mrchair

2009-11-14T22:01:00.000-08:00

Like Lazarus, Mrchair rises from the dead...

This blog now lives here. Call your mom, change your bookmarks. Thanks blogger, I'll never forget my roots.

2009-06-21T10:40:00.001-07:00

New Shower Curtain

2009-06-11T21:39:00.001-07:00

The Demise of the Other Cat

My dad won this movie poster of No Country For Old Men at a charity auction in Scottsdale. He asked if I wanted it and I said sure. I came home from a trip and there it was, professionally framed and elaborately packed. It was too big for any of my walls so I put it in my kitchen, leaning up against the refrigerator.

I planned to eventually put it on a wall, at least once I moved to a bigger place. But in the meantime, Knives developed a relationship with her own reflection in the glass. She would roll around on her back coyly, and paw at it. It was very sad, but kind of sweet. So we let the charade continue. We called it "The Other Cat."

Then last week I was washing dishes, and it sounded vaguely as if a very large and heavy sheet of glass had shattered in the kitchen. Knives was nowhere to be seen, but indeed that is what had happened. Jamie and I just kind of stared at it and each other, stunned.

I lifted the frame carefully, and nearly all of the glass had fallen out, leaving a rectangle outline of broken glass. It fell evenly on top of the cat's food dish, which shattered it radially into long spears of glass pointing to the cat bowl.

We carefully put all of the shards into a brown paper bag. Some of them were about two feet long. It was a very quiet, eerie process, like playing Pick Up Sticks with long, jagged blades.

The frame still had some big pieces of glass wedged into the border, and I had to pry the most menacing pieces out.

Knives hid for a while under the couch. She came out eventually, with a much smaller, narrower window to the land of the Other Cat. The next night she was playing with a bottle cap in the kitchen, and slid across the floor, limbs flailing. She plowed into the base of the frame and it came crashing down, again. She escaped before it landed on her, and went back into hiding. I moved the frame into my closet.

2009-06-01T20:34:00.000-07:00

The City of Driveways!

We flew to Portland for a week to go to Mary's wedding and have a visit. It was about a year since I moved away. We landed and picked up a rental car Sunday night, and drove to North Portland, where we were staying for the first few nights. About a few minutes after we got to town, Sam and Laura showed up at the house, rosy cheeked from a Memorial Day BBQ at Roland's down the street. We walked to Mississippi Pizza and caught up over beers that are only available in Portland. Uncannily familiar. Here are some pictures from the trip.

Waterfront Park. Flew out of Denver in pouring rain, landed in Portland in sunny, warm weather. A little too hot on this day, actually.

A little trip to the Gorge to experience the general soft and squishiness of everything in the Northwest, even the rocks.

For the first few nights in town, we stayed with Sam, Cale and Kaila, in their house in North Portland. They have a cute little place just off Mississippi and Shaver. A really great spot in a neighborhood I always wanted to live. Many other people wanted to live there too, as it had grown significantly since I left. An anti-hipster graffiti campaign had erupted on the walls of new buildings and renovations. "Hipster go home." "No more hipsters." My favorite entry "Only white hipster MILFs welcome."

We stayed on a futon in the living room, and the three of them were incredibly welcoming. It was great to see everyone again. Especially these two fuzzballs, Tnanu and Salton. Tnanu is the little scrawny orange cat, who has taken to exploring the neighborhood, only so far as the surrounding bushes. Salton is the Lab, who looks more like a sea lion than a dog. They were our roommates, and Jamie fell in love.

As did they.

Cannon Beach. We rented a car for half of the trip and made a drive out to coast. The mandatory trip to Tillamook. The Oregon Coast, of fine sand and strong winds. Cold water and spooky views unparalleled. "It's so dramatic here," Jamie said.

I made this sandcastle for her.

The ceremony was held in a courtroom in Vancouver, WA. Not the most unlikely place to wed, but it's up there. Phil's dad is a family law judge, so he married them in his chamber. I was a witness. Phil's family is Mormon, and there were so many children that if you were looking out just at the benches, you might mistake it for a preschool class.

In all sincerity, it was a great ceremony. It was very simple, with little ego or fluff, making it that much more emotional and honest. I've been to roughly 1,200 weddings, and this was one of only a handful that misted me up.

Reception was at a Portland park. Lots of donuts, because Mary insisted on them for her special day. The turnout was overwhelmingly Phil's family, they being so fruitful and multiple. But a handful of Mary's friends drank beer antisocially in the corner table.

Talasen and Chad have a little monkey now. Talasen wears the baby well, probably because she already dresses a little like a '50s housewife. Also, it's almost impossible to call the mother of an infant, "T bag."

We spent the rest of the vacation hanging out in town. Jamie found us a great deal at the Benson, which is a gorgeous historic hotel downtown. Highlights included black silky robes, and the cable. We mostly walked around, saw the sights, patronized bookstores and bars and bought world-class coffee. But maybe my favorite night was sitting on a futon in north Portland, with a big dog and cat, playing Super Mario Bros. 2 and drinking cheap beer. That setup could happen anywhere I guess, but it's just a little better in Portland.

2009-05-24T01:00:00.000-07:00

There are 6.8 billion people in the world. In the history of the world, an estimated 106 billion people have lived.

2009-05-06T08:58:00.000-07:00

Blog now unlocked

Apologies to anyone who attempted to view the blog since the weekend, but got a password prompt. The widget for my Twitter feed was locking the blog. Everything is once again free, free, free for all to read!

2009-04-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

It all started with Lady Gaga

2009-04-17T18:38:00.001-07:00

Once again, too cold to go outside.

2009-04-11T01:06:00.000-07:00

A bunch of songs, guided by frustration and bad timing

2009-04-07T18:53:00.000-07:00

Little baby fun mixes

Swede was a big fan of this website Muxtape, which was a pretty cool way to stream a handful of songs. But they ran into some trouble with an industry thats having a hard time accepting change that has happened long ago. Enter 8Tracks. Basically the same, but a few more bells and whistles. Here's the first one I made Sunday, when it was, in fact, too cold to go outside.

2009-03-07T18:06:00.000-08:00

Stay Positive

I've rounded year one of my time in Denver, CO. Admittedly, I've been a little sour on the place. I was in DC recently for work, and catching up with my friend Jerry and his GF Marjorie. They'd been toying with the idea of moving out here, and seemed surprised that I was lukewarm on the city. It occurred to me that I maybe I haven't been giving Denver a fair shake. It is an undeniably nice place to live. My problems with living here largely boil down to the fact that it's kind of one-dimensional, and people really only live here because they like skiing. But honestly, one year is only enough time to get your apartment furniture set up the way you like it, and pick out a few favorite places around town.

So I'll take this one-year mark as a way to catalog exactly what my Denver existence, present and future, has going for it:

1. Gabor's. A wise man once said that all you really need in a home is good bar and a good coffee shop within walking distance. Well I got good old Garbo's. Many a night I've spent with Danni and the big red booths and the free jukebox. If only they didn't have all that shit on the walls. It's like a TGI Friday's. Dammit, positive. I love G'bos. My home away from home.
2. The New Argonaut. The original Args was a beauty of a liquor store, and it had that welcoming smell of stale booze. Like opening a bar the morning after a big night. But when the new crown jewel of Colfax opened up in November, oh boy, it was a whole new world. Two stories, two walls of cold cases. Every beer and wine you could want.

3.The Denver Library. I'm not going to compare it to Multnomah County's library, I'm really not. The Denver central library is a fine public establishment. Decent internet ordering service, good-looking building. But best of all, it's heavily used. Nothing like seeing a good crowd in a library on a Saturday afternoon.
4. St. Mark's Coffee, but only when the cool girl is working. Most of the people who work at St. Mark's, let's face it, are assholes. But when that one great representative of the best coffee shop in city is on duty, the coffee is affordable and the smiles are free. She plays great music, she's talkative but not nosy. It's a lottery to walk into that place, you might not get a table, you might get a big fuck you from the barista. But on the right day, it's perfect, and there's nowhere I'd rather type away the day.
5. The Thin Man. St. Mark's swarthy brother. The lighting, the beautiful staff and clientele, the infused vodkas, the beer selection. There's not a damn thing wrong with this bar, except the fact that some nights it's a little too popular.
6. Hi-Dive. This is a new discovery, I'm embarrassed to say. One look at their calendar, and it's clear this is nexus of cool in an otherwise jam band and juggalo town. In April, we're going to see Mirah, Clem Snide and maybe Laura Gibson w/ Damien Jurado.
7. The sky:

8. Tattered Cover. Wood floors, good coffee, readings, and maybe the nicest staff in any bookstore.
9. And finally, it kills me to even type this as a positive aspect of Denver. But here it is: Colfax Avenue. It's filthy, teeming with malnourished, drug addicts. Storefronts with cracked windows and dried vomit on the stoops. Is it hell on earth? Little bit. But Colfax is the exact opposite of all the stuff that's lame about Denver. Denver at its worst is an over-polished, new money, Escalade-driving, tinted sunglasses-wearing Cheesecake Factory. Colfax likes to chuck eggs at that city and then go to the nearest bar to celebrate with beer from a dirty glass.

2009-03-01T19:18:00.000-08:00

New Mix

The following link takes you to a free download of a mix I made. It's a weird little bunch of songs that's don't make any sense together. Some old, some new. Stuff I've been listening to. Here it is.

1. Losing My Edge, LCD Soundsystem
2. Dance, Dance, Dance, Lykke Li
3. Summertime Clothes, Animal Collective
4. Let the Beat Build, Lil Wayne
5. Set It Off, Girl Talk
6. Time to Pretend, MGMT
7. Nothing Ever Happened, Deerhunter
8. Pushover, The Long Winters
9. Secret Meeting, The National
10. Empty Hearted Town, Warren Zevon
11. With All My Heart, Clem Snide
12. One Red Thread, Blind Pilot
13. The Ice Is Getting Thinner, Death Cab For Cutie
14. Dirty Keys, Darla Farmer
15. No One Moves and No One Bows, Irregular Instrument
16. Blood Bank, Bon Iver
17. Desperados Under the Eaves, Warren Zevon

Swede just wrote a really cool post about making mixes. He adores making them and getting them from friends. It's a fun little hobby. Lots of people do it, draw entertainment and comfort from it. I think we all privately think we've made masterpieces.

For about two or three years, I made mix CDs on a regimented timeline. I took the idea from Cameron Crowe, who said it made a good diary, better than anything you could write down. I did it religiously, one mix every two months. Ten songs from each month. Each one would start with some sort of media clip or non-song track, and in the middle was another such track separating the two months. I'd name each one based on time period, and design liner art, keep them in jewel cases.

I have a Taurean urge to collect, catalog and make lists. In one stretch of unemployment, I made a database of every album I had, that could be cross-referenced by Artist, Album, Release Date and Period of Life. I don't know if this level of compulsion is healthy, but you can imagine how much making the mix CDs soothed it.

I stopped it eventually, mostly when digital listening overtook CDs. When you can put your entire collection on a block about the size of a deck of cards, mix CDs seem clumsy. But also, when iPods took over, listening became harder to track by time period. It was like the floodgates opened up, and a stack of disks turned into a sea of tracks. I still make playlists and swap them over file sharing sites. But there's something archaic and cute about my little stack of jewel cases from that time in my life. It's most definitely a diary from my mid-20s, a chaotic and vivid time.

I'm glad I did it. Some of them are embarrassingly bad. Peppered with emo, and agro stuff from time living in suburban Phoenix. But some of them are, well I gotta say, some of them are masterpieces.

2009-02-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year

In late February. Dammit. Also known as, several pictures of Jamie with Shelley's dog, Abby.

A pack of us traveled an epic distance, including two buses, to get to a New Year's Eve party. Then we got drunk (er). Then we listened to Kanye West and shot bits of paper with trace residues of gunpowder across the apartment. There were masks. There were snacks. There were inappropriate verbal exchanges. It was a New Years Party.

The aforementioned pictures of Jamie with the dog. Look at her bliss. It's almost that of a cult member or a Chinese girl at a Michael Jackson concert.

I also fed this dog its weight in tortilla chips. She would do anything for those chips. ANYTHING. I was playing music on a laptop for part of the night. At one point I looked at the playlist that had been pre-created, and there was nothing but Kanye West. I said, "Hey, there's nothing but Kanye West on this playlist." "What's wrong with Kanye West?" "Nothing but it's literally ALL Kanye West." "Oh, don't exaggerate." And then I realized I had a filter on the playlist for Kanye West. Heh.

Wes was in charge of the party favors, of which there were hats, masks and popper thingys. It was funny, he was militantly protecting them from people tapping in too soon.

Dance for your chips Abbey. Dance.

Champagne cocktails spewed from their carafe into our glasses, draining into our insides like water down a bathtub drain.

Graveyard of the low-level pyrotechnics.

Somehow, this picture just sums up 90 percent of New Years Eve experiences, I imagine.

2009-02-19T21:34:00.000-08:00

Guest interview on Rabbit Updates

My friend Lisa has a blog of her own, called "Rabbit Updates." I've become quite a fan. It has three things going for it (well, more than three I guess, but for the sake of my plug, we'll say three):

1 Lisa is a graphic designer for that catalog guy, you know the one from Seinfeld, so it's pretty cool looking.
2 There are videos.
3 There are rabbits.

I did a short interview for the blog, to help her solve a mystery of devoured rugs in her house. Check it on out, and enjoy ... Rabbit Updates!

2009-02-15T20:00:00.000-08:00

Christmas in Massachusetts

Where they have beaches, but they are frozen.

If this blog were a house, it would the one on the block that leaves its Christmas lights up into March, while a jack-o-lantern gets soft on the porch. But anyway, here are some pictures from Christmas. I went back East to spend the holiday with Jamie's family. I had wonderful time, although sometimes intense. Most of the trip we spent on the couch, drinking Midas Touch Golden Elixir and watching cable, a golden elixir of its own.

Jamie and her mom are on the beach (actually it's in New Hampshire). This is a little coastal town, or "shore" as they call it, where we got a tray full of amazing fried seafood and crunched through frozen sand to the Atlantic.

We spent Christmas Eve shopping. For Christmas. In the rain. I went out with Jamie and her brother in their mom's car. It was a nice chance to have Josh tell some great stories about their youth and more eccentric family members. And I got to see the joy of New Hampshire strip malls:

We walked to the car after getting bagels and coffee, and the remote entry wasn't working. And then the key wouldn't open the door. "Shit. The battery must be dead and the ignition key must not open the doors." So Jamie called her mom and told her, "No Mom, I'm telling you that the key doesn't open the door. No we tried. Do you have another key somewhere?" Then Josh walked over to try again, and walked back. "Wrong car."

This is Christmas Eve night at her aunt's and uncle's house. Jamie has many aunts, and I met many of them. A table heaped with food, lots of wine and rum. I talked about unions with Jamie's dad and uncle and Josh. We watched cable.

And Christmas morning. I had heard rumblings of what kind of gifts I would get from Jamie's mom. She's been known to stuff stockings with sunscreen, mechanical pencils, decorative socks, etc. But I must say, I made out like a bandit. A metal water bottle, gloves, scarf and hat, a scented candle, and a tiny bottle of anti-bacterial fluid. All in all, her family was so kind to me.

Christmas night we spent at another aunt's and uncle's house, this one rather large, and a large gathering. A keg in the basement, which was just barely not distracting enough for Jamie's dad to wrangle up all of the kids for a group picture. It was all he wanted for Christmas and he got it. It was a Christmas miracle. And then all the kids went back into the basement and got shitfaced, Christmas-style.

2009-02-02T23:07:00.000-08:00

Phone IM with Mary, while at the library Sunday

Mary: Phill's a loyal reader of yours.
Me: Oh that's good
He should join Twitter
That's my answer to everything
Mary: Tate, I have an earache, what should I do?
Me: Clean the shit out of your ears.
Mary: say, "get on twitter."
because that's your answer to everything
duh
Me: Oh haha
I really missed my cue
Mary: yeah, god
Have you ever seen Titus?
Me: Get on Twitter!
Mary: Much better

2009-02-01T00:48:00.001-08:00

Things I like to do while drinking on the couch late at night

I like to sit on the couch and have some drinks. In my adult years, I've developed a series of routine activities that soothe various compulsions and obsessions. I do them as often as possible, as late into the night as I practically can. Here they are:

Blog. Exhibit A:
Download music. I do this the most when poor. Whenever I'm bored or lacking in money for activities, I find myself reading and downloading compulsively. We've officially reached the point in media where anyone can have anything he or she wants, any time. That's tough to resist when you have high speed internet and some time on your hands.
Watch comic book movies on DVD. Commonly Batman Returns/Begins, Hellboy, Spider-Man 2. The rare, perennial treat, The Crow.
Watch television on the Internet. This is a fairly new one. Its constant availability makes for a beautiful 2-5 a.m. occupation.
Google stuff. You know, like Monchichi or Captain Nintendo.
Listen to Jamie search for dogs on adoption websites. Also a new one. I'm always pretty amazed at how she can be equally enthusiastic about every single one. If the dog has a bandana on, forget about it. The other night, she found a litter of Border Collies up for adoption. Their names were Plum, Banana, Pineapple, Barack and Orange.
Buy clothes on the Internet. My favorite website for this is www.cheapestees.com. Nothing high fashion, mostly t-shirts, hoodies, etc. And there's nothing like getting a fun package of Hanes basics that you don't remember ordering.
Watch Battlestar Galactica (e.g., now)
Subscribe to magazines. This one peaked in about 2002, when I had just moved to Portland and didn't have a lot of friends, but did have a new computer and great windows for reading glossy print. I think at one point I had, I want to say, nine magazine subscriptions -- Harper's, Rolling Stone, US Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, etc. Then I moved and a lot of them lapsed. The flame has reignited, though, as my first issue of Wired should show any day now. Google cheap magazines, I dare you.
Download computer applications. Now and then I'll wake up, with the telltale zip file on the the desktop. Could be a twitter app, a new email. Who knows. Chances are, I'll scrap it later.
Reorganize the Netflix Queue. Wake up, open up the computer, and behold, 350 DVDs in the Queue. #1 in the list: Weird Science. #2: St. Elmo's Fire. #3: Sixteen Candles. #4: Ultimate Avengers The Animated Movie, Part 2.
Watch movie trailers on IMDB. I'll watch them all. Watchmen, 2012, The stupid-ass Spirit. Transformers 2, GI Joe.
And finally, the DVD culmination of it all. Stay up late enough. Drink enough cheap beers. Read enough back episodes of webcomics. And it's always going to end up with me, Angelina, Jonny Lee Miller and the 1995 soft-cyberpunk masterpiece, Hackers.

2009-01-29T22:00:00.000-08:00

I moved my lamp to the other side of the apartment

[Waving] Thanks for filling in for me Mom! No problem son! Try not to write about drinking so much! Can't make any promises, but okay!

[End scene.]

I can't get this one type of beer out of my head lately. It's haunting me. It's a limited release beer and has been in stock at Argonaut lately. To give credit, Jamie introduced me to it over Christmas as her favorite beer. It is called ... Midas Touch Golden Elixir. If you clicked the link, skip this. If not, it's based roughly on a drink excavated from an ancient tomb, a blend of wine, beer and mead. So it has barley, grapes, honey and saffron. Yeah, saffron. It's like the most expensive substance by weight on the planet. It's the pistil of a flower that must be hand-picked by enslaved brown people.

Dogfish Head makes some incredible beers. They're leading the gourmet beer charge from the commanding state of Delaware. Midas Touch is so good, that I have a hard time not spending the $13 for four bottles of beer. As Jamie puts it, "It tastes like 300 calories and saffron."

###

If you've not noticed the ticking column to the right, Twitter pretty much rules my life. But not rules in a bad sort of way, like a heroin addiction. More like a helpful new type of cigarette. It's like another IM, or email, or blog or whatever. One of those things that doesn't replace normal activity, just overlays it. A new venue for chatting, following people of note, watching headlines from off the beaten path. Or it's just another silly internet thing that I stop doing in a few months.

###

I've been feeding Knives her cod liver oil regularly. It seemed to help a little, but then she started hacking again recently. So two nights ago, we were watching TV and she started making a guttural heaving, deeper and truer than the usual hack. She coughed up a hairball about the size of a plum. I was so proud of her.

###

I'm wrapping up this book Spook Country, by William Gibson. I read the cyberspace books when I was younger, and The Gernsback Continuum is one of my favorite short stories, that when I read it in high school really drew me to short fiction. Spook Country is full of the same dazzling prose, loaded with images that mushroom in your mind before you can turn the page. Right down to the green sneakers of his paranoid performance artist. Gibson always seems about a day and half beyond the current ideas. Hundreds of mini-essays, Santerian gods, text-message wiretapping, Cuban organized crime.

It takes place closer to reality than the old VR will rule the world novels. "It's the place we all have landed, few by choice. The place where we are learning to live." While Neuromancer had me wondering in the '90s whether Gibson's world could someday be real, Spook Country has me wondering if it already is.

###

The other day we were in Jamie's car, and I had my phone playing music on the stereo through an auxiliary jack. She was in the bank and I noticed that when I touched the screen, it made a weird whine. But only the screen and only when it was lit up. Jamie got back in the car and I said, "Hey look at this." Whreeeeeeee normal whreeeeeeeee normal.

"Isn't that weird?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"It only happens when I touch the screen. Isn't that interesting?"
"Yeah, I guess it's kind of interesting."
"You never pay any attention to my interests."

###

Two nights ago, to allow better reading after dark, I moved my lamp from one side of the room to the next. It helped, so I left it there for now. Now it's kind of like I have a whole new apartment. All I want to do is sit on the couch under the new lamplight and do various activities. Read, watch TV, whatever. It's better now.

In the spirit of The Moving of the Lamp, I have changed the blog layout. Nothing too big, just a tweak here and there. Moving a couple things around.

###

2009-01-23T20:19:00.000-08:00

Guest blogger ... My Mom!

So my mom CC'd me on a letter she sent to the paper she's had delivered since I was a kid, and that I reported for a few years ago. She fancies herself a journalist in her own right, or at least an active participant in the fourth estate. Mom has always written LTE's, and called reporters to volunteer herself as a source for articles, or recommend story ideas. The Tribune laid off 40 percent of its staff, ended home delivery and cut publication to four days a week recently.

So anyway, the day after Google pulled the plug on its print ad project, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune filed bankruptcy, and there's a general sense of death rattle in print media, I thought this a tender, personal illustration of why it's so fucking sad (and yes, she writes emails in green):

RE: A sad day

This is the last day that I will get up in the morning, walk out to my driveway and pick up my morning paper. Coffee is already brewing, preparing for my little piece of calm and quiet before my day begins. I sit down to read my Tribune. I catch up on the world, the city, the weather, how my teams did. Check out places to go, what's on TV tonight,laugh at the comics and columnists and opinions (sometimes the serious ones) and always check the ads for deals.

