It Does Make A Fiery Ring

This is my last work day for the year 2006. For some, that would be celebration enough. But not for me, I'm a whiny bitch. There are outside forces keeping me from doing a celebratory song and dance routine, complete with powder blue top hat and cane... Showgirl style kicks....

Outside forces - how I hate you.

I would like to be feeling a huge, flaming force of love; a giant, face melting sense of accomplishment for the last year and excitement for the year to come.

I would like for this moment to be like a hot kernel of flaming love, like a molten lava love flame in kernel form. I want for it to be like when you're plowing through a bowl of popcorn (and I mean good popcorn with lots of real butter and fancy seasoning and maybe parmesan), and you get to those hard corn kernels at the bottom that didn't get popped. But since you've eaten the popcorn so damn fast, that kernel's still hot and it burns your mouth when you shovel it in there with the last dregs of the bowl.

Except this kernel is flaming lava hot, so it hurts. It starts burning a hole in your mouth, through your tongue and eventually through your jaw. Because seriously, your face is made up of just flesh you know, that can't hold up to burning hot flaming magma love. And while, shit yeah, it hurts, it also kind of feels good because you're being singed and burned and mutilated by love.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: I Should Have Known Better by Yo La Tengo. In fact, I feel I should recommend the entire new album, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, even if for the title alone.

Nothing More Than Feelings

It's pretty much a given, almost ridiculously so, that I'm not crazy about my job. My dislike stems from a variety of reasons, none of them interesting or novel. So instead of sitting here beneath the buzzing fluorescents and the odd grinding noise coming from the "voltage hasardeux" ducts above my head and stewing in contagious anger, I want to think about things that I do like.

I like beer and tots.
I like folks that make a point of spending time with me.
I like that Bif, with limited time and ability, went out and got me gifts.
I like that there's 3 discs of Tom Waits waiting for me at home that I haven't heard.
I like that Nikki got me cookbooks.
I like that I don't associate with anyone who would question my manhood for being excited about the cookbooks.
I like big butts, and I cannot lie.
I like that Jason and Mandy came straight from the airport.
I like a layered shot of Kahlua, Bailey's and Rumplemintz.
I would like a good name for that shot.
I like that despite an overwhelming aversion to peppermint, Jason drank 'em.
I like that the first few times she had said shots, Mandy had to plug her nose. Now she requests 'em.
I like that for the moment I'm waltzing around that anger and not playing in it.
I like feeling excited about getting home to see Riley.

Three Six (And Rising)

Realized something fairly interesting this morning; that even if I were able to relieve myself of lamentable human drama as I have wanted (and having your primary focus be a 4 week old baby really helps in that), I'd miss it a little bit.

I thought of the gentle and sensitive man who taught a room full of ruffian fathers-to-be how to diaper a doll, and how he said that when an infant gets past that near-constant screaming and shrieking stage, you will kind of miss it. I mentally called bullshit at the time, but now I think I kind of get it.

I miss waking up to presents to open, I miss angel food cake and Skate King parties possibly called off for snow. But then I think that I'm okay, and I just want to miss them.

This year I did not wake up with an "ah-ha" moment, with a complete understanding of myself and my place in the world.

Maybe next year.

Drive By Christmas

Quick like bunny - work is kicking my ass today.

It was sort of a strange, transitional Christmas this year; a whirlwind Christmas caught between different family traditions and a time to make our own. It feels like we were given a little breathing room this year, that folks stepped back and allowed us to take in the still calm of the eye of the hurricane of Christmas chaos that will tear into our lives from here on out.

We hit Bremerton for Christmas Eve, much as I have every year before that I have spent that particular day in Washington. The ferry trip over was Riley's first boat trip, and he spent it in the car nursing. It was sort of relaxing though, listening to his contented noises while the Puget Sound rushed past the car's window. We got to Grandma's, all the aunts took their turns holding the baby and I roamed around talking to cousins. It felt a little strange to not have my parents or my brother there with us, but it was comfortable nonetheless.

One of my cousins brought a tape of Christmas Eve celebrations from 1987 and 88. It was a trip to see my family once again from nearly 20 years ago. It was heartwarming to again see Aunt Betty laughing and Uncle Bud playing his guitar, it made me catch my breath to again see Grandpa alive for a brief second, strong and wily. And all those kids running around - all those kids that are now in college, or having kids of their own. I could feel it, it all sang a verse of a song of transition.

I took Riley up on deck for the return trip. The cold blast of the front proved to be too much for him, so we headed to the aft where it was almost warm. I stood at the rail with him, listening to the dark water below and watching the Christmas lights on the shore drift by.

We took our time getting Christmas Day started, there were only gifts for Riley anyway and he was passed out while we opened them. We listened to the poor weekend guys who had to man the posts at KEXP for the holiday. I was pleasantly surprised to hear them play Alan Parsons In A Winter Wonderland by Grandaddy. But I was dismayed to hear that James Brown, the hardest working man in show business, had passed away - but then it did seem appropriate somehow that the man would shuffle off on what for most is the biggest day of the year.

Thank you James Brown, your music made me also want to get on the scene, like a sex machine. You will be missed.

We went over to Mandy's (sans Jason) for dinner for another delightful festive-type feast of turkey and dressing and potatoes and what-nots. Good stuff, good times, but still this strange hovering feeling of transitions and new traditions. I thought about the family we had made for ourselves, Bif and I. Not just the baby, but the amazing friends we have surrounding and protecting us; the beautiful ones who were so excited for us even when we were terrified, the ones who believed in our abilities when we couldn't. I gotta tell you, I was tired and beat, but it felt good. It felt like the sort of great Christmas present that you get that you never even asked for.

American Cream

I was going to bring up something about the walk in this morning, about the fizzy wave of comfort falling with Girlfriend Is Better on the headphones and pre-dawn industrial lights sparking faded memories. Something about the grid work atop the baseball stadium brought back something about the permanent orange glow that is Southern California at night and my stumbling around grimly through its industrial parks.

But then Gorgeous brought up how she had at one time had a problem with dipping fries in ranch dressing. This seemingly innocuous statement sent all sorts of memories tumbling of days in Santa Barbara.

When Greta May and I were both living in Santa Barbara, both attending UCSB and both relatively miserable, we used to spend many evenings at JK Frimples. Frimples was one of those restaurants from another era, a diner of sorts that was open twenty-four hours and was filled with comfy booths. Frimples was on State Street, in Santa Barbara proper and not over by the campus, so it attracted little in the way of student traffic. Frimples had been built around an enormous tree that still grew in the center of the restaurant.

Greta May and I would go sit in a booth, me drinking mug after mug of coffee, and play Spite and Malice with two worn decks of cards. If one of us had some extra money, we would order cheese fries and a side of ranch - standard.

We would talk about the things that excited us to talk about, developing personal jokes and a language that would mutate and change over the years. This was back when I was sure we would be wandering, drunken writers together. It seems funny to think back to a time when there was no Chris in the picture, when I didn't know who Bif was. To think back to a time when neither of us had any idea that one day we would run off together with our significant others and marry together in a blurry, scotch-fueled haze in Reno. It's odd to think back to a time before there was no Built to Spill in our lives, back when we had no idea we would visit Prague and Venice and Greece together.

It seems sort of innocent and charming to think back on it, and not as turgid and desperate as it seemed at the time.

We were kids, playing at being adults and trying to figure out who the hell we were. She had just had her resilient heart shattered and I was in a perpetual state of being in the wrong place and thinking massive amounts of Jack Daniel's would fix it. I remember her being upset a lot, trying so hard to figure shit out, and I remember feeling as though I had wandered into a prison that was so nice I didn't realize it was a prison. I remember a vague frustration constantly floating around me.

Honestly, I remember a lot of difficult times, but I like to remember is a bright spot in all of it filled with genuine laughter and calm and cheese fries with ranch.

Oh, and hey, sort of related, but not at all: We were in Greece together when the four of us found chips that were "American Cream" flavored. We thought that was so funny and couldn't wait to find out what American Cream tastes like. Tastes like ranch. Turns out Europeans have no idea what the hell "ranch" is.

Big Night Out

Last night, Biff and I went out on our first solo date since Riley bounded into our lives. The grandparents took charge of baby duties and we went and had us dinner and beers. We talked about the same stuff that we used to, I at one point started singing Janie Jones by The Clash because I couldn't stop singing Most Wonderful Time of the Year the way Will Ferrell did in a SNL sketch, and we discussed short distance plans.

At one point, Bif mentioned, sort of dismayed, that she kept waiting to feel like this major shift would happen to her, that one day she would suddenly feel like a mom. I knew what she meant, while the evidence is right in front of me a lot of the time, I don't yet really feel like a dad. In fact, it feels a little weird to type the words 'I'm a dad'. I told her that I think a lot of people go into parenthood with this certain image of what a parent is and try to fit themselves into that mold. I felt like we were taking this on in much the same way as our marriage, in that we were not different people on the other side of a particularly amazing day. I'm still a dopey dreamer, she's still this beautiful woman who makes me smile when she laughs at the stupid things I say, only now we have this amazing little boy to be with us in all of it.

Coincidentally, we ran into kay-see at dinner and met her parents. It was coincidental enough, being one of many restaurants in a major city, but what's really eerie is that earlier in the day I had asked kay-see that if I were the one who had to break the news of her dad's death to her, would she want me to do it in knock-knock joke form.

I also worried for a second about keeping up the potency of kay-see ‘your mom’ jokes after actually meeting the woman, but I feel there is nothing to worry about.

We jokingly told her parents that we had put the baby in a box and the cats were watching him, which made me think of the great proliferation of abandoned child movies.

