Category: reminisce

Thoughts about the good old days… memories.

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my testicles hurt

Mercy me.
I used to joke with Sharaun that I must have some sort of internal “timer” that finds me visiting the emergency room whenever it runs down and resets for the next time. Sitting in the crowded waiting room now, I can remember the last time I was in a place like this – nearly a year ago. Hospitals suck. They suck bad.

This weekend was a whirlwind of travel. Sharaun and I flew home to Florida for our ten year high school reunion. Took the redeye into Orlando, leaving Thursday arriving Friday, and then flew back to Northern California Sunday morning. The trip wasn’t as long as I wanted, more run-run-run than relaxation, but it was good. Without going into the long of it, the short of it is that we had a great time. Saw some folks I literally hadn’t seen in ten years. Cheap beer and wish-I-hadn’t cigarettes filled two social-centric evenings with old friends. Since we were in Florida, we dined primarily the standard hot wings, southern barbecue, and sweet tea fare – stuff you just don’t get here in California. Fried alligator tail and Bud Light make for one hell of a fine southern meal.

I guess I’m not much in a writing mood. It’s late, I’m grumpy from flying and not getting enough sleep for the past three days. My Economy Plus seat wouldn’t recline on my last connecting flight home, which made getting my much-needed rest more uncomfortable than it could’ve been, and then our luggage somehow ended up on a flight coming in four hours after us. Since it was after 10pm, the next time they could deliver it to the house would’ve been mid-morning tomorrow (Monday). All Sharaun’s bathroom junk was in there, and it’s her first day of school with her new class tomorrow. That means we’d have to make the 45min drive back to the airport just hours after leaving, to stand and wait by the carousel for our bag to come off some flight we weren’t even on.

This place is somewhat surreal. Is it my imagination, or does the societal underbelly seem to need “urgent” medical care more than others? Right now, there’s a completely skeezed-out woman making a series of frantic calls on the payphone trying to locate some cigarettes. Something about leaving the older kids at Taco Bell and taking the younger kids home, then coming back for the ones left earlier. Bottom line though, is that she’s got to get those cigarettes. She’s got a pot-leaf embroidered on the right back-pocket of her size-zero jeans from Gap – Crack Whore. The young girl in pink terrycloth pants at the registration counter has multicolored hair and is giving her profession as “MT,” massage therapist. Cigarette-woman’s hands are soot-black, and her feet shoeless. I feel completely out of place sitting here with a portable computer on my lap. Emergency rooms are sad places, I don’t like them at all.

‘Night.

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ten years gone

Blimey.
Things are finally moving and shaking in places I’ve been waiting for them to move and shake. And that means I can start talking about them on Sounds Familiar soon enough. Until then, though, it’s the same-old same-old. The Gods of Northern California still have the oven on “broil,” and each day is so miserable I don’t even like being outdoors. Everything absorbs heat and then radiates it, the cars keep the garage sweaty well into the evening hours, concrete stays warm to the touch until the wee hours of the morning. Each afternoon I eagerly await that moment when I arrive home from work and can strip off the unneeded layers of clothes and get down to shorts, a t-shirt, and bare feet. As I’m pulling my shirt over my head, I imagine it as taking off an electric blanket, removing that outer layer of clothes that’s just been soaking up the sun. I immediately feel cooler. A man of my… stature… is not built for this kinda heat. Give me mild days and I’m happiest. You’ll know when that happens, as I start fawning over the Fallishness of things when those halcyon days arrive.

The house is a complete wreck again; one of those additive, snowballing kind of wrecks that just gets worse by the day… and more frustrating as well. I hate it. It begins pester me whenever I inhabit the place, my only escape being leaving for work each morning and letting it fester until I return again each evening. For all my complaining, I’m still sitting her ignoring it as I write. Oh, it’s there, looming right behind me; the menacing shadow of an ironing board left out for days, a table still in the wrong place from painting, unfinished half-painted walls, looking like the march of the yellow fungus growing on them is stalled in rough lines. Ack, I do hate it you know. I’m pretty anal when it comes to things like neatness… and I don’t think that’ll ever change about me. Sharaun, on the other hand, has about as high a tolerance for clutter as kids these days do for rubella (whatever that is). I’m trying to resign myself to the fact that it’ll never change, and if I want to have the place be ever-clean, I’m gonna have to pony up and maintain it that way.

