a few more bubbly anecdotes about "The Great Emancipator" while eating myself into a painful brain freeze.

But not this President's Day...

After re-reading, it's clear to me stopping there was the right decision. Anyway, so I still had some executive branch excitement pent up today that I didn't know what to do with — until just now.

Immediately after work I came back to my apartment, cranked the music Honest Abe probably would have listened to had he been blessed with an iPod, and made a fresh pan of mouthwatering CORNBREAD. So satisfying and delicious!

Finally, I think I'm prepared to go another full year without giving a shit about what Abraham Lincoln, George Washington or any other dead person would have thought about our country electing a black president. It's been a good day.

Snuggie update.

This EZ-2-Reed bar graph has really helped me attain the most well-rounded perspective before making any super solid plans for the future — specifically whether or not to invest in that Snuggie.

Lunatic(s) downstairs.

After living in my apartment building for almost five months, I'm still not sure whether the apparently schizophrenic old guy on the first floor is actually a set of twins with very different dispositions.

For the first few months, it seemed like there was just one haggard, angry, hunch-backed elderly man with an expression like Charles Bukowski waking up from a nap. He usually wore over sized sweatshirts and loose-fitting jeans. I'm pretty sure one of the other tenants called him Barney once.

Barney always seemed to leave the building when I entered. Once he glared and pointed at me for a solid minute while I shuffled from my car into the building. Creepy, yes, but probably, I assumed, harmless.

A few weeks later I drove up to my apartment and saw a few firetrucks and police cars outside. After a few minutes of badgering one of the cops for details, he told me Barney let a homeless woman into his room, and she tied Barney to a chair, beat him with a hammer for an hour and stabbed him with a knife. Eventually the cops came and knocked down his door. They arrested the woman.

I saw Barney leave the building that night. The cops were walking him to an ambulance. He looked pretty messed up, but he was able to walk at least. I recognized him as the crazy pointing guy, and another tenant told me he had dementia.

Recently I've had a few encounters with a much more congenial, identical person who sometimes wears a worn out Cardinals windbreaker. This Barney says "hey" to me sometimes, and he doesn't seem insane. Like the original Barney, he must do a lot of wandering around the neighborhood because he is always walking out the front door.

Last weekend I was standing by that door with Chris and James, and the more friendly Barney came out wearing his windbreaker. The three of us had been drinking, so there were two beers and a bottle of Kentucky Tavern whiskey on the steps. Barney just looked at us, smiled, and said something equivalent to "How're you kids doin' tonight?" Then he walked down the street. About ten minutes later he came back, smiled again and walked inside.

It was a pretty innocent encounter. But about two minutes later Barney came back outside. He was suddenly wearing grey pajamas, and he looked distressed.

"Do you guys live here?!"

I told him I did.

"Get that bottle out of here! Get it out! Get it out! You can't have that here!"

He was clearly mad at us. James grabbed the bottle and started carrying it down the street. I'm not sure exactly where he was going.

"Get it out! You can't have that here! Get it out!"

James kept walking. Barney eventually walked back inside, apparently satisfied that the whiskey was out of his sight.

It seemed ridiculous. Barney had just seen the bottle of whiskey twice, and he only smiled. Then, within minutes, he changed clothes and suddenly seemed genuinely angry that there was alcohol on the steps. I should point out that there are no posted rules about drinking or smoking anywhere in the building — the whole place smells a little like cigarettes and urine.

If there are two of these guys, though — twins — the altercation last weekend seems a little less absurd. Maybe Barney 1 told Barney 2 (presumably they're roommates) about the rowdy kids outside, and Barney 1 decided he ought to do something about it. Barney 1 was an asshole, sure, but maybe not completely nuts.

One thing I'm fairly certain about: neither Barney has anything to do with enforcing the rules around here. The building administrator, a reasonably nice guy who looks to be about forty years old, lives on my floor, and we talk pretty often. He's never warned me about any informal band of elderly, demented alcohol police downstairs.

