Category: reminisce

Thoughts about the good old days… memories.

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thanks for taking bullets

My bang is bigger than yours.
I was trying to explain what’s been bugging me lately… I have this open-ended feeling about work. I tried to explain it the other day when talking about how my perception of the post-vacation workload wasn’t quite accurate, but that’s just part of it. I have a lot to do at work, but I’ve been feeling kinda aimless. Last week’s vacation that wasn’t really “planned,” my non-travel this week (which was planned, and canned at my own hasty discretion), the March trip to Taiwan which, until today, wasn’t at all nailed down, etcetera etcetera. I dunno, nothing really tangible… I’ve just felt kinda “floaty” and undecided about things, and I guess I don’t like that. Today wasn’t a stellar day either, the morning started out crap… one of those stupid personal confrontation things I hate so much; lunch wasn’t any better… a mix-up left me stranded and eating a cheeseburger at my desk. Ugh. Whatever.

About a week ago, I got an e-mail from my old college roommate. It was unexpected, as we haven’t talked in a while. When I got the note, I immediately replied. I’d heard he’d gotten married, and I wanted to congratulate him, and mention how good it was to hear from him. After school, he joined the Army, went on to be a Ranger… y’know, the frontlines… the special ops… the intense stuff. Anyway, I know he’s done several stints in the Middle East… Afghanistan, probably Iraq, maybe other places… who knows. We kept in touch right after college, but after that I used to wonder where he was sometimes. Clearing caves in the mountains? Being the first on the ground during some critical mission? I kept up enough through other friends to know he was back safe, and had heard he’d got hitched. Anyway, he mentioned that he’s going back again… the 5th time. Hey Ton, I just wanted to say be safe man… take care and be safe. That you do what you do, is awesome to me… and not “awesome” like stoner-awesome, awesome like the worthy of “awe” kind. Thanks for it.

I alluded to it above, but my next trip to Taiwan has finally been finalized (“finally been finalized,” funny). I’ll be gone for three weeks in March, Sharaun won’t be able to go. I’m kinda bummed, as I was looking forward to taking her around. And although I actually am excited about being over there for that long – I’m again bummed to be away from Sharaun for that long. My two-week jaunt there was fine… but near the end I was more than ready to come home, I missed my wife, our house, and just good old normal American stuff. I’m hoping though, that I can make the most of the trip… experience-wise (work and personal). Some people I work with hate it over there… I don’t mind it much at all. The food is good, the people are nice enough, and I’ve made it abundantly clear in past entries that I feel “special” traveling on company money (it’s hard for me not to go back and edit that linked entry to sound less pretentious and self-important, ugh). Plus, if nothing else, it always makes for good posting.

I don’t even know what I’m doing up right now. I was so loth to get out of bed this morning, all because I stayed up late last night… for no reason. So why I’m here at half-past midnight… I don’t know. I think it has something to do with finally getting hooked on the narrative that is this Streets album. I wanted to hear the end of the story, wanted to hear about the girl and the money. I’m not much in the mood to write anything else. I wrote a huge thing, three paragraphs, about my confusion over telescopes looking back in time… only to realize I’d already written about it before. Crap.

Does anyone want my Gmail invites? Drop me a line and I’ll send ’em. Goodnight.

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newborn year

The internet has sprung a leak.
2005. 1st post.

Friday I watched Garden State again, for the sake of Ben and Pat, not because I’d fallen in love with Natalie Portman’s character… absolutely not. For some reason I identify a lot with the movie, even though I’ve never been on anti-depressants, killed my mom, or done lines off a urinal… I think I identify with some underlying sentiment or something. Some kid (can I still think of myself as a kid?) trying to find something. Not me now, or anything, but maybe a me back in the day. Skipping college to drive to a playground by the river and swing on the swings. The place was empty. We swung on the swings while songs from Mellon Collie played in my head. Each time I swung to the top, I wanted to keep to jump off and fly away. Then we stopped, and I decided to get a tattoo. I’d had the intended design in my wallet ever since wasting a day at my drafting table once back in high school… so it seemed as good a time as any.

