Category: Uncategorized

The IM is coming from inside the house

I didn’t go to klikitak‘s thing tonight, partly because I am a social anxiety poster child lately and partly because I didn’t want to get extruded through my own car by drunk people going to L.A. and back. Instead I ended up at realitylost‘s where she and Craig stuffed me with really great food and their dogs sat on me. One of the many reasons to like Craig is that he is serious about food. O garlic bread, O cobbler.

I meant to go over and hang with burntcurtis for a few later but a quick trip across the boulevard revealed that his entire neighborhood had been parked upon by partiers. Tonight is official Adult Halloween Party Night, and everyone was getting smashed, with pumpkins. A couple of his neighbors were incompetently necking in the condo complex and I nearly ran them down. She was wearing a slutty noun costume and he was in a rapist costume (pirate, soldier, Haidl, dunno). He was trying to paw her while simultaneously bracing a 24 pack of beer on his hip and she was trying to do the coy push-away-only-not but instead stumbling in front of my car. Two cheers for Halloween; it’s now Daterapemas!

Part of the time at Susie & Craig’s tonight the TV was on. I hadn’t seen the History Channel in a long time. Wow is it dumb! The supposed academic guy referred to the “Cape of Africa” (?) and they spelled Gibraltar wrong, and the show about the history of dragons spent a full segment talking to a couple of lunatics who believed that dragons existed and waved broadswords while saying they were druids.

One of their neighbors has a license plate holder that says “Foamer Forever.” Anyone know what that means?

short attention spam

This is a series of random observations or questions. They’re short because my ADD-like symptoms are bad and I can’t comprehend big ideas right now. Which pisses me off to no end! But anyway:

Nick and I keep discussing that action-movie shot in which our heroes run or jump in slow motion away from a big fiery explosion. They almost always jump while running in the air and extend their arms, and are silhouetted against a wall of flame. Is there a name for this shot? There must be, because almost every action movie has one. We think it originated with the Lethal Weapon movies but we’re not sure. Anyone know?

I was at the grocery store late last night. It being Friday night, there were a number of couples there picking up items after a date and before going home: beer, ice cream, snacks, wine. The couple behind me in line seemed like nice people and were alternately looking a little annoyed and then laughing about something. The guy kept leaving and coming back as we waited. The line was long. I caught her eye and said “What, can’t he find the goldfish crackers?” Turns out he was trying to get condoms, which were in a locked case near the back of the store. There were only a couple of employees in the whole place so it was difficult. I looked at the line behind her, all couples with snacks and beer. “You’d think they’d know better…” she said and then started cracking up again. He returned and we all decided that instead of a lock, there should be a happy bell clang and circus music whenever anyone got a condom, or maybe a booming CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR SEX! announcement.

burntcurtis is a great date. We IHOP’d it last night and had a good long chat, after I introduced him to Andy A and they nerded out about circuit boards and other electronic hardware items and their manufacture. The IHOP people were using an unusually sexual advertising technique to sell French Toast. Is “leave happy” like “happy ending” but with breakfast food?

Does anyone know where one goes to shoot rifles around here? Yeah yeah I know, lol clocktower. I mean for real, for learning. I want to get a .22 and poke little holes in things at a distance.

The orange cat who guards my street 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, approached me this morning as I stood on my doorstep, pointed its paw at me, and said “Gnaaaaarp.”

good MORNING

The later, shitty Metallica is the ideal music for driving around suburbia in heavy traffic surrounded by gigantic SUVs. This morning I went to an early doctor appointment with “Unforgiven” blasting on my radio, gazing up on shiny Range Rovers and Expeditions as we roared through light industry in Irvine and Newport. It was like being in a canyon half the time. Everyone in this ridiculous town has a Range Rover. I counted fifteen of them on a drive that was maybe 3 miles each way.

My doctor has a pleasant obsession with Hawaii and was putting on a mix CD one of his other patients gave him, of Hawaiian stuff, as I arrived. He doesn’t have an office staff in the early part of the day, so he was answering the phone and scheduling my next appointment himself when I noticed that the current song was a Hawaiian version of a John Denver song. I left before I found out whether they changed the lyrics from “West Virginia, mountain mama” to something more island-y.

The local women are wearing Ugg boots again this fall. Have we learned nothing from history?

I was at Kean yesterday and a mother and daughter came in. The mom was a primped and frosted zillionaire lady with designer everything, and the daughter was the standard model unhappy 17-year-old dressed for some sport or other. Mom gave me a deadly glare as they arrived, as if I was somehow going to be a Myspace sexual predator and make off with her daughter. Look, lady, I remember high school. Girls that age are soulless, sadistic mini-Maenads who will suck the marrow right out of your spine while laughing. Sell her to someone else!

The line of $100,000 cars stretching out from the Burger King says a few things.

hated and then loved

Some of my favorite art (books, music, food, all of it) I have hated the first time. Some of it is understandable: the shock of the new. Bitter foods, dissonant music, singers with weird voices, idiosyncratic writers. Other things I still don’t know why I hated at first. A partial list is below. Heavy on the pop music because, well, I am heavy on the pop music. But for some reason my taste there is fluid and weird. I love everything below but couldn’t stand it at first:

Gang of Four
Cilantro
Joy Division
James Joyce
The Mountain Goats
Bill Hicks
Van Morrison
Prefab Sprout
John Coltrane
Faulkner
Neil Young
Thomas Mann
Sashimi

Part of it is just maturing, I think, and not needing everything to be accessible. But I liked bitter, weird, dissonant, and generally obscure crap starting very young. I can’t explain those taste changes. Glad I enjoy all those things now.

The list of things I liked and now despise is shorter, more boring, and pointlessly negative so I won’t share. Most of them are pop culture that I liked because of some personal context and then realized was shit, or things I enjoyed because I was immaturer and later found the real version thereof.

eating lunch is a bug

  1. 600 lb guy causes crematory grease fire
  2. The Buffalo Beast presents: Faith-based comics!
  3. BLOG ABOUT BACON
  4. I am a diehard liberal Democrat, but this guy makes some disturbingly good points about how we’ve failed.
  5. Season Shot has to be a prank. Has to be. But wow! Honey lemon shotgun blast!
  6. Oh hey great, it’s spontaneous combustion time at the big science place where they keep the atomic things.
  7. Military e-voting is a huge army-style SNAFU.

Halloween dreams.

I dreamed that I had found a website that looked at first as thought it was the usual unpleasant sexual tourism thing, guys visiting impoverished countries to do nasty things. But it was worse. It was a cannibalism tourist site, where you could arrange to visit places so benighted that they’d sell you their children and you could eat them.

The site was disguised as a kind of crackpot medical clinic called the California Creative Radiology Institute.

I think this is the first actual Internet nightmare I’ve had!