the copy machine.

Pretty goooood.

2010-09-28T01:02:00.007-05:00

Mad science

2010-09-21T19:49:00.004-05:00

Sept. 18, 2010

My memories from Friday night were strangely coherent as I woke up Saturday morning: the coffee shop, the girl with the wax on her face, some hippie bar with cheap beer, the caveman guy with a wide-open Hawaiian shirt, a bigass red Cadillac, too much talk about money and science, a near hit ('n run), very loud vocal impressions of dub-step music, a free ride in some dude's pickup truck, a fall into the river, creeping through the woods, being chased off by security, a handful of aggressive drug salesmen, and a long trek through a loud canyon.

I was wide awake, but stayed in my sleeping bag at least a half hour anyway. The basement smelled like greasy broccoli.

It was 10 a.m. and I was in a mad scientist's den. Next to me was a tall stack of mason jars, some random parts of electronic equipment, a few scattered pieces of clothing and a couple curious-looking (closed) boxes. Also there was a Pop-tarts wrapper – I ate a couple s'more-style snacks the night before. Strewn throughout the rest of the apartment were several plastic tubes, a doctor's mask, a couple 5-gallon containers full of brown liquid, a partly disassembled CPU, many more jars (some empty, some not and some I wasn't sure about), a variety of plants, a projector, a scale, a box full of what appeared to be torn pieces of cardboard, six small bottles of hair spray (colors: red, green, orange, yellow, violet and indigo), compost in a small plastic container, a box of OxiClean, an Einstein quote on the wall, a few bottles of liquor and a paperback copy of "Adventures in Space and Time."

By the time I finally stood up there were people talking in the other room. Someone was cooking.

These notes begin a few minutes after I walked into the other room and discovered the broccoli smell was indeed broccoli — and eggs, onions, bacon and who knows what else. It tasted good. Anyway, someone said something about energy/life/matter/physics/etc. and that triggered my first note, labeled 10:43 a.m.: "I need to write this shit down." Here's the rest.

10:50 a.m. - "We are spiritual beings in biological jumpsuits."

11:02 a.m. - Dub-step impressions, McDonald's commercials..."right when I connected with the mothership. Woo!"

11:15 a.m. - Walking towards downtown. Discussion about investing in gold. Money is worthless. Glenn Beck.

11:17 a.m. - "A bird doesn't come up with a new way to catch a fish!"

11:40 a.m. - Talk of the worthlessness of money is peppered by stops at ATMs.

12:06 p.m. - DIY Fort Collins. Homemade beer, other intoxicants.

12:25 p.m. - Tourist shop. Cowboy hats and dreamcatchers. I'm back in Santa Fe.

1:01 p.m. - Sustainable Living Fair. Little girl to her mom: "I'm going to start eating healthy foods."

1: 07 p.m. Wind turbine. P = 1/2 x M x A x V(cubed). Everyone is wearing dirty sandals.

2:06 p.m. - Got a beer. Author: "Some people say the sustainability movement is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If it is, let's put all the chairs in a circle and have a good time."

2:15 p.m. - Sitting on a hay bail. Author: "Pretty much all ya'll are going to have to live in a shack and shit in a bucket if you're serious about this."

3:01 p.m. - "I was getting such a sick vibe from her. When I sat down, I could just feel her presence."

3:12 p.m. - Plants. "What we want to do is harness the life force." (2nd IPA)

3:56 p.m. - One of the hippies stole my beer glass. Big surprise.

4:12 p.m. - Worm lady: "You just want to know to help you grow your pot plants." Wrong, lady.

4:40 p.m. - "Karma killed the bee."

5:11 p.m. - Banjos. Mead.

5:40 p.m. - "It's like eating a sandwich, if me and the sandwich are both drunk."

6:50 p.m. - Little girl falls off a hay bail on her face.

LOTS OF DANCING AND BEER

7:54 p.m. - "The earth is too big to stay in one place."

8:12 p.m. - "I don't have a problem with smart people having a butt ton of kids."

8:16 p.m. - "I should just open a credit card and fucking go apeshit." - one dude. "You don't have to pay it back." - another dude

10:46 p.m. - At the coffee shop. "We're trapped in this life to figure something out about the proclamation of God. And when we do, we know why."

11:15 p.m. - "This third dimension is such a small part of what there is. Hey, what's up dudes?"

