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wouldn’t trade the memories


Not much today, an update to Keaton’s gallery, in which I tickled myself by creating this short video out of some random footage I shot. After that, I didn’t have all that much, I’m afraid.

Umm… how do I usually start these things… Oh yeah…

Thursday night, glass of wine in hand as I watch a TiVo’d episode of the Simpsons. Got a lot done at work today, booked all the travel I mentioned the other day. What started as a three day trip to Germany morphed into a full week. Not excited to be away Keaton and Sharaun, but kinda excited because I’ll be there with a couple close buds from work… and have some free time to boot. First time to Europe for me, so that’s another tick in the “pros” column.

You were three years my junior, but I still wanted you. Now, I’d consider you out of my league: younger, attractive, voted homecoming queen of your Baptist highschool; but back then, I had drive, game. I had a girlfriend who I’d cheated on already, and didn’t want to do it again. When I realized I’d made up my mind to pursue you, I ended it with her. I told you, and you were surprised – but I could see the knowing in your questioning smile. In a blink, we were walking a wooden boardwalk at the beach. I lifted you up to sit on the railing, and we whiled away an hour while my shorts strained. After work, we drove to the river’s edge, where we kissed in the darkness. You always wore the bras that hooked in front. I felt guilty when we were in my room, thought you wore those fancy ruffled panties to impress me, it made me feel exploitive. But the soft crop of your hair against my chin veiled my guilty conscience. In my journal dated 8/10/96, I wrote this embarrassing poem about you:

Wandering through plush lust
On the carpet blue is you
Let that skirt drag dirt
I won’t watch your crotch
I’m a good boy
I’m a young man
I’m mature enough to take a stand
Let my head roll takes toll
See your eyes feel highs
Laugh please then freeze
The face you make I’ll take
I’m an old toy
I’m your left hand
I wish things went the way I planned

And then one day I found myself walking with you on a busy downtown street, holding the hand attached to the end of your swinging arm attached to your shoulder attached to your neck attached to your face, split wide by a broad smile. To you, this was a relationship; to me, it was fun. And all at once I felt pitiful, sorry, homesick: you were not my girlfriend. I gave up my girlfriend for a few weeks with you, and as exciting as it was to have you in my bed, you were a poor substitute. So, I turned on you, left you no sooner than I’d snared you, used you. I was angry with myself, felt cheap. I hated facing you each day at work, pretending nothing happened. I’d see your face and be taken back to my room, remembering you smile coyly down on me; see your hips as you turned your back to me, wordless, and remember the feeling of them pushing against my face. I am sorry Liz, I really am; I was a ponytailed punk, you were a homecoming queen – and I’m sorry. But, I wouldn’t trade the memories.

Enough of this filth… again…

Really debating including that “poem,” actually I hate this whole entry. Just go look at Keaton’s pictures, OK? Goodnight.

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invested


I love my blog; I really do. Sometimes, I just point Firefox towards it at random times during the day. I’ll re-read my own posts maybe three times during each given workday. Sometimes I do it under the guise of “looking for errors,” but really I just like reading my own stuff – I’m that full of myself. Every night, I check the day’s blog stats: who visited, how long they stayed, what they’re reading and searching for; I eat it up. During the day, I’ll take quick notes on my cellphone, things I want to write about (yesterday my cellphone chirped at 6pm, flashing a cryptic two-word reminder: “island sex”). I like to imagine people reading it and smiling or laughing, I like to imagine the little green s|f icon sitting in peoples’ favorites. I like to imagine people thinking, “I wonder what Dave wrote today.” I like all these things because I’m arrogant, conceited, and self-centered – traits which I think a good portion of bloggers likely share (blogs are for an audience, after all). I don’t care though, I still love my blog – and see no end to it, even as we march onward towards three years together.