Whatever. I don't really want to know. This is my first experience with an elderly, somewhat mystifying set of identical twins, and I don't want to ruin it.

F the future.

There is a piece of folded notebook paper in my wallet with an elaborate, almost indecipherable chart drawn on it. When I first sketched it, the goal was to separate all of my options for post-March 13 (when my internship ends) into a few categories and identify the pros and cons of each potential path. There are about thirty phrases, circled and connected with lines. It's a mess. In all seriousness, here are the categories:

Journalism
Nonprofit (social justice)
Grad school
Lab rat
Wallow in existential crisis (travel)

If none of these work out, I've promised to reward my efforts by purchasing a Snuggie.

A modest proposal.

Unlike approximately 90 percent of the shit Anderson Cooper says to half-dazed audiences every day, the advice he gave to some kids at a prep school in Brooklyn seems pretty legit: if you're gonna be on TV, try not to be a "blowhard."

T.Rex, Animal Collective and Neil Diamond

all on one fabulous motherfucking mix.

I've been listening the hell out of this thing while lounging around my filthy apartment, staring at the growing pile of trash and pretending someone else will eventually take it out.

Here's the full tracklist, which you can also get by clicking that link above:

Raul Sexias - Mosca no Sopa
Niel Diamond - Delerious Love
Willie Hutch - Tell me Why Has our Love Turned Cold
Animal Collective - My Girls
Noze - Love Affair
Gary Bartz - Funked up
West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band - Ritual #1
INTERLUDE 1 of tomany
Whole Lotta Love - C.C.S.
Whole Lotta Love - Dennis Coffey
La Gringa Inga - Ingles En Un 2x3
Selda - Ince Ince (Devlin_Edit)
Selda(w/kardslar) - Nem Kaldi (Devlin Remix)
Super Eagles - Love is a Real thing
duction - intro
T.Rex - Cosmic Dancer
The Rah Band - Messages From The Stars
Ariel Goodman Weston - clean underwear
The Outcasts - Loving You Sometimes

If you get antsy, just skip to the 21:00 mark, where T.Rex begins, and listen to the rest. OR, you can just download that song by The Outcasts here. It's probably the best on the mix.

Man!

A letter from Roberto.

Generally, I avoid opening the approximately 10,000 "spam" e-mails per day that are sent to my work address. It would take a lot of time, it's apparently unsafe, and the spam filter does a pretty decent job. But when there's a lull during the day, and I'm feeling especially reckless, I dip into the junk mail folder and read for a while. It's sort of entertaining.

Yesterday, while ignoring deadline, I noticed one from a sender named Roberto. He wanted to know if I was interested in becoming his "conjugal partner." If I was — and he stressed I should really think it over and make sure I knew what I was committing to — he wanted me to reply. Roberto, who claimed to live in France, wrote his message first in English, and it was translated into Hungarian below. He requested replies be written in English though, because he doesn't really speak any Hungarian.

At the bottom was a URL for what turned out to be his personal website, where he published a lengthy, rambling explanation on the topic of romance. Here's an excerpt:

Women should be kissed and consumed from head to feet, & sexuality should always be an art, reviewed and rediscovered in permanence to entertain our passion. Your feet are also very sensitive, one of the most sensitive parts of your body, nervously connected to your whole organs & involving great feelings of relaxation, & attention to them can indirectly prevent some diseases. By kissing and adoring them and feel excited by the erogenic part of your feet, i can transmit with my aura, my most intimate affection and deepest love to your spirit through those slight kisses, caresses or intense & tender chomps.

Also:

I wouldn't want you to have a dirty job for reasons of financial obsessions. If we got along together, i wouldn't ever want it for my woman .. . I wanted to find my future bride abroad because women of western europe are too materialist, superficial, infantile idealists and conformist in general.

At one point he explains his predicament. He is 27 and he spent much of the past decade consumed with his first love, music composition. He has failed miserably, supposedly, at composing movie soundtracks. During this time, he also sank into a dark depression and lost all hope in a higher being. There just wasn't room for romance. But now he is in desperate need of a "second half."