Do you realize that both Home Alone and Baby's Day Out are the 'children' of John "The Breakfast Club" Hughes? What is it with this guy? What about a child left to their own devices when criminally negligent parents leave them seems like a good idea for a movie to this guy? C'mon, he wrote the immortal line, "you look good wearing my future".

And while I haven't seen it, I have to imagine that Unaccompanied Minors, a delightful romp with a pre-pubescent mob left to their own devices in an airport, is some kind of crappy.

And while I have no idea how anyone can help me with this, but: There's a movie coming out called Bridge to Terabithia, and man I KNOW this title but I cannot place it. It's based on a book, but I'm pretty sure I haven't read it. Why are there alarm bells ringing from the memory halls of my childhood in regards to this title? WHY?

Okay, snap out of it Badgley. I love you all, make it a great one out there.

I Heart I Heart Huckabees

I can't say what it is necessarily, maybe it's the fundamental understanding of questioning of self and the desire for an existential detective, but I love it all.

The performances all seem a little stylized, but somehow work. The script seems to bite off a bit more than can be chewed, but I admire the over-reach terribly. There is something wonderfully philosophical going on there, but I laugh hysterically every time I watch it - usually at completely different things than the last time I watched it.

There is an understanding that is achieved towards the center of the movie, that you can reach this Zen state of "pure being", but will inevitably be pulled back into the bullshit of human drama. Ain't it the truth?

This mad love is probably not helped by the fact that I seem to have taken on one of the character's obsession with the dangers of petroleum. But seriously, car emissions are more unhealthy for you than the secondhand smoke so many are ranting about, those emissions are literally destroying our planet, and they only reason we are involved in the wholesale slaughter of human beings in the Middle East is because we willfully refuse to let up on our gas consumption.

And while I'm ranting here for a second: There has been a wave of power outages up here in Washington due to trees blowing over in a storm and knocking out power lines. Somehow, this turned into a run on gas stations, with people waiting in lines for fear that they would run out of gas. Um? What does one have to do with the other, a rational person might ask. Well there are the people who are using gas fueled generators, and in areas where the power is out, as stations are unable to pump gas without electricity, but the lack of electricity does not at all hamper the tanker trucks bringing gas over our plentiful highways. And, if you need gas so damned bad, there is more than likely a working gas station within 20 minutes of where you are. It all smacks of people's gullibility into hording this precious, precious resource in the face of already manufactured price gauging. We're awesome...

Anyways, I Heart Huckabees, on my list of favorites. Marky Mark gives an unusually good performance, and there is a lot going on here that is worth getting to if you take the time. For some reason, Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin repeating, "How am I not myself?" to Jude Law over and over again makes me laugh, and breaks my heart all at the same time.


Song Stuck in My Head Right Now: You Make Me Feel Like A Whore by Everclear


Confidential to "Betrayed in Kansas City": As the mighty Bono once said, "it's no secret that a liar won't believe anyone else". Consider it a gift.

Codename: Tea Wrecks

When you're at work, typing away on your keyboard, do you ever pretend that you’re hacking a particularly difficult computer mainframe?

Do you pretend that your whiles, your intelligence, your skills will get you past the network security systems and into that particular file which will give you the information that you need, the information that may very well save the world?

Do you then pretend that the security forces are after you and the only way to cover up your tracks is to win a game of solitaire to throw them off of your trail?

And when you have that necessary information, do you fantasize about transferring it to some innocuous item to transfer it out of the building? Like maybe downloading it to a Rubik's cube? And then you can mess up the Rubik's cube and the only way to get the information out is to solve said Rubik's cube - in the safety of your underground location.

And then you can take the information to the proper authorities and bring down the awful corporation responsible for the murder of children and puppies, responsible for the degradation of the American way of life. But then you find out that the people you yourself work for have sold off the information that you have struggled for so that they could have a larger slice of the pie, and that they have caused an influx of bad corporate music, hackneyed and formulaic romantic comedies and a proliferation of feminine hygiene products?

Do you then begin gathering and arming your rag tag forces, training them into a skilled army, high on fumes of righteous indignation and household cleaners in an attempt to begin Armageddon?

Me either.

Frustration

If frustration could be rated by awful ice cream flavors, today was broken glass in vomit flavor; dog vomit after said dog had eaten its own poo. If frustration was a serial killer, today was Hannibal Lecter being raped by Ted Bundy.

It didn’t help that the day started off with disappointing news. And then things just began to pile up, like all of those cars I passed on the walk home locked up in stop; all of those people willingly ignoring their responsibility for the melting ice caps.

Know what else didn’t help? The Zen mantra voice, telling me that I am the perceiver, meaning that I’m the one perceiving the day as frustrating, that didn’t help.

If frustration were a voice, it would be my prissy, Zen mantra voice.

Oh, and coworkers who willingly neglect the work they’re supposed to do which conveniently leaves it to me to take care of tomorrow? Yup, another glass and dog vomit sundae.

But sitting here at home, downing my Brother Thelonius Belgian style ale from North Coast Brewery and listening the Riley make his little monkey chirps, well it’s a little easier to shrug it off.

And talking to Greta May for about five minutes at the end of the work day made it seem not that bad. There was that easy give and take that made us feel as close as cousins, thick as thieves. She was tired, I was tired, I could hear it in our voices. But we were okay; we were golden.

I knew it was okay when I was crossing the street, coming back from the store with Riley strapped to my chest in a sling, and some hyper aggressive freak tried to run me down in the crosswalk. Their enormous, bright yellow (because the sheer size of the vehicle wasn’t attention grabbing enough) truck blocked off a busy lane of traffic while I insisted on taking my pedestrian’s right of way. This lady then felt it necessary to flip me, my wife, and my two week old son the bird. Where normally, after a day of frustration building like magma below a volcano’s peak, I would have felt the need to scream obscenities until I ran out of breath, I just slowly shook my head and rubbed my sons back.

I’m looking at you Tomorrow, let’s make it better.

Magic Bus

It seemed like a good idea at the time. There was the whole neo-hippy fantasy of a VW bus after a number of years without a car to our names. Biff found a guy in Santa Cruz selling his, for like a grand, and so we got it. It was green and looked like this:


Oh yeah, it also once had a camper top which had been removed and the hole covered up with a removable piece of fiberglass. The previous owner had lost the keys at Reggae on the River or something, and so the ignition was destroyed and jury-rigged back together. It was painted with house paint. Oh and hey, right before leaving, the guy mentioned that quite often the throttle will stick, making the engine rev and rev, so you have to pull over, open up the engine compartment and manually un-stick it.

But I was able to overlook all of it. It looked so sweet sitting there next to the Pan Handle of Golden Gate Park. Bif and I used to just sit in there, light a candle and drink beer. Once, when we had too many guests at our place, we slept in it. We called it the "Bus Bus" and I would often sing, "bus bus, magic bus".

I overlooked the negative things about it until I had to drive the thing anywhere. That jury-rigged ignition could come detached at any moment, killing the engine even if you're doing a flash speedy 53 mph down the 101. Any gust of wind would hit that 10 pound box of sheet metal like a sail, pushing you all over the freeway. It always smelled vaguely of a lawnmower in there, and the trip to San Luis Obispo, which would take about 3 hours in a normal mode of transportation, took near 6 hours.

On said trip to San Luis Obispo, I had forgotten all about the insanely steep incline to the freeway just before it drops down into SLO town. I used to have stress dreams that involved driving up hills that became more and more inclined as I progressed; the dream had come alive. I was doing a robust 3mph, being passed by semis, wind tossing me around the lane and me holding onto the wheel with a grip that rivaled that of a chronic masturbator. How could this get any worse?

Well thick, thick fog, of course.

We reached the destination, and after many relaxing beers and glasses of scotch, I put it behind me as over and done with. When we then blew a tire around King City on the way home, and then realized that the Bus Bus came without a jack, and then realized after walking a couple miles to an auto parts store to get a jack that the lug nuts were fused to the bus, I believe I realized that my brief love affair with the VW bus was over.

While we ended up donating it to get rid of it, I sort of wish I had caused this:


I do though have fond memories of sitting in the darkness within, drinking beer and laughing with Bif. I do have that.

Drawn To Love

All of the Christmas time cartoon specials have reminded of something. Was it the uncharacteristic turning of children in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" to helping ol' Chuck make his loser tree into a thing of glory? No. Was it the Grinch realizing the true meaning of Christmas when he heard the Whos singing, even without their toys?

It wasn't, but this the made me think of The Who singing Magic Bus even though their presents were stolen. Never mind.

It was seeing a portion of "Frosty The Snowman" and remembering that I had a huge crush on the little girl, Karen.

Seriously, I was madly in love with a cartoon character; I always had a thing for blonds. And when the forest animals band together at Frosty's bidding to build a fire for her, not only did I wish I could be the one to build her a fire, but I was highly suspect of rabbits and squirrels and deer building a fire in a forest; it seemed a little unsafe.

Karen, I used to mutter, I can make you far happier than Frosty ever could. Let me assuage your fears; let me take care of you. You're just a little girl, and I'm just a little boy, and it's a little weird that you're hanging out with a pile of frozen rain, brought magically to life. I don't care if he has a happy, jolly soul or not, let me take you away from all of this.

Oh the longing I had...

This sort of embarrassing behavior continued when I watched The Little Mermaid when I was in college. I fell in love with Ariel; with sexy, sexy Ariel. It was the shot where she finishes singing Part of Your World and leaps up onto a rock while an orgasmic wave crashes up behind her. Man...