Back to Florida in three days. Ten years have gone by and it’s customary to re-convene with your graduating high school class. I’m not looking forward to having such an abbreviated trip “home” (I do still consider the place home, for whatever reason), but I am, in fact, looking forward to the whole business of reuniting. Thinking about it, ten years doesn’t seem all that long – but when I think about what all I’ve been through since my last year of high school… good lord it’s been a long time. Flashback to 12th grade, and you’d find a skinnier me, fooling around on his long-time girlfriend with the willing. Trying to do right by his newfound religion and thinking only the slightest about college and “a future.” Things were looking up, my folks had given me the little red Nissan for graduation, and I’d managed to score my dream job hawking wax at the local mom-‘n’-pop record store. Having moved on from fast food and go-fer positions at the local CPA, I was ready to tread the cheap carpet of the retail world. Breezing my way through the no-more-challenging-than-high-school community college curriculum and blowing the multiple-scholarship windfall on things I can’t remember. Man, those were some good days. Lots less to worry about… that’s for sure. My biggest daily concern is when Jeremy would get home so we could go smoke menthols on the porch and catch up.

Did you know I won a cruise to the Bahamas at my “keep-’em-sober, keep-’em-alive” school-sanctioned graduation party? Yeah, I totally did. And, since I was 18 at the time, I could totally go too. I took Jeremy, and we road-tripped down to Miami to catch the smallest cruise liner I’ve ever seen, the no doubt affordable Dolphin IV. Three nights, four days. My first night on board I hit the triple-7s and took $450 back to the cabin. We had a great time, sleeping in hammocks on private islands, smoking triple-price-for-the-whiteboy Cubans, parasailing, and getting robbed by a local named “Deuce” (really). And although I know many look back on their own with detest, my high school years were not that bad at all. I had a good time, and I’m actually kind of exciting about seeing some folks. I’m sure I’ll be writing about the whole thing, as it’s bound to produce some good material.

As I go, I thought it was interesting that, despite JK Rowlings’ insistence that the latest Harry Potter book not be released in electronic form, entrepreneurial pirates have manages to scan and proofread the entire book – producing a complete and accurate copy within twelve hours of the book’s on-sale date. What’s more, they’ve also made an audio-book version available… all within one day of the books release. Things like that make you wonder, is there really every going to be a way to “secure” any kind of media? Makes me think that, despite various industries’ attempts to protect their content, the pirates will always be one step ahead of them. Seems the best you can do is change the public’s opinion what constitutes “stealing” in regards to digital media… an uphill battle, it would seem.

OK then, g’night friends and lovers. Until tomorrow.

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baking

Hawt.
When I got in the car today after work, the digital thermometer read 110° F. That’s just too hot. The air conditioning doesn’t even really work when it’s that hot. I don’t exactly trust the Ford’s thermometer to be nuts-on accurate, but I think anything in the greater-than 100° range is hot enough to ignore the tolerance.

I didn’t write yesterday because I need a break. For a long time now, I’ve felt like I don’t have much to write. If nothing happens during the day, I have nothing in the way of material. Sometimes it’s like that, you get stuck in this “report out” mode of writing as opposed to a more “topical” approach. Being that my days at work are so busy of late, I often find myself sitting at home in the evenings thinking, yet again, about work. With so much focus on one thing, I don’t really have it in me to write about something that isn’t as fresh as the day’s happenings. That… and the fact that I’m keeping secrets from sounds familiar. It’s hard to write around things. But I think to myself, even when the kimono is open – what will I write? What will I write about today? You know, it’s actually a slightly guilty feeling. I look at the clock and it’s nearly 9pm and I’ve got nothing to say, nothing to write. I actually feel a little bad. Mostly because I love it, I love writing… and I can’t bring myself to put down something interesting, and I feel like I’ve said it all before. What a shame.