I guess, even though the Pumpkins and I had a “falling out,” and I kinda gave up on their music… three of their albums were huge to me at the time. I can remember listening to Siamese Dream in Andy’s room sometime in 10th grade. I played that album to death… driving down the river road back home. Then, Mellon Collie came out during my first year of college. Sharaun and I were apart for 8mos… and that album was prominent during that swirly-emotional period where incidents like picking up the daughter of a mother and father team of long-haul truckers at the Books-A-Million or, while trying to find a place on the road to pull over and have sex with a girl, stopping at a public park I only remembered because I’d been there in high school hunting psychedelic mushrooms on a nearby farmer’s land, just served to reinforce the fact that I wasn’t with Sharaun. Then, parts I and II of Machina (although I’d pretty much given up on them) helped me through my first mind-numbingly boring month at my post-college career by giving me something to read and a new interest.

Jeez… I know that was a syntactically complex paragraph, but I don’t really know how to rewrite it so it’s more clear. Good thing it’s Monday now as I write, and I care no longer about the coherency of old-and-busted, led-by-emotion writing. Guess that means it’s time to get back to the more practical “what I’m doing” style.

I’m sitting here, my last day off before returning to work. While I’d much rather sit around and not go to work, there is a pile of stuff calling me back to the cubicle. It’s going to be an interesting 1st couple of months I think. I’ll be “working from home” for a bit this week and next, since Sharaun goes in for surgery on Friday. Then I’ve got some travel tentatively planned for the first quarter of ’05. I feel like I really let things fester a bit over this vacation, but then I feel torn for feeling that way – since I have a deep belief that a “vacation” should be a true respite, a complete disconnect, from work. There are any number of loose ends I could have chosen to tie up with my free time this past couple of weeks, but I instead chose to watch the Twilight Zone marathon or take a nap. I promised myself that I’d play a little catch-up today… and in fact that’s why I’m here on the computer right now… writing this entry… not catching up at all. Maybe it’s the rain.

Listening to the new Decemberists album, which, while leaked on the 18th, isn’t set to see release until the end of March. I kinda felt bad reading Mr. Meloy’s response to news of the promo leak while actually listening to the album, a full three-and-a-half months in advance (apparently they even know who leaked it?). But my love of the band, and curiosity about the new material, once again drove me to listen. I held off on forming an opinion upon a single hearing… at least anything other than, “Yup, sounds like the Decemberists.” I’m about four times through it now, and happy to say it’s getting better with each spin. And, as always, to appease my conscience (which seems to be growing ever more virtuous with age), I’ll purchase the album at the next show. Sheesh, no more pirate warez on my box, no more P2P sharing (as if one-way downloads are any better), and no more beating up the aged. What’s happened to the callous badassness of my youth? Spoonfeed me applesauce and be done with it.

Afternoon folks… more tomorrow if you’re lucky.

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down at the end

You'll get it after reading it.
12:53am on… I guess on Tuesday morning, although to me it’s still Monday night. Once again my fingers protest the amount of coordination required to type words. I have a full glass of water on the desk beside me, y’know, my garlic necklace, warding off the vampire that is hangover. I actually had a really abstract paragraph written earlier today, about how I like women… it was a good piece of writing… but I trashed it. I do that sometimes, trash stuff I think is good… because it’s not fit… not fit for the “blog,” or something. So go the perils of an “online” journal, I suppose.

There are some times in my life, not very many actually, that I can remember feeling… feeling alone. Not that I really was alone, but that I felt alone. Not without friends, just an in-the-moment loneliness. Something not quite like a true feeling of being alone – but more like feeling alone in that moment… mostly a welcomed kind of alone, not something uncomfortable or negative. I don’t even really know, I just thought of this theme as I was brushing my teeth – and in my slight drunkenness it seemed like a nice personal divergence from the boring slop I’ve been posting lately… somewhat of an entry in the true “journal” sense, like things used to be or something. I’m going to run with it now I think, since it’s on top.