11:16 p.m. - "Egyptians, three pyramids, clones and shit."

1:22 a.m. - Drunk. Eating chocolate chip pancakes at a Christian coffee shop.

2:22 a.m. - Back at the house. It smells like puke. Tired of conversations about (illegible) and the law. Who does jury duty anyway?

The puke smell, apparently, was caused by the oven being left on all day and night. Presently, I'm back in New Mex and about to fill out the forms for jury duty. Peace.

Promises

2010-08-14T18:19:00.005-05:00

I told Katie I would update, so I am.

But really, I've got nothing. Nothing that comes to mind anyway.

So I'm posting something from a few months ago. At the time, I was mostly fleshing out my thoughts about something stupid, and I thought I deleted it immediately, but I didn't. In retrospect, it sounds like a junior high student talking to himself, making it an almost too accurate view of my actual thought process. But I promised.

Here:

It was a little surprising when a we ended up ankle-deep in snow. In the Valley it had been sixty degrees. A friend and I had driven into the mountains, but only a few miles. The snow was nice, in a sort of peaceful way, but also irritating because my tennis shoes were soaked a couple miles into the woods. The landscape was pretty decent: real tall trees, an ice-covered creek, some bear tracks and a few huge piles along the trail that seemed to be elk shit. For a while we talked about Where the Red Fern Grows, then about Accelerated Reader, then about sham marriages.

Hiking has been a part of almost every one of my weekends since arriving in New Mexico, and I would rank this particular experience somewhere in the middle. Anyway, I was in a decent mood when we got back to the car — my socks were sopping wet, but things were generally fine.

We drove a few miles down the mountain and the conversation slowly wandered into a few sketchy areas: first the Catholic Church, then Thanksgiving, then problems at work, then employer/employee relationships. It would take a while to explain this in detail, but the transitions between each of those subjects flowed fairly smoothly. They were connected in subtle ways, and I had no intention of stumbling into a discussion about labor. But I did. Not that there's anything wrong with talking about workers' rights, but this didn't seem like the time or place or friend for that. I mean, I wish it had been — I'm constantly in search of that time, place and friend — but it wasn't.

Some of the most disheartening experiences of my life have involved long, frank, arguably "serious" conversations with people who genuinely believe they're especially savvy as to how the world works. I'm talking about people who recycle the same clichés over and over without ever apparently thinking critically about what they're saying. Then they say "I'm just being realistic" and sort of believe themselves. One of the heavier burdens I carry through my human existence is a tendency not to tell these unimaginative fucks to shut up.

This post-hiking convo didn't quite enter the "I'm just being realistic" realm, but it came close. The condescending tone was present, but just below the surface. Again, the details are probably unnecessary, but I mentioned a fairly typical complaint about my boss and that led to a more general conversation about exploitation, power, etc. Well, it's worth explaining that it wasn't entirely a collaborative effort to take the conversation into that arena — my reasoning was questioned repeatedly until I was essentially forced into explaining a couple elements of context that would be important to somebody who was THAT interested in my thinking. Usually people are satisfied with letting touchy discussions die at superficial levels, especially when the parties don't really know each other too well, but this thing just kept getting deeper.

So I found myself describing what, to me, is not just a simple concept, but also one that should be very apparent to anyone, especially anyone interested in labor, employment, power dynamics, etc. Basically, I said the relationships between employees and employers are by their nature unequal. I'm speaking in the modern, conventional, American capitalist sense because I have no experience otherwise. This doesn't seem like leftist banter to me. (Again, this just wasn't the conversation for that. I'm not opposed to leftist banter.) By the nature of the arrangement, a business owner will exploit his or her employees. The unbalanced see-saw is pretty hard to miss: the owners in this structure almost always have higher wages, more ability to determine specifics of their daily activities, and the power to hire and fire. I don't know of many instances in which this isn't true.

An issue arose in the car when I mentioned that this relationship didn't seem natural to me. I said — and I believe this as much as I believe anything — that the arrangement is unfair, inappropriate and obscene, so it should be actively resisted. My reasons for coming to that conclusion aren't worth explaining here, although they're probably easy enough to guess. Essentially, I said that my boss's recent actions were effectively a "fuck you," and his message was amplified by the fact that his position as an authority figure is itself a "fuck you."