When I was in the 7th grade, I had my own little cocoon event. I wrapped myself up in the music and culture of three generations past. I cast off the idea of contemporary cool (mostly, I think, because I wasn’t doing so hot attempting to emulate it). I withdrew from the middle school culture of Gucci fannypacks and homemade MC Hammer puffpaint tees into a world of Ginger Baker drum solos at the Fillmore and bright Peter Max concert flats. A year later, and my transformation was complete. I had emerged a new creature, a butterfly clad not in bright colors but dreary occultist Led Zeppelin shirts and jeans. I loved it. I let my hair grow, stopped trying to keep up with the Top 40, and decided I needed to try marijuana. After meeting Kyle in 8th grade, and finding him a sympathizer to my anti-popularity cause – things only got better. Weekends spent watching rented copies of Woodstock, The Song Remains the Same, Vanishing Point, Blues Brothers, etc. There was so much to learn, and for a good portion of it he was my mentor. Together, the desire to try the weed grew. Until ninth grade, when we finally scored some.

It came from a buddy, just a little baggie… we’d seen nothing like it before, so we had no idea how to judge how much it was. We took it into our favorite place in the woods, a small clearing well behind Kyle’s uncle’s house where we’d often camp overnight. Secluded, perfect, the kinda place you felt safe hiding pellet guns under rocks in black plastic attaché cases, the kinda place you were supposed to smoke weed in. With no rolling papers, we resorted to the hard-up method of crunching a soda can in on one side. You kinda work it into a depression, with raised sides, then you stab it a few times with a pocketknife. Drop a bud or two on top and apply flame while inhaling through the drink-hole, and you’ve got a crude – but functional – pipe. I held the lighter to the can, feeling like a crack addict, and took a deep breath. That taste… unmistakable. A dry sweetness, tastes almost as scratchy as it does smooth, unmistakable. I passed the can, careful not to spill the glowing nugs. There were three of us, and I don’t remember when Kyle got the can… but on his first inhale he coughed hard – right into the can. The wonderful functionality of the pipe immediately performed perfectly – in reverse; blowing smoke out the pocketknife holes, and scattering our entire stash to the wind. I didn’t “get high” that day, and started thinking maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

I don’t know how much time, or how many other attempts, passed between then and the first time the drug actually worked. But I remember that time. I tried again, with no results. I inhaled deeper, held it in longer, smoked more, I tried it all. Nothing. After we were all pros, we used to tell unsuccessful newbies that their mind just hadn’t allowed them to “open that door” yet. I remember the night my “door” opened. I was driving, so it was the later half of my freshman year. I don’t remember where we got the stuff. I drove the little Nissan Sentra into the woods, over some sandy access roads to a clearing in the middle of nowhere. A place where the only reason you could get there was because there was a retention pond or firebreak that need truck access for maintenance. There were four of us that night, four of us who had tried before with no luck but were willing to give it another go. This time we rolled joints. This time it worked. At first, I was ready to write the night off as another loss. Then it happened. At the time, I remember describing it to those who had not yet arrived as “like hitting a brick wall.” One minute I was fine, the next minute I was stoned beyond all belief. That awesome kind of stoned where your face feels detached and your sense of time is all screwed.

That night we all got stoned, destroyed. We laughed at things we imagined seeing in the woods, remarked at the smoothness of our teeth, and had one of the grandest time four teenagers finding weed can have. I drove us back, weed not fully out of my system. Down the sandy roads, onto the street, to wherever we were going. At first, I was deathly afraid. After that first time, I didn’t want to smoke again until I got my next report card. We’d all heard the facts: weed makes you dumb, burns up your brain cells. We’d all seen burnouts on Cops, even at school – and I just knew that weed was gonna lead me down that path – make me a drooling fool. Maybe twice more before grades I indulged, but that was it. Then it happened… I got straight As. For the first time in my life I received nary a B. And it was like God showing Moses the burning bush to convince him things would be OK, it was my “permission.” From then on, the marijuana and I were close friends. For the better part of two years, we’d meet up for weekend rendezvous, with the rare-but-not-never weeknight encounter if the stars aligned. Oh, and the As, they stuck around too – just my ongoing reassurance that not only was I not getting dumber – apparently the dope was actually turning me into a genius.

The story ends with me giving up the smoke for a girl. How endearing. I did, however, get said girl. Still with her to this day, so I think it was worth the weed.