There are some days when I do not have this luxury in the morning, but there it is on my coffee table. I pick it up periodically during the day, especially when my 18 year old is watching reruns of Pokemon. Then there are always those doctor appointments. I am not a patient "waiter" but my trusty Trib is always in the back seat to fill the time when I need it.

I work in front of a computer everyday. Just not the same feeling to read the paper sitting in front of it too. I've never subscribed to the Republic and never will. I will drive or walk to the corner to get my copy of the Trib every Wed, Fri, Sat and Sunday.

I will really miss mornings like this. I hope my delivery person was offered another job. I hate to think of so many people being without work.

Just wanted you to know.

2009-01-21T21:00:00.000-08:00

The Path to the Presidency

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Barack Obama: Path to the Presidency

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

2009-01-20T21:06:00.000-08:00

Good night, and good luck

2009-01-19T22:05:00.000-08:00

A series of things that bring me joy:

Twitter — The concept is elegantly simple, and thus leaves endless avenues to improvise. Hard to describe in an appealing way until you've dug in and found how many potential uses, amusements it offers. If you have any interest in social networking, Twitter is hands-down the best game in town right now. Also pursue open source add-ons, like TweetDeck, TwitScoop, TwitterFox, and so on. I'm here.

Pet Society on Facebook — This is arguably the lamest internet-based fad I've obsessed over since the AOL game "Squelchies." No, fuck that. This is way lamer. I have a pet thingy that dances and laughs and changes clothes and plays ball. His name is scraps and he lives in a house with a couch and TV.

Blind Pilot, Three Rounds and a Sound

I Like to Rearrange the Letters in the Name of my Neighborhood Bar, Gabor's — a Facebook group I founded that dwells on exactly what you might think.

Jamie's use of the word hobag — for example, while listening to the Obama inauguration concert:
Me: This is lame. Really lame. Who the hell planned this?
Jamie: I don't know. Some hobag.

Netflix instant viewing for Mac — When I first realized this had become available, I watched, I believe, 7 episodes of The Office in a row. Stay away from CSI. It's like running on cement near the pool.

Monitor Mix — Carrie Brownstein, of the now-defunct Sleater-Kinney, has a blog on the All Songs Considered website. It's called Monitor Mix, and it's a pleasant blend of nostalgia, humor and obscure new music picks. Check it out.

A dish wand

The Fart Party -- Julia Wertz's autobiographical comic about her life of drinking, swearing and eating cheese.

Bamboo kitchen tools -- stirring spoon, spatula, cutting boards. Lightweight, non-absorbent. Doesn't warp or split. Fun fact from the label: bamboo is not a tree but a grass, and therefore a quick-growing and renewable resource.

Trailer Park Boys -- Must be seen to be appreciated.

2009-01-18T18:33:00.000-08:00

What's new with Knives??

The question on everyone's mind. And here are the answers.

Well, for starters, she's obese. Ok, that's not totally fair, the doctor said she's "overweight and borderline obese." If she gains any more weight, there's a chance she'll become diabetic and have to take insulin shots. I'm on vet's orders to put her on fat food and if she doesn't lose weight, she'll have to go on a prescription diet. I don't even know what that would entail, but it sounds like the veterinarian's equivalent to when a state has to take control of a local government because it's so independently inept. And I don't want to be the pet-owner's equivalent to Camden, NJ.

She wasn't always this fat, really. In fact, I'm not totally sure how it got to this point. People don't believe me when I tell them that I feed her less than the food bag instructs. They laugh when I blame holiday house-sitters for overfeeding.

I'm sure it's the same situation with obese humans. I always wonder how enormous people get to that point. I'm sure in their minds, things are going just great. Sure, a little between-meal snacking here and there. An extra potato on the side, or a short-stack with breakfast. Then one day, the clothes stop fitting. The hips and stomach press against and stick to the shower curtain in the morning. And the doctor is threatening a prescription diet.

The moment of clarity is unmistakeable, like when you let your apartment go a little, but don't notice it until someone comes over. And it's suddenly crystal clear that you've been living in filth. For Knives and I, it was when I opened up her cardboard carrier box, and she was clearly filling it up. She was like a soufflee.

"Oh, she's big!" the vet said. And the words actually crossed my mind, no she isn't. She's small. I have a small cat. But no. I do not.

And so, today I went to PetSmart, and bought her the fat food. They try to euphemize it as "Indoor formula," or "Less active." But we all know what it is. It's Weight Watchers. It's Diet Pepsi and a salad with lemon wedges. It's Michelob Ultra. It's an admission that something has gone wrong.

I didn't take her to the vet because of her weight. She's had a bad cough for the last few weeks. It's less of a cough, more like a hairball that won't come up. So I took her in to the discount vet Friday. She hates to go in her box, and in fact, can bust out of it fairly easily. I ended up squishing her into the little box, and holding the top closed with all my might, then duct-taping the lid on in several places.

The vet said nothing was wrong, so it was probably just hairball trouble. The solution is a little tube of goo, the chief ingredient being cod liver oil. It greases up her insides, so she either hacks it up, or it passes out the back end. The goo is 'palatable,' but in order to make sure she'll eat it I'm supposed to smear it on on her paw so she licks it off.

The second time I did this, it was first thing in the morning, and I scooped her up on the bed. But instead of licking it off she shook her little paw and flicked the cod liver oil all over me and the bed. It was disgusting. Jamie was horrified, and thought that the goo had immediately worked and she hacked something out at me.

In other news, Knives will now be shitting in wheat. I know, it's strange. And I'm skeptical that the wheat litter will actually work. But I read an article about how clay litter is strip mined by a company owned by Dick Cheney, so I went out and bought her some Swheat Scoop.

Diet food. Cod liver oil greasing up her insides. Shitting in wheat. It's an exciting time in her life.

2009-01-11T18:39:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving in Montana

Playing catchup here, but below are some photos and such from our Thanksgiving trip. Jamie and I drove to Bozeman, MT, for the long weekend to spend the holiday with her cousin Lauren and boyfriend John. Strangely, I really enjoy quiet holidays with other people's families. Probably because my own family gatherings are anything but quiet. Lauren and John were great hosts, and guides to Montana. Both from Massachusetts, one of those couples living a life boldly variant from their upbringing.

Montana is probably the wildest state I've been to, contending with its neighbor Wyoming and then Eastern Oregon. It's Bigfoot country. I've had the joy of driving through both states in the dead of night, twice. The only way I can describe the experience is gothic. You can go 100 miles across this part of the country without seeing another car, a town, a gas station. Nothing. And when it's late at night, you're talking no lights, nothing but dark. Icy cold pebbles of snow swirling across the highway in little tornadoes. The closest thing to life are the frequent explosions of Cervid blood and guts staining the road a spray of deep red.

Anytime I have to get out of the car while driving across Wyoming or Montana, I want to get back in. There's a haunting sense that bad things happen here, and if they do, nobody will help.

But anyway, enough of that spooky. Once you're in town with family and friends, it's a beautiful place and a great setting for TGive.

John eagerly prepped and baked a turkey, Lauren made squash and a Tofurkey. I made my specialty fresh cranberry sauce.

I know a lot of people like these little wheat and soy renderings of poultry, but they kind of creep me out, like little softball loafs. Still it was a nice addition.

So we sat around the house from morning till night, drinking mimosas, beer and wine. Reading magazines and making small talk. Eating and eating and eating. Just what a Thanksgiving ought to be.

Then we had dessert on the couch, and watched several episodes of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia."

Like every good trip to Montana, a drive through Yellowstone.

The animal life in Yellowstone has an eerie lack of concern for human activity. They seem completely oblivious, even to vehicles. And no matter how casual they seem to be toward us, you can't help be kind of staggered by the amount of power within arm's reach.

We had to idle past a herd of buffalo as they took up most of the road. The size of them is hard to grasp. It's not so much that you can feel the ground move as they near, but you can definitely feel them. Their presence has weight.

This one seemed to size me up as we drove through the herd. It's black, deep left eye kind of paralyzed me for a second. "It's your spirit animal!" Jamie said.

A fun little bar in downtown Bozeman.

The drive out. Much more stunning in the daylight. But still pretty creepy.

2009-01-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

Mr. Chair's Best of 2008!

They aren't really in order, the list sizes change arbitrarily. And between you and me, a lot of my picks aren't even from 2008. The last one was a topsy-turvy year. Comic books ruled the box office. Indie rock turned earthy. And a lot of art was, well, really fucking dark. As was the year I spose. But here are some things that helped us enjoy, and endure, 2008.

Movies.
I had a lot of fun at the movies this year. I can't say I saw a lot of the critically acclaimed movies that ought to be on such a list. But it was a dream come true for comic book fans.
7. Wanted -- The Russian director of Night Watch has handily taken the helm of flashy, stylized action from the Wachowskis.
6. Iron Man -- Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark. This is why we go to the movies.
5. Tropic Thunder -- Robert Downey Jr. as an Australian actor as a black man. This is why we go to the movies.
4. Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant -- The bipolar filmaker (Elephant/Finding Forrester??) is on a roll. His movies seem so real lately.
3. Hellboy II: The Golden Army -- I don't think a lot of people saw this one. But Del Toro's modern fairytales on screen get better and better. It's as much a companion to Pan's Labyrinth as it is to the Hellboy comics.
2. Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- Judd Apatow & Co. can do no wrong. Another perfect balance of irreverence, laughter and world-weary sincerity.
1. The Dark Knight -- No surprise here. Now I know there were some haters. It gave my girlfriend nausea and PTSD. Batman's voice sounded like Bea Arthur. But from start to finish, this movie was nothing short of an ass-kicking. It was dark, smart, weighty, and unforgiving -- clearly everything moviegoers needed last year. It nailed the zeitgeist. Hype aside, Heath Ledger's idealist/anarchist Joker elevated TDK to the best comic book movie ever made.

Music.
The music scene is fucking good these days. I credit the shift to digital and streaming. There are so many different, exciting artists. 2007 was great, and 2008 was still full of surprises. I haven't even listened to a ton of stuff yet, but from what I did, there was some pretty sweet shit:
14. Thao with the Get Down Stay Down
13. Vampire Weekend
12. Helio Sequence, Keep Your Eyes Ahead
11. Stephen Malkmus, Real Emotional Trash
10. Ratatat, LP3 - Fact: listening to Ratatat can transport you temporarily into the future, and increases productivity by 23 percent.
9. Jack's Mannequin, Glass Passenger -- Yeah, I still listen to emo. F off.
8. Weakerthans, Reunion Tour
7. Calexico, Carried to Dust -- I miss their spookier old stuff, but they keep evolving like a new Wilco.
6. Sigur Ros, jibberish words -- don't know what they're singing about but I likes the sounds of it.
5. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig! Lazarus! Dig! -- at his dark, funny, smarmy best.
4. Blitzen Trapper, Furr -- Portland gives us a new kind of indie rock. One made in the woods by middle-aged men with beards.
3. The Hold Steady, Stay Positive -- okay, it sounded a lot like the last album, but who cares. The only album of the year that blew my ass out the first time it started to play.
2. TV on the Radio, Dear Science -- everything you've heard is true. Nothing like them around, and they get keep getting better.
1. Bon Iver, Forever, For Emma -- Guys with beards ruled the year. I definitely listened to this more than any other album from 2008. Can't wait for the follow up. Can't wait to see him live.

Songs.
Bon Iver, Skinny Love
Blitzen Trapper, Furr
The Hold Steady, Lord, I'm Discouraged
TV on the Radio, The Golden Age
Hopscotch Willie, Stephen Malkmus
Helio Sequence, Keep Your Eyes Ahead
Weakerthans, Virtue the Cat Explains her Departure

Television.
I'm always behind cause I watch everything on Netflix, so almost none of this is actually 2008. But it's when I saw it dammit.
5. Mad Men -- Who would have thought a show on AMC about ad execs could be a pitch-perfect portrayal of the post-war American Dream's sinister underside.
4. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia -- "Dennis, our bar is south Philly in a scary alley... might as well call it 'Rape Bar.'"
3. Big Love -- Bill Paxton has too many wives.
2. Lost -- If you doubt me, sit down with a season. I dare you.
1. The Wire -- Perfect end to a perfect show.

Honorable Mentions, all categories.
Run Fatboy Run. Nada Surf, Lucky. Okkervil River, The Stand Ins. Fleet Foxes. The Swim, Random Walk. Shearwater, Rook. Randy Newman. Jenny Lewis. Giant Sand. The Office. Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Harold and Kumar. Flight of the Concords. Weeds. Cloverfield. The Orphanage. And of course all of the amazing stuff I've been reading about that I've been missing. Can't wait.

Shit I hated:
-The Signal -- I don't know where I heard this was good, but it wasn't. Could have been made by a bunch of 13-year-olds saying, "You know what would be cool..."
-Journey to the Center of the Earth -- I don't know why I even watched this. Self-loathing I guess. Brendan Fraser is still Encino Man.
-Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Poopy *fart noise* -- Lucas proves himself a total. fucking. ass.
-Newspapers going under.
-Devotchka
-Various bailouts
-MTV reality shows that are unmistakably scripted.
-The Zac Efron haircut

2008-12-12T13:24:00.000-08:00

A holiday wish from LoDo Denver

There's this fat bald guy who works next door to my office, who is just a mean, greedy son of a bitch. But nonetheless, he amuses us, with his douche-y mustache and framed photo of George Bush on his desk.

I was walking out of the office, and this guy was standing on the curb bellowing to another guy across the street, as though he had just slept with his wife or something. I'm not up on sports, so forgive me if I get the details wrong, but it basically went:

"The Pistons are fucking done! Done! Allen Iverson is shit!"
"Well you just wait until the Lions are back."
"The Lions are shit. They'll be shit for the next five years. Fuck your Lions. Happy fucking Holidays."

And then they both walked off.

2008-12-06T19:44:00.000-08:00

Cory and Shannon make it official

God, this has taken so long to post. I'm a bad blogger. My apologies to my 6 or so adoring fans. Anyway, here are the photos from Cory's wedding. Immediately after the events of the previous post, the following occurred. Swede, Tim, Jamie and I took Swede's bucket of rusty bolts, deathtrap of a car to the Valley of the Sun for more celebration.

The 'rehearsal dinner' in Cory's mom's backyard. In which barbecue was eaten, pictures were taken and people got drunk in the company of their elders.

Tim and Zack have a raucous moment:

More folks from out of town. Ande and Ryan made it, as did Sara and Jason, who used to live in Denver when Cory was here. I've been referred to as "new Jason."

Swede and Jason. This is Swedlund's face he likes to make when I take a picture of him. I don't know why. I call it his Metallica face, because he looks like James Hetfield when he does it.

The next day, preparing for the wedding. Cory looked very dapper. We drank Jameson and Scotch.

Swedlund, always wary of surrounding media, strikes a classic Groomsman/Groom pose:

Cory and Zack drifted into a smartphone video game session right before the wedding. Understandable, it had been a greuling few days, and we all need a little buttonpushy from time to time.

I adore this picture, taken in a school bus on the way to the wedding. But to be fair, if Sarah wants it yanked, I will understand.

My foxy date. Jamie is endlessly cute in pretty much all scenarios, but this was the first I had seen her in formal attire. Adorable.

Cory and Doug entertained on the school bus ride. Always the level head, even in the minutes before his nuptuals (fake nuptuals as they may be).

I love this picture. For one, it's a real time portrayal of the first time I had seen Dave and Jen in years. But it also has this great swanky Rat Pack feel. 'Hey Swede's rolling up, and look who he got in tow."

Another nice one. Jamie and Tim, with Jessica in the background. I have to give Jamie a great credit here. For five or six days, I towed her around with a small pack of my friends. Through hangovers and meet and greets and never ending transit. All this on her first introduction to my friends and home. She was a champ.

Zack, Labn and Jess did some juggling routines after the wedding. Yeah, with fire.

Cory and his dad have a moment. Kind of makes me tear up a little. The ceremony and reception very nice and as warm and disarming as the people involved. Mariachi band, outdoors, Sam made an unforgettable toast.

The following all occurred on the dancefloor after many drinks. If my tailor Mustapha knew that I did a backspin in my new suit, he would be so disappointed.

This is Jamie's signature dance move. Pushing it out. Yeah.

And finally, somehow it became tradition for the 'seemingly jovial' man in the background to take off his shirt at weddings. We all enjoyed it.

2008-11-23T16:13:00.000-08:00

Back in Tucson

You can't go home again, I reckon. But when your home is a place you really just love, for all of its changes or lack thereof, I think you have a pretty special place. I keep waiting to go back to Southern Arizona and find the magic has left, that I really have no place here anymore. But it never happens. The sunset looks just as beautiful. The bars are just as welcoming. The desert trails are just as calming. Familiar faces smile. And I can still sleep on Swede's couch.

Zack looks like Rasputin and juggles professionally (I typed that wrong at first and it looked like jiggles). Cory hangs out with ambassadors in Vienna. Tim is some sort of lawyer-engineer hybrid. Swede is out of papers and making an album. All changes aside, we can still inhabit the same small dirty apartment at pushing-or-pushed-30 and sing folk songs drunk until 4 in the morning.

It was great to see Matt again. It had been very long. I was jealous of his Marvel Zombies hoodie, and the fact that he and Evin have purchased rights to "suricountdownto18.com," because they are the entrepreneurial type. Jamie and I stayed in Matt's room the first night in town, and were amused by the contents: a mattress, a pack of Newports, two cups of Easy Mac, and a Mountain Dew.

While Zack, Jessica and Labn practiced their juggling routine for the wedding, and Swede and Cory planned the reception music, Jamie and I dashed to the Tucson mountains for a stroll through the Saguaro.

Jamie borrowed Swedlund's rigid and odorous corduroy cowboy hat to protect her fair New England skin.

In-between these trips to Gates Pass, there was a lot of bargoing for Cory's bachelor party. It ended up less a bachelor party, and more of a catching-up, two-day bar crawl/restaurant tour. So that was pretty much great. In fact, when our flight landed at TIA at around 11:30, we were greeted not with a sleepy driver and muted air mattress plans, but a bottle of Scotch and a trip to Che's Lounge.

But then we made it back to the Tucsons, this time so Tim could see one of those awe-inspiring sunsets that knock the aging cynic right out of anyone.

And then, a dinner at El Charro.

2008-11-05T19:17:00.001-08:00

Just one political post

Cause what's to say about a night like last night, except that you have to say something. What a night. What an election. What a great reminder that we live in a great country. I was joking with Lisa today that it feels weird to be sincerely emotionally affected by something, in a good way.

"(During the speech) I felt like I was in church, and that I actually believed in God," she said.

It's truly a political scenario that one who was paying attention during the last, I don't know, 50 years, would find impossible. As the New York Times put it:

"This is one of those moments in history when it is worth pausing to reflect on the basic facts:

An American with the name Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a white woman and a black man he barely knew, raised by his grandparents far outside the stream of American power and wealth, has been elected the 44th president of the United States."

And the amazing thing is that, while a broken economy and a highly unpopular incumbent party led the way, Barack Obama won in the best way possible. With a ground game of millions of volunteers. Campaigning every possible place he thought he could inspire a handful of people to vote -- not just electoral hot spots. He criticized his opponent, but kept his nose clean of the snide, depressing tactics McCain relied upon. His moves were all the right ones, strategically, but never seemed politically motivated. The man has a gift for -- at the very least the appearance of -- sincerity. This campaign was not only flawless, it was actually courageous. And that's something the Democratic Party has been lacking desperately, and has cost them a number of elections.

This man should not have won the presidency of the United States. But he did handily, and almost instantly it seems the rest of the world has a new optimism for a country that used to mean opportunity and unlimited prosperity, but of late has stood for fear, hate and a proud loathing for things like wisdom, generosity and temperance. Overnight it feels good to be an American again. And Progressives have control of the country for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt.

To be perfectly clear, Obama is far from a perfect candidate and will be far from a perfect president. And to be fair to his opponent, while I personally am about 180 degrees from John McCain's politics, until he sold his soul to the radical right the man was the conscience of the Republican Party. A good man who genuinely thought he could lead the country. Too bad his legacy will be wrecked by his horrible political judgment.

But again, I think this victory feels so good for how it was won, as much as the outcome. During his concession, McCain reverted to his old self, calling for unity and appearing comfortable and benevolent for the first time in years. And how did his constituents respond to his graciousness? Boos. Jeering. Taunting. Until 11:00 last night, McCain's presidential bid ran on the same fuel that the Bush Administration did: Xenophobia, anger, greed, bitterness and haughty self-interest. He tried to calm his supporters, but had already surrounded himself with the worst of the country -- the same people who bellowed racial slurs at Palin rallies. How did Obama's crowd react in Chicago, at mention of John McCain and Sarah Palin? Muted, calm applause.

This country is far from healed. If my conservative Arizonan cousins are any indicator, their online commentary was loaded with subtle racism and bitter fear that "this fuck could end up leading my country." The ruling class doesn't submit lightly. Who knows what's going to happen in the next four years, or the four after that. This world and this country remain, largely, covered in shit from the storm of George W. Bush. And for all we know, it could just get worse.

But for the first time I can remember, there is someone in a seat of tremendous power who I can look up to, and trust. And who, whether he succeeds or fails, wants to make this country great again, sincerely.

2008-11-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

DOche Do!

I made a playlist and named it, once again, after something funny Evin posted. Here it is to download, hope you like it. It starts with an oldie that seems relevant today. It ends with a ballad from my favorite piano-emo pop-punk band.

Enjoy Doches! And then go watch Mamma-Mia Doche- Bag~! Cause its obvious you cant watch MEN MOVIES with action and killing!!!

This Will Be Our Year, by The Zombies
Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
This Is A Fire Door Never Leave Open, by The Weakerthans
Acid Tongue, by Jenny Lewis
Umi Said, by Mos Def
Down Under, by Men at Work
Geography, by Thao and the Get Down Stay Down
Harps and Angels, by Randy Newman
Gloria, by Patti Smith
Virtue the Cat Explains Her Departure, by The Weakerthans
Red Right Hand, by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Spinning, by Jack's Mannequin
Knuckles, by The Hold Steady
Furr, by Blitzen Trapper
Hopscotch Willie, by Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks
Stay Positive, by The Hold Steady
Reckless, by The Swim
Two Silver Trees LIVE, by Calexico
Lillaby, by Jack's Mannequin

DOche Do!

2008-10-16T21:44:00.000-07:00

Mystique

Yesterday I saw a couple walking down the street, arm-in-arm. The woman was blind and the man was an albino. Which I guess makes for a good couple, because a blind woman has no need for pigment in a lover.

###

Jamie isn't even a huge Obama fan. But John McCain's bumbling, revelatory responses on health care and women's issues have brought out the rage. Today I got an IM from her during work that said, "I hope Obama crushes America with a fist of steel."

###

By the way, she was worried people I know would think she's in the military because I said she's been deployed. Not so. She works for the same left-wing conspiracy I do.