I mean, that's my opinion. It's not necessarily a definition of "how the world works" — it's just what I feel.

This is when the discussion took a sharp turn down, straight to hell as far as I'm concerned. For approximately the billionth time during my post-fetus existence, I was given this purportedly foolproof prescription: stop thinking about that stupid shit. I'm paraphrasing, obviously, and adding my own interpretation, but that was the gist of the communication. I think the quote might have been "Well that's going to be the case at any job, and you're never going to be happy anywhere if you go in with that adversarial attitude."

See what I mean? He thinks he's being savvy and, at the same time, brutally honest with someone he thinks needs a dose of brutal honesty. What a fuck.

In the past I've heard virtually the same message as "That's just how it is," "You've got to work within the system," and "You're wasting your vote." It's annoying every time, not just because the statements are condescending, based in some poorly examined version of common sense, and nearly always hinge on one or two anecdotes, but because they are self-fulfilling prophesies. If every progressive voter assumes he or she is one of only a few lunatics with the desire to vote for Ralph Nader, then of course Nader is written off from the beginning — never mind large percentages of people who say they support his policies. The collective thought process behind this situation is pretty bizarre: significant groups of people say they want something they don't want because they heard somewhere that some larger collection of people (which, of course, includes the group in question) wants something different (which clearly isn't totally the case). The same issue, which seems to come down to a basic problem of inertia, happens in the workplace when the lower ranking workers (generally the biggest group) assumes there is nothing they can do to better their collective situation. People are best controlled when they feel isolated, even when they're actually far from isolated.

The other issue I had was with the "you're never going to be happy" thing. The assumption was that in my list of priorities, somewhere near the top is "achieving happiness." Knowing almost nothing about the history of psychology and philosophy, I have no idea when happiness emerged as some all-important goal for a human being — I suspect Oprah was somehow involved. At some point the command, "enjoy," became the declaration most fundamental to discovering meaning in existence. And if it's not Oprah telling me to do it, it's me telling myself. Even though I know it's wrong, or at least relatively wrong, I can't stop myself. This is unquestionably a learned behavior. And it is somewhere at the top of my list of tendencies to eradicate within myself.

The "enjoy" directive, for me anyway, is difficult to get a handle on. At first, it seems like there would be at least a few glaring exceptions to this insistence on pure contentment: religious orders, societal demands, the law, etc. But the conversation in the car seems to exhibit why these don't usually play out as exceptions. The direction to enjoy effectively supersedes, or at least flows between the cracks, of any of these other mandates. Instead, a person is expected to reorganize their preferences, to alter their own structure of biases that lead toward satisfaction, in order to indulge a world that would purportedly leave them miserable if they didn't do so. We are told: Yes, follow the law, as much as anyone ever does anyway, and give up any values that might keep you unhappy as a reasonably law-abiding person. Those values are no good because they will cause you to feel bad.

Stop thinking about that stupid shit.

(There is alternative here that I think is also popular: you can keep the values that make you feel bad as long as you enjoy feeling justified in your combative stance. You can feel bad as long as you feel good about feeling bad. But it's unacceptable to simply feel bad. I think.)

This is, as far as I'm concerned, exactly the wrong way to act. It's depressing even to think about. I admit, it is a tempting way to make choices — even if I don't understand why — but it is the definition of the go-with-the-flow attitude that seems to be at the root of senseless clusterfuck after senseless clusterfuck every day. It is surrendering the most basic part of our humanity, the consciousness that makes us aware of whether it might be appropriate to instead go against the flow — or at an angle to the flow, or to swim faster downstream, or to sink to the bottom and see how long we can hold our breaths... Whatever it is, there is a distinct likelihood it's not best to just go with the flow.

I would argue even that it might never be right for people to find their desires in perfect harmony with the direction these external forces move. By allowing these inhuman pressures to push us a certain way (down stream), we ignore our humanity — the ability to help pull ourselves out of the mire. By going with the flow, we move in the same direction as all the shit that moves that direction because it has no thought, no consciousness: unjust and nonsensical laws, oppressive societal standards, the most obscene religious practices, etc. There may very well be many attractive parts of the river (the apparent happiness of the actor, for example, or good laws or liberating societal forces or whatever) but they are always accompanied by the shit. Almost everyone seems to acknowledge this at some level. (In a way, people who claim Buddhist enlightenment might be an exception. I think they are at peace with the shit, or something.) As people, we can at least try to differentiate between shit and what's not shit. And move away from the shit. At least.