At least this time I was logical enough to realize that it was impossible to be in love with a cartoon character, that it would never work out. She was a princess, I was a poor film major. She was from the sea, I was from the real world. She was drawn with pens and inks, I was ridiculously high.

I don't even want to bring up the first time I watched Toy Story.

Suffice it to say... Woody.

12 Shopping Days Left

Do you realize that Christmas is right around the corner?

Well, I'm sure that you do, you've always been far more organized than me. I remember that one time I was all, "hey, isn't Doc Robert's birthday next week sometime?" and you whipped out your planner/address book and let me know that I was 2 1/2 months late; plus an extra year as he had died the July prior.

By the way, I’m sorry about that DRo. Hope you were able to kick the nitrous demons in heaven better than you did here.

Seriously though, Christmas is so close to being around the corner that if you were being chased down the street by an angry panther, you may not run smashing into Christmas upon hitting that intersection, but you would definitely see it trundling its tinsel soaked self up the avenue.

I guess that I've just been so hyper-focused elsewhere, primarily on the marriage and subsequent celebrations of Tom and Katie, that the calendar has become this sort of slippery, time warp kind of thing. It is seriously making my mind hurt to meditate on how close Christmas is. All of the cartoon Christmas specials on TV didn't even clue me in.

I think my mind is adjusting to some sort of "dad brain". In trying to adjust to focusing on a child on top of the areas in life I’m already focused on, the brain is sort shutting down a bit. It's sort of like when I started taking a French class in college after a number of years of high school German. The teacher would ask a question in French, I'd translate the question to German in my mind, formulate the answer in German and once again translate, this time to English. It took me twenty minutes to answer "what color is your pencil?”

Actually, this "dad brain" thing is nothing like that story. I apologize.

I’m beginning to think that I may actually be having a very slow stroke. Every time that I pass by a certain area of the work floor, I smell Fruit Loops. And as far as I know, this is not a scent that people are choosing to apply to themselves. But then again, I've heard whispers of rumors that Jessica Simpson, or some other sadly untalented celebrity, has something like this on the market.

Which would make a nice Christmas gift for yours truly.

Like how I brought that full circle?

Sheep Boy Comes Alive

I got an email from Stephen today. I know Stephen from the grand DG days and I never hear from him, so I got that heady mix of excited and apprehensive when I saw his name there among those emails.

This may not tell you anything about Stephen, but the first time we shared words was when I walked into the audio room and in response to someone else's comment, I quoted Pee Wee's Big Adventure. "There are thousands of uses for corn, all of which I'm going to tell you about right now," said I. Stephen quickly spun in his chair and said, "how much do I love you right now?" I looked at him questioningly for a second and stammered, "I don't know".

Anyway, Stephen sent me this picture:


I am sort of jealous of this young man's full, bushy hair. I am sort of jealous of his slim physique. I'm even vaguely jealous of his apparent self confidence and the unlit cigarette in his hand. But I am not jealous of the sheep.

As many know, I have this same sheep. It makes a sheep sound if you apply pressure to the nose area.

I once wore said sheep to a party at Hellby's. The party degenerated, as they usually did, to nudity and abuse. I may be mixing up the abuser here, but if I remember correctly, Dougie P was whipping my sheep with a riding crop in order to make it "baah". And when I put a stop to it, as the whistling arc of a leather riding crop was striking my barely covered penis, Mercedes derided me as being a baby.

People in other states began calling me sheep boy.

It's been quite some time since I have slipped on the sheep, but it now sits in my desk, googly eyes and all. If you are a little rough in opening the top, center drawer you will occasionally be rewarded with that "baah".

Thank you Stephen. Oh the memories.

Second Best Laid

Oh yeah, I also wanted to start a religion.

Something nice and new, something inclusive. Something based on a philosophy of self respect and being non-judgmental. Something that helped people to love themselves and taught that not only was sex not evil, it was a wonderful art-form and pretty damn cool. Something that didn't insidiously pay for politicians, but did attract enough followers that law makers had to keep us in mind. Something that felt like a natural extension of our life experience and not force pushing us into a mold.

But then I saw the tide turning.

People get greedy, people want more power. People not raised in a culture of moderation are bound to push it too far. People will still tend to unburden their responsibility onto others. People will still flock to a popular idea without individual thought.

And oh yeah, the backlash…

There would be splinter groups. There would be Billyanity Reformists, Billyanity Protestants. There would be an as yet unnamed Martin Luther, tacking his doctrine to the barroom door. There would be bloody crusades, with followers twisting my wonderful ideas to their own desires. There would be cult turf wars. There would be religious excuses to steal others' natural resources.

And sure, good or bad, I'd dig the tax exempt status - but all that paperwork would be a bitch.

Best Laid

Oh the plans that I had. I was going to be a wandering, mendicant poet, traveling the deserted back roads of America, blowing the minds of the children and inducing quiet revolt. I was going to be a rock star.

My band would be named after an inside joke, cryptic to the point of catching the imagination of the jaded music press. We were going to release an EP that NME would rave about, but sales would be pretty lackluster. Interest in the band would begin to spread after a particularly fiery appearance on the "Arsenio Hall Show" where Tommy, the lead guitarist, would make like he was going to smash his knock off Les Paul only to savagely yank it back and toss off a roaring solo.

It would be after rumors of strange sex rites and rampant abuse of "mood elevators" on the Killing You Kindly tour that the band would become a hit. Our breakthrough video would be a dark, completely surreal (read: nonsensical) bit of four minutes, directed by a young, up and comer just out of film school. Our look and sound would attract the disenfranchised youth like ants to sugar water, and we would re-release the first EP (with a couple of previously unreleased outtakes and live cuts) to tremendous sales.

The wild stories of drug use and groupie abuse would be nothing compared to the internal struggle within the band. The drunken fights would destroy thousands of dollars worth of gear and end up burning down our newly built recording studio. The full on brawl that would occur onstage during a stadium show on the Soul Glue tour would be a staple of MTV and talk shows for weeks, but would unfortunately rip the band asunder.

I would embark on a solo tour, full of myself with the knowledge that I didn't need the rest of the band, with minor success. The venues would become increasingly smaller and dingier. To protect my self esteem, I would blame the lagging interest on the fact that the audience just didn't get what I was doing.

I would age gracelessly in a fog of cheap scotch and Whip-Its, writing a tell all book titled quite cleverly from one of the band's popular songs. This would spark a very brief interest in the band again. A song would be used on a soundtrack and would be played on a radio station serving those addicted to nostalgia. This would bring me enough royalty money to keep me in frozen pizzas until I died a completely unnoticed death at the age of 62 - a drunken, accidental drowning in the kiddy pool placed in the courtyard of the apartment complex.

Man, what the hell happened...

Life Lessons

Wow, that was a quick week. That was a week from another dimension. And being back at work, well it's a slice of awesome with a side of ranch.

Again, trying to keep this from being all baby all the time - but a quick update:
Baby and mom are doing great. Biff's still recovering, but nursing like a champion
Riley is now pooping real poop.
Riley likes car rides, being sung to, long walks on the beach and rainy weekends at home with a book and a nice, jammy zin.

Oh and here's a picture (thanks to Mandy for the pictures):


Okay, back to the nonsense. Let's talk tacos!

When I was a kid, I loved me some tacos. It was part of my triumvirate of pizza, spaghetti and the above mentioned tacos. My mom made tacos with hamburger and an envelope of taco seasoning mix. Meat went into crispy taco shells with shredded cheddar and iceburg lettuce.

Oh and hey, do any of you remember Taco flavored Doritos? Dammit, they were good. Not very popular apparently, but good.

One time I went over to Kenny's house for play time and dinner. Here are some interesting things about Kenny:
Kenny wore thick, black framed glasses - the same sort that my dad wore when he was in Vietnam.
Kenny was extremely smart, which unfortunately made him fairly unpopular with the general public.
Kenny had one of those boxes of little drawers that guys usually use to keep their screws and nails separated, but his was filled with little plastic guns from the original run of Star Wars action figures. He had apparently written to Kenner about a lost light saber or something, and they sent him this arsenal.

Kenny's mom, who wore the same kind of glasses that he did, made tacos for dinner. Shit yes! Tacos dude, I love tacos. How many did I want, she asked. I will take three of them Kenny's mom.

Problem. I don't know what Kenny's mom did to the tacos she made but they tasted like poop; spicy, sort of vaguely sweet poop. It took all my will to finish the first one, and I could not bring myself to get into the others. If I remember correctly, Kenny's mom really sort of let me have it for not eating the other tacos that I requested.

Lesson learned with this experience: If someone you're not used to is making you tacos - start out with one as a tester.

Hey Riley

You, my beautiful new son, were born at 4:20 (well technically 4:22, but...) on November 29th. You were 9 pounds, 4 ounces and 21 inches long. You came out with a conehead from all that pushing on mom's pelvis, but thank god it's flattening out; I love you and all, but seriously it was a little freakish.

I was telling kc! today that it's a little tough for me to put this into words, so I beg a little leniency and I apologize.

We went into the hospital at 5:30. After a couple minutes in Triage, and another view of someone putting vingers up in my wife, we found out she was at 4 centimeters which put her immediately into a birthing suite. The moms showed up and told war stories while Biffy went through her contractions. And while it did turn out very difficult to watch her in that much pain, it really took so much focus to be there with her that it became a little secondary.

Biff finally got an epideral (man I really don't know if that's how to spell that, and don't have the time to look it up), and no longer had that 12 year old with his leg caught in a bear trap look on her face. After many, many hours, the nurse (that reminded me a little of Hellby) told her to begin pushing.

