eep. psyche got hurt last night. on a scale of "how bad does that suck?," i'd give that a "real bad."

which brings up the subject of greeting cards that you need for situations like this. where is the "so you some psycho attacked you in the bathroom and gave you a bloody nose - that's a damn shame" card?

i mean, get well soon really doesn't give it that whole "i heard about it, don't worry about having to retell the story because i just wanted to say "hey, that sucks."" vibe that is distinctly different than "what moron stands out in the rain for three hours? i could have told you you'd catch a cold." y'know, genuine friendship over abject laughter.

blarg.

that was the weirdest meeting i've had in a long time. basically, the guy tried to get as much information about the program from me as possible during lunch. and he more or less dodged most of my questions in return. that doesn't make me feel very confident in his ability to offer me a position.

come to think of it, he didn't even have a packet for me to look over. that's pretty dodgy right there.

do i feel confident? nope.

in other news, the next handful of right click pictures are going to be the series of images that i made of shannon. starting tomorrow, for a week.

and i started a story, but all i have is the first line: "late at night, lisa would wake up and listen to the books talk to one another, their papery voices whispering their stories and secrets to the still air of the apartment..."

except for the fact that i'm wearing charcoal pants and no tie, i feel like the sixth member of the hives today (okay, so my shoes are brown, not white). maybe the fact that i'm listening to the band this morning has something to do with that feeling. wooo! die, all right! that'll get you moving first thing in the morning!

we woke up half an hour late this morning. that wasn't good. then i sat and talked to my boss for half an hour when i got in. (the interview is over lunch. anyone who tells you contract changeovers aren't stressful is lying.)

drinks last night with leah was a lot of fun. unfortunately, i'm bone-tired and we were only able to talk to her for about two hours before my brain just started to shut down on me. i hate that. i was actually looking forward to talking to her. dammit.

and don't ask about the meeting yesterday. that was just idiotic. bad things. very bad things.

so i'm wearing a tie because i have to go to a meeting over at the dot this morning. the fun part is that i get to go all by my lonesome because the other guy who was scheduled to go with me has been reassigned to another contract (starting september 1st). so our happy little team is calving. falling apart, moving away.

which is too bad.

i'm really concerned about how these new contractors are doing business. they've stepped over some moral and ethical lines by this point and aren't making me feel confident to want to go work with them. eh. i'll know more tomorrow after my lunch interview.

in other news, i got permission from the lena to talk about what went on. and shannon reminded me that a memoir does not have to be published, which was the right thing to say at the right time. as usual.

it's difficult to get out of the mindset of writing for an audience or even eventual general release, but maybe i should keep my thoughts to myself and a few individuals this time around. just so i can cut loose about what's really going on. i'd hate to have to censor myself in a memoir. that seems wrong, somehow. (which is one of the reasons that the lena was so accomodating about her permission. not that i really needed to ask permission, but politeness counts - especially amongst friends.)

(and, before i get a lot of questions about who lena is, let me just say that that's an alias and, if you don't know, you don't need to know.)

my horoscope from this morning said something about sex appeal. uh huh.

You exude powerful vibrations of sensuality, sex appeal. Maintain principles; your way is the "right way" today. You will have more responsibility and money. Capricorn in dynamic role.

riiiiight. why does that sound so familiar?

and there was an interesting article in the post about how our culture seems to be going through a crisis of faith lately. my question, though, is whether people really had faith in government or the church or even in corporations? i know i didn't. not as institutions. the purpose of an institution is self-preservation, not some mythical ideal of furthering the general good. i know that's cynical of me, but that's really nothing more than a rational response to the amount of irrationality that makes up our society.

or maybe i've just read too much dystopian cyberpunk.

still, it's good to know that it's not just me that's going through some kind of transition. society at large seems to be changing, too. but that's always the way it is, innit? we live in a dynamic culture and change is the only constant. anything short of that is just a delusion. right?

hm.

in other news, while we were watching mr. show last night (thank you, netflix!), we got a call from our friend the sociopath, who wanted to share news of his impending marriage. i had a good conversation with him and he actually said "you think of me as a sociopath? i'm truly honored." he even thought that four horsemen idea was a good one and wants to get together for lunch or drinks or something with the rest of the crew. in july, maybe.

i just wish that i'd brought the hives to work so i could really get ready for my meeting the way i want to. oh well, fell in love with a girl will have to suffice.