###

I downloaded like a dozen CDs in the past week or two. Highlights: Hold Steady, Almost Killed Me, featuring the line "I've been trying to get everyone to call me Sunny D. Cause I got the good stuff kids go for. But people keep calling me Five Alive." Nick Cave, Dig Lazarus Dig. Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream. Oasis, What's the Story Morning Glory. And Jimmy Eat World, Static Prevails. I'm all about the 90s rock lately.

###

As planned, now that I am 30, I have begun wearing Converse All-Stars. Because being a 20-something in Portland wearing Converse is tragically cliche. But being a 30-something who wears them in Denver adds a layer of mystique. And immaturity.

###

I voted early, and I voted for Obama. And my horse may just win this time around. And for once I can cast my vote knowing that it actually could influence the outcome of the election. And all of my politically misled family members in Arizona will vote for John McCain ... and their vote won't mean a damn thing. Ahahahaha!

2008-10-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

Goings-on

Well, Jamie's been deployed, so I'm solo for the week. I'm going to use the time to watch DVDs on Netflix that Jamie wouldn't want to watch. Predictably, it being October and all, the scary movies of the past year have jumped to the top of the Queue. On the other end of the spectrum, i just watched the second Harold and Kumar movie. A truly bad movie, but there are two sequences that are priceless: a dream sequence in which Kumar has a threesome with his ex-girlfriend, and a giant, anthropomorphic bag of weed. Then the final montage of a jaunt through Amsterdam. Probably worth renting just for those two scenes. Oh and NPH makes a comeback.

###

I'm very glad to see that my shower curtain exchange is gaining some traction. I think it's a good sign for the potential of a future business endeavor.

###

It's increasingly difficult to not discuss the election on the blog. It's become a good 75 percent of my waking thought and discussion. Like most of the country, Sarah Palin has become the target of my attention. I don't have TV reception at my place, so I've gone to folks' houses to watch the debates. Considering the crowd I run with, you can imagine the gatherings eventually devolve into alternating shouting of the C-word, and head-shaking disbelief. I'm growing legitimately concerned of my capability of living in this country if John McCain and Sarah Palin win this election. I don't think my rage can handle it. On the upside, looks like the wheels are coming off of their ticket.

###

Increasing the day-counting anxiety caused by an election year, the trips that will follow are also hanging just beyond the horizon. I'm heading to Tucson/Phoenix for Cory's wedding in mid-November. This will be the first time in quite a while that I'll be in Arizona with more than a couple of days packed with family obligation. I'm looking forward to the wedding and surrounding festivities, but also just being back home among friends. I can't complain about my living situation here, but I can't help getting homesick. The interesting thing about homesickness in the modern American West? It can't be cured. I've made too many homes. Which also accounts for a trip to Portland I'm planning shortly after the wedding.

###

For the first time in quite a while I went to the doctor last week. I hate the doctor. I don't really know why, other than the obvious discomfort. But there's such potential for complete loss of control over my daily life, that I just dread it like all hell. To give you some kind of idea of the level of my dread, when I first went into the office and the doctor took my blood pressure, it was something like 160 over 90.

But as always, these appointments go fine and actually are the source of some relief. The doctor was very nice. There was minimal poking or stabbing, and I'm in tip-top shape. My lungs work, my esophagus is just fine, and my testicles (testacles) are perfectly normal. Knock on some wood.

Because of my nervousness, I usually over-explain and inform my doctor. For example, after I had the testicle check, I said, "Oh shoot, I forgot to tell you in my medical history, but I just remembered .... um, because of what just ... uh, happened ... that when I was a kid I had a torsion of the testicular appendage. You know, not a full-on torsion. I just took some pills and it went away."

"Oh okay," the doctor said, seeming a little startled by my chipper and clinically specific revelation. "Well that must not have been a very fun experience for you."
"Nah, it was pretty lousy. What're you gonna do though right?"

2008-10-06T22:11:00.000-07:00

A Death in the Family

The holocaust of print journalism has hit close to home, as the paper I used to write for -- which also happens to be the paper I grew up reading and the last daily competitor for a monolithic corporate publisher -- will layoff 40 percent of its staff, pull coverage from two cities and scale back to four-day publication.

The Tribune is going the way of the Phoenix Gazette, and proving that there is no room in the coagulating media business for two (or really any) independent sources of news in even a large city like Phoenix, Arizona.

That's 142 hard-working journalists who will be sacked, departing along with the executive editor who hired me, who will retire after 37 years in the newspaper business.

It's the paper my mother read every morning since I was a kid, and made me reassemble back into its original form if I were to read it before her.

I had the pleasure to work for the paper a few years back, and the reporters there took joy in swiping stories from the dominant corporate paper in town, the Republic. And mostly, we just did what we could to give ass-kicking coverage of local events where Gannett didn't see profitable.

As much as the LA Times fiasco is the canary in the coal mine, the death of local, scrappy city newspapers is a blaring signal that the Fourth Estate is in big trouble in this country. Free speech and watchdog journalism are still around and will never die, make no mistake. It's just too bad it won't be delivered to your doorstep anymore. At least not seven days a week, and only about 60 percent strong, if you're lucky.

2008-09-28T21:25:00.000-07:00

The Running Man

I was reading this funny book about people working in an office, and how they've all struggled with depression at one time or another. And he refers to them all having taken showers sitting down. And I was thinking about how important the shower and morning routine in general is to your daily well-being. Someone once asked William Burroughs why he shot heroin, and his answer was, so he could get up and shave in the morning.

My shower curtain I have now is photos of goldfish on a backdrop of light blue bubbles. I've had it for a few months now, and I'm starting to get burned out on it. It's easy to get tired of the place where you spend your first 20 minutes of the day, every day. I had an idea the other day that the ideal would be to set up a system where you rotate shower curtains with all of your neighbors. So every two weeks or so, you'd have a new backdrop for your morning routine. A new setting in which to immerse yourself every morning.

One week you get the goldfish, the next you get an old-timey cartoon cowboy. Then you shower amid vintage postcards from far off places, Scotland and the Himalayas. And depending on the neighbor, maybe it's just good old transparent plastic. Splish splashing amid nothing but a smile.

I have to wonder if anyone has ever thought of this strategy. Or if somewhere, an apartment building of sunrise progressives wake up on the second Tuesday of the month, open their numbered doors to find a neatly bundled vinyl sheet with a fresh pattern that promises a day of optimism and vivid, exciting ideas.

###

I helped Jamie move this weekend and grabbed a pair of pliers and a Phillips head screwdriver to piece the bed and desk together. Once we got the apartment unpacked and set up, we were drinking some pop top beers and didn't have a bottle opener. So I used pliers to open the bottle, and started to think, why don't people carry around pliers with them on the daily?

Think about the day when you'd be carrying pliers, and someone needs a random task performed that can only be fullfilled with a pair of pliers. The task escapes me, but you're in a group of people, and someone needs something done, something that can only be done with a pair of stainless steel grips. And you just pull a pair out, and ply that job right done lickety split.

You would be a legend. People would tell that story until the day you died.

###

I was cooking in the kitchen the other day, and playing some music that must have been kind of dancey. Jamie came in and started doing this thing where she runs in place. Like just jogs in place, pumping the arms like going for a morning jog in the kitchen.

"Um, what are you doing there?"
"The Running Man."
"The Running Man?"
"Yeah, The Running Man."
"Hmmm. That is not The Running Man."
"Yes it is," she said.
"No. That is definitely not The Running Man."
"What's The Running Man?"
"Well, I could show you," I said. "But I'm not going to."
"Come on, do The Running Man," she said.
"No, but it's kind of like the Moonwalk, only more exaggerated."
"But I can't remember what you do with your arms," she said.
So I showed her.
"Oh yeah!"

2008-09-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

Pictures from Denver and surrounding area

I have a ton of old pictures I took with the responsibility phone that have just been sitting on the media card, so I'm going to unload a bunch here. Totally out of order and mostly unrelated.

This is a huge thunderhead from June or July. I was drinking coffee at St. Marks one evening after work and people started congregating outside. I went out and saw this, which obviously doesn't do justice to the whole thing. But it seemed like it was going to swallow up the world. I hate on Colorado a lot, but I have never lived under a sky so huge and repeatedly breathtaking. I don't know what it is, but every now and then it's so amazing that people actually gather outside and gaze up at it, exchanging looks of disbelief.

My first few weeks in town, this article was on the cover of the Westword, a weekly newspaper that is so boring and uninspired that I don't even pick it up anymore. People can listen to whatever they want, but this city is full of fans of terrible, white-anger rap/rock. I must confess that I do have some Insane Clown Posse music on my computer. But this is a distinct type of just soulless, angry young person. They wear enormous pants filled with metal studs, often nothing but a paper-thin tank top with an ICP logo, dirty ass facial hair, and can regularly seen on the bus, clutching to a half-smoked cigarette they can't wait to fire up again. Call me judgmental, but the juggalos of Denver are a constant reminder of the things I dislike about the city.

Jason's mug. Nuff said.

This is how I spent a good chunk of the summer. Sitting on Jason and Jamie's patio, drinking beer and watching horseshoes. Usually eating guacamole and tacos. Not a bad summer, I guess.

Mari's birthday party, a formal outdoor cocktail event that morphed into late-night Guitar Hero event. They look like an AC/DC cover band playing a terrible, terrible gig.

I like this picture, because Jamie is clearly disinterested in what appears to be the Point of the Century I'm trying to make to this girl. Thinking back, I recall the argument being about the Shins, and how she's mad that everyone says they're from Portland, even though they're from New Mexico, her home. That and she said the Shins are better than Lou Reed.

My one and only photo from the Democratic Convention. It was mostly just an annoyance for people working downtown (particularly those working on the issues).

A lousy picture of a double rainbow we saw on a hike outside Boulder.

The weekend before Jamie's birthday, we went on this hike and saw a mother and baby mountain goat. They were right across a little creek from us and didn't seem to mind our presence.

Chicago Lake near Mount Evans.

Echo Lake, also near Mount Evans:

2008-09-21T17:27:00.000-07:00

Pictures from High Seas!

Boarding the ship for our voyage.

The bunk, or galley, or whatever the hell it's called. It is as uncomfortable, tight and oppressive as it looks.

Gettin some bait in the water.

The leather strap-ons worn by nearly everyone on board.

My pop.

As with all of fishing, lots of downtime, predictably my favorite parts of the trip.

Check the dude with the white hat. This kid was unreal.

2008-09-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

Adventures on the high seas, part three

Moments of beauty and joy

This 20-year-old kid of one of the contractors, who wore a white baseball hat at an angle, and massive fake diamond earrings, hooked a marlin on day two. His pole started to shriek like a chainsaw and curled into a half-moon. The deck-hands smiled and didn't really do much. They usually jump into action.

"You guys going to help him get it on the boat?" one guy asked. The fish shot its body out of the water, an electric gleam of silver and blue. It seemed like miles away. The kid was running out of line.

"Nope. None of our poles or line are close to strong enough for a fish that big," answered a deckhand, who looked like a sunburnt cross between Heath Ledger and Patrick Swayze in Point Blank. "None of the gaffs are big enough to lift it on board. He'd have to fight that thing for hours before it got tired enough to reel in."

The water was dark blue, and sky light blue with little foamies cresting the swells. The bow of the boat dipped up and down with the current. A pack of 20 contractors watched as this kid pulled and pulled staggering along the railing. The fish threw itself into the air, over and over, it could have been laughing. If it knew fear it fooled us. The line ran out and snapped like a violin string. Twoiiing. The pole straightened out. The kid smiled huge, his earrings and white hat shining in the sun, an electric gleam.

• The second day, I slept in late because the day and the drugs allowed me to. I ate some food and went out to check on Dad. "Hey there he is. You missed the action."

"Did we catch some fish?" I asked. "Big fish?"
"I caught a fish," he said. It was his first one. He caught one the day before, but it got away when the cook was trying to get it with a gaff, a huge pole with a sharp hook on the end they use to bring the fish on board.
"Alright Dad, nice work!"
"It's time for a post-fish beer," he said. It was about 10 a.m., but if there's one thing my dad loves about being on an outdoorsy vacation, it's drinking in the morning, and then all day long.
"Yeah it is," I said, and cracked open a Miller.
"Atta boy," and he patted me on the shoulder. "Let's get some bait in the water."

• I had a bit of a revelation, as I started to get along with the people on the boat, better and better. I know, I know it's trite. In this crazy partisan country we're in these days, a weekend on a boat with Republicans teaches liberal that we're all basically the same. No, not really.

But one morning I put on a T-shirt and looked down and noticed that it was a shirt representing a lefty group I had worked for in Oregon. And then I looked around later and saw all of these other guys, wearing shirts of their tiling, framing, roofing companies that most of them either keep afloat or started themselves. And then a couple of other guys with right-wing humor shirts. And it's pretty hard not to feel like you're just the other side of a coin.

And then I also had a handful of somewhat heated debates about politics with my dad. He was a pretty liberal guy in his 30s and 40s. Definitely a proud Democrat. And as he aged and his parents died, he found himself growing increasingly backward looking and old-fashioned. But mostly I just think he's given up on politicians. Hope? Change? He'd be happy with someone who won't completely fuck everyone over just for once. And so we've split politically.

But by the end of these conversations, we found ourselves talking about issues with the term "we." As in "we just have to get development in the Valley under control," or "we have to find a more reasonable way to get energy in this country," or "we have to stop electing these small-town rednecks to Arizona legislature." We didn't find much common ground as to the how, but it sure did feel a lot nicer than trading militant email forwards.

• When I caught that fish that first morning, choking down vomit afterward and focusing all of my will on not collapsing on the deck, I mentioned my dad extended his hand to me. Let's be clear my dad and I hug all the time. We say we love each other and all that. We're modern enlightened men. But in all honesty, we aren't close. Not like when I was young, or like a father and son should be.

So in a strange way, extending a hand to me seemed much more affectionate than a hug. I was all flustered and weak, and reached across and grasped his hand, but kind of missed and only grabbed three of his fingers. Three of his fingers after a life of working with his hands are just as big as one of my little keyboard-pecking paws. It was a weird, great handshake. He smiled a genuine smile at me, like we'd shared something he'd been wishing we could share for a long time.

"Nice job son." he said. "You're hooked, huh?"
"I think I need to go sit down for a little while," I said.
"I bet you wish you were wearing that belt I gave you, right?"

• Later we would be sitting at the back (or as seamen know it, the starboard) of the boat. This became where Dad and I liked to stand around and drink beer for much of the trip. Something about those waves, man, he was asking me about my love life, about Jamie, about my older sister. Like all he needed to be an invested father and all I needed to be a responsive son was to be trapped on a boat 50 miles out to sea. How could we have missed this?

The final day, around 5 a.m., we docked and took our fish meat from the crew. I had a huge bag of yellowfin meat, packed with delicious bloody flesh. He had a tiny little one, even though he caught two fish and I only caught one.

"Son, I'm real glad you came along," and now it was time for the hug. I had slept about two hours when not hurling up a chicken dinner into a tiny toilet. The back of my throat was raw. I was on dry land now, concrete to be exact. But it felt like I was still on the water, as it would feel for two whole days.
"Yeah I'm glad too Dad. Thank you for bringing me," I said. We started to walk to his truck with our dead fish.
"Look at all that meat you got from your fish and look at me with this little bitty bag," he said, laughing.
"Well you shouldn't feel bad, Dad. It basically boils down to the fact that I'm just pretty lazy. So instead of having to reel in two fish, I just decided to catch one big one," I said, but he didn't really laugh.
"Oh, it's fine," he said. "But I caught three. I'm counting that first one the cook lost. That one counts."
"Oh, totally counts."

2008-09-13T20:15:00.001-07:00

Adventures on the high seas, part two: Squirminess that accompanies a person genuinely out of his comfort zone

• Rewinding to the beginning. As the captain (who all present would later agree was stumbling drunk) gave his speech that first night, it dawned on me that I may be legitimately incapable of performing this sport. Picture being in a group of people, and an authority figure giving scary and intense instructions that everyone seems to understand, but whenever he hits a really important part, the words become nonsense.

"Gentlemen, if there is one thing you need to know while you are on this trip it is this ... if you do not ******* your *** with the utmost caution, and while you are ####### your ***** do not tighten it three ^^^^, SOMEONE IS GOING TO GET HURT. MEN MAY LOSE THEIR LIVES. Understand me? Good. Very simple stuff here guys. Be prepared, pay attention, %%% the @@@@@ often, and nobody gets hurt and we catch some fish" (cheers erupt, aside from me)

• This lanky guy just older than myself, who I sort of made friends with, kept puking over the side of the boat. I tried to sympathize as he collected himself on a small bench on the starboard side. I found myself bonding with people who seemed either similarly unskilled, or apathetic as myself. This left me the teenagers who were brought along by their dads, and the people who likely were suckered in by co-workers. Or in this case, a city slicker who wanted desperately to be a sportsman, but just didn't wear the suit all that well.

"Feeling a little green?" I asked.
"Yeah, yeah, little green baby, little green." he said, again kind of proud of it like my dad was.

Later he would catch a fish and tell me, "Man that's just the greatest feeling in the world. Makes up for all the barfing don't it?" Um, yeah I guess. Sure does.

• I mentioned the lance pounding into my groin. Well, to be fair, there's a belt most of the men wore around all trip that prevented that injury. I was too proud to wear one at first because, frankly, it looked unmistakeably like a strap-on. All of these middle-aged men, with big leather dick holsters snug around their hips. And not only did they wear them, they seemed to revel in it. I kept thinking, am I the only one here who sees something really fucked up and dick-like about this piece of equipment?

I mocked and I mocked, and then once I suffered what I was positive was a hernia from the butt of my rod, I wore the damn strap-on. And then I was a man.

• The lanky guy I mentioned above had two T-shirts that were particularly hard to stomach. The first was a white shirt with small images of various handguns, and a caption: "Celebrate Diversity." The second was a heather grey shirt with big block letters across the middle: "NOBAMA: Keep the change."

• The cabin had satellite television and a flat-screen TV. It makes it sound a lot cushier than it really was. But they did have a handful of DVDs. I really wanted to watch Jaws one night, but we settled on Shallow Hal. The captain came in during the movie and asked what we were watching.

The son of one of the contractors, known for wearing a white hat turned at an angle and giant fake diamond earrings, said, "Shallow Hal. There's a lot of really hot girls in it. They're all supposed to fat. Or ugly." He really missed the point of the movie.

• After I caught my fish, I felt like all of the bones had been removed from my upper body. I also felt even more sick than before. I looked down at the fish I caught on the deck, bleeding out. A massive football of pure muscle flopping around, exhausting itself to death. I felt, not guilty or triumphant really. Just done. I'd killed enough fish for the trip and this was the only fish I needed. Two waking hours into the trip, and I decided I was completely done with deep sea fishing, and I never really wanted to do it again.

I stumbled across the deck of the boat, and my dad, grinning, extended his hand to me. "You're hooked now, aren't you?" he said. "Oh yeah," I said.

A minute later, I asked a deckhand the limit on fish I could I could catch. "Well, it's five a day. You're out for two full days. So 10 fish. You can catch 10."

Next: the finale, and some moments of beauty and joy

2008-09-13T17:16:00.000-07:00

Captain Chair's Adventures on the High Seas, part one

I can't really say that I have or ever will be shipped off to war or anything really comparable. But I have to imagine that it's not terribly unlike being shipped off to a deep sea fishing trip. I picture them both starting in the late hours on shore, then boarding with a systematic sign-up and speech from the captain. All of the men are then ordered below deck to three-foot-wide bunks crammed together like shelving units, with the only air to breathe first being circulated through the lungs everyone else first. Then waking up in the middle of the night with aching nausea, stumbling above deck to a toilet and vomiting violently. Then looking up at myself in the mirror and facing a tour of duty that only just began, with a solitary thought: "My god, I have made a horrible mistake."

After a few hours of sleep on a bench in the kitchen I woke up to a similar war-like setting. The boat was rocking violently, and men were shouting enigmatic commands barely audible over the engine roar. The men scrambled about deck in search of their weapons and before I could grab a cup of coffee or change clothes, a similar weapon found its way into my hands and I was thrust into combat.

So there are some obvious differences here. For starters, all of the men are contractors, not soldiers, and therefore all have enormous stomachs, and facial hair of various sorts. That and there's a shocking amount of beer on board.

Another difference is that my own father drafted me into this. I think partially it had to do with a series of deaths among family and friends in the last year. Dad's had this new found intense desire to spend time with family. And in the fog that surrounded the death of an old friend of mine, the invitation to his annual fishing trip sounded oddly appropriate.

I mostly went for him. Dad embarks on 5 or so hunting/fishing trips a year and this is the first one in years that he's actually pitched to me. So even if I were miserable and squirmy and sick the whole time, I'd tell him I had the time of my life, and make the old man's year.

Thankfully, it wasn't the worst case. The most adequate description would be two days of mild discomfort, highlighted by:

1. true misery
2. an overall squirminess that accompanies a person genuinely out of his comfort zone
3. moments of beauty and joy

1. True Misery

• I get seasick. I didn't think I did. Never have before, but there's something about being in cramped quarters, with no light or fresh air and a violently rocking boat that makes me vomit in a way I never have on ferries, outboard skiffs or afternoon cruises. The first half of the first day, which began around 5:30 a.m., I was very sick and not happy. There were a few of us not feeling well, but I felt my lack of passion for deep sea fishing put me at a distinct disadvantage.

Dad asked me how I slept the night before, and I told him I was puking all night, and after a split second of fatherly sympathy, he announced to the boat, "Hey we have a winner!" Heh heh, yeah guys, I'm the winner. I'm the winner of the, um, puking contest? Pretty funny stuff. Inside -- mortified.

I asked my dad for every kind of drug he had. I put on patches, gulped tablets, and chugged beer and Gatorade alternately. This worked for the middle of the trip but by the last night I was puking again. And puking.

• So during the peak of this day one nausea, I -- brace yourself -- caught a fish. A huge fucking tuna. I was seconds from putting down the pole and vomiting over the side, when I got a bite. I was praying it wouldn't hook, but it did. And in this moment of rushing adrenaline and the thrill of battling a mighty beast, I would love to tell you all of my worldly troubles faded away and I felt the true, heart-pounding meaning of life. But to be honest, all I really remember of the experience is aching, pounding muscle soreness, and a feeling I can only describe as the point of a medieval lance gnawing three inches up and left of my penis, into my intestines. That's how you leverage the rod to reel the fish in, by jamming the butt (hilt?) into your groin. This went on for what seemed like 6 or 7 hours.

Next ... part two, in which I feel a squirminess at being genuinely out of place...

2008-09-07T22:43:00.000-07:00

A test of will

I'm not going to blog about the election...I'm not going to blog about the election...I'm not going to blog about the election...

I will say though, that I spent part of the afternoon yelling, actually yelling, about all of the reasons I think Sarah Palin is an evil, bloodsucking, motherfucking antichrist. Then as I'm getting ready to doze off to bed, Facebook let me know that two of my cousins just joined the online group "Supporters of McCain/Palin."

I weep.

