Category: Uncategorized

The Federal Government is not allowed to serve coffee.

I made thai curry for dinner tonight, and damn it was good. Potatoes, mushrooms, and chicken in curry coconut milk sauce. With basmati rice, and artichoke salad. Mmmm. Stupid perl script is still broken.

I let my bitterness out tonight and annoyed someone oops. Otherwise doing a bit better socially. I talk too much, though. I’ve been sort of “up” for a few days and the result is that I’m a yapping Muppet. That guy thinks he’s Kermit but he’s really Statler and Waldorf.

It was sort of funny watching meta_kate get buttonholed by one of the odder patio residents for her opinion about How to Survive Law School. When I figure out how to describe that scene, I will.

I met someone I thought was pretty cool the other day but I’m afraid to pursue it at all because the same thing happens every time, the same way. I open the door and everything falls on me and then slowly kills me like some dreadful mix of a Steve Guttenberg movie and Requiem for a Dream. I would like a new shopping cart, please: one that doesn’t crash into the big pyramid of Ragu each time.

I’m sorry I shat on you, both of you. It’s not much of an advertisement for my relationship skills, is it?

please send me evenings and weekends
please send me evenings and weekends

Silverlake is this decade’s Laurel Canyon

Dinner with Russ & Amy and others in Silverlake. It really did give me that weird Laurel Cyn in the 70s feeling, like the Beach Boys might be hanging out with Charlie Manson next door. Hilly and semi-rural with hipsters run amok in houses with nice views.

We ate lots of noodles and thai curry and pr0k and good rice, and there was cake. They have interesting friends. They’re all in the entertainment industry which intimidates me and sets off my “I’m not a cool kid” reflex, but they were smart fun nice people.

I met a woman named Max who is an eBay wizard and sells Tupperware. She was really cool. I saw the Replacements Let it Be vinyl album cover that Amy had stolen back from our college radio station when she visited there. It had the label we’d typed on it and all the DJ comments scrawled in sharpie all over it from almost 20 years ago. What a lot of memories.

It’s odd, too, because these people know others that I haven’t spoken to since I left the entertaining part of the entertainment business in 1987. Somehow Geoff Gans came up, for example. He was the production guy at the Reader when I was there; his handwriting was on David Lynch’s “Angriest Dog” cartoons. He gave me lots of rides home. He had cool hair and liked cooler music than I did, and was in a cool band and in fact was generally way cooler than anyone. This hasn’t changed (he does things now like produce the reloaded Velvet Underground albums), but what amazed me is this. They told me that he still has the same horrible 1970s 4banger Mustang that he gave me rides home with in 1987. It barely made it over the Sepulveda pass then. HOW DOES IT STILL EXIST?

Current mood: perianal

I just had a shrink appointment and it took a while to recover from it. A bagel helped. Good times ahead.

I’m not getting nearly enough done at work right now and that bothers me, so this weekend will be spent at least partly getting this perl script written properly. That should improve things.

There is something stuck in my left upper chest. Anyone got a long qtip?

Tonight I am driving into Los Angeles in about 15 minutes to see Russ & Amy, whom I haven’t properly talked to in over 10 years. That should be worth the 2 hours of hell on the road, actually!

The Castroville Artichoke Festival’s web page says very emphatically, on the home page, NO DOGS. Is there a known problem with dogs and artichokes, or dogs and harvest festivals? I am confused.

Got it in the ribs every time I change gear

I spent almost the entire day fighting with a Heisenbug. My Powerbook’s hard drive started making that bad clicking and gronking noise that dying HD mechanisms do, although there were no errors in the log or anything informative at all. Today it did this a few times and crashed the machine hard. After doing some of the usual stupid human tricks to see if it was software-fixable I went off to the Apple Store and sat at the Genius Bar. The guy was very helpful but the problem had stopped in true Murphy’s fashion. Got to see mr_flippant for a bit which was nice.

So now I have to get it to do it again. I’m trying to figure out if something about the environment here at home caused the problem or set it off. How annoying! Grar.

The guy next to me was there with his 25-year-old daughter’s iMac which had died with her entire college career on it including the exam due tomorrow. No dice. He left to go to the place that charges thousands of dollars to do disk recovery.

I ate alone, as I always do, and watched people. My brain is a library of human experience, very little of it mine.

I feel like I cooked a meal for you and you never showed up because you thought you’d owe me for it.