I really have to say, Biff was not only the biggest trooper through the whole pregnancy, but she just shone like the sun during the contractions and pushing. You got yourself a pretty amazing mother there.

After about an hour and a half of pushing, they told us that a C-section was in order.

I tried to keep all of my attention on keeping Biff from being too scared, but couldn't help being amazed at the casual conversations all those doctors and nurses were having while cutting into her; it was like they were just doing a simple jobby job.

I heard you cry first, and everything seized up. I couldn't breathe all of the sudden, I kinda forgot how to for a second. Someone laughingly told me to stand up and look at the baby, see what we had. I gotta tell you buddy, I was so sure you were going to be a girl that I was flabbergasted by the sight of your johnson hanging in the wind. Biffy asked breathlessly what it was, and when I heard my own shaky voice say, "it's a boy", I lost my shit.

I cried those immense, blissful tears that come only once every so often; the ones that run with force when you're granted for just a moment to understand how truly amazing the world can be.

Those tears came again when I put my hand on your shrieking, red and bloody body, when I said softly, "hey Riley", and you immediately calmed down. The Hellby nurse had to prod me into touching you, I was afraid to break you.

Oh, and after I picked you up and you looked into my face for a second with those already familiar eyes, and I told your smiling mom you had blue eyes, I was overwhelmed all over again.

Everything since has been pretty blurry; the attempts at trying to get all the calls made, the crying, the vain sleep attempts the changing of diapers filled with this awfully sticky proto-poop. But those are the things I remember clearly, that and thinking that Doug Martsch singing in the backgrounf while your mom tried to push you out into the world seemed so right.

I gotta get back to the hospital now and see you. I already whispered this to your sleeping ear last night, but even when you turn 16, and all those "sins of the father" turn around to bite me on the ass, when you are so damn sure that you hate my guts, I will still be somewhere with my arm around you to keep from crying and smiling at those funny little murmurs you made.

I love you like crazy Riley Phillip. You've blown an amazing hole in this already amazing world and I can't wait to take this trip with you.

Hey Critter, Again

Had I written a post yesterday, it probably would of read like something a homeless dude on PCP wrote on a BART station bathroom wall with a mustard packet. I was out of it, and emotionally drained. Things aren't a ton better today, not a whole lot of sleep, but we're gonna try it valiant readers, we're gonna try.

I probably would have remembered to tell you that the clouds broke long enough for me to see the Olympics covered in snow on that walk home from work on Tuesday, that Tuesday that seems like weeks ago, on someone else's calendar. Had I posted this yesterday, I probably would have told you that seeing the mountains, and thinking of you coming so soon made me cry, and certainly not for the last time.

Had I posted yesterday, I would have told you that you kept me up far longer than was necessary, and put your mom through a lot. But today, I cannot blame you for anything. You are way too beautiful when you fall asleep on my arm.

Had I posted yesterday, I would have ended with the No!vember songs of the day: No Surprises by Radiohead and No Quarter by Led Zeppelin.

Chill out, I'll be right back...

Coming Soon

Got the call. I was at work for a whole of about 7 minutes when Biff called and told me it might be time to come home. And so I walked right back, all the glorious Pixies that my ipod could dish up couldn't wash out the heart palpatating news that we could have a baby today.

Currently at home, waiting on contractions to increase, moms on their way...

Oh and hey, by the by, something I never need to see again (besides The Cutting Edge): A doctor placing his hands up inside my wife's vajayjay and saying, "there's the head". At least this time he managed to not say, "2 fingers going in".

Then again, I guess this is something I'm going to need to watch at least one more time.

Hopefully news soon, we're jumping in.


No!vember song of the day: Oh No! by Camper Van Beethoven.

Hey Critter

On the day that you were due to be born, Mandy ran her first marathon. She rocked it like star she is.

We also got our first snowfall of the winter in Seattle. I had a nice couple of minutes walking through it to the store to get an eggplant. Apparently eggplant has something in it that can help getting labor started. We'll see how the eggplant parmesan works tonight.

It's time to come out, there's a lot of folks who can't wait to meet you.


No!vember song of the day: Ain't No Right by Janes Addiction and No One Else by Weezer.

Thanks

Much like the Thanksgivings of old in San Francisco, when we would sleep in, go see a movie or three and come home to make ground turkey burritos, Bif and I managed to avoid any family drama (directly anyway) for Thanksgiving. To which I give thanks.

Being she can begin having a child at any moment, she decided she did not want to make the hour to an hour and a half drive to Bremerton for the family Thanksgiving celebration. We had dinner at Mandy and Jason's, just the 4 of us, and just delightful. To which I give thanks.

We got dropped a small bit of family drama in that as Biffy's mom and dad have come up here to be with us with the impending baby, Thanksgiving itself was in jeopardy. In a glorious, passive-aggressive move from a grandmother who had attempted some other delightful passive-aggressive moves to keep the parents-in-law from leaving Los Angeles, the news came down the wire that Grandma did not know how to cook a turkey. As it turned out, the other grandmother claimed to not know how to cook a turkey either.

Okay, what? Not only did these two woman hail from the generation where they cooked every meal ever eaten in the household as the husbands obstinately refused to cook - and this is DEFINITELY true of these ladies, cooking a turkey is not akin to roasting a pig in a pit with hot coals. How did Thanksgiving go down when mom-in-law was too small to cook the damn turkey for them? What happened to their cookbooks?

And then other family members began jumping into the fray and throwing blame on popular family scapegoats... Whatever, family drama. As I was saying, we managed to avoid the great brunt of it. To which I give thanks.

Dinner? Just a giant slice of fantastic. There was turkey of course, which Jason also did not know how to cook, but managed to do it without purposefully trying to cause trouble and make people feel sorry for him at the same time - he's awesome. There was enough mashed potatoes to make an actual sized replica of Devil's Tower, gravy, sweet potatoes (and not that sickeningly sweet variety of them), corn, cranberry sauce from scratch, stuffing with apple and walnuts, brussel sprouts (thank you again Eric), and homemade rolls that I managed to burn on the bottom a little - sorry guys. There was also pecan pie and Mandy's chocolate pudding pie creation. Insert sound of smacking lips here...

Good dinner, good friends, inappropriate conversations and board games. Apparently Mandy will not play Scene-It with me anymore though...

Thank you M&J for having us over, for a great dinner and for a brief reprieve from the formless fear of what's to come any minute now.


No!vember song of the day: An Ode To No One by The Smashing Pumpkins.

Into Every Life...

As it is getting to be winter, we're getting into our rainy days. And we're getting into those intolerable days where born and bred Seattleites start bitching about the weather. I've said them before, I'll say them apparently as long as I have to endure the prattle: 1) It's Seattle, it rains here. Don't like it? Move. 2) It's winter, the weather's supposed to be crappy. Suck it up.

And yes, we've been inundated with biblical deluges up here; people are building SUV arcs, gathering spoiled lap dogs and trophy pets in twos. Whole towns have been washed away, which would theoretically be horrible if we hadn't lost a whole crop white trash, current regime supporters.

Hyperbole aside, we have apparently broken records for rainfall - again. Didn't this just happen not so long ago? Yes, we've broken records that have been kept for a total of fifty-some years. None of this changes the above bullet points people, shut the whining.

Last night, in a less harsh and judgmental mood, I stood at the window in the living room and watched shifting patterns the rain was making in the halo of the street lamp on the saturated street. It was a calming, sort of Zen moment.

I remembered, being a child, curled up in the silent living room, bathed in Christmas tree lights and listening to the rain hit the roof.
I remembered a little film called Regen that we watched in an avant-garde film class, one that I fell in love with.

Regen is a Dutch short that was made in 1929 and is essentially made up of varying shots of rain throughout Amsterdam; rain on windows, rain on streets, rain dripping off of cars. It's all a languorous song with a melancholy and hazy feel to it. This memory in turn made me lament the sort of child like wonder of filming that around you that fascinates, the ballsiness of creating beauty from something as simple as the rain and how this is missing from most popular film makers.

Anyway, if you're in drier climes, check out Regen if possible. It's available on some experimental shorts collections out there, possibly at the library even, and it's about 10 minutes out of your day. If you're here in Seattle, settle down, relax, enjoy the show out your window for a little while.

Everyone enjoy your Thanksgiving.


No!vember song of the day: Ain't No Good by Cake.

A Special Place For Special Moments

The day has come and gone, the day that I predicted like a drunken Nostradamus. I awoke from a fevered sleep the week before last with the words "the 19th" clinging to my dry, chapped lips. I became fairly certain that Biffy would have the baby on that Sunday.

No go, my flu induced psychic abilities have been debunked. But it's coming folks, it's close, it could be any minute. There's a lot on my mind, and more than anything, it's the memory of Shakey's.


Shakey's was a pizza parlor that had flourished around the Seattle area when I was a kid. It was a place that we went to for special occasions, like birthday parties or after baseball games. There is a little Kodak Instamatic picture that I remember very clearly of me, Kenny, Tom and my brother at the Shakey's near Kent's East Hill, where I believe it was a birthday celebration, and I want to say I have a Greedo action figure in my hand. The Shakey's was also so very close to the Skate King!

Shakey's had this old timey thing going for it. The guys making the pizza used to have to dress like this:

There was a player piano, and the one in Kent would often show old Laurel and Hardy shorts on a projector. All the signs in the place were made of wood and had like this "Robin Hood" font.

Shakey's was started by a man named Sherwood "Shakey" Johnson in Sacramento, so named due to nerve damage caused by malaria. Ahh, back in the day when people weren't afraid to take a malady and make a nickname out of it. I can't say why, but this makes me want to snigger behind my hand like I just overheard the teacher fart.