This weekend, I sent off a note to an online used CD store. In it, I included a text list of all the titles I’ve ripped and verified from my extensive collection – and asked what kind of price they’d give me for the lot of ’em (some ~500 discs). Their original offer came in a tad low, so I countered and raised by about ~$400. In the end, it looks like I’ll be lucky to make ~$3 per CD upon selling them. Surprisingly, this doesn’t disappoint me that much… I mean, I’m done with these plastic things, they’ve served me well, and certainly given me $15 worth of entertainment over the years – if I can get 20% resale on them after all this time and use, who am I to balk at it? So, in the end, I’ll be dumping nearly half my collection (the other half being mostly Beatles, bootlegs, or CD-R copies of albums I accumulated via online trading) for roughly ~$1500. That’s a $1500 windfall, as far as I’m concerned. Plus, I get rid of ~100lbs of plastic and paper and can sell my specialized CD racks on Craigslist. All in the spirit of simplifying, well that and a corrupt “make a copy and then sell it” sense of capitalism.

Don’t tell anyone, but I bet I got at least 100 of those CDs by scamming the Columbia House and BMG music clubs. Back in middle/high school, I’d join up each service multiple times, under multiple pseudonyms with fake variation addresses of my folks’ house (y’know, Ian Ichamore in “suite B” and the like). I must’ve been a member of each club four or five times over, sometimes maintaining several memberships simultaneously, each one garnering my 12 free CDs. But Dave, what about the commitments you had to fulfill to get out of the club? How could you keep getting the free discs without buying anything? Easy, I had a few standard excuse letters that worked brilliantly each time. My favorite was the, “I’m in the US Navy and am spending the next 16mos aboard a carrier in the Pacific.” I also used the, “I’m in the Army and have been relocated to Japan/Germany/South Africa” bit – but usually my excuses involved compulsory military service – so as to lay on the guilt should I not be absolved of my commitments. Worked like a charm every time. (Dang! I thought I already wrote about this!)

Like the day I discovered I’d been spelling the word “won’t” wrong for my entire life, yesterday I realized that, in my some 30 years of writing, I’ve been using the word “desert” to mean both an arid, dry/hot area of land, and a sweet post-meal confection. Somewhere along the lines, the lesson about there being two Ses in “dessert” missed me. As of tonight, I’ve gone back through the entire blog and rid myself of this embarrassing faux-pas. Isn’t my face red.

Goodnight my friends.

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on the island, all bets are off


Keaton’s in her swing, wrapped loosely in a pink blanket that defines soft, watching the mobile spin above her head while hiccuping. Sharaun ran out to do some errands and I happily traded the babble of the TV for silence and some time to write. I’m kicked back on the couch in shorts and my house slippers, thinking about how I’ll do the dishes from dinner just a little later. Tuesday night, home from a busy day at work around 6pm – had to stay late to finish “just a couple” things before heading home. Every day at work I have just enough “just a couple” things to do before I leave to keep me around until morning the next day, you just have to draw the line somewhere and cash out. I’m pretty good at drawing that line in the sand and sticking to it, and more often than not it’s right around 5pm. What am I talking about?

It’s Springtime, and my backyard is a verdant bloom of weeds again, the unending rain helping them take root in otherwise non-ideal places. They blanket the unplanted hillsides that flank my house left and rear, growing in the damp mulch. They crowd the Japanese maple, blocking out the little plot of dirt I’ve been intending to plant pretty flowers in. They have taken over, and I hate them. My only solace is in the knowledge that the summer swelter will scorch their little leaves and stems; dry up the milky sap that is their lifeblood, and leave them as brittle, crumbling shells of their former thriving selves. I hate weeds.