Unrelated short bits: Again, the bleat makes me embarrassed to call this a blog. I wish I could dredge that kind of realism up now and again. And Dave, here’s that link I was talking about. I swear they once had more explicit instructions on actually getting into the old lines, but either I’m remembering wrong or they changed it to less inviting text like “Doors from it, if opened, would give a good view of the platform.” Hmmmm…

Goodnight.

Posted on

a place to sleep

Good for the skin.
Man… just woke up from a hardcore nap, it’s about 9:30pm. Fell asleep on the couch watching TV, that damn flickerbox robbed me of another evening of productivity. I had big plans: unpack from New York, because my suitcase is still sitting on the bedroom floor; repack the camping equipment from this weekend, as it’s still piled in the garage from when I aired it out after returning; start picking up around the house, as it’s still littered with debris from the bridal shower and party Sharaun had here more than a week ago; I would’ve even settled for just doing the dishes from this evening’s meal. But man, I’m so out of practice with the regular chores that I’m really letting them slip. I feel like I’m all out of continuity or something. I set my alarm for an hour early on Monday, thinking I’d get up early and do some tidying before work – but of course I snoozed that entire thing away. Anyday now, I’m ready to get back into my routine…

When I was in the second grade, our teacher had a small squarish picture-book dealing with “hobby sports.” It had full-page action shots of people doing different things, with the title of the activity at the bottom of the page. There were pages for skiing, skydiving, surfing, boating, etc. I can remember looking at the book and flipping the pages. One of the pages seemed a little thick, too thick to be one page. Upon closer inspection I discovered that it really wasn’t a single page, but two pages that were somehow stuck together. Being curious, I carefully tried to pry apart the stuck pages. Turns out the were stuck together purposely, by our teacher, because one of the now hidden pictures portrayed the sport of “skin diving.” With the pages torn apart, I could make out the nude forms of a male and female diver. (Is it proper to have my pluralized “forms” be mated with the singular “diver” in that sentence?) At this point, I either began showing this to other kids, or Mrs. Kline spotted me – either way I was found out. I can remember her lecturing me for “ruining” her book. I think that’s kind of unfair. You glue two pages of a book together and expect inquisitive second-graders not to pry them apart in curiosity. How about cutting out the offending page, or not using the book at all – it was probably 15 pages max anyway.

Got a call from my little bro over the weekend. He’s busy making all the preparations for his tour in Iraq come December. His unit finally got their orders the other day, and they will be stationed at Camp Liberty (Camp Al-Tahreer in Arabic, and also formerly known as Camp Victory). Camp Victory is “… one of the largest US overseas posts built since the Vietnam War, [and] … lies northeast of Baghdad International Airport…” It is planned to be able to accommodate 14,000 troops at capacity. For a long time, my brother telling me he was going to Iraq was pretty much just that – nothing too scary. But hearing him tell me where he’d been ordered, and how he’s making preparations to send his wife home to her folks while he’s away made me really think about it. I don’t know, I don’t have a lot of fear for his wellbeing, I feel like he can handle himself and that the odds are with him… but all the same I wish he wasn’t going. I can’t imagine how it’d feel on the eve of leaving all the things I know and love for a year. Bugs me.

As much as I’ve been looking forward to our upcoming high school reunion next month, I’ve been dreading it nearly as much because tickets to FL are running between $500 and $600 per-person right now. Considering we’re only going to be there for a couple days since Sharaun’s scheduling around work, it was just hard for me to justify dropping more than a grand on the trip. So today, out of desperation, I started reviewing my various airline miles. Turns out, that we could fly for about $240 if we’d be willing to each fly a different airline. I called Sharaun, presented the ~$800 savings scenario to her, and she was down. So, I’m on United and she’s on Continental – but at least I was able to score pretty similar flight times so we’re not too disparate. Yeah, it sucks – but we already shelled out a hundred or so just for the reunion festivities… I am really looking forward to it, despite my lamentation. More importantly, it’s another trip to the airport and some more quality time on an airplane!

Need to make reservations for my trip to Shanghai, apparently I’m needed the 1st week of August. Also wouldn’t hurt to book travel for the (now two-week) September Taiwan trip. I’ve never been to Shanghai, so I’m looking forward to it – since I’ll know some folks in town who can show me around. Taiwan is Taiwan, we don’t need to go into that again until the time comes. I brought some work home tonight, y’know, to work on; never got to it.