The pizza at Shakey's had this thin crust with an almost overpowering beer/yeast flavor. Eventually the Shakey's developed a buffet style deal where you could get fried chicken and freaking mojo potatoes. Sometimes I see those seasoned, fried potato discs in my dreams...

On thinking back on it, the pizza was probably not so good, the mojo potatoes even less so, but the memories! All those drunken memories...

This was before you could call up and have a pizza delivered, and back before there were many pizza parlors out there at all. At least in Kent, WA. If you wanted pizza, and much like today I always wanted pizza, you went to Shakey's or made it yourself. Pretty soon, other places like Godfather's and Pizza and Pipes opened up. The Chuck E. Cheese's took over the special occasion pizza market for awhile. And then it just became easier to have some stoner 19 year old bring you a pizza and a 2 liter in his battered Honda, free if it took longer than 30 minutes, than to take the kids out.

Shakey's is now apparently huge in the Philippines, but not really anywhere else. There are about four left in and around the greater Seattle area. There was one left in the Hollywood/LA area a couple of years back that I went to after my brother-in-law's wedding. But this wasn't a particularly good memory as I was tired, hot, hung over, and had spent a majority of the night before cleaning up someone else’s regurgitated Filipino Bar-B-Q. Irony?


No!vember song of the day: a 2fer Tuesday selection, a double negative, of No Children by The Mountain Goats and No Love Lost by Joy Division.

Playing Doctor

I have this inherent distrust of doctors and pharmaceuticals.

It wasn't always this way, it was drilled in through bad experiences and far too many commercials for unnecessary "medicine" for manufactured illness. Now, every time I enter a doctor's office, even if it's not for me, I immediately flash to countless visits where I would wait in agony for a shot that was a short lasting band-aid on a big scar.

They are all fairly similar, those doctor's offices. They're all beige, fastidious little rooms with bland watercolor paintings. They all smell the same.

I know there are doctors out there that are good, that care for their patients, that care about helping people and making them well. But doctors seem to have been forced to bend to that sort of American "fast food" mentality - just fix it now! And if you can do it in pill form, all the better.

There seems to be very little interest in getting to the root of the problem, of attempting to cure someone on a more holistic approach. But Americans don't have the time for this, isn't there a pill that will fix it? Hey fatass with the Cheeto crumbs lodged in the corners of your mouth! You probably wouldn't need your heartburn/acid reflux medicine if you wouldn't eat like a fucking pig and got out of your car once in awhile to walk your ass around the block.

Oh and yes, there are pills that will fix anything for you, even problems you didn't realize you had. Turn on the television, you can't go ten minutes without a commercial for some brightly colored pill with a Latin-lite type name. And the litany of symptoms that they begin to list off begin to seem like a daily paper horoscope; just generic enough that any hypochondriac out there will realize they have that symptom.

Restless Leg Syndrome? 12 million people suffer from this? Are you fucking kidding me?

Pharmaceutical companies have pimped out our doctors to becoming nothing more than drug pushers. There's big, big money to be had in avoiding actually fixing a problem and causing side effects that more pills can take care of for you. I've heard too many stories about psychologists (psychiatrists?) prescribing mood stabilizers and anti-depressants faster than a fax to your insurance company, but don't seem terribly skilled in a regiment to get you off those pills.

It's even gotten so bad with me, that I fear taking over the counter medicines, I fear all of those unpronounceable chemicals that take up a side of the box. And yes, there's the herbal route, but then people fall into that sort of weird brainwashing of, "it's all natural so it’s good".

I realize that it's something I'm going to have to get over, this fear of doctors. At some point there's going to be some sort of ailment that all the juice and bed rest in the world won't fix. I just hope to god it's not Erectile Dysfunction.


No!vember song of the day: Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine by The White Stripes

Deviled Egg Flavor?

Bless you Jones Soda!

I can't remember exactly when I became a fan of Jones Soda, if pressured by some enraged looking Cossack with a rusty bayonet, I would probably say it was the blue Bubble Gum flavored soda that won me over. I am a fan of both odd flavored soda and foods that are blue. But it was the fan picture posted on a bottle of root beer, one of a Port-a-Potty apparently named Biffy, which enamored forever.

Jones Soda operates out of the Seattle area here. When we first moved up here, there was a job posting for them that I applied for but didn't get. They also introduced their holiday flavors around this time. A limited supply, 5 pack of holiday themed sodas which included the flavors: Turkey and Gravy Soda, Green Bean Casserole Soda, Mashed Potato and Butter Soda, Cranberry Soda and Fruitcake Soda.

I learned about it too late to find any in the store and it stuck in the back of my mind in that hateful file of regret. Effing Turkey and Gravy Soda? I had to try that shit!

I don't know what happened exactly, but I missed the last holiday offering as well: Turkey and Gravy, Broccoli Casserole, Smoked Salmon Pate, Corn on the Cob and Pecan Pie.

However, on a beer run with Eric, I saw the majestic packaging up above all of that beer; the 2006 edition:

Turkey and Gravy, Dinner Roll, Sweet Potato, Pea and Antacid.

The first sip of the Turkey and Gravy proved to be... disturbing. Instead of the sweetness that accompanies a swig of soda, there was a wash of salt. It took a lot to get your mind around it. And beyond that, it didn't really seem to taste much like turkey and/or gravy. Mercedes nailed it when she said that it tasted like Slime.

Remember Slime?

I effing loved slime! Chemical smelling goop in a plastic trash can. I cannot explain what the god damn fascination was, but I wanted some Slime so damn bad. And I never got any... As the years progressed, they also introduced Slime with worms in it, Slime with eyeballs in it...

So yeah, the Turkey and Gravy did sort of taste like what Slime generally smelled like. I moved onto the Dinner Roll. Again, the non-sweet, uber salty made me wince because of years of programmed soda expectance. This was mildly better than the Turkey and Gravy, you could taste the butter, but still so salty it made old sailors seem tame.

The Sweet Potato was at least sweet, but it did have the flavor of a tuber. It was okay, not something I would buy on a regular basis, or probably at all, but it did at least taste close to the item it was supposed to approximate. It did also unfortunately lead to a Sweet Potato vs. Yam discussion which can, if you've ever found yourself in one, last much longer than you'd ever want.

As the flu came back from hiding around this time, I have been nervous about continuing on with the Pea Soda, so it still sits in the fridge unopened. I am curious though, very curious indeed.

And I'm pretty sure I know what that pink Antacid flavor is going to taste like, and I have to say that I feel a little jipped in the desert soda department, the Pecan Pie Soda sounds good.


No!vember song of the day: (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones.

Protected From The Rain

It's funny when people come to visit you from out of town. You want to show them the best of what your home has to offer, and while this may not necessarily include things on the universal tourist checklist of things to see, you as tour guide somehow feel responsible for every time your guest is forced to say no when asked by some well meaning person if they saw such and such.

Okay, well I do anyway. I also feel this overpowering urge to tell people that it doesn't always rain here. Part of me likes it when visitors get the full Seattle feel of things when they get rained upon, but then I also wish they could have one of those spectacular days when it is crystal clear and you can see water and mountains everywhere your eyes go.

So Mercedes and Eric got the rainy days while they were up here, rainy and cold. But damn it, they were troopers! Did they stand in the pissing, cold drizzle to watch boats come through the Ballard locks? Yes they did. Did they walk through downtown and down to the market in the rain? Yes they did. Did they jump on a ferry to Bainbridge Island just to jump on a ferry to anywhere? Yes they did.

And that is exactly the sort of tourism that I love, they can handle what comes at them with a joke or bitchy comment, and will go check something out for no other reason than to go check it out. Having had the experience of traveling with Mercedes, I already knew that we fit together well; I drag her hung over ass around when she can't find the motivation, she buys me shitty Circle K coffee when I'm locked in a bout of post Hand Grenade vomiting.

While I'm not sure if I played the perfect salesman for Seattle, I know Mercedes at least would tell me if there was something else she would rather be doing. And she would tell me in a very caustic fashion...

But the things that make me smile thinking back on them are not the Touristy McTour Guide things we did. It was walking through the downpour to the grocery store with Mercedes, both in bright yellow rain gear, to get ice cream and then mock fighting over the honking duck dog toy she decided to get. It was watching Eric cook up a feast in our little kitchen, giving tips on boiling greens and cooking rice all the while. It was sitting, or laying, around the living room with the heater going, listening to music and talking shit.

Thanks for coming guys, it was great seeing you. I hope you will at least think about coming back in the spring or summer when it doesn't get dark at 3:30 and you can see the mountains from atop that water tower.


No!vember song of the day: No New Tale To Tell by Love & Rockets.

Remiss

I've been remiss in posting today. I have been doing actual work type work, and the flu that I was pretty sure that I had kicked last week with that squinty-eyed near suspicion that the fucker's just hiding, has morphed into a head cold that is slowing the world down considerably.

I've been remiss in not having eaten brussel sprouts before this weekend. Oh hell yes. Thank you again Eric , you've shown me a light that I didn't know was not on.

I was remiss in not teaching Eric the A,E and G chords on the guitar. I did bust the guitar out to show you sleepy man, but you were sleeping. Next time...

I've been remiss in not collecting stories of Mercedes' and Eric's visit to our fair city for today’s posting. I'll revisit this thought tomorrow, but as I pointed out above - worky work and head cold tired.

I was remiss in not waking up early enough to see the two of them off this morning. I awoke to find the blankets and such in neatly folded piles atop the empty air mattress where once lay a tumble of bodies. There's not a lot more that can break your heart so quickly as that.