What I mean is it seems like there is often value in whatever makes life more difficult, to the extent that it doesn't make it unlivable, I guess. (There could still be value in unlivable difficulties, I guess, but that's a different conversation.) And pushing back against an unjust design that allows a few dipshits run the show while the rest of us are robbed of basic dignity at work would be one of those valuable, but difficult, things. The mathematical likelihood of seeing some incredible transformation in this relationship for our efforts is not important. Changing my point of view to accommodate the alleged inevitability that I can't escape the paradigm is not worth it. It's not worth anything.
I realize this isn't something revolutionary. I didn't invent it, and it's a long way of way of saying something very simple. But it just seems like a lot of people totally ignore it.

Anyway, before I got to explain any of these thoughts to the dude driving the car, the conversation was derailed by our stopping at a roadside taco stand. I immediately managed to eat a chile that was so hot I could barely breathe and I spent at least a half hour trying to get the burning to stop. It was extremely painful. I wasn't really able to talk, and there was no meaningful conversation for the rest of the ride, which was probably good. Eventually he dropped me off at home, where I drank about a half gallon of milk and finished my tacos. They tasted like shit.

Suicide fight.

2010-05-23T02:31:00.003-05:00

I didn't write this story, and it's confusing if you don't know the context, but it's a fairly tame documentation of a weird day a few weeks ago. "Shoving a reporter" refers to me.

4/24

2010-04-26T23:45:00.003-05:00

7:30 a.m.

Fuck. Up too late drinking Hamms and compiling "White Sands Beer Cans." Tired, and barely hung over. Whatever — how much sleep do you need to hang in the desert?

8:10 a.m.

No laundry left. I should stay home...and get something done for once. Like the fucking laundry. Maybe wash a dish or something. Why am I so tired?

This beard is getting ridiculous.

It would be cool to own a dog.

Throw my bag in the car. Drive to Lou and Sarah's.

9 a.m.

On the road. Sort of. Drove for three minutes and stopped at the old Taco Bell. Ordering a Country Burrito. Just realized I haven't eaten since yesterday's lunch. No reason. "Green sauce" on an empty stomach.

10 a.m.

Stop for coffee and a bottle of water. Collin is pissing off the dog.

Back on the road.

"I walked 47 miles of barbed wire. Use a cobra snake for a neck tie. Well I got me a house on the road side, made out of rattle snake hide. I got me a chimney made on top, made out of human skull."

12 p.m.

Off the interstate, onto the highway. Everything everywhere looks abandoned. Cows all over the place. Southern New Mexico. Maaaaaannn.

Sign: "Trinity Site: The nuclear age began with the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site on July 16, 1943. The site may have been named Trinity by Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who said at the blast, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," quoting from the Bhagavad Gita."

Now I am become Death.

12:15 p.m.

Guards and cops at the Trinity Site. No entry. Something up on the hill looks like a Bucky dome.

1:30 p.m.

Please pay $2 to see the petraglyphs. No thanks. I'll just walk past your sign for free.

Some Texan woman is screaming at a bunch of first graders to shut up while she talks a bunch of bullshit about Indians. Failure.

What is a petraglyph? Am I to believe the drawing of a man with a fluffy moustache was done by Native Americans centuries ago? What about the anarchy symbol? "Petraglyphs are so postmodern." I agree, Lou.

3 p.m.

Here we are. It only took a couple Crushers, but we made it. White Sands National Monument.

Brochure: the unique component of the sand is gypsum, which is water soluble. Two hundred fifty million years ago this was all a lake. There are white lizards here.

Shit is weird. Seriously, what is this? It looks like hills of snow forever. I'm on a different planet.

3:20 p.m.

Left our shoes at the car. Filled the backpack with Bud Light and a Crusher. Off into the wild.

3:45 p.m.

Can only see sand...and mountains in the distance. The sun is a little warm. It's somehow unsettling to be this far from shade.

Oh my god. You can jump down these hills. Just run....and jump. Into the sand. This should be so uncomfortable, but it's perfect.

4:15 p.m.

Laying on a dune, finishing a Crusher. Covering my face with my shirt. Don't wanna sunburn.

The dog is eating sand. And he's drinking water from a beer can.

4:45 p.m.