Fell in love with a girl
fell in love once and almost completely
she's in love with the world
but sometimes these feelings
can be so misleading
she turns and says are you alright?
I said I must be fine cause my heart's still beating
come and kiss me by the riverside,
bobby says it's fine he don't consider it cheating

Red hair with a curl
mellow roll for the flavor
and the eyes were peeping
can't keep away from the girl
these two sides of my brain
need to have a meeting
can't think of anything to do
my left brain knows that
all love is fleeting
she's just looking for something new
and I said it once before
but it bears repeating

Can't think of anything to do
my left brain knows that
all love is fleeting
she's just looking for something new
and I said it once before
but it bears repeating

Fell in love with a girl
fell in love once and almost completely
she's in love with the world
but sometimes these feelings
can be so misleading
she turns and says are you alright?
I said I must be fine cause my heart's still beating
come and kiss me by the riverside,
bobby says it's fine he don't consider it cheating

Can't think of anything to do
my left brain knows that
all love is fleeting
she's just looking for something new
and I said it once before
but it bears repeating

i feel like following a trend today. but only in my minimalist way.

Matt is dedicated to creating the best quality art

Matt is a true Brutarian

Matt is a workaholic, constantly laboring through a workload that would stagger the most prolific artist

Matt is our captain and he is the player we want to build our squad around

(i wrote this last night as kind of a recap of my day and sent it to the culture list. i thought it summed up a lot of what's been going on, only in greater detail. apologies in advance if the beginning has no new information. the end does, though.)

so the weekend was nice. shannon and i went over to a nice little boutique hotel and pretended to be rockstars in a place we couldn't afford. but we needed the time off from our friends and to just be us and sometimes that's all the excuse you need, really.

romantic, sexual. fun.

we didn't want to go to work on monday morning. at least five different people we know (including us) either skipped work on monday or wanted to. it was a trend, i think.

the only thing i had on my plate all week was drinks with a friend in from out of town on thursday night. she's a writer and she wants to meet shan, who also wants to meet her. (i'm looking forward to that, actually.)

by monday evening, i had lunch on tuesday with my mother, dinner with a friend (which i just got back from) and tentative plans for lunch with another friend. crazy.

and, in the mail, shannon got a notice from the irs that she owes $300 in back taxes. that was nice.

so i woke up and went in to work this morning. it's not even eight o'clock and you can already feel how hot the day is going to get. and my primary computer has no dhcp connection. that was a nice surprise. i didn't get that fixed until ten.

(luckily i have two computers, but i also have work to do that involves long-distance dial-ups, so i had nothing but work email to play with, which was more of an annoyance than anything else, but i'm whining, so shut up.)

oh. and the contract agreement negotiations about the changeover in personnell, assistance and information for our program are going on today, too. so that's an itch, too.

so i go to lunch with my mother. during the course of conversation, after i've bored her about our money situation and the bs about my job, she tells me that she and my father are seperating after 29 years of marriage and five years of conversation about whether or not to get seperated (which i've known about since my divorce, two years ago).

so there are those issues. more than i care to list, frankly. because i have a host of other, more pressing concerns.

i get back to work after lunch and the management has delayed a meeting until i get back (half an hour late) to tell us about what's going on with the contract. which is it's own, fucked up, ongoing saga that isn't worth telling until it's over because.. well, just because.

so. that was my day. oh, and the open house that the new company is throwing next week to try and recruit us all is happening while i'm in los angeles. so i have my own, special, lunch meeting with a company rep from the other side on friday.

and i had a really nice dinner and consumption of alcohol and conversation with a friend of mine, who happens to be a demon (it's difficult to explain, dealing with people who've taken altered states of personal reality and transformed it into something resembling a lifestyle choice).

heh. and it's only tuesday. this is going to be a very weird week, i can tell.

(and now, some thoughts and conclusions....)

last night, shannon and i talked about a lot of different things that are going on in my life right now (as is proper) and we figured out that a lot of stuff is happening all at once for me.

i should have responses back from all the agent query letters i'm sending by... the end of august.

my grandfather's funeral is in... the end of august.

my parents should have their house sold by... the end of august.

the contract that i'm currently working on is up in... the end of august.

and we're not going to chicago like we planned to at... the end of august.

i really wish that i could say there were no coincidences in life, but i would by lying. these things happen. that's just the way it is. but all at once? and then, to have everything major in my life come to a resolution all at once? that's just kind of scary, really.

shannon figures i should write a book about it all. she's not wrong, either. it's been a very fucked up year in a lot of ways. i even have a title and a beginning. i should probably wait until there's an ending, though. that just seems to make sense.

oy. life took a severe left turn today.

at lunch, my mother told me that she and my father are seperating. after 29 years. that's interesting. lots to talk about there.

and then i got back from lunch to find out that the new contractor has no idea what they're doing and wants to try and headhunt our entire team for an uncertain future with an unproven company on a complicated contract. uh huh.