I feel alone. I’m staying at my Uncle Tom’s place in California. My brother and I are here for a week. Uncle Tom and Aunt Judy live in small house here in Tepesque Canyon. They have goats, and chickens, and a satellite dish. In the morning, we throw feed to the goats and gather brown eggs from the hens for breakfast. Aunt Judy cooks the eggs while Frank and I watch the Monkees and You Can’t Do That On Television on some crazy satellite-only channel called Nickelodeon. Right now it doesn’t show much but Canadian programming for kids and some old, old reruns. I don’t know that at the time though. I remember helping paint a shed, and sitting on a porch swing with Tom and Judy’s dog. I remember a tree-swing’s apex that put you over a small cliff looking down on a field of tall grass. I remember masturbating for the first time, and associating the feeling with homesickness. Hey, I told you this was going to be personal.

My mom and my brother and I have just come home from our after-school place. My dad has beat us home today, sometimes that happens. Before Frank and I can get out of the car, my dad comes out of the house and greets my mom with a hug. Something is wrong, I can tell. I’m not sure what Frank was thinking, or even if it made that much of an impression on him at his age. But I know something is wrong, even through the silence of the car-window glass I can tell by the way my mom is reacting to whatever my dad is telling her. The house has been robbed, and vandalized. Many of our things are missing or ruined. It feels very personal, the “feeling” part of the word “violated” that can’t really be conveyed in a dictionary’s definition. I get on my bike and ride. I feel alone. I ride aimlessly, I don’t want to see the house anymore… don’t want to smell the soy sauce in the hallway carpet; don’t want to see the ketchup on the walls and ceiling; don’t want to wonder what they did to my cat that makes her walk funny; don’t want to think about the fact that they stole the spare keys. I ride to my school, and find my 4th grade teacher still in her classroom. As I cry on her shoulder, I feel alone.

I feel alone. I’m on a Greyhound bus to Texas. I left college only a few hours ago. I didn’t bring a book to read or anything. There is some humongous kid next to me, he got on the bus in a town called Defuniak Springs and he’s talking about going to football camp in Texas. I try to be as polite as possible, making him feel good by keying in on things he says and learning what makes him feel comfortable. I’m good at this. I feel like I can read people like books, judging within minutes what makes them feel most comfortable and using it to befriend them. Do they most enjoy talking about themselves?; listening to you talk?; strategic non-talking cues?; whatever it is – I’ll exploit it and make them comfortable. Emulate his posture, his demeanor, ally loosely with the things I presume he believes in and trusts. We talk for hours about things I could care less about. His folks are split up, one lives here, one lives there. Eventually he gets off the bus, and I’m alone again. No matter who sits down next to me, I’ll have this conversation with them. The couple going to Las Vegas, the girl who’s just leaving Florida. I don’t even smoke, but I’ll have cigarettes with you at the stopovers. As I retire from my game of dice with four guys in the Dallas Greyhound terminal, and curl up to sleep on my suitcase so it won’t get stolen, I feel alone.

I’m sitting on a stone bench outside a lecture hall at college. I feel alone. I watch as people ride by on bikes, heading to class. My class isn’t for another hour, but it’s easier to stay here than go home to my place. At least I found the right building, this campus is huge. I only have an hour to wait. Between classes the street is full of students making their way to whatever’s next. I’m waiting here for the 1st day of differential equations. Calc I and II were no sweat, but I had a hard time during some of the more abstract portions of calc III. I don’t really know what to expect from differential equations. I couldn’t know at the time that I’d strike an accord with the teacher, enjoy the class immensely, meet a couple friends, and go on to earn one of my post-community-college As. At the time all I could know was that I was feeling kinda lonely on that stone bench in the sun waiting for class to start. Watching all the other kids go by with such a sense of knowing where they were and where they were going. A long way from the here and now of writing this paragraph, a lot less confident, a lot less knowing.