2008-09-01T22:05:00.000-07:00

Calexico in Denver

I didn't see Denver on Calexico's list of tour dates, and I had resigned to the fact that it would be the first year in many that I would not watch my favorite band play a show. So I was pretty sad when Jamie pointed out in the Onion AV Club that they had played the night before in Boulder.

This happens a lot actually. Some bands just don't come to Denver. Boulder has something of a music scene, moreso than Denver. I hesitate to say a good music scene, because the large majority of its shows are unenjoyable to anyone who doesn't have enough chemicals in his bloodstream to make even a college freshman raise a concerned eyebrow.

Buuuuuut, then Jamie also pointed out that they would be playing an intimate show at Twist and Shout, a great music store down Colfax, in just a few hours. And the result was this fun little show. No Convertino, but Joey Burns and even Nick Luca playing some rocking solos on this ancient guitar.

It felt great, like home. Like getting a call from an old dear friend who will just happen to be in town long enough to have lunch catch up, give you a hug and tell you he looks forward to your next interaaction. Short set, about an hour. They played to a room of about 50, and at the risk of judging people by appearance, these were good people. A hispanic family, a handful of middle age couples. A bunch of 30-somethings, scruffy-looking in t-shirts and sandals. There was a guy in a Club Congress shirt and I wanted to give him a hug and cry.

And everyone was so happy to be five feet from this group of musicians. Helping them decide what songs to play, bantering about the virtues of Jane's addiction and guacamole. Their plans for the rest of the stay in Colorado.

On a Saturday afternoon, drinking a cup of coffee and in broad daylight, one of my favorite concerts. It just felt like home. Now I just have to hope the Hold Steady decide to drop in town for an unannounced concert in the park.

2008-08-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

Tender Moment

I eavesdropped on this conversation between an older couple, probably early-to-mid sixties, on the ramp to a plane at Denver International Airport:

"She's going to be in that other movie, with that other fella, that looks pretty good," wife said.
"Who's that?"
"Diane Lane, we like her," she said. "I just think she's so cute."
"Oh yeah, she's going to be in that movie with that one who I like, but his politics bother me," husband said.
"Richard Gere," she said.
"Yeah, that fella. What's his name? Gere?"
Pause.
"Well those two were together in that other movie, Unfaithful," the husband said. "You know that real sexy one."
"Did I see that?" she asked. He shook his head in disbelief. "What, I don't remember, which one?"
"You know. It's the one where she's in New York, looking for books or running errands for the kids or something. And then she carrying a pile of stuff and it flies all over the place. And then she meets that fella with the foreign accent. And then Richard Gere tails him. Remember?"
"Hmm. Not really," she said.
"Well it's pretty sexy," he said.
Pause.
"Pretty hot," he said.
"Well maybe we should rent it again," she said.
"Well maybe we should."
And they both laughed a little.

2008-08-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

Hoax revealed

So in my attempt to create a hyberbolic goodbye to Chloe, the cat I attempted to adopt from Charissa, I made it unmistakable that she's actually dead.

But, like Paul McCartney, Warwick Davis, Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Harrison Ford, Chloe the cat is alive and well at her original home. The video I made was so beautiful and somber that it seemed like one of those funeral montages, and so I presented it as such, and without any irony.

And then people started consoling me for my loss, so I thought I'd better set the record straight.

I did, however, tell my other cat Knives that Chloe is dead. They didn't get along and I thought it might make her happy.

She's alive. Back at Charissa's house. Not dead.

2008-08-06T21:53:00.000-07:00

Chloe, R.I.P.

I know it's been a while since my last post. And I have an explanation. Things have been kind of rough around here at mrchair headquarters. We've had a loss. I mean, you always know that when you take in a troubled youth, anything can happen. It's a risk you take. You want it to work out. Sometimes you get a Zahara. Sometimes you get a Maddox. And sometimes. Well, sometimes you get a Chloe.

So this is a tribute to Chloe. Or as she was sometimes known around here, "Stupidface," or "The Mean One." She wasn't bad. She was so sweet in her own way. She tried to connect with us. She even became very fond of Jamie. But she held an inner-rage that the love of two new humans and a scrappy little tortoise-shell domestic couldn't possibly quench.

And so, here's a little something I put together for Chloe. In memory of the good times we shared. Not the stitches I had to get, or the chunk taken out of Knives' left ear. Or even the DVD player she broke. The good times. She's gone to a better place now. We loved you Chloe.

2008-07-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

The annual Fourth of July post

I think I want to save the profundity in this year's Fourth of July post. You can only ponder the importance of mid-summer as a watermark for life so many times. But, as usual, I was at barbecue, drinking beer, surrounded by friends. And it was happy. Matt came up to me at some point and said,

"Tate I was trying to remember what I did on the Fourth last year, and then I remembered, I spent it with you."
"Oh yeah, at my old house on the deck right? Yeah, and I had just moved in."
"And all you had in your room was an air mattress, some shirts and a photo of Walter Kronkite," Gavin said.
"Actually, it's Willie Nelson, but yeah."

A lot can change in just one year. But there I was, in a new city but a lot of the same people. So actually, kind of the same. Like everywhere you go, your life follows you, and everywhere the pieces of your life go, they're still kind of with you. Okay, so a little bit of pondering. Now pictures of aging functional drunks:

"What are you taking a picture of?"
"I'm taking of picture of four foxy ladies, so you better smile." And it worked. Women love flattery. Even smarmy flattery.

The party was at Jamie and Jason's this year. A fierce game of horseshoes was played throughout in the background. Only two people were hit.

I've discussed the merits and demerits of the "game" that haunts my life, called "Slap The Bag." Here it is in photo illustration. Drink Chablis from the bag:

Slap the bag:

And fireworks. Jason said we had to light them off in the street, because he just cut the weeds and the stumps were all dry like hay. But by dark we were all so lit up, that we just went for it in the yard. There were a few little fires, put out very quickly. The neighbors had a pretty vicious salvo on their front porch too:

And for another year, we were once again, all truly free. Free to drink yellow beer, eat a melon soaked in alcohol and three or four cobs of corn, throw metal shaped like a 'U' into sand, play with a tiny dog named Pompadour, set fire to your girlfriend's backyard and then plunge into a tequila and potato salad soaked sleep at 10 p.m., dreaming tenderly of a country that doesn't torture its immigrants or tap the phone lines of its citizens.

2008-07-12T22:26:00.001-07:00

Rock and Roll!

So I usually leave the online rock critic thing to Swede, but I have to talk about the new Hold Steady!!!! That's right! Four exclamation points! Because that's how I feel when I listen to it! I feel like FOUR CONSECUTIVE EXCLAMATION POINTS!

But seriously folks, Stay Positive grabbed me by the throat and has been shaking me and shaking me until I just gave in and started dancing and singing along. And I don't even care anymore. The first time I listened to the opening track, "Constructive Summer," with the piano solo bridge and "let this be an annual reminder that we can all be something bigger," I literally threw my fist in the air and yelled "Yeah!"

"Me and my friends are like the drums on Lust for Life." "Raise a Toast to St. Joe Strummer he might've been our only decent teacher."

The people in this band love rock and roll. They are the true believers of rock and roll. And they give it back to us as a gift, like they aren't taking credit for making the music, but more like they found it by a curb, in a beat up notebook, and it changed their lives, so that they had no choice but to get on stage and give it back, demanding everyone sing along. Rock is scripture to them, and a concert is their sermon on the mount.

Which brings me to the next thing I love about this album. It isn't happy. Or at least, it isn't cheerful. It reminds me of an album that I've mentioned here before, The Pernice Brothers' "The World Won't End." At first it seems upbeat, but when you listen to the album, you realize that the title is not being encouraging -- the speaker is disappointed that the world won't end. So while the album is upbeat almost to a fault, the subject matter is dark. Very dark. The Polyphonic Spree makes these albums of unfettered joy that, while pleasant, are shallow. There is nothing shallow about the message behind these sing-along rock anthems. The music is referred to in a scriptural way throughout the album, and the stories it tells are Old Testament-violent and scary. But the music is fist-pumpingly redemptive.

And another thing -- Stay Positive is a rock musical! Not a concrete story with a beginning, middle and end. But the Hold Steady's music oozes narrative. When I listen to it, every song is like a page I can't wait to turn to find out what happens next. The first time I listened to it, it was on my phone's music player. I listened to the first three tracks and was convinced it was a steady story arc throughout the album, like The Streets "A Grand Don't Come for Free." But then I realized I had the playlist on shuffle. I was listening to them out of order. Every lyric that frontman Craig Finn writes is a story. It's a line you hear someone say next to you at a bar, but can't make out exactly what the person is recollecting, but it sounds like a great time you wish you could have been around for. Or a horrible time you're glad you didn't have to experience firsthand.

2008-07-02T20:12:00.000-07:00

Scuba gear

So Jamie and I were talking about urine tests the other day, and while regaling a classy story of a time I had to take more than one urine test and was unable to go, I revealed a little-known fact. When I was about 12 or so I had a testicular torsion. A torsion is when one of the testicles (or to mrchair readers, 'testacles') becomes partially twisted, cutting blood flow, endangering the testicle and causing a gnawing pain that no 12-year-old boy should ever have to endure. Much less tell his mom about.

As I explained to her, my tangled testicle was of a very mild form, and all I had to do was take some pills and ice it and it went away and now today I have both of them, perfectly fine and full of sperm, ready to be wasted as frequently as I get the chance. But, understandably, this tidy description of what eMedicine describes as "a true urologic emergency," that is "the leading cause of testicular loss" didn't ease her curiosity.

So a couple days later we looked it up on the Internet, and found gritty descriptions that, while funny, didn't match my memory. But anyway, have some knowledge about what happens when your testicle gets twisted:

-"Torsions are sometimes called "winter syndrome". This is because they often happen in winter, when it is cold outside. The scrotum of a man who has been lying in a warm bed is relaxed. When he arises, his scrotum is exposed to the colder room air. If the spermatic cord is twisted while the scrotum is loose, the sudden contraction that results from the abrupt temperature change can trap the testicle in that position. The result is a testicular torsion."

-"If there is the slightest hint of a torsion of the testicle, then doctors will perform surgery; even if the testicle turns out not to have twisted, they will still protect it by attaching the testicle to the scrotum wall. If only one testicle has been problematic, the surgeon may suture both testicles as a preventative effort."

-"A salvage rate of 100% is found in patients who undergo detorsion within 6 hours of pain; 20% viability rate if detorsion occurs after 12 hours; and 0% viability if detorsion is delayed greater than 24 hours."

- "Manual detorsion can be attempted with pain relief. The procedure is similar to the 'opening of a book' when the physician is standing at the patient's feet. For example, in a suspected torsion of the right testicle, the physician is in front of the standing or supine patient and holds the patient's right testicle with the left thumb and forefinger. The physician then rotates the right testicle outward 180° in a medial to lateral direction."

-And my absolute favorite: "Torsion of testicular appendices is one of the most common causes of acute scrotum; it is the leading cause of acute scrotum in children."

And we laughed and laughed. But Jamie a little more than me. And me occasionally saying, "that's not really funny. Hurts." There was one particular section that said "testicular pain is a great source of anxiety for men," that she thought was hilarious.

But pain plus time equals comedy, so a testicular torsion 20 years later must be fucking agonizingly hysterical. Fine, ok, it's funny. But the more we researched, the less satisfied Jamie was with my recollection.

"It doesn't make sense that you could just take pills and it would go away. You must have had surgery, or maybe the doctor untwisted it with his hand and then gave you painkillers," she said.
"I have no motive to lie about this, nor is it likely that I'd forget having a doctor untwist my testicle, with surgery or otherwise."

But then I figured it out, and the mystery was solved: The torsion of the testicular appendage.

You see, there's a full-on twisted testicle, where they sew it to your ballsack and a lot of the time they have to cut it off. Then there's the other one, of the appendices. See balls have these little attachments. Inside of the skin, there's a lot going on. Chances are, if you saw the inside of a testicle, you wouldn't even recognize it. You'd think it was scuba gear, or a lizard sunning itself on a river rock.

So one of the lizard's legs, or the snorkel mouthpiece gets all twisty and it hurts really bad and then you tell your mom and it's all embarassing. Then an old man makes you pee in a cup and than another old man makes you do the same, but you can't pee because you just went. But it works out alright and he gives you a bunch of anti-inflammatory drugs and you lie to your friends and sit on the couch with an icebag for a few days and play video games.

So when it was said and done, we all learned a lot. Mostly Jamie. Mostly that I'm usually right, especially with matters of my testicles. But also, now I finally know why I have such acute scrotum.

2008-06-29T15:58:00.000-07:00

No Subject

This is one of those occasional posts I start with absolutely no intended content or idea. I just haven't posted in a long time, and I'm starting to feel cranky about it. So prepare for a lot of nothing:

It's getting hot in Denver. I bought a $12 box fan for my window and it was one of the better investments I've made.

###

Chloe, Charissa's cat who was unhappy living with her hyperactive dogs, is now my foster cat. She and Knives still get into a lot of scraps, but she's really coming around and becoming much sweeter and less skittish. I've decided I want to start thinking of them as my Angelina babies. Troubled babies taken from tough environments, because I have so much love and wealth to give. So I'm going to start calling Knives "Shiloh" because she's my real baby, and I'll start calling Chloe "Zahara."

###

Speaking of, I was in 7-11 the other day buying Tums and Canada Dry, and I noticed that Angelina is on the cover of seven magazines right now. I, and America, are totally fine with that.
###

I'm still fairly homesick for Oregon, and while the summer has been beautiful with some great evening thunderheads, the weather here is so goddamn oppressive. The sun is like 20 feet away, as if it's perched over you, shoving you on the shoulder saying, "Hey, hey, hey." There is so little moisture, or oxygen in Denver that every morning I wake up with locked up sinuses and find myself flicking water at my clothes to get the static electricity out. And there's nowhere to run to, no waterfalls or pools or swimming holes. Just mountains, everywhere giant mountains swarming with chiseled extras from Nike commercials who love, LOVE to goddamn run and bike and do anything that will take them away from a second of inactivity or calm.

###

Dear Denver,

You are not Los Angeles. Take off those ridiculous sunglasses.

Love,
Tate

###

Me and Jamie went to see David Sedaris read from his new book at Tattered Cover. He was predictably funny, and if you've ever been to any of his readings, the best parts are his unpublished little passages from his diary. I can't remember any and don't feel like taking the time to mull it over, so too bad for you. Jamie's been reading the book for the last week or so and keeps uncontrollably laughing out loud. I look up at her from my book or computer and she usually says something like, "It's funny."

###

At Jason and Jamie's house, they have huge back and front yards and overwork/lack of maintenance has turned it into a wavy sea of knee-high weeds. They got a huge green sticker on their front door and a ticket for "unsightly weeds." Jason had to have someone come and cut them, which broke his heart because he wanted them to grow even higher so they would get "Eyesore of the Week," a feature in the community rag reserved for those in Denver who are standing in the way of the juggernaut of gentrification carving through old neighborhoods. I pictured him going out in the afternoon, beer in one hand, hose in the other, spraying down the yard until it turned into a Savannah of razor-sharp green reeds.

They also have a horseshoe pit, which I never take part in but often find myself watching while drinking beer on weekend afternoons. Until one day I walked up to the pit and picked up a shoe. "How do you play this stupid game?" And I chucked one overhand, baseball-style across the yard. And it was a perfect ringer. And with that I retired my game, perfect.

###

Just now, I was struggling for content and I asked Jamie, "What's something interesting that happened to me in the last week or two?"
"Ummmmm." she said. A few seconds passed and she started laughing hysterically. I thought she had a really good one in mind.
"What is it? What?" I asked.
"I can't think of anything!"
"Oh, well that's great," I said.
"You made a lot of funny jokes."
"Can you remember any of them?" I asked.
More uncontrollable laughter followed by shaking of her head.
"It's a lot of pressure!"

2008-06-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

Let the record show...

I have made the best spelling mistake of 2008, maybe the decade. Wow. I have to think it's some kind of Freudian slip, and that there's some kind of meaning behind it. But damned if I know what it is.

"It's not truly hairless, as it's covered in fine, soft fuzz. Touching it is like touching swede, or very soft leather."

2008-06-12T19:10:00.000-07:00

Pictures of Ande's birthday party

Jamie and Rocky. You'll find almost all of these are pictures of various pets. Rocky has the cutest, weirdest face I've ever seen on an animal.

When he's playing tug-of-war, he gets this blissful look on his face like no creature could ever be as happy as he is at that moment. It's the face of content.

When we first arrived at the party, Jamie wanted to see the hairless cat really bad. So we pretty much immediately hunted around the house and found it napping on Ande and Ryan's bed. When it woke up, it instantly pounced on me and started rubbing against my chin, clinging to my shirt.

Some interesting facts about the hairless cat:
-its body is very hot to the touch, especially its chest.
-its head is extremely small and narrow, and the skin is wrinkly. When it's close up to your face, it looks like either a fetal face or the face of a very old woman.
-it's not truly hairless, as it's covered in fine, soft fuzz. Touching it is like touching swede, or very soft leather.
-the skin's pattern reflect what the hair would look like. It's a genetic defect that has been carried on as a breed.
-the paws are squishy and bald, and look like a baby's hands curled into fists.
-the tail is very skinny and bare, and curls up on itself like a rat or a piglet.

As we were walking away, it walked up to a piled-up knit blanket and bit on part of it. Clutching the blanket in its mouth, it started kneading it furiously with it's eyes closed. "Let's get out of here."

Oh, and also, Ande had a great party. Ryan made some delicious food. And they got engaged or something.

2008-06-07T14:37:00.000-07:00

Being 30

As opposed to turning 30, is a peaceful experience. It's a hard feeling to pin down, but being 30 has put a calm and steadiness over me that is about the last thing I'd expect from aging. The best way that I can describe it is that as a 30-year-old, you have a license to be an adult, in the best way possible.

I think my entire young adult life, I had this driving compulsion to be flighty or irresponsible, immature as a badge of honor. Which isn't a bad thing. There is certainly a value to such a way of life, and I adore my 20s. But now, it's like I can exhale, rest my bones.

I was having this conversation with Mary, and she was asking about how long I'm going to live in Denver and stay at my job. I told her I didn't know, but at least a couple of years.

"So you're taking your commitment (to the job) pretty seriously?" she asked.
"Well, yeah. But it's not just that. I think I've hit a point in my life where two years goes by so fast that doing anything for much shorter than that doesn't seem to make sense. Which is totally the opposite of how I used to be. It was hard for me to envision doing anything for more than a year."
"Yeah, I used to be like that too. I used to dictate my life based on that," she said.
"Yeah, me too. Like if I ever faced a choice of sticking with something versus moving on, I'd always cut and run. It was like an assumed rule of life."
"Oh, totally, like the whole world is this wide open place for you to explore at will," she said.
"But not anymore, because you realize there are millions of places and things you'll never have time to experience, so you might as well try to experience a handful of them thoroughly."
"And the older you get the less attractive it seems to leave something behind every year," she said.
"Otherwise, you would live a life made up of dozens of tiny lives, all left unfinished," I said.
"Wow Tate..."
"I know, I've grown wise in my old age."
"And your hair is thinning," chimed in Phil.

All of this isn't to say that I sit around in a lazy boy with a pipe and robe, and go to bed before nine. Quite the contrary. And I think too often we confuse youth with an enthusiasm for life and new things. That never has to go away. Unfortunately the energy and resiliency does.

I was talking to my mom about this on my birthday, and she concurred. "My whole life I've wished I could have the perspective I had when I was older, but the health and energy I had when I was younger."

And that's the fucking bastard of it, right?

And also, I feel like I can wear Converse now, and be the cool older guy who wears Converse, instead of the guy in his late 20s pretending he's younger than he is.

2008-06-07T14:28:00.000-07:00

This could get nasty

I don't blog about politics. I'm not part of the "blogosphere" or "online liberal punditry." But I'm making a small exception.

I think once the bliss of the Obama nomination started to fade, the reality that, in fact, a black man is running for president in what is ultimately a very racist country started to set in. And it's a little scary.

The day after the nomination I walked past an Onion newspaper box and saw what I thought was a new issue. But in fact, someone had gone through all of the current copies in the box and cut out a headline picture of Obama (in the Onion for god's sake. It's fake news!). But on a couple of copies there were angry notes written in Sharpie. "Obama Osama bin Laden Hussein! Only good for janitorial work!" was my favorite.

Then yesterday my father (a longtime Arizona Democrat, and occasional redneck) sent me a forward from his century-old father-in-law. I get a lot of forwards from my dad. Most of them are harmless wishes of love and caring, or silly if politically incorrect jokes. But this was a cartoon of Obama standing next to a sign saying White House, with the caption "Well I guess that's going to have to change." Then it went on to say that he's a Muslim who refuses to say the pledge or salute the flag and that he was sworn in on the Koran.

This is from my father! I don't know what's happening in this topsy-turvy world. The next few months are going to be interesting.

2008-06-02T16:53:00.000-07:00

A fascinating evening at a local bar

A couple of weekends ago, around midnight, everyone was going home from the bar and I didn't feel like it yet. You know, those moods where you have to stay out in public and can't quite withdraw into your little bunker quite yet. So I walked around the neighborhood and watched folks carouse Capitol Hill on a late Friday night.

I slid into the most obscure bar I could find for a nightcap, which in retrospect I'm 90 percent sure was a gay bar. I sat at the bar next to an unattended drink, and its owner soon returned. He was one of those guys who looks about 10 years older than he probably is, and was missing his top-front four teeth.

A couple of minutes later, he started talking to me, and told me a couple of jokes about Jesus. I don't know what it is about lonely drunks and jokes about Jesus, but this is not the first time this has happened to me. So I told him a couple of jokes back, and we were getting along just great. He asked me what I do for a living and I explained it. He asked if I ever wanted to run for office, and I told him there's no chance.