Thoughtful discussion.

"Twenty-Five Pounds of Cocaine Shoved Up a Dog's Ass: How Phallic Burritos and a Startling Critique of Georgia O'Keefe Revolutionized Norteño Art."

5:30 p.m.

Jumping down the biggest hill we can find. Writing a 75-foot message (PARTY) below.

6:15 p.m.

Out of water and beer. Time to leave. Final message: ALIEN BOOM! PARTY

The dog leads the way. Only gets us half-lost once.

8 p.m.

Las Cruces is a 10-mile long Wal-Mart. Lots of stuff, but nothing.

It costs $80 to stay at the Best Western. Lou and Sarah are banned from the other hotel... What to do?

8:30 p.m.

No cover at Graham Central Station. Drinking $1.50 beers and watching bar employees sing karaoke to "Creep." Stupid.

9:15 p.m.

More beers. Signed up to sing Johnny Cash. No one is here. Where are we going to stay?

10 p.m.

Assholes at the bar crossed off the song. Oh well.

Gas station food and a long drive home. Why are we leaving?

Eating chips in the back. Lou drives. Who's got the oil can?

10:15 p.m.

Yes, officer, we're all citizens.

3 a.m.

How long have I been sleeping? Yeah, Ok, let's get the hell back home.

I need a quesadilla.

3:30 a.m.

I should have cleaned this pan before cooking this quesadilla. I should have done my laundry.

There is sand in my ears, hair, pockets, wallet and cell phone. It is time to sleep for years.

nm travels

2010-03-11T23:54:00.002-06:00

The hippy must have been drinking all that liquor about the time I was talking with the shoplifter and the guy who looks like a game show host. By the time I wound up our conversation and drove fifteen miles down the highway to the gas station, he was staggering.

"Too many horses showed up, man. Too many horses."

Four other dudes, all locals who seemed pretty strung out, were drinking with him at the gas station's bar. One of them apparently bought "a million shots for everybody." It was five o'clock, and I missed the fucking party. Now he needed a ride.

He didn't look like a hippy at all actually, more like the image I have of a stereotypical highwayman. Like a 19th century British outlaw, what I imagine that would look like. He was probably about 60 years old, close to 6'6" and wearing a long, black coat with heavy boots. His face was sunburnt and he had a strangely creepy, permanent half-smile.

But the guy told me he was a hippy. Or maybe it was more like he was of hippies, at least once.

"I was out there for a while — out in California, man, back in the 70s. Then I drifted out here with the hippies. A bunch of us came out here to the mountains, I don't know why."

In retrospect, it seems shitty of me to grill him about his identity before letting him in the car, although he didn't seem to mind. The decent thing probably would have been to ask those questions during the strange trip down the same dirt road five times as he drunkenly gave me terrible directions to his trailer. Every couple minutes during the drive he drifted from one half-baked story to another, always forgetting to tell me when to turn. At one point I pulled over so he could get out and piss next to the post office. It was 5:30.

"I know where we're going, man. We've just got to get there."

He told me he made a hundred bucks that day cleaning horses for some rancher a few miles up the mountain. But there were only three dollars left when I found him. Not that I asked him for money, but he told me anyway, maybe thinking I would ask.

About six o'clock he flagged down a truck and asked directions to a fire station he said was near his place. I was getting hungry, and was feeling pretty sure this drunk/hippy/outlaw/asshole was making a lot of things up. He looked approximately as much like an average northern New Mexican as I did, which he noted.

"It's tough being a white guy in Canjilon, man — the Spanish never give me a break. You, where are you from? Illinois? Yeah, you look really Lincoln-esque. Seriously. You could be president, man."

Then he started in with a long description of some half-drunken accident a couple months earlier when he tried to ride his prize horse over a cattle guard in town and it fell through. The accident almost killed the horse and the hippy was stuck on the back of the thing until some dude helped pry him off. Most of his neighbors (the Spanish) had reportedly been mocking him since, which must have bothered him.

Somehow the physics of that story don't make sense to me (like how the hippy wasn't seriously injured), but the underlying narrative does: forty years after moving here, this dude was still an outsider. The locals drink with him at the gas station, even buy him enough liquor to get so drunk he forgets how to get home, but they still laugh extra hard when his dumb ass almost kills his favorite horse.

I've been in this goddamned place six months — maybe he was trying to make a point.