I’m sitting in some cubicle. I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing, so I’m not really doing anything. I’ve got conflicting feelings of guilt and getting-away-with-something. I’ve been working here for a month or so, and my manager has changed twice already. No one even really knows I’m here, I can leave when I want. So I do. I come in late, and leave early. No one knows I’m here, I report to no one. I feel guilty sometimes, taking a paycheck for what I do during the day: listening to Kid A and researching alchemy online. Frequenting the Smashing Pumpkins message boards, engrossed in the mystery that is Machina and the symbology and double-meanings of it all. I do nothing to contribute to this company, I am collecting an engineer’s pay for nothing. God I feel alone up here, no one knows I exist and my requests for work seem to fall on deaf ears. Once, I got called into the lab to help record data… but it turned out to be idiot’s work, and I was back at my desk reading about Jung’s thoughts on the spiritual applications of traditional alchemy in no time. I have none of the knowledge required for this job. I am in over my head, but it’s OK because no one even knows I exist. Lonely.

Yeah, I feel good about this one. Tipsy or not, I like the writing. I like when paragraphs appear without effort, like they’ve written themselves or something. It’s that easy sometimes, when you’re “in the zone” or something. Words come out and start lining up to make sense, you don’t even need the full faculties that soberness affords… it just flows.

So, with my glass of water nearly empty and my eyes heavy in anticipation of dreams… I’m signing off. Goodnight to you all.

Posted on

i don’t want to watch

Open road.
Vacation. Off to an “iffy” start though, as vacation’s defined at least. I’ve got two meetings to attend tomorrow (via cellphone, of course), so I won’t get that whole separation-from-work vibe until sometime well along the road north. It’s OK, I can deal with it I suppose. Tonight we got together to do another mini gift-exchange with friends, and when Ben ended up getting Napoleon Dynamite in said exchange – Suzy and he stayed over to watch it with the Mrs. and I. Man… what a great movie, right up my alley in terms of disjointed, sometimes squirmy, humor. I can’t wait to see it again. After that Sharaun and I were left to prepare for the trip: packing clothes, packing up gifts (we’re exchanging up there), and readying other bidness. This is the first chance I’ve had to write, and it’s nearly midnight…

The first real porno I ever saw was called I Want to Watch; I was in 9th or 10th grade. I was at a friend’s house hanging out on the weekend, and the subject came up. He said he had a real porno, that he’d borrowed from another kid we knew. Of course, once this info was out of the bag – there was nothing to do but watch the tape. There was no jacket, just an old VHS tape with a cheap white label. The video was old, at the time I pegged it for early 80s by the feathered hair and clothes strewn about the floor. The movie was light on plot (I guess that’s not really fair, considering it was porn). Anyway, the premise was that there were four sex scenes, and in each one there was someone “watching” but not participating. The watcher was always a female, and was perennially masturbating. Somehow, this tape was passed down to me. I kept it locked in a briefcase in my closet (why I had a briefcase, I have no idea). I don’t know where the tape is now. Perhaps, unbeknownst to me, the cycle began anew and some teenagers are getting their first look at the early 80s coke-fueled porn industry, and all the unkempt body hair it has to offer. I can only hope. Oh, and if you somehow have my tape – the 4th scene is the best.

Well, it’s Wednesday morning, my 8am meeting is over, and I’m officially on vacation. At least… until I have to call into my 10am meeting. Hoorah. I’m all packed and the bags are by the door, ready for Ben to come by and load up before we head out for a pre-road-trip breakfast. Then we run some small errands, and finally pick Sharaun up around 1pm. Then the tires hit I5 and don’t stop for 9hrs.

And with that, I’m done. I’ll write when I can.