I have this daydream thing I sometimes do, where I sometimes dream about getting stranded on a desert island (yes, I know I’ve done the island thing over and over and over, but this one’s different). It takes me as I am now, and puts me washed up on some desolate beach far away – only I’m not alone. I’m with a woman, one that’s not my wife. The fantasy really doesn’t do much else, it’s more of a setup for the line of questions that follow. I always wonder, if I were to find myself in this situation, how would my new island life with this person unfold? I’m assuming, of course, that I am a skilled enough survivalist to provide us with food and shelter and keep us alive, and we’d have each other’s company as a ward against insanity. With all the basics of life taken care of, you’re now left with an island existence, both of you living out your days together. It’s there that my mind begins to work, to twist and turn…

At some point, this woman and you would do it, right? I mean, you’re on an island, there’s nothing but the trees and waves and coconuts to eat… It may be slow in coming: you first erect a small lean-to for shelter, later you further the bond between you by perhaps bringing her a fresh-caught fish or starting a fire with a stick. She begins to trust you, depend on you even. In my daydreams, this woman is nearly always someone I know, a friend of mine or Sharaun’s. It’s all the better if, in real life, you could never imagine yourself having a relationship with the person. But, on the island, with just the crabs and gulls and wind in the palms, all bets are off. It may start as a simple compliment – how becoming her new grass skirt is; how the berries make her hair smell good. Yes, that’s where it may start, friends, but it’s not where it ends – only the island knows where it ends.

Soon, as the reality of life on the island sets in, urges turn less survivalist and more animal. Glances are cast, body language broadcast: it’s about to be on. Then, one day (yes, it’s the bright of day – that’s the awesome thing about stranded-on-a-desert-island sex, there’s no one there to be bridled for… in fact, you can be as unbridled as you want on the island), the impossible happens: humping. Oh yes, there’s no question that the time on the island would lead to doin’ it; all desert-island roads lead to fornication – I’m convinced. The bond that the island can form is a unique one, and the island can get even the loneliest of men laid… provided they can build a fire and clean a fish. You’re Screech Powers and find yourself washed waywardly ashore alongside the fetching Kelly Kapowski? No worries my friend, the thick impenetrable layers of highschool social strata do not exist here on the island. Here, you are as boneable as AC Slater. All God’s children got game on the island.

Uh-huh, I’m aware that this is nothing more than a complex construct to daydream about humping unattainable women whom I know – and I’m OK with that because it’s not as direct as simply dreaming about an affair. At least my sex-fantasies are set in impossible situations and only happen after hard-won demonstrations of manhood and survivor/provider instinct. Only if all men had to jump through such a set of pre-daydream-sex hoops – maybe there’d be less indiscriminate humping. Sharaun’s pretty much guaranteed a faithful husband unless a friend of hers and I happen to land ourselves in the remote South Pacific… and even then I have to keep us both alive long enough for the island to make her want me. Those are pretty good odds, if you ask me.

Where that all came from, I have no idea. Goodnight.

Posted on

nap in a hammock


I can feel the weather starting to turn: a little warmer with each day, trudging slowly through Spring on our way to what’s sure to be another sweltering Northern California Summer. Every time I go outside in the evening to take out the trash, or, recycling, if you’re more eco-sensitive, I get a little more anxious for my first Summer with a backyard. Oh, and I’ve got plans; I’ve got hammocks to string up and benches to build, foliage and flowers and groundcover to plant, and garden-boxes to build and seed. I want strawberries and maybe corn and tomatoes and fresh herbs; maybe cucumbers and squash or maybe even a watermelon or two. I want summer naps in the hammock, beer in-hand while the iPod shuffles my favorite songs over the speakers and the sun shines. Am I dreaming? I can have this, right?

While reassembling my PC after dropping in my new RAID array, I took the time to throw in a friend-donated PCI card to parallel port (so I can use my trusty laser printer, which has been sitting idle since I upgraded to a legacy-free PC), and I took a chance and re-hooked up my old DVD burner which I disconnected long ago when thought it failed. Turned out, the drive is fine – and I’m back to having a decent speed DVD burner again. Not only that, I removed a PCI Firewire card that I never use, as well as the swappable drive bay hard drive caddy thing that I also never use. Stripped down and back to health, the machine is running like a champ again. Not only that, but the PATA drives that make up my new RAID5 array seem to run much, much cooler than the SATA drives of my old RAID0+1. Don’t know why, but I do know it’s better for the drives and everything in that case. Sorry for the nerd talk, I write what I do.