I already miss those kids…


No!vember song of the day: For No One by The Beatles

Been Caught Stealing

I was thinking of writing a diatribe on how I really hate it when people abuse systems set up to help people who legitimately need them; selfish fucks who insist that their accessory pets are service animals, selfish fucks who abuse work disability systems... This also brings to mind those who claim discrimination to get their way when they know it didn't happen. This horridly mocks those who actually have been discriminated against. There's a special death squad fantasy place for those folks, here in my heart.

But then, as I'm wont to do, I started thinking about porn.

My dad kept a small supply of dirty magazines in his bedroom - usually the sock or underwear drawer. When I was 11 or 12, my friend and neighbor David and I snuck one of my dad's Penthouse magazines into the small tract of woods behind my house. We sat there and looked at the lurid pictures.

I don't remember being particularly aroused by the soft focus pictures of heavily made up ladies with digits strategically placed. I think that it was really that faint thrill of flirting with the forbidden. It was knowing I wasn't supposed to be looking at the magazine, that I had snuck it from my dad's bedroom.

"What are you guys doing?" my dad yelled from the backyard.

The two of us, wide-eyed, quickly closed the magazine and rushed out of the woods. David, saying only a hurried goodbye, rushed past my dad and went back home across the street. My dad again asked what we had been doing and after making some lame excuse, he told me to take him where we had been. I began to lead him down one of the paths away from the clump of huckleberry bushes where we had left the Penthouse, but in that particular moment my father proved to be far slyer than I had given him credit for. He left my following and went directly to where we had been.

I don't remember any words he might have said, I'm sure he understood the curiosity of a prepubescent boy, I only remember him grabbing the magazine and pushing me before him out of the woods. I remember him making me clean the garage as a punishment, but I had the feeling it was more of an excuse to have someone clean the garage so he wouldn’t have to do it.

I do also remember him getting mad at David for leaving when he returned a couple hours later to play catch.

From what I understand, if donating sperm, the clinic will provide magazines such as these to get things going. I wonder how often the folks are asked if the donor can get something "a little raunchier" if the Playboy provided doesn't work out.


Because I feel that I have been remiss to dedicated readers who have asked for it... No!vember song of the day: No Depression by Uncle Tupelo.

Ketchup

Been out for a week, so a quick follow up on the going-ons around about here:

My beloved Jen Jen is now a married woman. With Beth being in the condition that she is (y'know, exasperatingly pregnant), we were unable to take the trip to the OC for the event, but I have mad love for those crazy kids. For some reason I imagine the four of us making popcorn balls in a kitchen somewhere, kids playing loudly in the background just underneath the sounds of some triumphantly indy band playing on a record player. Congratulations Jenny and Michael, I love you two something crazy.

I went to a fathering class on Saturday. One of the other fathers made a joke about having to be out at a certain time to get to a bar and watch the Seahawks with the guys. Oh boy, was that funny. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it was the diaphragm shattering laughter that ensued which made way for the illness that put me down for the last couple of days. We learned about how to pick a baby up without damaging their fragile little heads and necks (fuckin' babies), we learned about diapering and swaddling, we learned about having a plan for those times when the baby starts crying uncontrollably for hours on end and you have the urge to induce some sort of brain damage just to shut it up. My plan is to put baby in a separate room, close the door, open a beer (which will from here on out be in steady supply) and watch a couple minutes of Jaws, or The Big Lebowski.

On Sunday we visited the hospital and the "birthing suites" where the child shall enter the world. They're nice, a lot of wood trim everywhere. They seem very Scandinavian somehow, which is apropos for a hospital named Swedish. I imagined myself floating around the "baby entering the world" floor for hours, Biffy apparently imagined for the first time how real this all is going to become. She began to get worried about being able to do this, and tried in vain to reassure her that she'd be fine.

My beer supply is diminishing quickly.

I spent Monday rearranging the office which once held bookshelves and a desk and my amps and guitars so that it could now hold baby things. Things like a crib and changing table and all of these things that I would not know about, or realize that I would need to know about, two years ago. I am still holding out hopes of one day having a house with a basement where the amps can make a triumphant return in all their loud, feedbacky glory.

Tuesday I awoke to a flu that felt like it had taken a playpen to my joints and whacked unmercifully. Things have been pretty fuzzy since then. I tried to watch some Star Wars movies, but ended up sleeping through them in a feverish state instead. But I can say that even a fever does not make Ewoks palatable.

Ewoks still suck...

Not Quite Heaven, Not Quite Hell, But There's A Sharper Image

I just awoke from a flu-filled sleep where there lived a fever-induced dream of what purgatory is like.

It’s not that bad.

Purgatory is a ginormous river front shopping pavilion. Oh the shops that are there, my stars. I actually don’t remember what shops were there, except that they stretched on as far as the eye could see. Oh, there was a Safeway, a great big Safeway with generic looking produce. But this Safeway always seemed to be playing the Best of the Cure over the loudspeakers, but it was the latter, less enjoyable, post-Disintegration era Best of the Cure.

Everyone there was dressed fairly nicely; everyone had sunglasses. It was sunny and hot on the sidewalk, but the lazy river that curved around the shops was constantly in the shade, and cold from what I could gather.

I believe that there was a zoo somewhere in purgatory, and I believe there was also some sort of experimental lab on the premises. Which naturally brought a gaggle of protestors.

People wandered around shopping, girls were stealing the boys that their best friends were interested in. kc! and I sat on a bench singing What Is And What Should Never Be, discussing Jimmy Page’s slide playing.

I’m hoping to be back to normal tomorrow everyone – lots of rest and apple juice.

But I Won't

I could tell you someone else's story about their roommate's immense porn collection which apparently contained a tape of amateurish, black and white and quite raunchy gay porn inside a straight porn cover which had been found accidentally...

Or I could tell you about the flash of a movie scene that came to me this morning: A man crosses a freeway overpass as monstrous squid tentacles begin to wrap over the safety railing from below. A young woman who had been walking about twenty yards ahead, suddenly turns, clutching what appears to be a box of Hostess Ding Dongs to her chest. She throws out the sort of snarl one would imagine a cornered mother badger would, clutches the box tighter to her chest, turns and runs. There has been a sort of aural mix of Angelo Badalamenti score and seedy bar, honky-tonk piano through this, but now a distortion heavy guitar picks up. The man looks over to his left to see a fairly conventional looking rock band playing on a makeshift stage made of plastic milk crates. The crowd surrounding them dance in a pagan frenzy, somehow setting concrete pillars on fire...

Or I could tell you about the odd, calm, but melancholy feeling I have after the raging frustration that had built with the man period I had been experiencing the last couple of days, and how it feels made and built by the odd combination of things; excitement for the unknown and being tired of looking for things to be angry at, the inane chatter around and the lonely wail of the train whistle outside...

Or I could tell you that I really want to be at home on this rainy and cold day, wrapped up and watching a movie, drinking coffee and eating a chicken pot pie...

Madonna And The Whore

So I was watching a network "news" program, which admittedly was my problem, and it got me to loudly and aggressively ponder some things.

And I was feeling good, I'd gone out and gotten some beer and tots, I was cuddled up on a couch. But apparently, my bullshit acceptance valve has been broken by the lack of television watching.

First there was Madonna. She was doing an interview in response to the ghastly media attacks in regards to her adoption. Shhhh, did you hear that? That was the exploding sound of me giving a fuck. There was a brief teaser trailer for the upcoming chat with Madonna that the grave voiced announcer promised would be coming right up. Commercials quickly followed, and one of them was for the network's showing of Madonna's concert.

Coincidence? I think not.

I'm sure Madonna is a great lady, I'm sure she loves her children and I certainly hope that she has the best intentions with raising what I'm sure was an expensive African child, but using this non-fascinating hoopla to pimp her show is a little tasteless. "No! You're wrong! Madge would never do that!" I can hear legions of her fans saying. No, she has certainly never been a publicity whore before.

See, stars have publicists who earn their paychecks making sure their client's names are kept in the public consciousness. And then there are celebrities that don't use a publicist, or don't use it to the extent that the Jessica Simpsons and Paris Hiltons do. How often do hear about Robert Deniro's kids? Is the name of Johnny Depp's child more of a household name than some of our best writers?

So avoiding Madonna's oddly disturbing British affectation, the channel was turned to the local news. One of the news stories, I shit you not, was telling us that if you rent Blockbuster movies online, you can return those movies at a store.

How the fuck is that news? That my friends, is a commercial for perks to having an account with Blockbuster online. Did Blockbuster have to pay money to get that onto the local 10 O'clock news? Viacom owned Blockbuster, Blockbuster which bowed to the Religious Right and refused to carry The Last Temptation of Christ and carries edited versions of other films for their "family" demographic, had a commercial in the guise of a news report.

It's 7 degrees of awesome that Blockbuster is righteously indignant at the thought of carrying a film rated NC-17, but has no problem turning the "news" into a whore for their services.

Long Live The New Flesh

I'm in this strange head space. You can taste transition on the air - it tastes like slightly overcooked caramel by the way; you can feel it pressing in. It could get to be a paranoid downer if I didn't feel good about this, if I didn't feel, if not ready, at least ready to face changes.

On the walk in to work today, I stopped at least three times realizing that the prior five minutes or so had gone by as if in a blackout. No memory of buildings passed, no memory of the music in the headphones, no memory of the thoughts I had been thinking. This is not normal mental behavior on my walk, I may become uber focused on something and lose myself, but I can always ask the inner stenographer to read back the inner dialogue. Not today...

I feel my mind trying to adjust itself to the change.