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nickel and dime

It even comes in a bag.
Monday come and gone, busy again at work. Got home and found my mother-in-law had sung me “Happy Birthday” on the answering machine, complete with custom lyrics (sounded freestyle, y’all) about missing me and whatnot. A nice thing to come home to, makes a guy feel good.

Saturday night I spun a big wheel at the sushi joint and got a free bag of rice; Monday morning I got a hard rock in my chest, the kind I get when I feel bad about things… things like fucking over 9 people reveling in my honor. It’s lunchtime on Monday right now, and that sentence came to me on the drive home from work. I put “No Cars Go” on the wireless-thingy, made a yummy sandwich with Italian turkey and pepperjack cheese, and sat down to watch last night’s Arrested Development. Remember I said it was the anniversary of my birth this past weekend? And that we all went out for sushi? This morning I caught wind of some unhappiness within the group, seems the meal-ending activity of bill-settling had, in fact, unsettled some.

I hate settling bills from large group-meals, it’s tough, and people inevitably pay more than they should. It may seem so small, but I can understand the frustration of paying 4x the price of your personal repast to keep from making waves. Anyway, being that it was my birthday, I had decided to splurge and get four rolls between Sharaun and I (the breakdown of who ate what isn’t that important, but yes I ordered three and her just one). Beer, sake, and seared tuna appetizers also filled the table. In the end, people kindly decided to chip in and cover the expense of my meal (a very much appreciated sentiment). Come Monday morning, the birds were singing in my ears of discontent over the bill’s breakdown; and I was left feeling the summary heel for over-indulging and passing the cost onto the very people who had gathered to applaud me into another year of breathing.

Two paragraphs. Two paragraphs on the details of a weekend’s sushi meal and the fallout. Ahh.. the problems of the modern American man. No longer do I fret about being able to kill enough meat for the clan before winter comes, or dodging tyrannosaurus rexes while moving my nomadic family to greener pastures. No longer do I worry about my crops, polio, communist superpowers, nor the black death. Nay, what worries me, friends, what worries Joe America 2004, is the division of the damn multi-hundred dollar check from our gluttonous meal of hand-prepared delicacies and the alcohol of other countries. What’s that brain? You want me to write “fuck it” and be done with this subject? Well, let me consider that.

Fuck it.

Saturday Sharaun and I decided to go grocery shopping together. We don’t normally do this. But, I had been getting frustrated with the lack of food in the house. Not that there wasn’t food, if we were for some reason locked inside the house I’m sure we have enough provisions to last several months (we could live on rice alone for quite a while, thanks to the bag I won at the sushi joint. “Fuck it.”) My complaint, however, had been that there wasn’t any “easy-access” foodstuffs that I could enjoy for, say, a low-cost lunch or perhaps pre-dinner snack. So, we hit the local market together. In my mind, I was there to stock up on things I wanted – this was to be one trip to the grocer that I would do right. I wanted the makings for escape-from-work lunchtime sandwiches; breakfast materials; and small goods to nibble in anticipation of the evening’s meal.

Sharaun and I, however, shop very differently. For instance, did you know that, for some reason, you can only have one type of cereal in the house? Yup. And, it should be a cereal that you both can eat. Not Cocoa Pebbles, because I love it and she hates it; not Mini Wheats, because she loves it and I hate it; not Raisin Nut Bran, because despite the fact that we both like it, it costs like $12 a box. Nothing from the “Bed and Breakfast” line that looks so regal in its ridiculously small-sized and high-priced miniature boxes. Nothing with dried fruit, nothing that’s too sweet, nothing that leaves that nasty slick film on the top of your mouth (you know who I’m talkin’ to… Fruit Loops, Apple Jacks, and gum-rending Cap’n Crunch). Apparently, it’s against the law to purchase, prepare to recoil in horror at the mere suggestion, two completely different types of cereal – one of each that best suits the tastes of each eventual consumer.