He told that story as I was finally driving the last hundred yards up to a muddy spot where I dropped him off. He said the trailer was a couple hundred yards away, past an area where he grew "organic vegetables." As a thank you for the ride he offered me some fresh broccoli (in March?) and a joint. I was told both "vegetables" came from the garden.

For some reason, I turned both down. So he got out and stumbled into the woods.

Not that it exactly matters, but I still have no idea if he really lived there, or whether he actually owned any horses or if he even had any weed. I don't even know if he knows, actually. He might have wandered into those woods like he and I both wandered into this state, having no real plan.

I've got to move, or get a horse.

It's been a few months.

2010-02-28T20:50:00.005-06:00

I should probably use this thing a little more to "keep in touch," but it's been hard to figure out what to say. There's just too much, but somehow also nothing.

For the past five minutes, I've been staring at the wall and trying to decide what goes best after George Jones: Simon and Garfunkel or The Soviet Army Chorus Band. I've been thrift store shopping for records.

Also, my brain is generally scrambled. I should take out the garbage.

I'm at home. It's the same place I've lived for the past six months, since moving here. That situation came real close to falling apart during the past couple weeks, but it's been salvaged. My landlady tried this weird scam, and I called her a bloodsucking liar, and she called the cops on my friend, so I talked to the cops about her, and then I refused to pay the rent, and she eventually caved. Now we're cool, I guess.

"The silence is like thunder as the enemy prepares another round."

Thank you, George Jones.

Without getting into any serious philosophical talk, my notions of trust and honest communication (basically: what is a lie?) have mostly adapted to northern New Mexico by now. It's frustratingly difficult to verbalize, and I won't try. But it's approximately as unsettling as it sounds. On any given day, the landlady might be the third or fourth person to speak to me in a way that at one time (like, a couple months ago) I would have termed dishonest. But it's really not...somehow.

Everyone is a fucking cowboy.

There is this bizarre sensation I've been getting more and more often: everything I know — or really, my image of what I think is everything I know — is pivoting on some axis I just realized existed. That sounds like bullshit, and it is bullshit, but that's what it feels like. The word, pivot, sort of echoes in my brain every time it happens...

And it's not "culture shock." At least, I don't think so. When I think of culture shock, I think of the new reporter from Wyoming who seems weirded out when drunks at Tiny's sing karaoke in Spanish. Or this time when I stopped at a taco stand and tried to order from a guy who didn't speak English and somehow ended up eating half a pepper that burned my mouth for about two hours. Maybe I have a pretty superficial understanding of culture shock. Or something...?

The copy of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" I bought from Somebody Else's Treasure is apparently scratched to hell. I guess it's "Hymn to Lenin" then.

Announcement

2009-11-10T22:54:00.002-06:00

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

2009-10-12T21:55:00.010-05:00

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...

2009-09-01T22:34:00.006-05:00

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.

2009-06-18T02:30:00.012-05:00

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.

2009-06-17T17:14:00.006-05:00

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.

2009-05-30T13:26:00.015-05:00

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.

2009-02-26T14:07:00.005-06:00

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.

2009-02-25T13:14:00.000-06:00

Midnight economics lesson.

2009-02-19T00:30:00.007-06:00

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.

2009-02-17T18:40:00.009-06:00

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.

2009-02-15T11:34:00.007-06:00

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.

2009-02-12T20:16:00.005-06:00

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.

2009-02-11T12:17:00.005-06:00

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.

2009-02-10T11:52:00.002-06:00

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

2009-02-09T19:18:00.009-06:00

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.

2009-02-07T18:00:00.009-06:00

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.

2009-02-06T21:38:00.004-06:00

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

Nostalgia for DOS

2009-02-06T14:45:00.004-06:00

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

2009-02-04T22:06:00.005-06:00

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,

2009-02-04T15:59:00.004-06:00

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

2009-02-04T15:48:00.002-06:00

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.

2009-02-04T00:14:00.002-06:00

Splish, splash.

2009-02-03T15:52:00.004-06:00

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

2009-02-03T12:39:00.004-06:00

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.

2009-02-02T20:26:00.005-06:00

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

2009-02-02T19:40:00.005-06:00

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

2009-02-01T18:34:00.002-06:00

and angry, incoherent rambling on my BRAND NEW BLOG.

It's gonna be great!