Everything right now sort of feels like driving over a bridge with someone who is afraid of driving over a bridge. The passenger takes in sort of a hurried, nervous breath on leaving solid city ground, holds that breath as best as possible while driving over, only to let loose a sigh when safely on the other side. I didn't realize at the time, but all of that rush of fear and excitement was the long pull of breath in.

We're in the held breath section right now, a place where every action seems to hold far more responsibility than it does, a place where it seems every superstition is necessity and is only held together by this supreme force of will.

I have this memory that I'm not sure is mine - someone getting their tarot cards read and getting this panic stricken look when the Death card is dealt. The reader very calmly explains that death is not a negative thing, it only represents transition, change. I feel like I'm preparing for the death of everything that has come before - and I'm realizing that this is not a negative thing in the least. My life is about to change to the very core of things, and I think my mind is trying to give me a reassuring hand on the back while it ushers me to a whole new focus.

I've always had a tumultuous relationship with change, but I'm even excited by the change that will come to that as well.

"Everyone's Entitled To One Good Scare"

In high school, when I lived in Southern California, our house was fairly close to a funeral home. The funeral home was also close to a 7-11. Coincidence? I think not. The funeral home was always something that your eyes just sort of drifted over as you went past it; you knew it was there, but you didn't need to register the fact.

Our apartment here in Seattle is also fairly close a funeral home. I was walking past it once when some employees were leaving. I overheard one of them mention that he had quit smoking. The quitter's coworker said, "Congratulations. Then again, that's not necessarily good for our line of business." I had this strange double reaction to that statement. I thought it was really funny, but I was also a little offended by it, which disturbed me more than the statement. Forever in denial of death...

But, let’s go back to the funeral home in California. I remember riding my bike around the building with my brother once. We were looking in the windows as we rode by, and in one of them towards the back, there was a dress hanging. We thought it was someone standing in the window and it gave us both a start. We continued to circle the place and continued looking at the window with the dress hanging in it. I don't know, it's one of those kid things where you dare yourself not to be scared, but sort of revel in the being scared at the same time; it's walking past a haunted house, walking through a graveyard at night. On about the fourth loop around the funeral home, on looking through the same window, there was an actual person now standing in the window. My brother and I both shrieked and rode off home.

On a Halloween night, so many years ago, a friend and I were walking past this funeral home on the way to my house. As it was Halloween, our eyes naturally drifted to the place. And then, just as we were right before it, the front doors flew open and a guy came charging down the stairs. My friend and I gave a yelp and ran off down Alicia Parkway as quickly as possible.

I think that one of the guys working there got a kick out of scaring the shit out of kids, and I appreciate that.

It was one of those good scares, surprising and ultimately non-threatening. Not like when a guy with a burlap sack on his head ties you up and leaves you in his earthen floored basement where there’s this makeshift shrine to Satan.


Rocktober song of the day: For the last, the final, the Halloween edition, I present to you Doug Martsch dressed up in full Neil Young drag. I present to you the mighty 20 minutes of Cortez The Killer (Live) by Built To Spill.

Not At All What I Intended To Write

My mind is sort of working on overdrive today - a lot of concepts swirling around all willy nilly; a lot of monkey mind chatter.

I thought about math as language, trying to give concrete value to abstract ideas. Music does that as well. Language does it, all these silly words trying to nail down specifics from the ether. And how any concept invented by us will be fraught with the same fallibilities no matter how much our brains want us to believe in the perfection.

Our brains seek out the order in the chaos. Everywhere you look in nature, you can find this calm and pristine order, but I think we're missing half the picture by not allowing ourselves to see the mad chaos in it all as well. As of this morning, I think this may be the great lesson I've pulled out of dabbling in hallucinogens, getting a peek at that chaos.

I thought about a line from Rest Your Head by The Wrens: I hate the change, but I love the effect it's bringing on.

Then I thought about William Burroughs and how I had been strongly attracted, not to William Burroughs' writing, but to the idea of William Burroughs' writing. There was that rebellious affection for an outlaw soul, a fighting of normalcy by proxy. I would like to go back and re-read Naked Lunch, re-read The Ticket That Exploded and try to see them simply as books and not as underground culture talking points. I however do not think that these are picks to be reading to Bif's stomach...

I feel like some sort of windstorm picked up inside my head and started knocking loose thoughts that were clinging desperately, some of them moving too fast still to grab onto. I need a quiet place away from this frustration factory of work to still my mind a little. Or I need a bottle and a partner in crime with a desire for some mutual, intellectual masturbation.


Rocktober song of the day: Queen Bitch by David Bowie.

It's Like Thunder, Lightening...

When things start to get to be a little much at work, when customers frustrate me, when actions of those around me frustrate me, I can always look to the man above.

There's some sort of air duct juncture right over my cubical, and on this is a sticker. The sticker is one of those universal pictogram type things for those who cannot read the English or French warnings that go along with the picture. This is good for visiting dignitaries from Java who come by my cubicle all the time.

The picture shows the black silhouette of a man touching a wire, and there's a bolt of white lightening, bigger than his head, coursing through his body. I cannot say why, but this makes me smile something fierce. That, and the exclamation: VOLTAGE HASARDEUX!


Which also reminds me of a story Erik said that he heard on NPR - it's apparently verifiable, but I cannot remember the host whose website you can find this on. A woman was at work, brushing her teeth in the restroom. She bent down to take in water from the tap in order to rinse her mouth out. At that exact moment, lightening struck the building went through the plumbing and into her. The woman had on shoes that kept the lightening from leaving that route, so it found the only other way out it could. Ready? The woman shot lightening out of her ass!

No shit, this is a super power that I want; to shoot lightening out of my ass. Voltage Hasardeux indeed.

The woman lived, paramedics helped her and explained to her what had happened, but I have to imagine the next few bathroom breaks had to be a bit of a chore.


Rocktober song of the day: It's another 2fer ladies and gentleman! White Girl by X, followed by 20th Century Boy by T. Rex.

Not All Who Meander Are Lost

Come here, follow me for a second. Here, grab my hand…

Bif and I were walking out of the apartment the other night and both happened to be looking up the street at the same time. Two fall brown leaves had chosen that moment let loose the tree and float to the street within the cone of the streetlight. As she was raising her hand to point it out to me, I began laughing at the giddy rush that comes with miraculously catching those little moments in life. She asked what I was laughing at and I told her it was the same thing she was going to show me.

Synchronicity, which was the answer a Jeopardy player gave to a question regarding an album by the Police. The correct answer was actually Ghost in the Machine. What the hell happened to Sting? The guy turned into the worst kind of cheeseball, adult contemporary schmaltz-fest. The man came up with some of the effing kickingest bass lines of the 80's, the guy played with the Police.

On the walk in this morning, there was police activity a couple blocks north of the building. From a distance, it looked like serious business - lots of flashing lights and cruisers in the middle of the street. My mind ran rampant with theories; sniper, high tech heist of the Krispy Kreme, beginning of the zombie apocalypse. It appeared that some time before there had been a spill on the road of some sort - fuel, I'm guessing. The cops were leaving and a sole hazmat guy was spreading a brown, powdery substance on the road. I'm not sure the substance did what it was intended to because as I walked by the cold fall wind picked the stuff up and blew it around in swirling sand eddies. It looked like outtakes from Lawrence of Arabia.

Desert islands? Are there such things? Every time I see islands, there seems to be at least some trees and not just stretches of dunes. I think they may be the thing of childhood myths; like vampires, moon men and fair and equal treatment under the law. I guess I can see how someone from the grasslands of Middle America could see the large amounts of beach as desert.

I've been trying to avoid watching Lost, trying to avoid TV in general. I sat down for a second while Bif watched last night and got suckered in, yet again. God damn you Lost! At least I could rationalize it by playing guitar while I watched, like I was multitasking.

I'm trying to teach myself to play slide guitar. I'm trying to find the inner motivation to be at home and write, to work on the larger ideas that are floating around in my head. I'm trying to ignore the burning rage I feel when I'm bombarded with constant stories of celebrities adopting children. Apparently buying children is to A-list celebrities what obvious plastic surgery is to the lesser ones. It's fucking awesome...


Rocktober song of the day: Going back to Zeptember for a moment, and ignoring the ubiquitous Cadillac commercials it is featured in, today's pick is the still powerful Rock & Roll by Led Zeppelin.

Ain't It Strange That I Can Dream

If I had the power to travel back in time (and I'm working on it good people, I'm fairly sure the key is microwaves) and talk to my 13 year old self, my 13 year old self would be shocked and dismayed to hear me say what I want to tell him. He would shake his head furiously, throw out his hands as if warding off some profane beast and say, "it's not true" over and over - probably throwing in a "dude" from time to time.

I have officially seen too many vaginas on video. And the last few had babies coming out of them.

Yeah, I knew going into it that I was gonna see 'the video' in our birthing class, and I've seen similar footage before, but it was fairly amazing that 35 years of media and societal manipulation was wiped out so quickly; things went from sexy to scientific in about 35 seconds.

Relax, I'm exaggerating. It's still sexy, it was just a tad unnerving to see a part of the body that is typically deemed as not proper for the masses to be so proudly on display - and as noted, with babies coming out of them.

It had already been decided that when the time comes, I was going to stay above the DMZ when the baby is introduced into the world, so I wasn't worried about that aspect. And even if I was down there with goggles and a catcher's mitt, I probably wouldn't be worried about it. What I'm concerned about now though, after the class, is watching the woman I love go through what could be a lot of hours of serious pain and me not being able to do anything about it.

We were practicing labor positions in the class, things to do that might make Bif more comfortable and things I can do to assist. I was making inappropriate jokes, as I will do, and making her laugh. She informed me that when labor actually strikes, she is not going to be in the mood for my stupidity, so now I have to be concerned about that as well.