I also was not aware that you are always, regardless of any rational reasoning, supposed to buy the store’s own generic alternative to name-brand foods. Even when you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the “Sunshine Pride” version of Suddenly Salad’s “Ranch ‘n’ Bacon” pasta salad is repulsive in comparison, the $2 price differential is reason enough to buy it instead. I am not allowed to pay more for something that tastes better, which, to me, makes no sense. Sometimes, things cost less not simply because they are a deal, but because they suck butt as a product. There’s some truth to the saying “you get what you pay for,” even if we are just talking about mayonnaise.

Tonight we finally finished the Christmas tree. And I gotta say, it looks awesome. While we decorated, we tried to listen to the year’s best album (IMHO) over the new wireless media-thingy. Much to my chagrin, the thing almost immediately began sputtering and freezing during playback. Several times it completely restarted the song only a few seconds in, only to freeze again. I didn’t do any comparison testing, but I think the “buffering” problems may have had something to do with the fact that I was downloading mass amounts of MP3s at the same time (the entire Trans-Siberian Orchestra Christmas canon for a friend). Not that I was in any way saturating the wireless connection in downloading, since it was all happening on the wired PC, but I can’t think of anything else. It did a similar thing yesterday, but not quite as bad… I’m gonna keep an eye on it – but I’m hoping it changes its attitude because it’s a really cool idea..

In the third letter Shaine has managed to scan in and send me (background here and here), it seems I have become a 6th-grade fireworks salesman. I can remember when we discovered that the fireworks store on the island about 15 min away would sell illegal fireworks to kids. We would ride all the way there (which was a daunting ride, over a huge causeway and probably taking an hour or more), and ask to see the “back room” where all the “boomers,” bottle-rockets, and roman candles were hidden. I guess I thought being able to score fireworks made me cool, so I decided to get into the resale business (across state lines and through the postal service, no less). I doubt Shaine ever really purchased anything from me, but the letter is hilarious nonetheless.

A lot of writing tonight. Time for bed now, midnight says so. Goodnight.

Posted on

would you be, could you be

Liar.
Happy Monday to us all. Writing this, it’s Sunday morning. I think we’re gonna use the day to put up the Christmas tree and hang lights on the house. I’d like to get out of my slump and finish the porch in the backyard, since the stone-saw magically starting working again yesterday. I had a feeling you know, that it’s brokenness wasn’t final. So I decided to put it in the garage and wait, just let it relax, maybe not cut bricks for a couple weeks. And just as I suspected, when I plugged her in yesterday to see if she had self-healed, she fired up right away. So, now I have no excuse not to finish… time to get off my butt and get out there. Cut the remaining bricks, make the final adjustments to the sprinkler-head positions, then do the cleanup, topsoil, and finally sod and plants. It may seem like a lot, but having a finite amount of steps until I can be “done” is really exciting to me.

The above is the centerpiece of this entry – another letter Shaine managed to scan in. You can read the backstory here. Looks like I switched to typing in this letter, probably because my handwriting was so deplorable in 6th grade. Anyway, where the last letter was only a tad on the fantasy side, with this one I’ve decided to weave an entire narrative of lies. I mean, read it; it reads like I was making up each sentence as I went. The part about Kristina was true, at least the gist of it. She got mixed up in some deep stuff early on when we moved. Maybe I’ll get into the whole Kristina thing one day, it’d make an interesting story I think. The part about the VCR and cable in my room was true too. I remember saving a lot of allowance and mowing more than a few lawns to buy that Goldstar VCR, $99 is a lot for a 6th grader. I loved that VCR, it enabled us to rent and watch Rebecca De Mornay’s And God Created Woman… remember the pool table scene?… I do.