"What about you?" I asked him, referring to his line of work.
"Oh, no no no. I could never run for office. Too many skeletons in my closet."
"Oh, yeah, gotcha. Um, what do you do for a living?"
"Well, it's complicated," and he shifted around a little, hesitant. "Have you ever had someone pull up to you in a van, and open the door and try to sell you speakers? Like really cheap because he needs to get rid of them in a hurry?"
"Yeah, I have actually. Once in Tucson, Arizona" I said, truthfully.
"That's what I do."
Pause.
"You sell speakers? Out of vans?"
"Yep. A van. My van."
"Dude, don't take this the wrong way, but I thought people who sold speakers out of vans had, um, stolen them. Do you ... steal speakers?"
"No, no. That's the idea, though. We want you to think that, so you'll buy em," he said. "But they're not stolen."
"Wait, so you're telling me you sell legitimate speakers to people out of a van, but try to make them think they're stolen so they'll buy them, like in a hurry or like they think they're getting some amazing deal?"
"Yep. See the guy you talked to probably told you that it was like a $2,000 speaker system that he'd unload for 300 bucks. But truth is that it's more likely a $100 set of speakers he's marking up. But you think you're getting this smoking deal."
"Holy shit, are you serious?" I had never heard of anything like this. "So you sell things totally legally, under the pretense that you're a thief."
"It's completely legal. I am not a thief. I do not break any laws. I'm not exactly honest, but they get exactly what they pay for," he said, getting a little defensive.
"So where do the speakers come from?"
"I don't know. China or something. I get them from my boss."
"And how long have you been doing this?" I asked, now completely captivated.
"22 years."
My jaw dropped.
"22 years? This is like your career?"
"Yep."
Silence.
"Do you like it?"
"Well, it's starting to wear on me. I mean I'm basically a con man. I gotta say, I'm getting so tired of lying to so many people. I mean I'm not a bad person, but I lie to people all the time, for my job. I lie to people for a living."
He was getting a little emotional.
"And I really feel like I can do better than this, you know? Like I have this idea. You know how we're having all of these energy problems, and global warming and oil is running out? Well I have this idea, that the Earth is basically a huge magnet. And you can make electricity by running a wire through a magnetic field, generating a current. So why can't we hang a giant copper wire through the atmosphere and run it through the earth's field and make electricity?"
"I have to admit," I said, "that's a really interesting idea."
"I mean there's a lot of kinks to work out, like how you would make sure the wire wouldn't hit planes and shit like that. But you see what I mean, I have these ideas in my head."

We talked a while more, I tried to lighten things up a bit. We shook hands and parted ways. And it was pouring rain outside. Huge drops. I got soaked on the walk home.

2008-05-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

Me versus Dawg: Bounty Hunter

I got this letter in the mail that I owe the state of Oregon $560.00 for abandoning my automobile in Multnomah County. This immediately loosened my bowels for obvious reasons, and I did a quick scan of my memory. I left my car in the care of a couple of friends with a house in SE Portland. I drove a Uhaul down, and planned to fly back to get it when I get a chance and some cash. I remember Matt telling me that they were going to tow it off the street, so he moved it into the garage.

And then I didn't hear anything more about it for four months. Until I got this letter that I'd been convicted of auto abandonment and the fine had doubled for my lack of response.

So I called the county courts the next day, my voice trembling, and explained the situation. She truly sympathized and told me my recourse:

1. I can appeal the ruling by writing a letter to a judge, and spilling my guts in the nicest way possible. The judge could reduce/reverse the sentence, which actually does happen sometimes.
2. Before appealing, I should pay off the fine, as often judges won't even consider an appeal unless the fine is paid.
3. If my appeal is honored, I'll be reimbursed, but it usually takes at least six months for a judgment.
4. I can pay it on an installment plan, but it will cost $100 extra as a fee. And even then I'll need to pay off the entire sum before appealing. The down payment will be $200.

I explained that, well, $560.00 is a lot to cough up for a crime that I didn't actually commit, and then wasn't given due process because the notices didn't forward. And besides, if you guys have my money, why would you accept my appeal? It seems like paying a fine is an admission of guilt; why would a judge spend his precious time reviewing a traffic fine that is already paid off in full?

Again, she genuinely sympathized, and explained that the fine is considered bail for my offense pending judgment. I didn't say this, but $560 fucking dollars is considered appropriate bail for a fucking parking ticket?!

And then the lady on the phone had a gem of an idea to assist my problem:

Why don't you throw a big party as a fundraiser? And charge an entry fee to pay your bail?

And in my mind I said: "Are. You. Fucking. Serious? Lady, we are not in Saved By the Bell, and I am not Zack Morris. Life's problems are not solved by zany hair-brained schemes. And besides, Screech would just do something stupid and fuck everything up anyway."

So I told Jamie about this and her response was, "That's actually kind of a brilliant idea. I think we should do it!"

But then we'd have to go all the way, and bring a video camera to the party and tape testimonials about what a great guy I am and then send it to the judge to melt his cold, legal heart. And he'd be so moved that he'd reverse the judgment completely and then rip off his robe and grab a Pina Colada and start partying down with everyone, like Rodney Dangerfield.

I told Alan and he said he was sorry, and suggested we have SUM41 or Good Charlotte play at the party. And the nerdiest kid will fuck the hottest girl at the party and she'll dump the captain of the football team. And we'll all learn a little about ourselves along the way.

Or, he said, I could just not ever return to Multnomah County. "But then Dawg: Bounty Hunter will probably come after you."

2008-05-26T17:47:00.000-07:00

Bad news surrounding my new home:

-The Hold Steady will not be coming to Denver.
-I can no longer deny that my apartment is going to swelter once the temperatures pick up.

On the upside, my new regular coffee shop is, in my humble opinion, on par or better than most places in Portland. (the coffee is not quite as good though)

2008-05-18T17:27:00.000-07:00

Another Birthday!

Ryan's birthday was Saturday, and he wanted to do a bike barhop. I don't have any brakes on my bike, but you can't let that sort of thing get in the way of enjoying this world. I just drag my feet and try to turn instead of stop. Anyway, I had an engagement party to go to in the afternoon, which I did. I drank a few margaritas. I missed the first part of the birthday celebration - go cart riding - because of this anniversary dinner. But it's okay.

Charissa came and picked me up in the evening and we met up at Ryan and Ande's where I got to see Weird Face and Quick, their dogs, and their hairless cat, Mr. Big. The hairless cat is the strangest little thing. It doesn't have any hair, just skin. When it meows, it's like a recording is being played, because a normal cat sound couldn't come out of this little alien mole-like thing. And when you hold it and then put it down, it's kind of sweaty, like when you remove bare skin from a leather couch.

Me: "Does it get BO?"
Ande: "No, Tate, it doesn't get BO. Do other cats get BO?"
Me: "No, but other cats are furry. Does it smell if you don't bathe it?"
Ande: "No."
Ryan: "Yes."

Hop, hop, hop, biking around the Highlands. Shots, but not for me, I'm on shot probation. And "XXXX-bomb" drink probation.

The guy with the shaved head is hilarious, and I can't remember his name, because he reminded me so much of Conrad from Weeds.

Fun topics of conversation:
-I relayed a story of a relatively young man who got a vasectomy, and opinions on the subject were diverse. Conrad from Weeds said nobody is ever allowed to perform surgery on his eyes or testicles (testacles, shaving testacles/testicles, how to shave your testicles). I found this really funny that he has this militant protectiveness about anything spherical on his body. There was also some fun debate as to how a vasectomy affects your ejaculate. "Does a cloud of smoke come out?"
-There are many words used for the female reproductive organ. The best: Vernonia, which Mary and I coined after a small town in Oregon. The worst: a tie between Hatchet Wound and Gash.

On that note, Happy Birthday Ryan!

2008-05-15T20:50:00.000-07:00

A good karma day

Today I did some shopping for things I want. First I went to Ross dress for less, with the intention of getting some pants, maybe some socks and underwear. Boy oh boy is there more to Ross than dress! I almost bought about 50 things, including picture frames, silverware, glassware, ties, slaps. But I did buy a little lamp (my apartment is kind of dark), and a mug with a picture of Tupac Shakur and his signature: "Peace, 2Pac." The lamp I bought was sold separate from the shade, but the cashier didn't charge me for the shade! Yes!

Then I went to the telephone store and bought a media card for the responsibility machine, so I can load music onto it. The clerk was multitasking, on hold with customer service and helping me, and it took a really long time. But I was patient and he gave me a discount!

Then I was walking home with an enormous Ross bag and it tore open without my knowing and my media card fell out into the street. But some people said, "Sir! Sir, oh sir! You dropped this!" And I took it back and threw away the ripped bag.

2008-05-12T21:21:00.001-07:00

Tales from my birthday!

I'll only deliver you little snippets of the events that occured, since that's all my mind wants to give me.

First of all, I watched Iron Man on Friday after work. I'm tempted to say it's the best movie ever.

Anyway, Charissa, my really awesome and pleasing to the eye friend put together a little celebration for my 30th. It's always a little nerve-wracking when you invite a bunch of people to go out for your birthday. If nobody shows, it's a beeline to depression. But lo, a bunch of people showed! Mostly folks from work, and a Andy and Ryan and Andrea (they stayed out so late!) and some friends from Boulder.

The plan was a bar hop through various dives around my neighborhood. We started at the Thin Man, then crawled along Colfax. Satire, Irish Snug, the Bank, some other places I'm told.

Here, I think Andy is giving me advice on the ladies.

And so on. These are all the pictures I have. At first my batteries were dead, then I bought batteries and took like four pictures and then I fell to pieces. The last thing I remember was doing the second consecutive Jager-bomb (an extra one for the birthday boy). Then it's really fuzzy. Then an Irish car bomb pops into memory. Then not being able to find my apartment. Then puking. Lots of puking.

I have to kind of censor the full story, but I'm told there was inappropriate smacking of behinds. Charissa tried to give me some water and I laughed at her, and later she and I got into a fist-fight. And eventually I just disappeared, following a shameless public display of affection. When I woke up my camera was dead, and all of the little compartments and hatches were opened up, with the memory card removed. I had several text messages of "where are you" etc. Kate had my wallet, since I apparently gave her the whole thing, told her to buy whatever she wanted and sign for my tab. I had a couple of bruises.

And that's how you turn 30. All in all a fantastic night, and a great story for a landmark day. And I'm told everyone had a great time, despite my Jekyll and Hyde-like transformation, and subsequent disappearance. So thanks Charissa!

Then on my actual birthday, I laid around the apartment, forced down a couple of Singapore Slings (my birthday tradition), and enjoyed the text messages and social network comments from friends and family. Watched a disc of Lost and Batman Begins. Then chatted with Swede until pass out time. Happy Birthday to me.

2008-05-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

Adulthood: Better living through upholstery

I never wanted to become a millionaire before I turned 30. If anything, my only real career goal throughout life has been not having a real career. Sure, having a short story or two published in a barely read niche publication would have been nice, but I'm not an architect or a pilot either so boo hoo. And now, as I roll over into undeniable adulthood, I find my biggest goal is to acquire furniture before the big day.

It wasn't a "turning 30" thing when I first started trying to furnish my apartment. I desperately need a table and chairs, and I've been meaning to get a box spring and frame for some time. But I'm vulnerable to symbolism and internal drama, and when Charissa's birthday celebration invite declared that a bed is my ticket out of Never-Neverland, it suddenly became something to latch onto.

And the first lesson I'm taking into my 31st year is that craigslist sellers are unreliable little bitches. But patience is a life lesson. And I may just piece together a cotton and aluminum life by Sunday. So what better way to chart a journey into manhood, than the story of where the man has laid his weary bones over these wild and calm decades.

Infancy: presumably a crib. I don't know. I was a fucking baby. I had a three bears quilt I used until pre-teen years.

Toddlery - grade school: A low-to-the ground, wood setup. Painted white with three big drawers along the bottom. Great for holding toys.

Youth - Preteen: I shifted into bunk beds, though I never shared a room. I just always wanted bunk beds. Some nights I slept on top. Some nights I slept on bottom. Also solid wood painted white. It was good times, that bunk bed, made every night feel like summer camp. Strangely, I hated summer camp. And as I got older and awkward, I used to slam my head into the top bunk, leaving painful lumps.

High school: King-size waterbed. Oh yeah, for the ladies. Similar to the bunk beds, I'm not completely sure why I wanted a king-size waterbed. Most likely the novelty. Features included a chambered headboard where I kept a walkman full of classic and punk rock. I watched many a late-night movie from my video store job in that bed. Oh, and no young lady ever graced those uncharted waters. But it did have a great little hiding spot in the wood frame where I could store booze and adult publications.

Freshman year: Tiny little dorm bed. Arguably the smallest and least comfortable bed I had up until then. But somehow I adored it more than any other. When I went back to the dorm after a weekend at Mom's, it was heaven, even compared to that king-size. It was the bed of freedom, a dinghy cut loose from a sinking teenage ship.

College: Here, the timeline starts to splinter. But the most interesting bed was yet another bunk bed. This one -- not arguably, definitively -- the least comfortable and smallest bed I have ever known. My roommate and I needed beds for our house, so we salvaged and dismantled his little brother's bunk bed. Not even a wood platform, but a frame with rubber straps holding a thin pad of a mattress. Smaller than a twin. The miracle (spoiler alert!): I lost my virginity in this bed. That must be where I gained my affinity for cuddling, since in a bed that small, you have choice but to interlock like Legos.

Post-college slacker: Shared a bed with my girlfriend at the time. In fact, I surfed that bed for years. All the way back up to Phoenix, then further north up to Oregon. Only we left the frame and box spring in Arizona to save Uhaul space. So we slept on a mattress on the floor. And then she went Hollywood. And then we broke up. And the bed went into storage for a while.

Mid-to-late-twenties: Lot of couches. Lot of air mattresses. Sometime a car. No secret here.

Then it was back to the old trusty mattress on the floor. Different girlfriend. Then that girlfriend bought a fancy new bed. Pillow top, high off the ground. Beautiful sheets, legendary thread count. And I think we ended a few days after that purchase.

Then back to mattress on the floor. Then this mysterious story, with this beautiful resolution.

And that brings us to today. Fitting I suppose that the old trusty floor mattress that survived my 20s and two relationships is stuffed under the magical fairy mattress from Portland. And even more fitting that tomorrow I'm going to acquire the missing hunks of an adult life. A box spring and maybe even a frame, and throw out that old mattress for good. Or maybe I'll just tuck it underneath, in the hidden, unused space between my new bed and the floor. I guess I have a few days to decide.

2008-05-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

My Landlord is Crazy II: Electric Boogaloo

Not as crazy as BJ the Kegel lady, who it turned out fell in love with me. She used to mail me articles about green technology she'd clip from the paper. She was really sad when I left (she thinks I'm a just a real neat guy) and now I use her as a rental reference. But Chris is pretty crazy. He's not crazy in a scared when she pulls into the driveway way, but more in a Flowers for Algernon, kindly simple guy down the hall way.

I hadn't given him my rent Saturday, and he came by the door at 8 a.m. I guess that's your right when you're the landlord and you don't have rent yet. You can drop by Saturday at 8 a.m. "It's the thiiiird," he sang me a little song. This is especially funny when you can't open you're eyes all the way, and you're wearing a robe, and the guy singing his little song is a bald, bearded stout man with a furrowed brow who talks kind of like the guy in Sling Blade.

"Oh, yeah, I have it, I just keep forgetting."
"No problem, just slip it under the door."

Then later in the day I was taking out the trash and he was loading a ton of furniture into the alley. Sweating like a dog, poor guy.

"Hey I slid the check under the door," I told him.
"Oh, thanks," he said.
"What are you up to?"
"Oh, some people upstairs moved out and left a bunch of stuff behind."
"Huh. So it's all going to the trash?" I'm on a furniture mission lately, as furniture, not love, makes a house a home.
"Yeah, or whoever wants to take it," he said.
"Nice, I'll probably salvage some of it."
"NO! Don't. The people who moved out had bedbugs. That stuff was there when they had the bugs. Normally, I'd say go for it. But please, don't. It took us weeks to get rid of them. They're gone now, and they don't like to travel, but please, just don't. There's a metal shelf you can have, because they hate metal. But it's not very nice."
"Okay, thanks for the tip. I'll just leave it." There was some nice stuff too. A couple of desks.
"Man I wanted to strangle that guy. He brought the bedbugs in from outside," Chris said, brow furrowing. "I'm glad they're gone. They were grungy people. They liked to go to concerts. That's probably where the bedbugs came from. They probably got into some guy's van or something. Picked em up there."

2008-05-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

With great power update

So I'm fairly enamored with the new phone thingy.

Highs: The hands-down best thing about it is it's aptitude for third-party software. As a Mac fanatic, you forget the advantages of flexibility. WIRED magazine's recent cover was an Apple logo surrounded by barbed-wire. Charissa found my inferiority complex over not having an iPhone amusing. I was trying to explain the dichotomy: "See the cool thing about non-Apple is that you can use all kinds of gadgets and software, where with Apple you have to use Apple stuff. But the thing is, Apple stuff is always the best. By far. See what I mean?"

And so goes the Blackberry. I fuckin tricked it out. Everything but spinning rims. Gmail, Google Talk, AIM, mobile Facebook, my work email inbox, it automatically syncs up with my work iCal schedule. There's an Apple syncing program that makes them more compatible. There are thousands of free ringtones you can download, not to mention a bunch of cool desktop themes. I like one that appears to be made of hardwood. But the coolest are two Apple mockups: one with the exact iPhone interface and one that mimics OSX Leopard.

You can just google 'blackberry applications' and dozens of links pop up. Open source, free. It's amazing. I'm gonna get a media card so it can hold and exchange music and photos with my computer. And the Google Maps app is incredible. I like to ride the bus and watch the 'my location dot' move as we drive. Super lame, I know.

Lows: Still not an iPhone.

I've gotten used to the rollerball, but I fear I'm going to break it. That's my biggest problem I think. I'm always afraid I'm going to break it.

It gets my work email, which took some getting used to. I had to learn to ignore it at times. Also, a lot of people I interact with are in Boston or Minneapolis. So when I'm sleeping I start getting work emails at 5 a.m. I made a sleepytime sound mode with pretty night sounds.

I'm still kind of embarrassed to take it out of my pocket.

2008-05-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

Prunes are not to be eaten by the handful

The great part about being friends with Mary long-distance is that it’s largely the same as being friends with her locally. It’s made up of text messages and IM. And she usually has something funny or fucked to say that I can put on my blog. Behold (edited for space and content):

Chair: tell me something funny or fucked up about your life. You haven’t been on the blog lately
Mary: um, we went to the coast. Last week.
C: Nice. Doesn’t make the blog.
M: I received the fourth and final installment of heiress money. this is actually good, you should like this.

Mary’s grandfather left her family a little money when he passed. But Mary’s grandma, (Gma as she appears in IM) doesn’t like Mary nearly as much as her brother. Mary called her a bitch when she was around 14. So Gma gave brother his money, but didn’t tell Mary about it. Her mother found out about this and has made it her personal crusade to get Mary her share of inheritance.

Phil, Mary’s boyfriend, has been trying to play online video games with her brother, but Phil can’t keep up with her brother’s new video games. “He’s always playing something new. Jesus, it’d be different for us if we had nana money too.” So Mary mentioned this joke to her mom, who suddenly became livid and called Gma and “turned into Tony Soprano,” demanding she stop withholding the inheritance.

M: the old lady FLIPS. phill is now a sonofabitch who is only with me for my money. im rotten, who would do that to her grandmother. my mom seemed to have gotten a kick out of it, until the old lady told me off, told me she didnt want me coming to her funeral. she didnt want anything to do with me anymore. then she called my mom up for days on end, and got her so worked up (my mom) had a mini stroke and ended up in the hospital
C: Holy shit. is she better?
M: she is
i havent cashed the check yet
so, yeah
how was that?
C: pretty good

But I wasn’t planning on blogging about it until this part:

Mary: i made the mistake of mindlessly eatring prunes this morning, which inevitable has consequenes. so i send a text to my mom 'prunes are not to be eaten by the handul'
Chair: does it make you shit a lot?
M: omg, i was in the can every 30 mins. and i decided to send a text to landline message of that to my grandmother

Mary is obsessed with ‘text-to-landline.’ If you send a text message to a landline, a robot lady calls the line and speaks a phonetic approximation of your message.

M: I sent a text message to caroline once that read, "wakey wakey, eggs and bakey"
C: I miss Carolline
M: it said, "wack-y, wack-y.. eggs.. and.. back-y"
C: that's fucked up that you send anyone a landline text message much less your estranged grandma about eating too many prunes
M: *nods* my mom thought it was hillarious
C: what did the message say?
M: "prunes should not be eaten by the handful"
C: that's making the blog. we have a winner
M: prunes a better story? hahaha
C: yep. it's got that 'x factor'
M: oh, and she apparently sent a reply back, grandma did, i tried to listen to it, but i think for some reason it didnt take
C: too bad (Pause)
people at the coffee shop I go to are hot
M: i'll send it to the number of the coffee shop ur at if u have their number
C: and it sounds like a robot or something?
M: oh, it totally sounds like a robot. i ran in to August at thanksgiving and he was like, "send me dirty text messages so the robot lady can read them to me"

I have nine days...

2008-05-02T20:22:00.001-07:00

before I am invalid in this book's eyes.

2008-05-01T23:02:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna fucking puke

I try to never judge a movie until it's over. But I'm five minutes into "I Am Legend" and I've already seen Will Smith chase a pack of elk in a shiny new Ford Mustang, trying to shoot them out the window with a rifle. This is followed by some of the most insultingly bad CGI I've seen since "American Werewolf in Paris."

Goddammit, what does a red-blooded American man have to do to get a decent big budget action movie anymore?

2008-04-29T22:29:00.001-07:00

A boring post about pizza. And water.

I ran out of ice and I don't have any ice trays, so I figured out I could freeze water in a little bowl in my freezer. Then I hold it under hot water until it frees from the bowl, put it in a bag and smash it up. For a brief while, I was really proud of myself, like I had come up with some ingenious solution to a modern problem. Then I realized that all I did was make a bad ice tray. And that ice trays cost like a dollar. But I like to smash the ice.

###

I order pizza from a place down the street; it's good. I probably order it every other week or so. When you get a pizza, they give you a menu and if you save 20 of the menus, you get $20 off of a purchase. At first I was excited. "Twenty bucks, nice." And then I started thinking about it. Twenty fucking pizzas? Who the fuck can eat 20 pizzas? That would take like a year! If I eat 20 of your pizzas, you owe me more than that. You owe me a franchise.

###

I was thinking the other day about how once I had to cover a speech at some awful 'women in business' banquet. Everyone in the hall (it was quite large) had to give a brief introduction where they said their names and their personal hero. There was a couple there, and the man said his hero was his wife. And the woman said her hero was her district manager.

These little exchanges, common as they are in social functions, are intended to reveal a small personal truth and they almost never succeed. Because if people answered really honestly, the results would be either very dull or horribly inappropriate for the benign occasions they frequent.

"Pick a suitable adjective that starts with the first letter of your name!"
Abusive Alan. Psoriatic Pete. Barely-literate Barbara.
"If you could have dinner with any one person, who would it be?"
My mother, because she died two years ago and I really, really miss her.
"What's something nobody here knows about you?"
I had labial cosmetic surgery. I can't get an erection unless I'm high. My first sexual experience was with my little league coach.

2008-04-27T00:47:00.000-07:00

Knives' likes and dislikes

Likes:
Bottle caps
Sleeping bags
The laptop's remote control
Kibble
The Matrix
Cloverfield
The DVD player's screen saver
Windowsills
Mewing
Beards

Dislikes:
Flushing toilets
The alarm clock
Period drama films
Being alone
Spicy foods
Unburied poop
Noises
Not eating
Plastic bags

2008-04-26T00:06:00.000-07:00

Peek Rouy Seye Deaha

This video makes me weepy every time I watch it:

2008-04-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

Bad coding

In the book I'm reading, there's a line by a computer programmer learning shiatsu massage,

"Everyone has a special place they store their tension, the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over."