But what I got most out of the class, other than a very uncomfortable feeling watching the teacher shove a doll over and over again through the pelvis bone of some poor sap who donated their body to science, was the flood of emotion that comes when that baby enters the world. As I mentioned yesterday, I was tearing up watching these people go through this sort of elation I don't completely understand yet. When the time comes for me, I'm gonna be a fucking wreck.


Rocktober song of the day: Fat Bottom Girls by Queen.

"Heaven Never Dreamt Of Anything As Sweet As That..."

And so it ends, feeling monumental somehow, feeling like so many factors lined up just right to make it happen. We closed “Soul Of A Whore” on Saturday night, partied it out, said a long goodbye.

Author-man Denis Johnson came up to see us closing night, which made a lot of people really nervous, myself included. But when it came right down to it, it was realizing that it would be the last time I would be walking that stage as Will Blaine and speaking Will Blaine's lines with his faux Southern gentleman swagger that blocked out the fact that Mr. Johnson was watching.

There was a particular scene, my particular favorite, that was just me and the super talented Terri that I just plain hated to see come to an end. It's a disturbing scene, one where I had to fully acknowledge my creepy side. Every night, on finishing the scene, the two of us would walk off stage, stand right behind the wall for a second and hug it out - just a sort of reassurance to each other that we were cool. Saturday night we hugged, went back to the green room and both started crying a little bit knowing we weren't going to get to do the scene again.

I don't know, it's weird and I probably can't explain it very well, but we all put a lot of work into this show and invested a lot of emotional intensity to make it work, so now that it's over there's an emptiness that sort of hurts. The next morning, sitting in a birthing class (which I'll bring up tomorrow) and watching videos of women going through labor and delivery, I was still so emotionally raw that I couldn't stop crying at the simplest expressions of emotion.

The closing party started out as a relatively sedate affair. I was sitting down on a table, talking to Erik's fiancée Irene about having seen the show 3 times during the run when Denis Johnson approached. I had met him once before and he struck me as very quiet, particularly shy. He still seemed this way, but also had this sort of happiness floating around him, which I assume probably occurs when you see something that you yourself have slaved and sweat over come to life. He thanked me for the job I did, mentioned a couple of parts he was fond of and told me about how the script had changed over various incarnations. He has this sort of plain, Midwestern handsomeness and a dry smile that just puts you at ease, and I remembered wondering why I had ever felt nervous about performing in front of this man.

The night wore on, more beers, more hugs, a fake striptease by yours truly that turned into a real one when Jodi ripped every goddamn button off my shirt (well, all but one, but Robert made sure to finish the job). I made my usual prolonged goodbyes and wandered into the cold around 3. I felt a big crying jag trying to bust itself out of me while I walked the dark roads home, pulling my button less shirt closer around me. I pushed it down trying not to think about the fact that it was done, but about feeling like I'd done some pretty good work and had gotten the chance to work with some truly amazing people. I thought about the extra time I'll have now, and of getting to see people I haven't hung out with in awhile.

But no joke, I'm gonna miss it.


Rocktober song of the day: Don't Bring Me Down by E.L.O.

Where It's At

My mind that is...

I cannot shake the internet headline I read the other day: Scary Spice Pregnant With Eddie Murphy's Baby? So many aspects of that assault my delicate sensibilities, it's like I’m trying to look at a four dimensional object spinning on one of those heat lamp hot dog things.

I cannot stop thinking about how I really want to throw away my happy-go-lucky customer service script and throw in a well placed “are you fucking kidding me?” to a large majority of the people I have to deal with for a living.

I cannot get Grandaddy’s Campershell Dreams out of my head.

I cannot shake the sort of melancholy feeling that is riding the knowledge that we end the show tonight. I’m gonna miss these people, I’m gonna miss this world.

I also have a hankering for a scotch and soda, and a Rueben.


Rocktober song of the day: Closer by Nine Inch Nails.

Secrets On Bayshore Boulevard

The Sparrow stood in the fog, his trench coat swaying in the stiff breeze. He could smell the salt coming on that breeze, off of the bay. He put his hands in the pockets of the black coat, attempting to avoid the cold. He pulled the coat tighter around him, felt for his pack of smokes and pulled one out. He was lighting it as a man began to materialize out of the thick fog.

The man stood before The Sparrow, his own trench coat cinched tight with a stylish belt. The man lit a cigarette of his own and squinted at The Sparrow through the darkness.

"It always rains on a parade," the man cryptically said.

The sparrow took a deep drag off his cigarette, dropped it to the ground and let loose a jet stream of smoke.

"But on the bright side, Denny's has a great deal on the Grand Slam Breakfast right now."

The man nodded. "Sparrow? They call me Ribbon Maker."

"Do you have it?" The Sparrow asked. He spoke calmly, but he could barely contain his excitement.

The Ribbon Maker pulled an envelope from the pocket of his trench coat.

"The recipe for Andy's 'Secret Sauce'," he began to hand over the envelope, but as The Sparrow reached for it, he quickly pulled it back. "You have something for me I believe."

The Sparrow reached into the blue backpack that sat at his feet and pulled out a small figurine. The Ribbon Maker's eyes widened.

"Is that? Really?" The Ribbon Maker stuttered.

"Yes, it's the Secret Squirrel. The very Secret Squirrel that the Sons of Marvin protected with their very lives. The very Secret Squirrel that was the actual cause of the skirmish in the Falkland Islands. And now it goes to you and your people."

The two men traded their goods. The Ribbon Maker stared down at the Secret Squirrel with eyes full of wonder. The Sparrow put the envelope in his pocket and shouldered his bag.

"Now I have to find my way back across the line and into the city," The Sparrow said with a weary sigh.

"Do they have the border blocked? I mean that would be weird to cut off San Francisco from South San Francisco."

"No, it's just my car broke down."

"Oh, well there's a Samtrans stop just like a block up from here. You can jump on and it should take you to like Market Street."

"Cool. Punch it in."

The two men tapped fists before separating and disappearing into the foggy night.


Rocktober song of the day: Queer by Garbage.

Walking Blues

Let's talk transit for a second. I know, tres exciting, but let's also talk about naming a child Trey. I know that some people are nicknamed Trey (or even Trip, which frankly is just dumb) because they are Suchandsuch McSuchandsuch the third. I gotta say, it sort of seems ballsy to walk around with a name like Trey. Hats off to all y'all Treys out there.

Okay, let's get back to transit.

I've mentioned before that I miss the San Francisco MUNI. I miss being able to fairly quickly and fairly easily get around a city. I've always wondered why a city like Seattle, which considers itself ecologically minded, doesn't have a better mass transit system. Your options of getting around the rather expansive city itself are fairly grim, but let's say you're coming over from the East Side, from Bellevue. Nothing. There's the Sound Transit, which is mildly helpful if you're heading North or South of Seattle a couple of times a day.

We were discussing this at work today, and it's a subject that frustrates me to no end. Take Europe for a second. Seriously, just hold it for a second. C'mon, I need to examine my zipper, pretty darn quick.

If I were in Amsterdam right now... Mmmmmm, if only I were in Amsterdam right now... Sorry, if I were in Amsterdam, and went to the central train station, and wanted to go to... Let's see... Brussels, Belgium, I would have 5 trains to choose from that would get me there in 3 hours. If I wanted to go to Paris? Again, 5 trains to pick from to get me there in 4 hours. Berlin? 5 trains, 6 hours.

Now, let's say I'm in Seattle and I want to get on a train somewhere today. Well, I can get to Spokane today in 7 hours. Never you mind that I can drive to Spokane, even in the slightly bad weather, in 4, maybe 4 1/2 hours. Let's say I wanted to get to San Francisco. Well, I can catch a train... Tomorrow! Twenty-two hours it would take by the way - to get to Emeryville. Hey, if I want to get to Phoenix, fuck me, the schedule cannot pull anything up.

I'm sure that the governments are heavily subsidizing the European rail systems, but why shouldn't we expect the same? Instead, we subsidize oil companies with billions of dollars and wars, even when they're making record profits, so that spoiled Americans can drive their ginormous Escalades, continuing to poison the air and radically change the climate, and not have to share space with a stranger.

Man, it's easy for me to hate my own country sometimes.


Rocktober song of the day: Rid Of Me by PJ Harvey.

One Rainy Wish

I walked to work in the rain this morning, the first time in awhile. I don't mind the rain. Yet... I do enjoy watching other people having to do their mandatory couple of blocks with faces that makes it look like they've swallowed steroid soaked goat poop, doing everything humanly, and hysterically, possible to avoid getting wet.

Don't any of them remember how bad they wanted to run around in the rain and splash in the puddles when they were younger?

And okay, yeah, if I had the power to wake up in the morning and say, "today, the weather on my walk will be...", I probably would not choose rain. But I don't have that power. I barely have the power to speak complete sentences and make it into the bathroom without bumping painfully into something when I wake up in the morning.

"Is it wet outside?" I get asked when I approach my desk, pretty well soaked. Yes, very clever, clever coworker, it is wet outside. Now go back to your row and eat more witty pills.

Nikki 2 K's threw down a little Muddy Waters on my desk, first thing, and I say thank you Nikki 2 K's. It was absolutely a great way to start a gray, rainy, work day. But I'm now filled with the desire to go back home, put some blues records on the record player and lay on the floor and listen, letting all of those dark gray, muted, rain day shadows float around the apartment. I want the cats to come cuddle up. I want some soup and grilled cheese.


Rocktober song of the day: Bone Machine by Pixies.