As for the letter’s main subject, fighting, there are some loose connections to real events I suppose. I do remember the candy-stealing incident of that 1st Halloween… and I did somehow end up with the perp’s candy at the end, but I don’t think there was a single punch thrown in between those events. As for the supposed four other fights, they are bald-face lies. The one with Chad may have been based loosely on an afterschool tussle that actually did happen, but I certainly wasn’t involved. Seems I concocted all sorts of brave tales to impress my long-distance best-bud. I mean, I can recount nearly every fight I’ve been in, and I surely would’ve remembered five fights in one night… anyway, I was a pacifist. Well, if anything, I guess it shows I’ve always had a knack for narrative…

Sunday’s over, back to work in the AM… the weekend happens too fast y’allz, the stench of cubicle is still fresh in my mind from Friday afternoon – and I’ll be punching in again in a mere twelve hours. I did, however, make good use of the day. I put up our new dartboard (in accordance with the standard British pub rules, of course), cleaned/organized the garage, finally put away the Halloween decorations, and put the lights up on the house. We pulled down the tree and in-house baubles, but didn’t get around to setting it all up. Tomorrow night perhaps. Putting up the Christmas lights is always a chore, but today it was OK. Up on the roof in the cool weather, me neighbor across the way was also putting up lights… we shared some light-putting-up banter from rooftop-to-rooftop. At one point, our other neighbor came out and we were all chatting about thisnthat, and it struck me how “suburban” it all was. Here we all our, decorating our houses, shouting to each other from rooftops to driveways, sharing waves and smiles… and I deemed it all very good and enjoyable. In the end we all told each other our respective houses “…look(ed) good man,” and went about our business. Nice. Very homey.

This week is the Arcade Fire show in San Fran. I’m really looking forward to it. I hope they are as good live as I’ve heard, and that they’re worth the drive. Now I’m off to bed, goodnight.

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out of the shadows

My sinuses are still punishing me.
Saturday night was outstanding. At last pre-sleep glance, the cellphone said it was nearing 4am, and my swimming head said it was an evening to remember. The plan was to meet up with old friends at a local brewpub, enjoy some beers and company. Turns out the chosen watering hole must be a popular place in town or something, because before the evening was through, a small crowd of old friends had amassed. People I hadn’t seen in years, people I hadn’t dreamed of seeing. It was all so awesome, seeing people, talking to people, hugging people. Everyone’s a long-lost best friend when you’re standing around outside drinking. I couldn’t do it every night, but had time and beer not beat me down ‘round 3am, I’d’ve stayed longer. I really want to write more about it, but I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to gush on as if it were “magical” or anything, but it sure was nice to see everyone again and catch up.

And even though I don’t smoke, I found myself having a couple “social cigarettes” Saturday night. Beer-induced smoking is a vice of mine, and sometimes I indulge it freely. So happened that this time, as I was sitting, drinking beer and smoking, up walked two girls from the past. They walked up and greeted the older, fatter, balder, me, all as I sat swilling beer and puffing pussyish Marlboro Lites. What a great visual statement I must have made on my current station in life. Not that I expect I was judged, just wish I hadn’t had a cigarette pinched firmly between my fingers as I hugged my hellos. It’s OK though, the morning finds my body punishing me for my lung-blackening moments of weakness – with the stuffy head and caved-in-chest feelings of the infrequent social smoker. Look at me… smoking, drinking, and starting sentences with “and.” I am a soul damned. Here are some ones and zeros from the evening:

Old habits die hard.

Like it was yesterday, 15 years yesterday.

Changing subjects…

Because we’re driving home from Mims, FL, I’m reminded of a good story. So, sit right back and you’ll hear a tale. A tale of a fateful trip. Four passengers set sail that day, aboard a tiny ship. They were: Me, my then-girlfriend, her mother and her step-dad. I had been dating this girl for a couple weeks, or months, or something. It was the first time I really did anything with her family. We hitched up the boat, picked up some sandwiches, and launched at the local public ramp. I think the trip was mostly a pleasure cruise, I don’t really remember the intent – other than my intent, hang out with my hot new girlfriend in her bathing suit. I don’t remember a lot of the trip, but one memory sticks out in my mind.