Oh, and Wes is right about McD’s, I had already forgotten the whole McRib incident… a textbook example of repression. Goodnight.

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porn potential

Look close to see the jubblies.
Resisting my better urges, I’m staying up to try and log an entry for tomorrow (or today, by the clock). I finally signed off my VPN’d work connection, sending and receiving mail (yes, I’m not the only swamped person working late, it seems), and I was getting ready to go to bed. Then, I realized I’d downloaded some new tunes over the past couple days and wanted to hear them… it was enough of an excuse to move my computer-staring activities from the living room to the computer room, where I can listen to music on some proper speakers. So I’m here, and I’m writing… it’s a start.

Guys, I apologize. The writing about work has got to stop. But, I’m gonna do it again for a minute, because lately it’s been what’s all-consuming. While I had hopes for a change, today continued along the alarming trend of having no time to breathe between tasks. In fact, I’ve taken to adding a 3rd class of Post It note to my Post It notes filing/tracking system – the “to do tonight” note. A subset of the broader “to do” list, this small note contains only the items which need to get done before the next workday. The stuff that, while it is important and has to be done, just gets pushed aside while putting out the day’s many randomly arising and ill-timed fires. So, tonight I’ve got a couple hours to log before I can start tomorrow with a relatively clean slate. At first, the crunch was exciting… made me feel important. Now, I’m starting to get tired of the crunch. Today, the crunch prevented me from getting a much needed haircut, not to mention stopping me from mowing my overgrown lawn. So as boring and repetitive as it may be, my writing will continue to be dominated by the overriding activities of my day… and for the immediate future, I have a feeling that’s gonna be work, work, and more work.

A lot of times, when my phone rings, I purposely ignore it. I may be that I just don’t feel like talking, or it may be that I just don’t feel like talking to you… either way I just silence the thing and go on with my business. I always have this fear though, that the person calling me is outside my house, or somewhere where they are able to see that I’m there to answer my phone… walking behind me in a public place for instance. I can imagine someone watching me look at my phone, press a button, and get transferred to voicemail. So, even though I’m sure I’ll always continue to ignore phone calls – I do get a small pang of guilt every time I do it. Now, at work I’ve got caller ID on my phone, so I know when someone’s calling from their desk that they’re at their desk – and I can safely ignore it. Cellphones, however, add caller mobility as an unknown. Stupid cellphones, making my call-shirking all the more difficult.

When I was growing up, my friends and I of course enjoyed thumbing through the occasional pornographic magazine. However, being that we were in the 5th grade (or 6th, 7th… whatever, it was a pretty consistent trend in the post-5th grades), we couldn’t exactly go and pick up a skin mag at the local 7-11. No, we had to rely on the many kid-tested porn “dumps.” I don’t know if you guys had this kind of thing or not. But, as boys, we had an almost instinctual knowledge of a place’s porn-potential. For instance, when I lived in Lompoc, there were a series of empty fields which were known as “the dirt trails,” where kids would go ride their bikes. There were burms and corners and dips and jumps, it was a BMXers paradise. It was also a notorious skin mag dump. If you spent a few minutes exploring the underbrush off the trails, chances are you’d happen on a hidden cache of Playboys, Penthouses, Juggses, Barely Legals, Hustlers, and occasional Cherry. When your primary method of transportation is your bike, you tend to either find, or hear about, likely porn locales all around town. In Florida, we had a “Playboy ditch;” so named because a ride back and forth along the edges would almost always produce a sun-faded, bug-addled, waterlogged flesh rag. It wasn’t a once-in-a-million, you-might-get-lucky kinda thing – it was almost a sure-thing that you could score a magazine at these places. Don’t discount these kinda stories as some sort of coming-of-age apocrypha – I would wager a decent percentage of males reading this can identify with something similar from their growin’ up days… but… I could be wrong.

1am folks… and I’m ready for sleep. I’m gonna wake up tomorrow and do this all again, so wish me luck with that OK? Thanks, I appreciate it. Goodnight.