We really do thrash our way through the same missteps, like they're built into our cells.

On a similar note, I have had the new experience of meeting a woman I like, and disregarding going out with her, because I can look down the line and predict exactly how it will end. I know the things I'm going to do to fuck it up, and I have a pretty good idea of the things about her that will become intolerable as time passes. And I'm a little ashamed to say that more often than before I find myself doubting that it's worth a shot. That it's surmountable. Is that a new talent or flaw?

2008-04-19T18:30:00.000-07:00

Dognapping

Being a pedestrian in Denver is comforting in the sense that being a smoker is comforting: you're fairly certain you know how you're going to die. I would say that every week, I have no less than three near-death experiences with some cocksucker hauling ass from Littleton to the downtown center. The other day, a woman in a Prius had to swerve to avoid hitting me as she made a left and I crossed the street. People who saw were yelling at her. I was on the way to Keith and Megan's and I told them about it.

"Some fucking bitch in a Prius almost killed me just now. And she had a Hillary bumper sticker too."
Keith: "That doesn't surprise me at all. Fucking Hillary supporters. Traitors. Judases."
Me: "I know. And then she pulled into the lot nearby and tried to yell an apology."
Keith: "She's probably a superdelegate."

Still, compared to the time I lived in Phoenix (also known as the worst time of my life), a 30 minute stroll to work is so much nicer than a 30 minute drive. It's my time to think, and breathe and relax and listen to podcasts. I walk halfway to the free downtown shuttle, then slouch in a seat the rest of the way.

I treasure it so much, that when people leave at the same time from work, I'm internally disappointed because I know they'll want to walk with me and I'll have to make smalltalk. I hate smalltalk. That's why I wear headphones on the shuttle.

Still, headphones and all, a portly woman started talking to me on Thursday.

Her: "I'm sorry, what kind of cologne are you wearing?"
Me: "Oh, um. I don't wear any cologne. Must be someone else."
Her: "Oh. I love it. It smells like my dad. I love a man who smells good. Not that many men do smell good. They're all stinky. Except for my gay friends. They all smell so good. Where did you grow up? I grew up here. This place has changed so much. My grandma, when she was younger, used to walk around all night long. We both have trouble sleeping. But back then, you could walk down 16th and be totally safe. She did it all the time, at 3 in the morning. She never once got raped or kidnapped. Now you can't even hardly leave your house without getting raped or kidnapped or getting your dog napped. Can you believe that? People will kidnap dogs. I think that's awful."
Me: Blink. Blink.
Her: "Well, this is my stop."

I also like to stare at people on the bus. The other day, this pretty couple were all cuddly and the girl kept kissing the boy's chin, because he wouldn't kiss her on the lips. He was uncomfortable with the public display of affection. I kept thinking, man just kiss her already, Jesus. In two years you're going to be thinking, damn why didn't I kiss her that one time on the bus? Things could have been different.

Then I wondered if I would have kissed her if I was in his position, or been uncomfortable and evasive. I ultimately decided it would depend a lot on my blood sugar at the time.

Later in the day, I overheard a co-worker mention the ever-increasing crime of dognapping.

2008-04-19T16:21:00.000-07:00

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

or, a review of my new telephone, internetting product. It's hard for me to actually say the word out loud. I want to give it a new name. And I absolutely refuse to call it a Crackberry. Because I'm just not that kind of person dammit. Why the love-hate relationship with the little silver box that does everything? Well, I guess for one it's kind of a symbol of something, namely people who let their work rule their lives. It's a tool of the bourgeois, an accessory to upper-middle class lifestyle.

But also, I have a kind of dogmatic devotion to all things Apple. Alas, an iPhone is $400, even with service contract, and I got a smoking deal on my little gadget friend. So there is part of me that scowls at the machine, knowing it did not come from Steve Jobs and is instantly inferior, but mostly that I'm betraying the tech institution that has done so much for my life and happiness.

So here's a rundown on the "Curve," with constant comparison to Apple products, for anyone who's interested.

Cost: Curve is like a mid-range model. It retails for the same amount the iPhone does (about 400), but with service contract and a little ingenuity, you can get one for far cheaper. The iPhone, however, comes from Apple and only Apple and you pay whatever the fuck Apple wants, and with a smile. My old phone cost zero. The real bastard is the rate plan. The minimum media plan for the device is $35/mo. My old phone's media was 10 bucks. But without the media pack, the Curve is just a pretty phone with a great monitor and a full keyboard. With the media pack, it's a new life.

Awe: Pretty damn good. When I first pulled my new Mac laptop out of the box, I couldn't take my eyes off of it, like I was trying to penetrate it, absorb it with sight. I hyperventilated, ran my hands gently across it's flawless surface. That's a pretty rare reaction, but the Curve was pretty impressive out of the box. The difference is that Apple products scream grace, simplicity and elegance. The Curve is enticing in its complexity. From first look, it's clear that there is a lot to explore in this phone. It sort of says, "You will never know me completely, but go ahead and try."

Design: Similar to Awe. For style, you can never compete with Apple. Once you look past the novelty of the Curve, it's actually not very pleasant to look at. Tons of tiny buttons scrunched together. It's interface is also a mess, and full of garish 90s colors. Currently, nobody but Apple looks at tech tools as pieces of art. Even this thing's logo, a cluster of little dots that I guess is supposed to look like some kind of berry, is a bad corporate boardroom image that makes you want to look away.

User-friendliness: I'm in the very early stages, but this is easily the least-intuitive piece of technology I've ever owned. It's main menu is a tiny grid of 27 (27!) vague icons that I don't even find myself looking at. I have to see what the text says below when I highlight it. And the keyboard, while leaps better than a phone keypad, is so tiny. The rollerball is alright, but kind of pain and I feel like I'm going to break it. It's no wonder Apple found itself looking at these things and thinking, "Jesus Christ there has to be a better way to do this than just including everything a computer has, only tiny." Who knew it would end up being touchscreen. We're one step closer to the tangible, interactive holograms in Minority Report. And then we get jetpacks.

I have a theory that the reason the blackthingys are so addictive is because they're like little puzzles. I can't stop fucking with it, trying to uncover yet another thing that if I invest a little time I can force it to do for me. And I know that I live in a Mac world, and therefore speak a Mac language. But still. I almost sent the thing back after my first day. I felt like I had married a whore who wouldn't have sex with me.

Fun: Once I convinced it to have sex with me, it started to get really exciting, really fast. That metaphor will end now. But this thing does so goddamn many things, most of which I'll never use. It integrates my phone/voicemail, text messages, personal email, work email (which I'm resisting for now), web browser, calendar, maps/GPS, music (although as a Mac user, I'm shut out of that business), photos and instant messaging.

The best part though, and something Apple is not very good at, is that you can fuck with it a lot. Apple, unless you're particularly wily, is very exclusive and monolithic. There are dozens of applications you can download with this thingy. The best of which come from Google. All of this is much more a testament to Google's ingenuity, but I credit the BB for having so much room for innovation. It's more of a shell for what you want to fill it with. So there's a package of Google apps you can download, built in with a new program auto-uploader that includes:

Faster desktop Google search. Pop it open from your main menu without connecting, nothing but the word Google and a bar to enter text.
Google Maps. Hit find my location and it gives you an instant interactive Google map with your location roughly GPS'd. Zoom in, zoom out, map or satellite options. Direction search, and so on. The stock GPS software, Telenav, has a separate cost, and probably is annoyingly complicated.
Google Calendar can stand alone or sync with your online calendar in real time.
GMail. This is my favorite. A desktop Gmail that takes me to my inbox with one-button. It updates regularly and even notifies me, a la text and voicemail, when I get a new email.
Blogger lets you send a picture or text to it from the mobile and it remotely blogs it for you.

And a bunch more I'm not even going to use. And time will tell if I get tired of all the bells and whistles and just turn off the media pack and use it as a cool phone.

Trivia:

This morning when I woke up, I checked my email from bed, so as to avoid walking across the room to the computer.
Knives is freaked the fuck out by my cat meow ring tone.
I never feel it vibrate in my pocket, and miss text messages.
I'm thinking of getting a desktop theme with a blue, flaming skull.
It occurred to me that if I pursue it, I can potentially integrate my entire life with Google. Glife.
I hate the fonts, and I'm going to have to do something about it. They're so wiry and pixely.
Also on my lists of things to conquer: figuring out how to hack it so I can connect it to my laptop. Currently, I can connect them with Bluetooth (another business-oriented word that makes my skin crawl), but they're totally incompatible, and I they don't interact at all. They're just connected. Like my computer is saying, "Hey, I recognize you exist, but let's just leave it at that. You don't like me, and i don't like you."
The internet is not fast, but not slow. The iPhone actually connects to wireless signals when one is detectable. Don't think mine can do that.
The camera is pretty good. Here's a couple of pictures:

Brave New World

2008-04-18T23:36:00.001-07:00

I am sending this message from my scary new phone with a scary good camera and a scary small qwerty keyboard. I'm not even sure if its going to work. But its shiny and does all kinds of things that I don't need. And I haven't taken my eyes off of it for 8 hours.

2008-04-13T21:44:00.000-07:00

What a beautiful day

We broke 60 today. A nice little spike from our late snow flurry. I went to Cheesman Park, just a few blocks from home. It was full of people, a kickball game going on, a lot of frisbee. It was crowded, lots of traffic flowing through, but kind of beautiful. People in Denver seem to live in the city because they have to, but then the second the circumstance allows they get in their cars and drive to something outside. They fucking love getting in cars and driving to pretty places. So truck after truck lining the sidewalk along the park is annoying, but it's nice that everyone likes to go and frolick whenever possible.

I sat in the grass and finished a book with a cup of coffee. There was a flock of people standing by their cars with hulahoops. Like 20 people sitting around, playing hulahoop. Playing their hippie music pretty loud. Why do people have to turn a perfectly good day into Bonaroo? But elsewhere there were people lying around reading. A pretty couple playing some kind of horseshoe game, drinking beers.

A couple of dogs came up and said hello to me. It's too bad you can't bring a cat to the park. Knives love to lay down in the sun.

2008-04-12T14:19:00.000-07:00

The Gayest Night Ever

I know that's a bold statement. The gayest night ever would probably involve sodomy, which mine did not. Still, it was pretty gay. Sometimes after work Fridays folks head to a Happy Hour, and usually I join. I've resolved to almost never turn down social invitations, so as to avoid transforming completely into a hermit. This invitation was to a place called Mint, which made me suspect because every city I've ever lived in that's had a Mint, it was a gay bar. It's like the Eagle, or the Rainbow Room, or the Egyptian. It's just a gay bar name.

Robin told me it wasn't a gay bar, but if that's true, it really should be. The interior is very shiny, with plush booths surrounded by curtains. The floor tables are surrounded by cushy, low to the ground, vinyl sofas, and the light fixtures are alternately crystal chandeliers and chrome satellites hanging by wires. There was an elevated DJ booth, dance music playing, and the waitresses wore skin-tight black mini-dresses, black off-the-shoulder sweaters and either heels or Uggs.

I showed up a little later than the rest to find a table of women only. Not an uncommon situation, as I usually have more female than male friends. But given the venue, I found myself in the never-occuring situation of being the most masculine presence in the vicinity.

But the best part is the reason we go to Mint is the killer happy hour. Three dollar mojitos. The mojito is the gayest thing you can drink besides jizz. And I drank mojito, garnished with a spear of sugarcane. I can't turn down a bargain, especially when booze is involved, so I just couldn't order a beer. I finally told our waitress that I couldn't take it anymore, and she offered that martinis are also on special. Oh, and happy hour goes on until 9. "Fine, I'll take a martini. But gin. And dry. Extra dry."

At one point in the night, the table held two martinis, a mojito, a cosmopolitan, a hazelnut martini, and a fruit and cheese plate. By the way, that's one of my peeves, when people put together these elaborate drinks with fucking chocolate and fruit, and throw it in a cocktail glass and call it a "martini."

Let's get this straight: a martini is gin and dry vermouth, with an olive garnish. If you even change the garnish, it is no longer a martini. Use vodka, that's okay, but then it becomes a "vodka martini." Or if you like, replace the olive with a cocktail onion and call it a Gibson. But you wouldn't ever walk in to the bar and say, "I'll have a cranberry Rum and Coke. You know, it's a Rum and Coke, except you use tequila instead of rum and cranberry instead of Coke." Because things have names goddammit, and words are important. So if you take Apple Pucker and caramel and put it in a cocktail glass, more power to you, but you are not drinking a martini.

So anyway, we're having a great time and Melissa's husband actually shows up and joins us, then they leave. And about four martinis later (you know that saying "one martini isn't enough and two is too many." I've never understood that saying), these other girls show up. Friends of friends. And they are all very, very attractive. And very well dressed. Like going-to-the-clubs well dressed. And now the sun's down and there's a doorman, and I'm starting to get that feeling like the movie I was acting in ended and now I'm in another movie, but I've been horribly miscast and never got the script.

"So what the hell are you girls all dressed up for?" I asked.
"Well these two are celebrating becoming recently single," one responded. This is great news, I think to myself.
"That's great news," I said. "Your choice or his?"
"His. For both of, unfortunately."
"Oh, I'm sure you're both better off," I said. "So what are you gonna to do to celebrate getting dumped?"
"Excuse me," one friend said, "but she and her boyfriend broke up yesterday, so it's still a fresh wound, and you're basically rubbing salt in it, so thanks."
"Oh," and I think I stared straight ahead for a while.

I left shortly after my failed attempt to connect, and walked half way home before I realized I left my vest with my ipod in it at the bar. I walked back and thank god, it was still there and the girls weren't.

Then I walked home and watched Walk Hard, and fell into a solid, gin-soaked sleep.

2008-04-06T22:02:00.000-07:00

Boohbah!

I recently read "Hey Nostradamus!" by Douglas Coupland. Coupland is Lipe's favorite writer, so when were going out she convinced me to read "All Families are Psychotic." All in all, an incredibly entertaining writer. He kind of pulls a magic trick on his readers. By that I mean he seems to start his books with a high concept, that is particularly timely or topical. One of his books is about a school shooting, another is about 90s software designers working for Microsoft. But then what he does is turns the story into something totally independent of the concept. It's as if I said, "Hey, listen to this story about this Civil War battle." And then I went on to tell you about the day to day life of the cousin of one of the soldiers. But somehow it was so compelling that you just sort of forgot about the battle.

He also has the ability to intercut banality and shocking plot twists that are completely far-fetched, but somehow you just accept their possibility. Keep in mind, I've only read two of his novels, but the take home message I keep getting is that, in modern life, anything can happen, anytime. This makes day to day existence both extremely anxious, and also incredibly dull.

The most rewarding part of a Douglas Coupland read, though, aside from the bone dry Canadian sense of humor, is that his characters are so beautifully flawed. And they're so easy to relate to and care for. His books are the kind of books where when you put them down, you end up missing the characters, like they're friends of yours. And that's rare. So anyway, pick one up. All families is a good staring point for my money.

###

I loved Michael Clayton. This may be because I'd watch George Clooney do a crossword puzzle for two hours and think it's the coolest thing in the world (wow, that sounded really gay). And the ending was a little Hollywood. But overall, one of the more entertaining, well-acted movies I've seen recently.

Sweeney Todd, on the other hand. Ick. My sister would kill me if she knew I felt this way (she's 17 and worships Johnny Depp and Tim Burton) but I completely disliked this movie. Musicals, as I've aged, have become one of the things I've become less dogmatically opposed to. Just as I no longer automatically despise Karaoke, or dancing in public, or blue cheese, I no longer despise musicals up front. But they have some work to do. And Sweeney Todd, even with all of its gore and spooky set design, didn't pull it off.

The singing was bad, but forgivable. I don't know, I just didn't buy it. Something about the Tim Burton thing didn't gel with the Sondheim thing. Like a clashing outfit. I'm curious what someone who really liked it would say to this...

###

On Saturday, I went to a place called City O City, with Keith, Megan and Jason. It's a vegetarian restaurant on the hip 13th Ave. We ordered vegetarian Buffalo wings and vegetarian pepperoni pizza. It was, without exaggeration, incredible. One of the best meals I've had recently. Better than real chicken wings and pepperoni pizza, in fact. And the atmosphere was great too. It reminded me of home.

When we were contemplating going, during the Final Four games, Keith was telling me about the vegetarian wings.

"How do they make vegetarian wings? Do they chop off the wings of chickens, but then nurse them back to health so they survive?"
"Yeah, and they have a vegetarian steak, where they shear off some of a cow's flesh and then bandage it up and give him some painkillers."

###

During that same meal, I had an odd flashback of a time in my life in college. I told the dinner party about how at one point, I would stay at my girlfriend's apartment most nights. She's have to wake up super early for some reason, and I'd always wake up when she did. About that same time Teletubbies would come on. I'd watch it every day and get so relaxed and then fall back to sleep. They found this ridiculous, particularly when I explained to them all of the ins and outs of the show. The baby head for a sun. The little dances they'd do. The giant rabbits. Casey even eventually bought me a little talking Po doll. I'm not sure where that doll is. Sad.

Teletubbies was designed for infants to get very basic mental stimulation. Later its creators would make a show designed to keep toddlers active physically. But it wasn't soothing to watch as an adult. In fact it was kind of horrifying.

###

Speaking of, on Friday night, after some indulgence, I suddenly felt like I had sandpaper in my eyes. I just got home from going out with some folks, and my eyeballs were on fire. I jumped in the shower at like midnight and washed my face. That usually works when I have allergies, but it didn't fix it. So I turned the water pressure down and got under the showerhead and pulled open my eyelids and let water wash over my eyeballs. I woke up and my eyes were all crusty, like I had been crying all night. This may sound grotesque in print, but anytime I've told it to someone in person, it ends with hysterical laughter. I told Megan, and she said, "Why didn't you use some Visine or contact solution?" I told her that obviously I didn't have any, otherwise I wouldn't have been standing in the shower holding my eyelids open. And besides, "You're giving me credit for a level of rational thought that I clearly didn't have access to at the time."

2008-04-05T16:07:00.000-07:00

Nausea, follow up

After Nausea was published, and a swarm of existentialists popped up all over Europe (Camus being the most noted), controversy followed this bleak new philosophy (that wasn't really new, since Kierkegaard paved the way for Sartre. But suddenly it was tres chic). The communists hated Sartre, because they feared he would dissuade people from joining the cause. Christians said he lack morality and fixated on the most pessimistic of human qualities. But he had people packing into halls and cafes to hear and discuss philosophy.

c.samuel said...

I guess that's an interesting thought, but it would be unfortunate from my perspective. Existentially you will in fact exist less for those who only know what you do from reading your blog. This is so dramatic. I think Sartre would have loved it.

5:46 AM

And here I am still. But I like your suggestion that there are those who only know what I do from reading a journal. It reaffirms the falseness of it all. Like I've created a totally different person who has his own friends and acquaintances who exists independently of me. I'd be a murderer if I stopped blogging, or stopped recounting stories at least.

Eric said...

I was surprised at your last line. To meditate on the subject of telling stories, even with the notion that such a realization as you mention just might ruin the whole house of cards, and conclude that it might be time to stop just didn't seem to add up.
On another note, consider the "group story," reminiscing or whathaveyou. This is shared experience becoming shared story.
When a group of friends (if it's our sort they in all likelihood happen to be drunk) gets together after a while and starts laughing and joking about the old times - this party or that crazy thing or remember that one weirdo who showed up that one night - is the experience of the story that much richer because it is shared?

10:34 PM

Sartre would not like this premise that multiple people telling a story makes it more real, I think. As though multiple people somehow create triangulation points that pinpoint reality. If anything, their observations skew it further. Group think comes into play. There have been studies where the subject's family says, "Do you remember the time when you broke my lamp and hid it under a rug and the pieces got smashed even smaller ....." Most of the stories are real, but one is made up. The subject concurs with all stories' reality equally. Which isn't to say there is no value to what you describe. Just that the essence it creates is far subordinate to the truth of what we really were at the time.

Catfish Vegas said...

That last one was me... happened to be signed into another gmail account at the time.
(People are extra-badass when they have more than one gmail account!)

10:37 PM

Remember when I decided that I wanted to refer to you only as Eric. It didn't stick. Remember when I wanted people to start calling me Digby. That also didn't stick. Remember when you wanted to start calling me Baron Mutate. Again, no stick.

Charissa said...

I'm depressed. Thanks.

Sartre would say that his philosophy is the most optimistic of all, because in it, man is the sole determinant of his destiny. He creates his own essence. He would later narrow his philosophy to say that "existence precedes essence" means that man has no inherent nature, and therefore any action a man takes makes him a legislator for the human race. Our actions create a track record that defines the true nature of what we are. Hence the anguish and nausea. That's a lot of pressure. You have nothing to rely on in the guidance of your actions. It makes just as much sense to kill someone because they annoy you as it does to befriend them. It's up to you.

But all in all, yeah, I agree. Pretty depressing stuff. I was ready to put on dark eyeliner after 200 pages of Nausea. I'm not sure I could allow myself to live after 900 pages of "Being and Nothingness."

2008-03-31T19:16:00.000-07:00

Walking around and looking at stuff

So anyway, I spent a lot of the weekend walking around the neighborhood. This has become a major pastime for me, walking around. Looking at stuff. My neighborhood is beautiful, and just edgy enough to stay interesting but not require a knife. It's largely residential, and the walking through the houses and apartment buildings it's easy to fall in love.

I had a professor, the same one I mentioned below, who would talk about how the architecture tells the story of a city, it's its fingerprint. Spires reach toward god, domes show a society bound with law and reason.

Denver had two big booms. The turn of the century is when it first really became a city, so that's where you get a lot of the Victorian, kind of Gothic buildings. The old churches with pointy spires. But its other boom came mid-century. So Denver trumpets post-war optimism. Sweeping Western expansion, Cadillacs and neon.

I think it falls under the vague school of post-war modern. It has the flair of art-deco, but none of the substance. Still, it's not quite as frivolous as post-modern. William Gibson calls it "Raygun Gothic," in his story "The Gernsback Continuum" Coffee shops and egg beaters that look like spaceships. It's the architecture of optimism; the car was king and the good times were here to stay. It's one of my favorite times in American culture, not necessarily because of the glitz, but because of the spookiness in the background.

I've been fixating lately over not just the buildings, but the fonts. My god, the fonts in this city are right out of a comic book. Typefaces have style. Some words are carrying martinis. Some words have never worked a day in their lives, just sit by the pool all day and gamble all night. Others just got out of a flying limousine to say, "This is what words look like... In The Future!"

There's also a sense of living the dream in these buildings and letters that adorn them. Every building has a title. You don't live in Eastridge Apartments. You live in .... The Patrician! The fact that the neighborhood has aged and scuffed up a bit makes it even more charming. There is residue of a future that never happened. Like a watermark, or an old man in an old, but flawless suit.