Travel coming up for work, taking me away from Keaton for the first time. I’ll be doing a US tour in early April: Texas, South Carolina, and Colorado. Then I’m off for a few days in Germany later in April, I think four or five once all is said and done. My first time in Germany, or Europe, for that matter – I’m pretty excited, but leery leaving Sharaun alone with the baby. I know she can take care of herself, I just feel bad taking off and romping ’round the world while she stays home and does the mom thing. I’m also a little worried about the material I’ll be presenting, as, for the first time in a looong time, I’m not the one developing it. Presenting something you created is one thing, but presenting something borne of someone else’s mind and organizational/content-flow preferences is another thing altogether. I just want to make sure I have time to get comfortable with the stuff before I’m up in front of a group of Germans parroting it. Germany!

I guess it’s time to go to bed, I’m not doing any good here anyway. Goodnight.

Posted on

the mountainfolk of wal mart


Long entry today, some boring some not. Hit it:

This weekend I up and torrent’d the entire Dick’s Picks series, which I already own, but figured would take longer to rip than just download. I wonder if that’s illegal? Likely so. Anyway, now that my “big storage” has evolved to 3/4 of a terabyte, I don’t mind holding multiple gigs of Dead shows – it was harder to stomach previously when >10% of my entire drive was live Dead shows. The Dead have always been pretty progressive with their intellectual property: allowing taping, abiding trading tents, restoring and releasing live shows on CD and radio broadcasts, etc. They even offer digital downloads on their website, in multiple formats – including FLAC and WMA-lossless. Pretty much anything you can buy, you can download (prices are equivalent to buying the actual discs). Not bad dead, hopefully we’ll see more of this. I’d honestly think I’d be more likely to purchase digital copies of albums than buy CDs – maybe it’s because online money seems all “virtual” and just spends easy…

New dads out out there, especially those of little girls, I got a question for ya: How’d you get back into… taking care of business? I mean, dang… the third trimester was… slow, at best; and the doctors, in their infinite wisdom, mandate a six week moratorium post-baby. So, how? How? When? Where? For crap’s sake, I have trouble when the cat saunters into my action – I can just feel those judgemental green eyes on me whenever she’s in the room. Aware of even cat eyes, you can imagine what having an infant daughter in the house is like – it’s just not fair. I’m reminded of the opening scene from American Beauty: a father, starting off his day in the way I’m sure many fathers occasionally do… at least that gives me hope that one day I’ll learn to live within these strange new boundaries which have been imposed upon me. There, I wrote around the whole thing – had that drafted for a couple weeks and was just trying to find a less-sensational way to do it. I think I managed it, eh?

This weekend, I lost a good bit of the hate I’ve been harboring in my heart for Wal Mart. I hate Wal Mart, get the “creepies” simply walking those carny-filled aisles, staring up at the double-overhead stacks of cheap, Made in China, merchandise. I’d be willing to wager that even the Wal Marts in the Hamptons is full of gut-over-pantline, sparsely-toothed, barefoot mountainfolk (I don’t know what “mountains” have to do with this, but the word “mountainfolk” was too awesome not to get into this sentence). Anyway, let’s move off my hatred (lest it return with a vengeance), and get onto my newfound appreciation for the small-business-raping beast.