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off the top turnbuckle

Work, you're goin' down.
Forgive the randomness of the post, I actually had a full entry written last night and just got too lazy to search for an accompanying image and post the dang thing. So there is a mixture of two days’ writings. It’s OK though, because I’ve learned I essentially write about the same crap over and over and over…

I’ll be honest, nothing happened today. I went to work and for eight hours I clenched my teeth and things sped by without me getting a chance to think. I don’t think I’ll have much to write, but I felt like sitting down to at least and knock something out.

You know when you have a wad of silly putty, pinch a thumbful in each hand, and pull them apart slowly, creating a long droopy thread connecting the two? That’s how I’ve been feeling after work lately. Just plain stretched. I don’t know what I was thinking, but a couple weeks ago I agreed to “cover” for a couple of my co-workers while they are out of the office. Turns out I’m covering for two guys this week as well as handling my own stuff, and it’s just about my limit. I’m doing it, and it’s working, and I’m not dying… but just barely. If the person who’s pulling my silly putty decides to do a fast yank instead of leisurely pull – the whole thing may snap clean in two at the center. I usually look forward to my Taiwan trips as small respites from the day-to-day grind, but I’ve got a sinking feeling that this trip will be anything but a lull. The way I see it, I’ve got to maintain what I’m currently doing on top of doing the normal Taiwan stuff… great.

Don’t you hate it when, you’re about to leave for two-and-a-half weeks in Taiwan and, you don’t even have any new tunes to carry you through your stay? Really, because I totally hate that. So tonight, I went a’scourin’ the usual suspects for something kind on the cans. I mean, I’ve got this NIN album, but I’ve been listening to it non-stop now for days. I suppose it might last through the trip, but it sure would be nice to have something else to kick off the trip with. But I got some stuff y’all! I got it. The Cribs, who are a less-afraid-of-pop Strokes (gee, I wonder if this sound is hot right now or something?); and The National, who are more subdued and lusher (is that a word?). Anyway, I think I like ’em both – so I’m happy. I mean, honestly – look at the current Phoenix that is rock ‘n’ roll rising from the ashes – then tell me this little tune wouldn’t eat its way right up to the front of the TRL line to share the laurels with the Killeraveryjetstrokes. Man… I want to make music.

I used to trade CDs online. I posted a wantlist, along with the list of things I could offer in trade, and I’d arrange trades with people who had things I wanted and wanted things I had. It all started out as a way to amass the completist’s Beatles collection, but soon blossomed into a full time addiction. Once I acquired every single Beatles item, I moved on to simply trading for things I needed. In college, and for my first couple “career” years, I was trading at insane volumes. Burning and mailing up to 50 CDs in a single week. I was shipping all over the world, and even spent several days on the job at my college internship writing a custom CD trading database to automate and track the trading process: printing shipping labels, sending confirmation mails, even updating the lists on my website. I can actually remember telling people I couldn’t do something with them because I had to stay home and “burn CDs.”

Soon enough though, the whole thing became more trouble than it was worth. In the beginning, I’d listen to everything coming in. I’d print out all the artwork from the “scans” disc which was requisite with each trade, and lovingly cut them out with scissors to fit them in jewel cases. In the last year though, I got buried. I began shelving discs in the little plastic or paper sleeves they were mailed to me in, without ever listening to them. I wanted less and less to spend my time burning, packaging, and mailing CDs. So, sometime a couple years ago – I quit. I left the pages up, but told the world I was done. And, up until a year or so ago I still had my last few trades in unopened mailing envelopes. I mention this now because I’m thoroughly wrapped up in my migration project as I type this… and tonight I “found” my huge pile of un-listened-t0 and un-cataloged CDs. And, it seemed like the perfect time to me to do some house cleaning. I’m ripping through it now, and simply tossing the discs as I archive them. Feels good, like I’m finally “catching up” on something I’ve let stagnate for several years.

On the way out of work today, I caught myself giving myself a virtual pat on the back for a good day’s work. In my time at Company X, I’ve come to realize that I’m very bipolar when it comes to the “how was your day” question. Some days, I leave that building feeling like I gave work a flying cross body chop off the top turnbuckle – like a damn champ. Other days, I leave the building with my tail between my leg because I F’d up. Something I did was dumb, or worse yet, something I didn’t do/know made me look stupid. I guess, then, that it kinda goes without explanation that I feel best on the days when I feel like I gave work the business. Those are the days I go home feeling like a star. The other days are the days I go home and am already counting the hours until 8am as I’m driving out of the parking lot.