This could very well be one of those things that I get compulsive about, and invest too much in and people get bored with. But indulge me, and look at all of these pretty fonts.

2008-03-31T00:40:00.000-07:00

Nausea

I spent last weekend catching up on reading and walking around the neighborhood. Jason sent me my first shipment of comics from Floating World, so I had that to tear through. The highlight was David Lapham's new Vertigo title, "Young Liars," the best first issue I've read in a long time. The main character relies on her best friend for moral judgment, since the bullet embedded in her brain robbed her of hers. She bites someone's nose off in the first few pages.

On a more academic note, I read Nausea, by Sartre. I'll save the tutorial on 1930s existentialism, but it's a downer. This is not the novel you want to read in one weekend alone in your apartment. Or maybe it is, actually. You certainly get lost in it that way, lost in the narrator's head. Maybe that's perfect. One of the sections that really kicked my teeth in is the following:

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell...Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I've been traveling for three years, I've been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks. There are moments - rarely - when you make a landmark, you realize that you're going with a woman, in some messy business. The time of a flash. After that, the procession starts again, you begin to add up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926.

That's living. but everything changes when you tell about life; it's a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense...
I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

This is an excerpt from a larger part of the book where the protagonist discovers that our internal narrative is completely off base, and indulging in it is to lie to oneself. But that he craves it so much. "Cutting short tedium, making for continuity."

Story, to Sartre, is an opiate we use to relieve the anguish of existing. We create time, continuity, meaning, and overlay it on top of nothing, because the alternative is unbearable. Knowing that in the grand scheme of things, man isn't unlike a stone, or a table, or a tree.

I once read that people who keep journals, who write down their thoughts, suffer fewer maladies than those who don't. Lower blood pressure, get sick less, etc. And anyone's who has been to therapy knows that 90 percent of it is the therapist sitting and listening and you telling. And it helps tremendously. Just telling someone what happened to you.

Because if you don't tell, it didn't really happen did it? We have to instill it, implant it into existence. I had an English professor who used to say that all literature serves one of two purposes: to help endure or enjoy life. I think that's true, but an understatement.

Sartre puts it in a truer sense: without story, there is no life, not in the sense in which we strive to experience it. With nemeses and troubles and beginnings and ends, and chapters. All of that is fabrication that we create by recounting.

And what do you do after that realization? Our narrator can't go back. It'd be like a devoted Christian waking up and figuring out that there's no god, and then just continuing to go to church.

When I started keeping this blog, the first or second post I did was about the absurdity of keeping a blog. That was five years ago. I was coming out of a miserable time in my life. I was starting a new life in a new home. And when I started narrating my day-to-day like this, it was like a relaunch. It released so much anxiety.

Four in the morning? Can't sleep? Go blog about it. During that year, I was so happy and relieved and in love with my life again. A symptom of starting a public diary or vice versa? Either way, now I'm compelled, almost addicted, to keeping the narrative going.

Which raises an interesting question: what happens if I stop? It's a scary thought Sunday at midnight, but I'm thinking this should be my last post.

2008-03-29T01:02:00.000-07:00

Music for Mr. Chair readers

Here is some music! Follow the link and click on 'Liquid Mahogany.'

Seventy-Four Seventy-Five, by Shearwater: I don't know what it is about this band. They're an Okkervil River spinoff, but there's something special. It's a cinematic, epic sound. Like what the Decemberists strive for.
Bird on a Wire, by Rogue Wave: I feel like Rogue Wave is the most under-recognized indie rock band. Every song on "Descended Like Vultures" is a great time.
Party Pit, by The Hold Steady: The Hold Steady bring the long-awaited return of sincerity to Rock and Roll. Sincerity is the new irony!
We've Been Had, by the Walkmen: Annoying voice. Lame album. Good song.
I Don't Believe You, by Magnetic Fields: "I had a dream and you were in it/the blue of your eyes was infinite."
Clinically Dead, by Chad VanGaelen: Recorded in his one-room apartment.
Red Sea, Black Sea, by Shearwater
Lately, by The Helio Sequence: Four years of waiting, and the new album deserves three songs on this mix.
Draw 50 Vehicles, by Caleb Christopher: Not quite as good as The Swim's amazing debut album, but still lots of fun. Swede's ex-tenant.
Ice on the Wing, by Nada Surf
South America, by the Shout Out Louds: if the Cure were Swedish. Goddamn, this song makes me so giddy.
Love's Lost Guarantees, by Rogue Wave: at 3:47 the amazing last minute starts.
Broken Afternoon, more Helio Sequence, but folksy
Skinny Love, by Bon Iver: Not a damn thing wrong with this song.
Apartment Story, by The National
Walcott, by Vampire Weekend
Audience of One, by The Swords Project: this Portland post-rock band broke up, just as a lot of us were falling in love. God they were so beautiful to watch live.
No Regrets, by The Helio Sequence: just in case you survived the last song, here's a quick fun sing-a-long.

2008-03-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

Sleepytime

My friend Mary had a dream last night that her entire immediate family was involved in a suicide pact. She told me this over instant message from our respective workplaces. It was her mom, her brother her and her uncle, I think. And they all made this suicide pact as this great family activity for everyone to take part in.

But Mary didn't want to do it, so she confronted her mom, Floanne, who you should all add on Myspace, because she's the greatest. Floanne said to Mary in her dream,
"Mary, this is something we were supposed to do as a family."
"But Mom, I don't want to die. I want to live!"
And Floanne said, "Okay honey, you just go to the Red Robin across the street and get some of those spicy fries you like."

So Mary did and then she went back to the house and everyone was dead. Her mom and dad were both slumped over at their computer desks. And then she woke up and took solace in her boyfriend, who was playing violent computer games with headphones on. She told Floanne in real life later on, who thought it was hilarious. "Just call me Jim Jones."

And I told Mary, that's weird, because I had the exact opposite dream last night that my entire family was taking shelter together from a tornado. But it was equally banal as her dream. We were mostly shopping for stuff to eat with my mom beforehand, and we did a little clothes shopping at the mall too. And then during the tornado, it was scary, but also fun like a party.

2008-03-21T21:38:00.001-07:00

¡Spring Break 2008!

"That's right, I still have a spring break. Very funny." In Tim's defense, he's getting a law degree after getting a masters. That said, Denver got a little south of the border during Tim's week-long visit. Things got a little MTV Snoop Dogg crazy. There was tons of beer, some Red Bull, Irish car bombs. Enchiladas, happy hour, food-poisoning. Passing out on the floor, sleeping in chairs, racism. What a week. Here are the highlights.

I met up with Tim and Charissa at an Irish bar down the street from my apartment. I hadn't seen Tim in years. I last saw Charissa in Aspen about two years ago, after a backpacking weekend that I remember being great but somehow everyone else remembers being awful. They're both lawyers, or Charissa is anyway. Tim is close. By the way, I know you guys are all respectable, so I can redact your names if you want.

We caught up for a while, and tried to figure out a timeline for what had happened in our respective histories. We talked a lot of shit about our mutual friends. Mostly Cory, but also Swede. Some of it was positive. It was an unlikely trio, considering how long we'd been out of contact, but we ended up having a great time. We relocated to The Thin Man, you know, the place with the hot bartender. Tim had to go skiing early so he left. We stayed and closed the bar. I got drunk and ended up in a rickshaw.

Monday, Tim wanted to go to the Whiskey Bar. What he didn't mention was that they had Nintendo Wii! The thing where you hold a little stick and wave it around and it's like pretending to do real things like sports. Charissa reluctantly played, but ended up being the best at it and started plotting to get her rivals to the bar to defeat them at Wii bowling.

Friday was our night to rage, since nobody had anything to do Saturday (actually I did at 2 p.m., which I thought would be plenty late but turned out to be wrong). I got a text message from Charissa (who for some reason goes by Sharice on this blog) at about 4 p.m. saying that she was drunk. Her whole firm knocked off at 2 to go to the bar. Lawyers wake up early and go to court, so they do their drinking in the afternoon.

That night we met up for pizza and then back over to Whiskey Bar to see Ande and Ryan. Now there's some controversy about the rest of this evening. I will concede to this: I had a fair amount to drink. I also may have become excessively opinionated and may have said some things out of turn. But I maintain I wasn't nearly as bad as the rest of these yahoos.

Tim and Ande, for example. They argued about the difference between will and shall, during which I'm pretty sure Tim said "a priori," at which point I think I said, "You gotta be fucking kidding me." Then they argued about whether Teddy Roosevelt would be a Democrat today, which ended in Tim telling her that her argument was ridiculous, repeatedly. This argument ended in tears.

Then Tim and I argued something about China. Then we drank some car bombs. We went to another bar, then we argued about the ethics of law. Now keep in mind, I had been very civil all night until this point. But during my argument with Tim, Charissa caught a stray bullet. I challenged both of them to recite to me the ethical oath that lawyers take. I was just making a point. And I said something mean to Charissa, the type of thing I tend to say late at night under the influence (which sometimes gets me punched in the face). I hit a sore spot. So I apologized, I thought very sincerely. But sincerity is not my native tongue.

And that was our big lawyery late-night heated argument. We're all still friends, and for the record, I am legitimately sorry for hurting feelings. And while the arguments are getting most of the press, all in all it was a pretty fun drunken night. We did end up going back to my place. Charissa was in and out of sleep. I poured Tim and I glasses of Jameson. I talked to Swede on the phone. Charissa taxied home. Tim fell asleep on my floor, then in my chair. They were my first guests.

The next night, we all went to Mezcal for dinner. A much more civil evening. I was hungover. Tim had to get on a plane at 1.
Me: "Tim, what did you do today?"
Tim: "Oh pretty much felt guilty about making Ande cry. You?"
Me: "Yeah, pretty much felt guilty too."
Charissa: "Good."

St. Patrick's Day festivities were just getting under way. It was Saturday night. Big drops of rain turned into big flakes of snow. It was about time for Tim to take to the skies. I'd see him soon enough, either in Portland or Tucson. I'd see Charissa soon enough. Old friendships were rekindled. New friendships were made. All of the above were tested to the limit. And we all got matching lower back tattoos. It was a spring break to remember.

2008-03-17T22:08:00.001-07:00

Why do we fall, Bruce?

Little Lisa sent me a letter the other day. It contained: a car window sticker of a diamond,
a picture of a person (Lisa?) standing under an ice sign at a gas station, an article and a photo clipped from the paper, a note from her and her rabbit, Jackson. It's rare to get something real in the mail these days. I loved it, and it made me feel homesick and at home at the same time. I gotta send something back.

###

I could watch Batman Begins every night and not get sick of it. Maybe not. A lot of times though, I could watch it.

###

I keep changing my thermostat, and I don't think it does anything. In fact, while my I'm always comfortable, the hall of the building is way warmer than my apartment. I decided to drop it to its coldest and see if anything changes. I picked a cold night for the test, so if I wake up to a 25 degree apartment tonight, I'll know that my thermostat works.

###

When I cooked dinner the last two nights, I didn't have a thickening agent. I had just been to the grocery store, so I decided to try bread crumbs instead of flour. It actually worked pretty well. I made an outstanding cream of mushroom soup Sunday and a broccoli and mushroom sauce tonight. So there you go. Fucking Heloise over here.

###

Speaking of cooking, I was chopping garlic with my sharpest knife tonight and brought it down square across my thumb. "Oh fuck oh fuck that's bad." And I held it up and squeezed it and waited for the gush to decide if I needed to get stitches. But there was nothing. A surface cut. Not a drop of blood. That knife could have cut my fucking thumb off. I felt like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable. It was a St. Patrick's day miracle.

###

Every single time I go to the bathroom, I walk out to find Knives standing outside the door concerned. She looks up at me and then when I flush the toilet she says, "mew," and runs away and hides. Every time. Except last night. She waited in bed for me. I was so proud.

###

I got really homesick yesterday. I was walking around town and felt like going to Powell's Books. I went grocery shopping, because it cheers me up. It did cheer me up, and I made it a leisurely, marathon trip for extra fun. But I kept judging the poor grocery store, like its produce and bakery sections. "You're not good enough! Nothing here is good enough!" Then I bought new salt and pepper shakers.

###

The Brothers Solomon is a very funny movie. Written by Will Forte and directed by Bob Odenkirk, also starring Will Arnett from Arrested Development. Funny.

###

I bought a bottle of orange juice at the 7-11 by my house, and when I got home I shook it up and opened it. It exploded all over the kitchen counter, floor and me. It must have fermented. I took a sip to be sure. Oh yeah. Spit it out and poured it down the drain. I took it back to get a new one and the Middle Eastern gentleman didn't believe me.

"It doesn't make sense. Why did you drink all of the juice if it was bad?"
"I didn't drink it, it exploded and I poured it out. Look at my shirt, it's all over me."
"No. It doesn't make sense. That's the one you bought. They will all be the same. The same shipment."

I convinced another guy to give me another orange juice, but now it's uncomfortable when I go in. I go there all the time. It's funny how the people who run the store by your house have amazing insight into your lifestyle. If the people at Swan Mart by my old house paid attention, they would think I'm an alcoholic, crack-smoking ninja who likes Ben and Jerry's fudge brownie ice cream. Which is a half-truth. Now I also have a Planned Parenthood right by my house. I hope they don't pay attention.

###

And now ... The Photo Section!

For a couple of months in 2005 I seriously considered pursuing pet portraiture. It all started when I took a picture of Maddie's dog Melville and she told me I "captured his soul." I'm still not half-bad, but the toes in the corner aren't very professional:

Batman Begins:

The aforementioned shower curtain:

2008-03-16T20:31:00.000-07:00

The Audit

In one of the fever dreams I had, someone came to my house to perform an audit of my life. More like a departmental review. I'm getting older, so I guess it was time to take stock of how I'm doing at being an adult. I brought this up with a co-worker and we thought of a few things that are solid watermarks for adulthood, like having framed pictures on the walls, tapestries on the wall are big knocks.

Camila took me to Target a couple weeks ago to apartment shop. She downright refused to let me buy certain things, claiming "You will never have sex again." She actually took things out of the cart and put them back. "You are almost 30, you can't have a Spider-man bathmat." I did win on the shower curtain though. She wanted plain, but instead I got goldfish.

I think I'm doing alright, but here's what I imagine the audit would catch:

1. My bed is on the floor. I read a stupid article on dating in the Portland Mercury, where this woman said she'd never date younger men anymore because she can't handle sleeping in a bed on the floor. I've been self-conscious about it ever since. (-20 points)
2. I have a coat rack. (+5 points)
3. I use an electric toothbrush. Sometimes I don't use it for the full two-minute cycle, but I try. (+10 points) I do not floss though. (-5 points)
4. Several bookshelves with neatly arranged books. (+5) One of the shelves is filled with action figures (-4)
5. I own and care for a pet. (+10 points)
6. Framed picture of my little sister. (+5)
7. Framed picture of Willie Nelson. (-5)
8. Two framed rock concert posters on the wall. (neutral)
9. Four unframed comic book-related posters on the wall (-3. This would be much worse, but they're non-superhero, indie comic art posters, so I get a pass. If I frame them, I might even get points!)
10. I eat in front of the television on a piece of plastic I use as a table. (-10)
11. I live alone (+5) in a studio apartment (-3).
12. I have health insurance (+10)
13. My bathroom has a color scheme (+5. Thanks Camila.)

So, let's see, that gives me a score of, carry the one, and: a Two. Wow, that's completely of no use to me. Come to think of it, in the dream, there was never any score. And most of the dream I was just trying to find out who ordered the audit, and then I found out it was Knives and got all upset. I knew that she was doing it out of care for me, but I was upset that she would go over my head instead of just coming to me with her concerns. But I guess she can't speak English, and somehow was able to communicate with the auditors so she must have felt it was her only option. Anyway, take the test yourself, and see if you're good enough.

2008-03-12T21:25:00.000-07:00

Darkness/Light/Darkness

This blog has been awfully wordy lately. I've been thinking a lot about this short film. When I was young I was watching late night public television, and this short animated film by Czech Jan Svankmajer came on. It blew my fucking mind. Scared the hell out of me to be honest.

I've been thinking a lot about it lately. There's something about a major relocation that feels like building a man. Starting with an empty room. Piece by piece you clumsily put together something that resembles a life. I think I started to feel like a real person a week ago when I bought a shower curtain. You add on and add on, put things around you that you enjoy, that make you feel human and safe. It's exciting, and fresh. I love this time. You're rebuilding yourself from scratch.

Watching this film again, it's just as eerie and terrifying to me as when I first saw it. Even the part with the clay penis (yes, there's a little clay penis, settle down, we're all adults here), which could be considered comic is really scary. That's why it's so powerful I think. It takes this surreal, slapstick look at a horrifying sensation and hits a little close to home. Darkness/Light/Darkness. That last frame. The look on the man's face as he has nothing to do and nowhere to go, and the light's about to go off...

2008-03-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

The Chill

I spent much of the following week in bed shaking and sweating, alternately, with flu. My routine for my first week of work was as follows: Wake up. Take a shower. Ache. Moan. Work on a diet of cough drops and ibuprofen. Go home. Watch TV and drink tea. Pass out and sleep for 10-11 hours.

I hadn't been this sick in years. Not just the intensity, but the lifespan, were singular. I was pretty much running on sheer will and drugs all week. Tuesday night, I was at a happy hour (it was a welcome happy hour for me, I couldn't really miss it) and I got a call from Joe. It's funny how since the past year, whenever an unexpected phone call comes, I assume death or disease. When dad calls after 9:30, or someone I haven't heard from in a while, it's never good news anymore. Joe called earlier while I was at work, so the second call I knew something was wrong. My mind scanned through friends' parents, anyone who's had health problems.

It was another old friend, my age. We used to live across the street from each other. He might have been my first friend, certainly my best friend for my younger childhood. Then we grew up together and stayed friends, if not super close, all through college and after. He died over the weekend, alone in his apartment. We hadn't spoken in years. I knew little about his life, except that he was a partner in a law firm and had a different group of friends lately. No one has an official cause of death, and I'm sure we'll never have one. We all new he'd had problems as long as we've known him. But he was successful by all accounts. Wealthy. Incredibly smart. I guess we all just sort of figured he was alright.

The funeral was scheduled for the next week. There was no way I could go. I just moved across country. I just started a new job. I couldn't do it. I'd send flowers. I worked all week, him at back of my mind. Then Friday the flu got tired of fucking around, and took my ass down. I went to work for two hours, and went home delirious. I slept all day long. Woke up for a few hours then passed out again. I had that super-intense delirium that's strangely vivid and insightful, like a drug trip. Saturday morning I drifted out of sleep and realized I had to call my family and tell them. I told my mom he died, and hung up and started crying. Sick, angry crying with a lot of snot. I figure it had just then become real. I really needed to fly to Phoenix for the funeral. In a recent post, Mary saved my ass. I mentioned the next time a friend needed me I would drop everything and rush to his aid.

I landed in Phoenix around 9 Tuesday night. Jared picked me up at the airport. I hadn't seen him since his wedding two years ago. He was wearing a suit. It's always strange seeing old friends in adult contexts. It seems like they stole a car and some guy's clothes, or are house-sitting for their parents. We drove all the way across the sprawling Valley to Jake's house, where I was going to stay. All of my friends bought houses in the big real estate boom a few years ago. They all have 2 and 3 bedroom places, brand new and super nice way out in the suburbs. Kind of a strange feeling to be in them. It helped to know that before Jake's live-in girlfriend got a hold of it, the house had white, empty walls and a couple of Bowhunter magazines. That's the Jake I know and love. Joe was there, Jerry showed up. It may have been the first time in five-plus years this group of kids had been in the same city. We were drinking beer and watching the Simpsons, and I think Joe said something along the lines of "This feels awfully familiar." It's an extremely trite notion, but so many things change without really changing.

We were all laughing, drinking. It was so easy to forget why were all there, and it felt so good to be together again that it didn't feel guilty. Then every once in a while you'd remember and start asking questions. Where was he living? How is his brother? When did you see him last? What was he doing that weekend? And the big question. Never really voiced aloud or verbatim, but asked many times in many ways: Was there something we could have done?

Jake and I pulled up to the funeral home. Me in a borrowed tie from Jake. All of my ties are wedding ties. Too happy. We walked in and I looked at the picture display. I didn't recognize anyone in them besides his family. I looked up, toward the head of the hall, and saw him. In his coffin. My heart started to pound and I darted for the bathroom. I pulled it together and went to the foyer. One by one old friends started trickling in. Some looked beautiful. Some not so much. Others pregnant. On the ride from the airport, I asked Jared how one of our friends was doing. "Just like everyone else. Exactly the same, but swollen."

His little brother spoke. There was milling around outside after. I made my way to his family but didn't make it. I started talking to an old friend's parents. I could have broken away, but I didn't. I regret it a lot that I didn't talk to them. I should have said something.

Some of us met up at a nearby bar in Scottsdale. At least two of my friends don't drink anymore and can't really be around the rest of us and stay dry. We had a couple beers and a few close friends decided to go get lunch. My friend Anthony told me a story about how before his wedding, he tried to track down our friend Craig to invite him. Craig's mother reluctantly invited him in and refused to give out his new address in California. She didn't want him talking to us. It had me thinking a lot about old times when, for a bunch of spoiled suburban kids, we found a decent amount of trouble. How much everyone has changed, each in different directions, for better or worse.

A lot of hugs, and a lot of promises to get together outside of weddings and funerals. It used to be just weddings included in that promise. I flew back home. Drank beer in the airport, whiskey on the plane. Strangely, I desperately wanted to have sex with someone. I guess it makes sense though, after a funeral. Took the bus home in pitch dark, packed with late night commuters. I treated myself to some more whiskey at home and slept.

It's not a coincidence that I left the subject of this story completely out of it. I didn't want to eulogize him. It seems silly on a blog of all stupid places. I'm apprehensive writing this even, but I sat on it a while and had to get something down about it. I will say this, he was an extremely kind person, and a very loyal friend to me for decades. And he shouldn't be gone. I said next time a friend needed it, I'd drop everything and rush to his aid. But I have this feeling I can't shake, that I got there way too late.

2008-03-05T19:34:00.001-08:00

The Arrival

I found the apartment fairly easily, but had to park illegally so I could sign my lease. My super met me at the door. "It's funny when you've only talked to someone on the phone, and then you meet them, how they can look different than you imagined," he said. "I pictured some young blond guy." Ouch. Chris is a very easygoing landlord. We flipped through the lease, I signed a couple papers, he gave me keys and wham, done.

I drove the Uhaul to the liquor store across the street and bought a bottle of champagne. I desperately needed a drink and it seemed appropriate. Loaded my bed and Knives into the apartment and that was about all I had planned. But, as I would soon find out my neighborhood is very tight, virtually half of the people I know in town had just come out of a show at the Fillmore and were currently walking a block from my apartment.

