redmaenad: Oh, drum circles! That reminds me of college, and trying to sleep!

It was Opening Night for the high school football season and the local bible college’s mating season. This means that the trip to Al’s and back for pizza had to negotiate heaps of spawning teens, including at least one schoolgirl dressed up as a schoolgirl and one Studio 54-style disco queen imitation. Both of which probably cribbed from 20-year-old rock videos.

Back on the patio it was the Vanguard University Fall Festival of Repressed desire featuring mostly a sausage party of uncomfortable and well-scrubbed young gentlemen in button-down shirts and pressed jeans. One ethereal model/bunhead type was cornered by no less than five hopeful future pastors as she shyly gave them her cellphone number, in a Montana area code.

Bible students apparently block SMS messages as I was unable to send homoerotic messages to brianenigma in a timely manner while they were clustering.

JE played his also well-scrubbed songs and some covers. Over this portion of the evening, dear reader, I must draw a curtain. Suffice it to say that genericus went GAAAAAAAAAAH at least twice.

Ever meet someone who was between channels? You know, like he had missed out on what kind of human to be, and was stuck between two variants and spewing static and confused signals? Yeah, like that.

I’m a lot nastier than I want to be. I bet you are, too.

Don’t put another dime in the jukebox
I don’t wanna hear that song no more

PAUL MITCHELL TEA TREE STYLING GEL!!

PAUL MITCHELL TEA TREE STYLING GEL!!

PAUL MITCHELL TEA TREE STYLING GEL!!

bOING.

1. “Drop-dead hot blogger babes with washboard abs”
2. “Blogger and Photogger”
3. OMG IM A JURNALIST

I am now in possession of a 1 gigabyte I-stick, a cute little USB drive that’s about the size of two pennies. For $100 from digi4me.com.

Wow. 1 gigabyte. That’s, like, a lot. In a little space.

genericus and I share a disease. We both have an obsession with early 1980s obscure music that we heard on the ROQ of the 80s in our youth. And we both go around chasing impossible crap like The Humans’ “Get You Tonight” or whatever, because it’s been stuck in our heads since we were 14, etc.

One of my grails was this song “Visitors” by the eponymous band, very new wave robot electronica. Sort of Devo ish. I was starting to think I had imagined the staccato chorus of guys saying “VIZ EE TORS WE ARE, VIZ EE TORS” over and over.

Nope. Found it. The band was called the Rockets, actually, and they were from France. (Nuke France, etc.) They’re most popular in Italy. They’re still around. And some kindly Russian maniacs had the very mp3 I wanted. And much, much more, all in Cyrillic characters.

What’s weirder is that they were sort of called the Visitors, for the album Visitors, on which was the song V-I-S-I-T-O-R-S which I sought. Allmusic is sort of opaque on the subject, but apparently there was a temporary merger with some other band called the Visitors. The whole thing is complicated, and also very Euro New Wave and conceptual (rubber suits, stiff motions, drum machines).

Anyway, here’s the song: visitors.mp3 (6.4 meg).

Opening line in the form of a narrative hook or introductory statement about my day.

A few descriptive sentences about routine things, often very similar to previous entries. Exposition of day’s events, including items or people seen that seemed unusual. Situation or item described here that will be used later in entry.

Plaintive remarks about one or more of the following: work-related stress or overwork; inappropriate impossible crush on woman at least ten years younger than I; illness; social anxiety; poor self-image and loathing of my own appearance and behavior; age and oncoming death.

Humorous aside, with ironic and dark flavor.

Epigrammatic and occasionally lapidary punch line with links both to subject line and item referenced above, usually also tying in opening line.

its made from morans!!!

My friends and I are neurotic in mostly the same way. We’re all terrible egotists with big problems. Therefore we proclaim things to each other, tell each other our stories, cut each other off to achieve the aforementioned, give unwanted advice to each other, and resent advice and story-telling and egotism and interruption in each other. We go to a coffeehouse and ingest caffeine and enhance our ADHD related neurologic problems and talk over each other, louder and louder.

My own reaction to this is self-loathing. I go home still buzzing from the caffeine and conversation and then replay it all and hate myself. Telling repetitive stories like a drunk old man, interrupting, barking at people for interrupting me, giving unsolicited opinions on others’ lives, ignoring or fighting their opinions of mine.

Excuse me, I have to brush a bug off my chest.

To add to this, socializing always gets tangled up with my problems with sex, so that I’m constantly meeting or seeing or talking to someone I’m attracted to but have no confidence to approach even if it’s somehow possible. I’m so much older than everyone I meet that I feel both predatory and pathetic even thinking about it, and the friends I could reasonably have interest in are all attached anyway. Strangers I just ogle like the other disasters on the patio. It’s Guilt Without Sex, redux.

There is now another bug on my leg. I don’t like summer so much, what with the bugs.

In sum I need to socialize and hate it. And inevitably I end up feeling spent and dead inside, and angry at everyone, and angry at myself, and then I go home and stare at the ceiling and think: Jesus Christ. I’m almost forty and I’m still thirteen. This has sucked for a really, really long time.

And then I slide into sleep and dream of travel-related anxieties.

I was at the local high-class liquor store yesterday. As I was browsing about looking at all the weird stuff (they have every kind of libation ever made including the dutch egg liqueur and fig flavored vodka), a young woman walked by. She was about 20 and had a knockout body, legs up to here. Her costume was: cashmere sweater off one shoulder; pleated miniskirt; pink leg-warmers over high heels.

I froze. Was this 1982? Could I be back in high school? Was it even legal for me to be buying liquor? No, no, this is 2004. What the hey. What the WHO.

An older man maybe in his sixties was standing next to me, a gnarled fellow with the deep tan of the outdoor worker. He looked at me, I looked at him.

“Wow,” I said. “That was different. I really don’t know what to say.”

He grinned wolfishly and raised his eyebrows. “Show me your PUSSY!” he barked.