For a random link, did you know Billboard magazine now charts ringtones? Of all things. Crazy.

Goodnight.

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D is for dreamer, A is for actor…

Down the rabbit hole.
Welcome to 11:30pm on my Monday night. ‘Twas a busy Monday at work, where I win my bread. It seemed I was no sooner in the office than I was on the phone or on the computer or on the tiles, meeting and working and walking and talking and thinking. I have to go do it all again tomorrow, and I wish I didn’t… have to, I mean. Enough with the exposition though; shall we?

I’ve been listening to the new NIN album the past couple days, and I really like it. In particular, there’s a part in the song “Right Where It Belongs” that’s really rad. From the beginning of the song, the vocals have a muted, in-the-background presence which is slightly off-center to the right in the stereo image. Then, about 3/4 of the way through, they totally morph, taking on a much warmer, foreground presence that’s dead-center in the image. At the same time, a crowd noise sound effect is ramped up in the background, and the “wetness” that’s added to the vocals also gets layered on the instrumentation… along with the addition of a little bassy synthesizer. Very cool effect, almost like the song “comes alive” just then. You can listen to it if you want. Just take the URL of this page, and change the root by: adding 18, subtracting 8, subtracting 2, adding 9, and finally appending ’12.mp3’. Neato.

When I was in high school, I used to like to write things down without actually writing them out. Meaning, I liked to write little cryptic things. I think my inspiration came from the back pages of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, where Carroll closed the book with a poem, which, when read every-first-letter acrostic style, spelled out Alice’s real name: Alice Pleasance Liddell. I adopted this, and variations of it, to write down secret things in my journal. So, what seemed like a semi-poignant limerick about some thoughts or feelings was, to me, really an admission of infidelity or something more exciting. My favorite, and most challenging, was to write a small poem where the lines’ first letters read forward spelled half of what was really being said, and the lines’ last letters read backward finished the hidden message. Care had to be taken: to manipulate the shrouded thought to contain an even number of letters, to split it in half and write the opening and closing letters of each line, and finally to fill in the gaps with a cohesive thought. I masked things like that all the time, but only the most super-secret – the stuff that should only be thought, not recorded. When reading back over my journal, I can spot these instantly. In fact, they stand out to me as only the intended text, the contrived filler only there to protect what shouldn’t be put down on paper. Useful, if you’re into that kinda stuff.

Saturday night was a party at Ben’s house, in honor of Ben now having the house where the party was. We went there. It was good. After the crowd dwindled, and all that was left was what partygoers sometimes call the “hardcore crew,” we set a fire in Ben’s backyard. Not on the grass, but in a pre-fab firepit that came in a cardboard box from a warehouse store. Ben had gotten it as a gift, and he and I had spent some time earlier that day assembling it. Anyway, the box of Hot Wood purchased at the grocery store up the street was set alight, and six or seven people huddled in chairs around the fire. It was a chilly night, so the pre-warmth period of the fire was somewhat of an endurance – but the few powered through for the sake of conversation. Something about sitting around a fire brings out the best conversation. Staring into the stuff. Pat said it was because that’s all there was to do at night for ten-thousand years. Maybe. Maybe it’s something primal, pre-conditioned into our consciousness at birth. Although huddling around the sub-$100, assembly-line, terra-cotta and metal firepit, burning our purchased-at-Albertsons, came-in-a-cardboard-box firewood (with kindling) wasn’t exactly recalling caveman days. Anyway, it was one of those moments for me where I was just…. complacent. Good friends were around, and the planets aligned around a little firepit in Ben’s backyard. I’m a sucka for flames.

Did you see that paragraph about the firepit? That’s writing. That’s what I used to do. That’s what was gone. That’s what I feel slowly creeping back into my hands as they click the keys. Keep the faith, it may be back… it just may be back. Also, today at lunch we went on an adventure to the 150 year old abandoned Chinese mines. I’ll write about that tomorrow OK?

Goodnight.