Sharaun and I have several family members who are computer… challenged. All the digital pictures in the world mean nothing to someone who can’t check e-mail. These people can’t be bothered to log onto the internet, they’re probably too busy getting up to flip their LPs over, filling their iceboxes from the truck that comes by, and hauling their wash back and forth to the stream. Making fun of old-timers aside, it really is a shame that we couldn’t get some visual aids to our kin, and I figured, in this digital age, there must be a way to transmute these new-fangled “paperless daguerreotypes” into something our dinosaur relatives could enjoy. Wal Mart to the rescue! Wal Mart allowed us to upload pictures of our choosing and print them at any store across this great nation. Our e-nothing family could then crank over the horseless carriage, strap on their motoring goggles, and sputter right in and pick them up – pre-paid for by us. The prints are excellent, and the price is right. Using Wal Mart’s handy service, we were able to get photos in the hands of our family in hours, thus moving Keaton from their imaginations right onto their refrigerators.

Wal Mart, I take back (some) of those nasty things I said about you. Who cares if you smell like Filet-o-Fish because there are McDonalds’s inside of you? And, where in the rule book does it say cashiers should be able to make complete sentences with their mouths? Nowhere, that’s where. Anyway, I hope you’ll forgive me… I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t buy 1000 nightlights for 17¢.

Wait wait wait – I started this whole “we can print pictures from Wal Mart” deal to talk about some great new software I found. Let me explain: when there’s not enough natural light for photos, most people like to use the flash. I hate the flash on my camera, it’s too “flashy,” and paints the photos in some eerie, undead glow. So, I tend to turn on all the artificial lights in the room and take the photos in manual mode at a higher ISO speed equivalency. This works great, but the indoor lights tend to make the photos yellow (a white-balancing issue). I used to live with this, because the yellow tint isn’t all that unattractive, I had no idea how to fix it, and it’s still worlds better than the flash. Just recently, I discovered the “tungsten” white-balance setting on my camera. This special white-balancing mode for indoor, tungsten-type, bulbs completely eliminates the yellow tinge to my flashless photos. Using manual mode with white-balance in tungsten mode, and the ISO speed set to 400 – I can take great flashless photos that mimic natural light and are well balanced in terms of color. This makes me extremely happy.

Wait wait wait – I started this whole “I found the right way to white-balance” deal so I could talk about some great new software I found. Since Sharaun had grown tired of yellow-tinted baby photos, the tungsten-balancing was just what I needed to appear a baby-documenting genius. Problem solved for the future, I now wanted to try and address the yellowy images we’d already taken. Used to be, back in the day before I got clean, I’d use my pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop and choose “auto levels” and “auto contrast” to do quick fixes on poorly shot photographs. However, since I went all freeware and open-source, I don’t have a “one click” photo fixit app. Enter the app that spurred the last four paragraphs of tangential blather: PhotoFiltre. Talk about a full-featured photo editing application, this thing does things both novices and experts would expect to pay dollars for – and it’s completely free for personal/non-commercial use. Installing it merely for its automatic level/contrast controls – I was blown away by what all it could do. If you’re looking for a nice, free photo retouch/editing tool (not necessarily a Photoshop replacement, for that use the GIMP) – this is it.

By the way (nerd stuff ahead), that “Dave goes freeware” thread I linked above is pretty out of date. CDBurnerXP Pro is still great, but the Cheetah software is probably just as nice and slicker looking. There’s now a completely viable free alternative to Norton Ghost by way of DriveImage XML installed on a WinPE bootable disc (try Bart’s WinPE) – although TrueImage is still good if you want to make runtime backups. And, turns out the K-Lite stuff has some bootlegged junk in it, but it doesn’t matter because you don’t need it if you run VLC Media Player. And FileZilla is better than WSFTP LE. So, there you go – a little freeware update for the conscientious nerds out there.

Goodnight.

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that’s no lie


I’ve truly, truly got nothing today… debated even posting what little I did have – mostly cobbled together from one-sentence notes I hadn’t had the time to develop over the week. Tonight some friends were over, part of the feed-the-new-parents drive. While here, they held and heaped praise upon our new daughter. After they left, we both talked about how much we love hearing people fawn over her. I swear I can already see her changing: bushier eyebrows and longer lashes, fuller hair and a rounder face – and more active all the time. And, anyway, she’s deserving of such prattling on – I’m convinced.