They were on their way to Keith's apartment between the show they were just at and another late night show, the Glitch Mob, which would be just a few blocks away at midnight. At that point in a night, after that long of a drive, it just seems stupid to go to sleep. I remember when I drove from Denver to St. Louis to meet up with Sara before we were dating. I think that was about 16 hours non-stop. We went to the local bar and closed it. I don't know how it happens it just does. Adrenaline, I guess.

And so, I met up with Keith, Matt, Gavin, Amy, Dave and Cory, all hanging out at Keith's place, I kid you not, three blocks from my new apartment. "Welcome to the Denver family. It's a good place to be," Keith said, with a quick toast. "I have no intention of leaving this town anytime in the near future." After a couple of beers they talked me into going to this show, starting what has become my Denver routine of attending concerts I initially have no interest in. The show was at probably the douchiest venue in town, and it was full of douches. But what a great time. Drinks, dancing, sweat. And the Glitch Mob was fucking badass.

We loitered outside the club for a while, and met back up at Dave's apartment, also about three blocks from my new place. I ended up staying up until I think 4 a.m., talking shit and drinking beer. I arrived in this city just six hours ago. What a great way to start up.

I stumbled back home to Knives, who was huddled in the corner. An empty apartment with nothing but a mattress, a bottle of champagne and a spooked cat. I collapsed into the bed and went into a long, hard, dreamless sleep. The sleep of arrival.

2008-03-03T20:24:00.000-08:00

Traveling with Knives

We had about 1,259 miles to travel and we got a very late start. I slept late (we had that party the night before) then woke up, then went back to sleep. Then woke up and finished packing. There's always more to do. Always about three more trips to the truck you need to take. Stuff to pick up at the office. Food to eat. A box to stuff the cat into.

Knives hated going into the box. I can understand why. It took me four tries, and when I finally got her in, she started throwing herself into one of the walls trying to knock it over. I stood there watching it for a while, mouth open, wondering how the fuck we were going to drive for 18 hours in this state. But once I got her in the truck, she must have entered some kind of a trance state. She just stopped moving or making any noise.

We didn't actually depart until about 7 p.m. Thursday night. I had to be in Denver
the following night to sign the lease. Also, the minute I started driving I got incredibly sleepy. Not the start you want. But I had a full pizza on the dash and an entranced cat in the shotgun seat. So I drove. And drove.

About 3 a.m. I got delirious-tired. The point in a late night drive where you start feeling things crawl on your legs, and seeing things dart in the corner of your eye. We were somewhere in Idaho, and I pulled off into a rest area. I let Knives out of her box, and she carefully ventured out. I offered her food.
"I've been in a cardboard box for six hours. Fuck you and fuck your food," she said.
"Fine, I'm going to get some sleep," I told her. "Explore if you like. I left a miniature litter box on the floor."
"Fuck your miniature litter box."

I budgeted time to sleep for about three or four hours. Two of those I spent trying to find a comfortable position. I found out the best way was to lay down on the bench, head by Knives' box, and then fold my legs and rest them on the car door window. Sort of a horizontal lotus.

Pain woke me up, and I decided it was time to drive. Knives was astoundingly calm and not as angry. She laid on my lap for a while, then found a spot she liked right on the dashboard. I turned the heat on to the defroster to keep her warm and she cuddled against the glass. Occasionally she would wander directly in front of me, like a little furry hood ornament, leading our way, and I had to push her out of the way. But for a surprising length of time, she surfed the dash, watching the stars.

I think it was when the sun came up that she got a little overwhelmed. I stopped to get gas and when I came back she was gone. I found her behind the pedals. I turned away and lost her. I panicked. I thought she crawled into the bowels of the dash. Was there some way to get into the engine from the cab? I reached my hand around and finally found her behind the bench barely reachable. Okay, I figured, I'm okay with it if you are.

I drove for about another hour and started to fall asleep on a busy stretch of freeway in Utah. I pulled into a Perkins parking lot and slept for about a half hour and started up again. She'd come out every now and then to see where we were, then back to her cave under the seats. She ate a little.

I ate pizza when I got hungry, drank Gatorade, soda and coffee in rotation. We were very lucky; the day before the highways through Utah were closed for high speed winds and snow. Utah wasn't bad, but Wyoming was gnarly. Blowing snow, packed snow on the road nothing but commercial trucks on the road and me. I found an incredible radio station.

When the sun went down, Knives came out again to her spot on the dash. She even used her miniature litter box. By the time we were rolling into Denver, she had curled up on the passenger seat next to me and slept.

And then we made it. At about 10 p.m., 1200 plus miles and almost $500 in gas. I cruised through downtown, past Coors field and the glittery skyline. Into Colfax, and the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Friday night and the main drag was busy. Snow in the gutters of the streets and sidewalks, to my right the state Capitol was lit up greenish-blue. Downtown loomed behind me. Past the crowded Fillmore and the Ogden theaters, Argonaut Liquors. My new apartment was right in the middle of the beat poets' old stomping ground. And I got a huge smile on my face. I had been so fixated on leaving Portland, I forgot that, goddammit, I love this city. My new home. This must be the place.

2008-02-28T18:57:00.000-08:00

Good Journey, Portland, OR

You can't really sum up a five-year stint in a place, so I decided to flip through the blog and the computer and throw together a series of nostalgic images. I prefer, while you look through the images, to play the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," written by Burt Bacharach and performed by B.J. Thomas for the classic film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Okay, now unless you've been rushing and not contemplating, "Raindrops" ought to be over. So here you should put on ... "Say You, Say Me," by Lionel Richie. I had a dream, I had an awesome dream, People in the park, playing games in the dark....

Okay, now stop Lionel Richie. Now start playing, "Teacher," by George Michael. So when you say, that you need me, that you'll never leave me, I know you're wrong, you're not that strong, Let me go...

I'm gonna miss you Portland. The city where every man seems gay, but is usually straight, and every woman seems straight, but is usually gay. Where the question isn't whether we should spend three million on public transit, but whether it should hover in the air! Where when a new Starbucks moves in, you instead patronize your local mom and pop coffee house. And then throw a molotov cocktail through the window of the Starbucks on the way home. Where people go to the bar to watch the Super Bowl ... naked! Where almost anywhere you go, you can get a beer, an espresso or watch a tattooed woman take off her clothes and shimmy up a pole.

I'm gonna miss the Matador, and Powell's Books. Union Jack's and the Acropolis. Floating World and The Waypost. Washington Park and the old historic Columbia Gorge highway. Sinferno Cabaret and KBOO. Famous Mysterious Actor and Ladd's Inn.

Enough of that nonsense. Remember, in Eternia, we don't say goodbye, we say Good Journey. Because every destination is but a doorway to another.

2008-02-17T18:33:00.000-08:00

The Long Goodbye

Between training in Boston and the big move, I had a week. More accurately four days in Portland to pack, say goodbyes and tie up loose ends (that phrase always sounds like killing people, but it more often involves making out and returning borrowed books).

Leaving town is always a tricky endeavor. Especially when the clock is ticking. My to do list involved visiting a lot of places I've come to love (Virginia Cafe, The Matador, Powell's, Union Jacks), meeting up with people I love, and boring things like paying old bills and packing. The last three days I had in town were loaded, some days hour to hour. You can only give most of your people some of your affection, and the rest you try to at least hug goodbye.

The first goodbye was on Monday night. I made one last trip to Floating World Comics (although Jason and I worked out a plan to ship to Denver. Yes!). While he closed the shop, I walked to Virginia Cafe, one of my favorite bars in Portland. I have a lot of history in that bar. One of the first I patronized. Where I befriended Jason. I was kicked out once for bringing in my underage girlfriend. New Year's Eve 2006 with Cory, Swede, Sara and Zack. It's where Sara and I broke up over whiskey. That night I talked with the bartender about the future of the bar. It's an ancient building, and it's time has finally come. They're tearing it down. So this was a true goodbye.

When Jason closed shop we met up at Tube, a bar in Old Town, to have drinks and say goodbye. To my surprise, Jen, Michael and Ryan showed up to send me off as well. What a great surprise. We talked politics and television, modern ways to die and gruesomeness cartoons. These guys were some of my first friends in Portland, when Casey and I first moved to town. We didn't know anyone, and Jason and I temped together. I spent every Thanksgiving in Oregon at their annual gathering. We spent one of my favorite birthdays on Mount Hood. I slept on their foldout for a while. I even got to meet up with Jason and Jerome in Manhattan for a weekend.

People bought me drinks. We talked about how in this age, it doesn't matter where your friends live. How our best friends live across the country, or leave town for years at a time, but stay in touch on the computer. Still it was bittersweet going back to the comic book store and indulging more afterhours, and eventually hugging and saying goodbye.

The second goodbye I had to double-book. I was supposed to meet up with Stephanie for drinks, and also Mary and Phil. The timing got muddled, so I mashed them up and met all three at the Matador. I went downtown early and said goodbye to Powell's, Reading Frenzy, Rocco's Pizza and Burnside in general.

We met at my favorite bar in Portland and had a lot of laughs and reminiscing. I spilled a beer on Phil. Mary gave me a skinny weird scarf. We moved on to Red Flag, another favorite bar of mine. Had more drinks. Stephanie showed us her photo albums from her stay in Nicaragua. Phil and Mary were suddenly too drunk to stay out and had to go. Somehow we stayed and closed the bar. Because you have to close the bar when you're leaving town. There's no other way.

Goodbye number three was a party Wednesday night at my soon to be former house. It's a scary situation throwing a party for yourself. There was initially supposed to be a party the night I got stuck in Atlanta. So I had to throw one together for my last night in town. Especially a going-away party can be scary, because what if nobody shows up? On your last night? That means that you not only are a bad host, but nobody cares that you're moving. The night started off with Little Lisa at Beulahland. We were supposed to see a movie, but I decided I'd rather just get trashed at the bar with Lisa. So we did. Ate some food, played some songs. Reminisced, and talked plans for the future, relationships past and current. Magical unicorns.

We headed back to the house. And slowly but surely, then all at once, a bunch of folks showed up. First just roommates, then Mary and Phil, then the canvass. Then later, some folks I hadn't seen in a while! Michael! Pete! It was great. We listened to music and drank lots and lots of beer. I hugged a lot of people. And exchanged some books.

There were other goodbyes mixed in. My last Karaoke night at Ladd's included 10 or so guys, one of them 65-years-old, singing "My Heart Will Go On," to me. It's a very, very long song. I sang a duet with Weber, then with Mary. There were Jager Bombs, I think. And then I walked all the way home for some reason. My last week of work, there was the traditional steak dinner at the strip club. My last Monday, Alan and I had our last Monday meeting in the bar.

The lasts can go on and on. And then one morning, it's the last anything. And the clock is ticking, and then you have to go. And it doesn't really kick in until then. Until you're alone and your room is empty. And there are no more to-dos or people to see or hug, or at least no more time for them. And it's the most profound morning after you'll have in a long while. So you take all of the goodbyes and put them in your back pocket and wipe the mist out of your eyes and get in the truck. And try not to let your own breathing scare you off the road.

2008-02-16T20:27:00.000-08:00

Boston Shit Show

Kristin promised me a good old-fashioned shit show on my last night in Boston. And she delivered. She was my boss when we both worked in the Portland office in 2006. The term shit show was used then to describe 1. whenever we just totally lost control of the office, or 2. a night of indulging that got way out of hand. So she invited a bunch of people in the office for an outing on my last night. It was a very work-heavy stay, so a chance to hit the town was welcome.

We started out at a sushi bar. Whenever Kristin has a vision for anything, she just grabs it by the balls and makes it happen. So by the end of dinner, everyone at the table had drank, I think, 6 or 7 sake bombs.

The restaurant owners didn't kick us out, but they should have. We were loud, knocking things over, and definitely overstaying our welcome. I was lobbying heavily for us to leave. Or as I think I put it at the time, "We need to get the fuck out of here. Now."

We had a lengthy trip on the train to get out to Kristin's house in Jamaica Plains. I'm pretty sure we were acting like children the whole way.

This is the view from Kristin's rooftop. If you walk out of her apartment, take a narrow side door and walk up several flights of narrow, rickety stairs, the path spits you out on the roof. There is no rail or protection from falling over. But it was a really great view of a part of Boston I really enjoyed. This picture really doesn't do anything for it.

People started to trickle into the party. I think my camera died at this point in the night. There were tiny bottles of tequila involved. Lots of Pabst. At one point there was a massive, multi-team party game, similar to catch phrase or taboo, but you had to get your team to say the name of pre-chosen celebrities. Heather entered my mother's name into the mix, but I don't remember if it ever came up in the draw.

The party ran nice and late. I woke up in the guest room, on a sea of black foam rubber. Kristin woke me up right on time.

I've already gone into detail about the ensuing travel disaster, but I had a couple of good photos:

While I hate travel delays, I LOVE hotel rooms. And the one Delta put me up in was pretty nice. It was also filled with people from canceled flights as well as pilots and flight attendants.

You can't stay alone in a hotel without at least checking out the porn selection. These were my favorite entries. "A little guy-on-guy action doesn't mean you're gay," is the best. It's stated with an almost medical certainty. Like, "Don't worry, there was a study the New England Journal of Medicine. Turns out, a little guy-on-guy action doesn't mean you're gay. You can watch this movie and not get AIDS."

And no, I didn't order any porn. It was like 15 dollars. It's free on the Internet.

Whoever owns the Crowne Whatever hotel must have a huge phobia of not being able to sleep. There was a little sparkly bag on the bed containing: a sleep mask, ear plugs, a cd with sleepy music, and the masterpiece, a bottle of lavender essence spray for your sheets. My own alternative was basic cable TV movies and four beers.

I took this picture because it's the only art I can remember seeing in a hotel room that I really liked.

2008-02-10T15:13:00.001-08:00

Aspen Part Four: The Stache Bash

My friend/boss had been planning this for months. Both growing out his beard, and researching types of moustaches. The turnout was great (professional organizers know how to throw a party). The party itself was kind of short, but in my opinion the best event in Aspen. We named all of the various types of moustaches, and events included "Slap the Bag," a game in which one holds a bag of wine up in the air, and a player drinks from the bag, then slaps the bag full force. Now that I think about it, that's not really a game at all.

This shady character had the job of mascara-ing (sometimes forcefully) staches on the women, or men without enough testosterone.

Pat slaps the bag.

I like this picture for two reasons: 1. I'm clearly so happy with myself, and 2. I think my hair looks really good. There was, however, an intervention among some people in Aspen who felt it looked sleazy and needed to be cut off.

Heather loves to see pictures of herself on the blog, so here you go. Her hair is actually shinier in person. Like a thousand suns:

Gavin's is called, "The Batarang":

The guy on the right is the organizer. I dubbed his stache, "The cage fighter."

Referd had my favorite stache. I call it "The French Impressionist."

Keith's (left) is called either "The Zorro," or "The Johnny Depp." Most agreed he wore his stache the best.

Left: "The bait fisherman." Right: "The middle school art teacher."

Chris called his "The Seleck," but it's actually called, "The Freddie Mercury."

And mine is "The truck stop." I got the neck tatt at a truck stop in Idaho. I liked the stache so much I wore it for like a week. I scrubbed the tattoo off the next day, and it kind of hurt.

I think you can guess what Blair's is called.

2008-02-10T13:36:00.001-08:00

Like an animal trapped in the jaws of a predator

During the last seven days I have traveled on five planes, five buses, a taxi, two trains, several subways and a couple of cars. I've spent actual hours on hold, other hours standing at help desks, almost 24 hours in the air and one night in an airport hotel. We all have bad travel stories, but this trip to Boston was fucking doomed.

I fly a fair amount, I think five times in the last six months or so. I usually get by alright. I never miss flights, I've only had a tantrum in an airport once (I screamed 'fuck' on the floor of McCarran Airport in Vegas surrounding events that had me living there for 48 hours). Generally I'm pretty lucky, but in February 2008, my luck ran out.

I've come to believe that my tragic transit flaw was hubris. Overconfidence in my abilities. And like all tragedies, a small error resulting from that flaw started a chain reaction, like a crack in the dam. Knowing my flight out of Portland last week was in the evening, I assumed I'd have plenty of time. I even decided to take the bus and Max, instead of my usual failsafe cab. I also didn't give myself enough preparation for the public transit. And as a result, got on the wrong bus to the wrong transit center. I realized it too late. About a hundred blocks too late. I hopped off the bus and called Mary, frantic. She sped to my aid, the plan being to pick me up in Gresham and haul ass to the airport, and if all goes perfect, make it just in time. But all did not go perfect, and the plane left early.

I was crushed. I never miss planes. It's my superpower. I've fucked up way worse than this and made it into the seat on time. But even Superman died once. Mary tried to console me. I was practically in tears. I had to get to Boston for training. I thought I was going to throw up. I called my dad and borrowed money to rebook a later flight for a sum I'd rather not discuss. It was the first time since I was maybe 20 that I'd borrowed money from my dad. He was amazing about it. "This is small stuff, son. Take my credit card number. Relax, get yourself to Boston and get your training."

Mary was also great. This is what a friend does. She consoled, talked me down, told her own nightmare story. Bought me a Frosty from Wendy's. Took me to her apartment and gave me beer and wine and put on a Wayans' Brothers marathon on BET while I stared catatonic. Then she dropped me off at my house and gave me 40 bucks for a cab in the morning. That's a friend man. Next time one of mine is in trouble, I'm going to remember that night and drop everything and rush to his or her aid. I am a lucky man.

###

So anyway, I got to Boston fine, went through a week at the new job. Caught up with some friends and had a little fun. And this time, I'm going so totally completely prepared. My boss got me the time and spot for a bus from Boston to Rhode Island, where I was to depart. I had a night on the town with Kristin, who woke me up with plenty of time and drew me a little map for the subway to the bus station. And I pulled up to the airport with an hour and a half to spare when the lady at the counter told me my ticket was suspended.

"What do you mean suspended?"

"It says your flight was transferred and they cancelled the reservation."

"Can you fix it?"

"No, only Orbitz can fix it."

"Can you get Orbitz to fix it?"

"No. I'm not allowed to talk to travel agents."

"Can you get me the Orbitz phone number?"

"No, I don't have it...

Pause. Blink. Blink.

"If you have a cell phone you can call information."

And so it went I would spend (zero exaggeration here. none.) two and a half hours at the check-in desk. At one point, while standing at the Delta Airlines counter, I was on hold with an Orbitz operator, who was herself on hold with - you guessed it - a Delta Airlines agent.

"I'm at Delta Airlines! Could I just hand my cell phone to the agent and have you two sort it out?"

"No sir, they probably aren't allowed to talk to travel agents."

"Rose," I said. I knew all five agents behind the counter by name as they had all taken a crack at my problem. My favorite was Paola, a beautiful Dominican girl. "Rose, you really aren't allowed to talk to travel agents?"

"No. We aren't allowed to talk to travel agents."

"Oh Rose."

At another point, Tina was on the phone with Eric at US Air, who was working, no shit, across the room. Eric put her on hold for a long time. At another point, all five agents abandoned my case because the US ski team had 10 bags of skis and slalom poles and the system would only let them enter eight.

"Do all five of them need to be with that one customer?" I asked Rose as I flipped through Entertainment Weekly.

"They always do that," Rose said, rolling her eyes.

"Tina, seriously? Just let him on the damn plane," I called to her. "He's with the U.S. ski team. Delta is their sponsor for God's sake. Do it for America."

"Mr. Williams, I wish I could," Tina said. "But are you going to help me and Maureen look for a new job?"

"No."

In all of this time, weather had delayed every flight out of Providence. My connection in JFK was long gone. Rose ultimately fixed my ticket and got me on a transfer through Atlanta. "Thanks Rose! Bye Tina! Bye Maureen!"

"Run Mr. Williams, you're boarding now!"

Then, pop, flagged for extra security screening. "But my flight is boarding now!" No response.

But I made it on the plane. And the plane sat on the runway for a half hour while they de-iced the wings. We landed at 7:25. My transfer was at 7:35. I called over the flight attendant to see if I was going to make it.

"Maybe."

But there was no open gate. We sat on the runway for another 15 minutes. There were no other flights to Portland until the morning. So I got a voucher for the Crowne Plaza and a seven dollar meal.

###

And this is the time in the night, when - much like an animal trapped in the jaws of a predator finally relaxes and goes limp - I let go. Just totally let go. I'm not getting home tonight. I'll call and cancel my going away party. I might not even get home tomorrow if the weather keeps up.

I'm starving and haven't eaten today and I want a plate of nachos and chicken wings and I'm going to go eat them. And I did. And they were delicious. And I chased it with two giant six dollar Sam Adams. And I went to the Crowne Plaza and took off my shoes. And I watched basic cable and drank beers by myself. There was a false fire alarm. I walked out barefoot, carefree chatting with neighbors.

I slept for four hours and jumped out of bed. Pop, singled out for extra security screening. This one even more intense. Full pat down. I slept on the airport floor, and waited to board. Zone 9, the very last zone to board. My seat, of course, in the middle of two fat guys. A five and a half hour plane ride.

Then I took the Max from the airport to the bus station. Waited for the bus. Got on the bus, got off the bus, waited for another bus. The bus didn't come. Sunday hours. I called Beulahland and asked when they stop serving breakfast. In 40 minutes. I started walking. Said hello to the cat and walked in to the restaurant.

"Hey, how's it going?" the dreadlocked server asked.

"I'm doing great thanks."

"Want some coffee?"

"Coffee sounds great thanks."

"Well, we serve breakfast for another 20 minutes. You're just in time."

"Thank you. Thank you so much for saying that."

2008-02-07T19:58:00.001-08:00

More Boston

Beer sucks in the Northeast. Talk all you want about Samuel Adams. You can't get a decent craft beer to save your life, and all they have domestic is Bud, Bud Light, Michelob, Heineken and so on. I went to a bar downtown to watch Super Tuesday with colleagues. The girl next to me, from Rhode Island, ordered an IPA. I said I'll have the same. When the beers came, I took a sip and thought there must be a mistake. It tasted like Fat Tire if I was giving it the benefit of the doubt. More like the carmelly shit they pass off as Amber in British Columbia.

"What beer is this?"
"Harpoon IPA."
"Is that local or something?"
"Yeah, it's made here in Boston. It's a pretty standard IPA."

Poor poor thing. I didn't have the heart to tell her.

###

All day Wednesday there were people walking around with black smears on their foreheads. Then I walked by a church and there were men wearing elaborate robes on the massive steps, holding some kind of ceremony. Catholics. But unlike in Phoenix, much less Portland, the most secular city in the country, it wasn't just the odd co-worker or two with stuff on their faces. It was everyone. Everyone is Catholic in Boston. Eerie.

###

I got out of work early Thursday and thought I'd wander around town a bit. I strolled past Boston Commons, then across the city to the Eastern edge, by the shore. Then I walked up through the historic part of town past the Boston Massacre, a whole string of old original government buildings and cobblestone squares. It was dark, and people were talking in heavy accents and being rude. It was cold. Snowflakes were floating down around me as I was walking down narrow streets. Then I had dinner in a 200 year old bar. Crab cake sandwich and a cup of clam chowder.