He ends with this:

I send you warm kisses to your lovely hands, chest, navel, lil nose, ears, forehead, & to your candid & lovely soles,

XxXxXxX

Roberto

This is, without question, the best piece of junk mail I've ever received. I won't write his web address here, but let me know if you're very serious about having sex with this man. Here's a decoratively-framed photo of Roberto.

A real beauty.

Katey and I have been laughing at this for a few days.

Nostalgia for DOS

Finally, someone made Oregon Trail easily available online. Thank God. It really takes me back.

My cousin, Carla, introduced me to Oregon Trail during a family reunion-ish thing at her house in North Carolina when I was six or seven. Her family was apparently more tech-savvy than mine in the early '90s (or her parents just weren't as skeptical of any kind of game played on a brightly lit screen) and someone had installed the game on their computer.

One afternoon, she and my cousin, Mary, and I spent an hour or two on a few attempted ventures West with wagon loads of characters we named after our actual family members, most of whom were probably in the other room. I don't remember if we ever "won," but I do clearly recall thinking it was hilarious when our virtual relatives would get sick or drown.

Except for my first experience with the Internet a year or two later, when I spent close to three hours in a high school computer lab totally mystified by NBA.com, my introduction to Oregon Trail is the most fascinated I've ever been by technology. My brain had not yet developed a file in which to categorize experiences with interactive "virtual reality," and so the primitively-animated trips to Oregon's Willamette Valley felt sort of real. It didn't feel authentic to some crazy, scary extent, but just enough to make me excited and slightly confused.

It's a little pathetic, I guess, but those imagined treks to the Old West are a lot more vivid in my memory than my family's actual trip to the East coast that year. Oh well.

One good reason

I muted the Super Bowl's half-time show after twelve seconds.

Not that I doubt the proficiency of the E Street Band at ripping 99 million viewers a collective new asshole with their musical ability, but since moving to the "Show Me" state, I've developed contempt for anything that's not 100 percent authentic. So if I'm not really hearing Little Steven play those gut-wrenching riffs live, I don't care.

Sadly, this also means Monday nights are now boring.

From what I remember,

this is pretty much the plot to 'Twilight.'

"A self-described "vampyre" and former fringe political candidate faces charges for threatening a teenage girl who tried to break off their relationship by telling him she was actually a vampire hunter."

If most of my worldly possessions

didn't fit in the back seat of my car, maybe I would hire these people someday. There is apparently a rag-tag group of ex-cons in the city who work primarily as movers, but who will do almost any kind of work the law will allow.

When I read this story, I was seriously disappointed I didn't write it. It's hard to deal with missing an opportunity to interview a reformed bank robber and casually jot down "I used to boogie for the devil, now I boogie for the Lord. I still boogie, but I changed dance partners."

Agreed.

Splish, splash.

Not to scoff at a proposition to save the world from certain doom, but dumping our pesticide-ridden corn stalks into the ocean to slow global warming seems a little reckless, eh?

The thought of a wailing Bruce Springsteen

didn't entice me to watch much of the Super Bowl.

Apparently, that means I missed the ad for FREE GRAND SLAMS at Denny's today. It's over in an hour.

Now that I've finally caught up with the times, it's probably too late to drive there, stand in line with fat assholes for a few hours, scarf down that stomach ache in two minutes, reel from the pain for a while, and then walk out sick and humiliated.

Plus, I've got work.

Big decision.

Wouldn't want to be the parents forced to choose whether to have their kid's sixth fingers and toes hacked off.

After all, "think of their typing skills."

Man joins wolf pack during walk in woods

This song played a few days ago at my friend Ryan's apartment while some of us ate coconut milk curry.

It tells an epic tale, man.

I promise plenty of petty introspective drivel

and angry, incoherent rambling on my BRAND NEW BLOG.

It's gonna be great!