The boat was anchored in shallows right off some island in the river, and we decided to get out and clam. Clamming involves walking around in the shallows, waist-deep in the river, and burrowing into the riverbed with bare feet, feeling for shells. It was just her and I, her folks stayed on the boat. Which meant, for us, clamming involved making out in the shallows, searching hands obscured from sight by the waist-deep river. It’s such a fun memory for me. Feeling, and being felt, up beneath the water. Adolescence, makes for good memories.

Changing subjects…

Just arrived home on a cool Sunday afternoon. Turns out there was some mix up with the housekey we left so that the cat could be fed and her litter emptied. While not that big of a deal, the combination of fatigue and travel-wear made it a sore point for me. Already pissed, I flipped on the computer only to have it tell me one of the drives in my RAID array had failed. Great. Not in the mood, I give up and emptied the cat’s shit-brimming litter box as Sharaun picked up the nuggets she left in her favorite litterbox-overflow area of the living room carpet. Having not eaten since the pre-flight 5am meal and arriving home to bare cupboards only exacerbated my agitation. As if to seal me to my gloomy mood, the fates made this the day the TV decided that the flaky video-in jack would start acting up again.

Woe is me, what I horrid life I have! Surely I must suffer like no other on Earth, right? I mean, how could anyone, anywhere, possibly have a worse day than me? The toll of flying home from a week’s vacation spent with friends and family, arriving at the house which I own and inhabit with my beautiful wife, and now the picture on the TV is so crappy that I can barely make out the “for the price of one cup of coffee a day” kid with a distended belly and fly-filled eyes… like I said, I have it so bad. Order me a pizza before I take my own life.

Changing subjects…

Wow, wow, wow. Got home from Florida and checked my e-mail. There was one e-mail that I got while on vacation, but couldn’t open the attachments. Turns out it was from my oldest friend – Shaine. After meeting in the 5th grade, he became what I consider to be my first “best” friend. We kept in touch after my family moved to Florida, but eventually lost track of each other somewhere after high school. Later on, Shaine somehow found my e-mail address, and we got back in touch. We had a few years of sporadic communication, and then I got married and moved back to California. Somehow, we managed to get in touch again – and now we talk pretty regularly. This year I saw him for the fist time in 15 years, and even attended his wedding. Anyway, the e-mail that this paragraph started out talking about came from Shaine. I guess his mom found some old letters that I sent him, dating from sometime after I’d moved to Florida. If I were to guess, these came from mid to late 6th grade for me. How rare is it to have something like this?

As, I suppose, is to be expected of a letter to an old friend – I stretched the truth a bit to make my goings-on seem a bit more exciting, but to be honest I was surprised to see how close I stuck to the facts. The part about the fire pit and gas and singed leg-hair is 100% true, as is the part about sneaking over to “Mary Jo’s” place and playing spin-the-bottle. We were what, 12, 13? Walking the streets at 3am, 4am… insane. Anyway, the only part that’s fabricated is the part about the kissing. Looking back, I exposed my own ruse. The part where I say it was “great” because there were two guys and one girl… not exactly what I call a “great” spin-the-bottle scenario. No one kissed me, I just hung out. In fact, my first kiss wouldn’t come for another year and a half. I don’t know if anyone kissed anyone, really, for the most part I remember being bored, but excited about being somewhere I shouldn’t at a time I shouldn’t.

I wish I’d saved the letters I got from Shaine. The one I remember most came in an ordinary envelope, but had a strange bulge at the bottom corner. Upon opening it, I found a small rectangular “packet” of paper, tightly wrapped and taped for transit. Inside that packet was a solitary seed. “Mexican Redhair,” promised Shaine. Although I was still a year or so away from my first experiments with marijuana, I’ll never for get that letter. If Shaine can dig up more, I’ll put ’em here… I eat this stuff up.

One good thing about getting home, I found the new dual Bright Eyes releases leaked online. Haven’t had the chance to listen to them yet, but am excited about both.

Look at all that media!! Blog-media, may I be excused from writing? Yes, yes you may. Dave out.