In part, I hate that awesome albums are always so short. Then again, maybe the shortness actually helps with the awesomeness… afterall statistics do dictate that the more music there is, the better the chance some of it will blow. Short and sweet, maybe that’s what it’s about. Anyway, this new Tapes ‘n Tapes album is short, I mean, like, I listened to it maybe… 700 times today, so much that I now hate it – to death. I seriously don’t want to hear it again until listen 1 of 700 tomorrow morning ’round 8am – and that’s no lie.

Know what I hate about the iPod? I hate that, after playback has been paused, hitting the play/pause button doesn’t immediately restart playback. Nay, it instead “wakes up” the iPod, whereupon it returns to its paused state. This means I have to hit play/pause twice to make the music happen again… and that’s unacceptable. Hey Apple, you think I have time to hit buttons twice? I’m a busy young guy, money to spend, and fickle tastes – show me a digital music player where the buttons do what they say on press #1 and I may just take my dollars elsewhere.

I don’t want to write, don’t really even know if I’m gonna end up posting this. Goodnight.

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guided by the divine


I completely kicked ass at work today, and feel damn good for doing so. In fact, today was one of the best work-days I’ve had in a long time – the planets all seemed to align for me, and things just kept falling into place as if guided by the divine. Coming off a day like that, and arriving home to this brand new food-to-poop-converter Sharaun and I gave life to, puts me in an exceptionally good mood. As I tick off items on my to-do list, my confidence grows. Taking time off for Keaton’s arrival put a more significant dent in that confidence than I’d originally thought.

You wouldn’t think two weeks away would be able to cause much pause, but for me, that feeling of being “out of it” that I described the other day really gnaws at me. I don’t feel right as a “manager” until I’m holding all the reigns of that team of horses before me. I know I’m to blame for my confidence waxing and waning in relation to relatively unrealistic factors, after all, I’m the one who sets these fairly ridiculous OCD-like requirements for myself (i.e. having to have “closure paths” for all the tasks before me before I can sleep easy), and they’re largely unnecessary – but I live and die by them regardless. For this obsessive behavior, I blame my dad. Thanks pops, I still love you.

I suppose it’s all related back to my self-confidence, or lack thereof. I’ve come to understand that my sense of self-assuredness and feeling of being “tied in,” or “in control,” is fairly brittle. Things that wouldn’t be specks of dust in the path for others can topple my cart. I’m not sure where this comes from. Since I was a kid, I think I’ve consciously undervalued myself out of a desire to seem humble. Understating achievements and strengths in front of an audience is natural for those attempting humility, but I think I actually undervalue myself to myself – which is different altogether. That little part of me that knows I’m smart and talented, and “better” than a lot of other people is shut-up tight in a cell at the back of my brain. I know it’s there, I let it have a little time in the yard every now and again – but for the most part I repress it, for whatever reason. This is just me: the not-so-subtle fake-humble guy.

Today I logged on to CNN to see a headline about how we (the USofA) arrested some Colombian drug badguys, which the US authorities have dubbed “narcoterrorists.” No, those aren’t the kind of terrorists that fall asleep suddenly and randomly, rather they are so named due to both their narcotic and terrorist activities. I think this is awesome. We’ve discovered a way to take someone who may be considered as a “vanilla” criminal, and equate him immediately with the likes of Al Qaeda. By simply by appending the root-word “terrorist” to their moniker, we knock the layer of ho-hum dust off their crimes and recast them as glamorous international fugitives. In celebration of our newfound way to arrest anyone we want using semantics, I terroristed up a few more common criminals – just to demonstrate how powerful a tactic this actually is. Check out these cutthroat thugs and tell me you don’t want to go all Operation Carpet Bomb on they asses:

  • jaywalkerrorists
  • atheierrorists
  • litterrorists
  • public intoxicaterrorists
  • terrorespassorists

Awesome, let’s round ’em up and send ’em to Gitmo, stat.

Nite.