so our current company is going to find us jobs within other contracts, which is nice of them. except that we don't know what that job is going to be. should be interesting.

so that's my life. complicated, all at once.

gah! i came in this morning and my computer had decided that it wanted nothing to do with the dhcp server. so, for the past two hours, i have not had an internet connection on my primary computer. (good thing i have a secondary computer, huh?)

it's fixed now, but god that sucked.

anyway, i wanted to talk about how i'm friends with a demon, an alien warrior and a sociopath (the nicest guys you could ever meet, actually) and use that as a springboard into some kind of introspective whine about how i don't have an inner archetype to identify with. instead, i'll just mention that the four of us would make a great set of not-quite-horsemen of the apocalypse for halloween. (i would be famine, of course). the only twitch would be john as an extremely charming pestilence, cause, y'know, pestilence has to have personality these days. but i think we could make it work.

(you know, i initially left out the words "for halloween" in that paragraph and it still made sense. that's kinda scary, actually.)

let's see. i have things to do today. lunch with my mother and shannon (odd), a call to the dmv, a call to the post to stop delivery for next week. you know, the usual.

i posted something the souvenir koan today that is very confused and disjointed, but that's where my thinking is on several issues right about now. just because i can write well doesn't mean that my brain has to be pulled together. i tend to think that it's allowed to be fragmented. sometimes.

i was thinking about a bit from watchmen where rorshach says "there is no meaning save that which we impose upon reality. there is only ever the illusion of order in chaos." (paraphrased, of course, because i don't have a copy of watchmen sitting around the house.) and i think that's very true. meaning is what we make of it. context is the most important thing there is. (of course, i may change my mind next week and decide that los angeles is the most important thing there is, but i doubt it.)

anyway.

i'm sorting through my pictures now and deciding what to post. i have a beautiful series that i made from two pictures i took of shannon. i was playing with them last night and coming up with interesting compostions. we'll see where those end up. i'm kind of curious, myself.

i had a line all ready for today's title, but i had a sneaking suspicion that i should have tried to make it rhyme, so i didn't use it. (for you completists out there, the line was "i'm in a lemonheads kinda mood, but i'm listening to james instead.")

it's another code red day in dc today (mmm. taste the ozone!) which reminds me that eccles has posted about his trip to america. no pictures yet, though.

i read on moby's website yesterday that his personal email address was posted on the internet, which meant that he was getting a ton of hate mail interspersed with occasional fan mail. i googled for the address and sent him a nice little piece of fan mail. because i'm a fan, obviously. i got a mass mail reply back this morning, which was nice. i know he's a busy guy and i know that he would have liked to reply personally to everything, but i'll sleep well tonight with the knowledge that he knows that real people find him interesting. or something.

"it's the sentiment that counts," is the lesson i'm pulling from that.

i'm learning all kinds of lessons these days. i feel like i'm back in school, i'm learning so many lessons.

we watched riding in cars with boys last night which was a really good movie, but a tough one for me to watch. (i knew it would be both, really.) what hit me across the side of the head, though, was that i had the same kind of hate-hate relationship with my mother at one time in my life. but i'm better now. really, i am. but it's good to know that i'm not the only one who's been there.

that seems like a perverse thought, really, but sometimes it's comforting to know that you aren't unique.

that was fun. i had a fantastic time. i am fufilled (or i feel myself to be on the brink, which is almost as much fun.)

putt putt was entertaining, as was tenoya's afterparty. we would have stayed later, but we had plans for saturday. eh.

i'm listening to beck (again) and letting my brain go wander.

we watched a documentary on msnbc about burning man last night. that was very interesting. i've read enough about the event from the perspective of the participants, but very little from the perspective of a mainstream news organization.

i've declared myself to be a scientific heretic in my notes by asserting that gravity equals time. i don't know that that's the truth, mind you. it's just something that seems to make sense with my primitive grasp of physics. so if i'm wrong, i wouldn't know how to understand exactly how wrong. perverse, isn't it?

i thought about the abstractions of reality earlier yesterday. just because. how it tends to be a repeating pattern. reality is abstract, culture is abstract, language is abstract, this alphabet is abstract. and so on.

i told shan this morning over breakfast that i wasn't sure what disturbed me more: that i think about this kind of thing all the time or that i wouldn't know how not to think about this stuff. there is no question about whether i enjoy my brain in this state. the only question really is whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

the only difference between now and two hundred years ago is that there is more information available now about how much information is available. the access is easier, as is the amount of noise generated by cross chatter. hey, cool. i'm making noise.

time to stop.

i've gotten some good responses so far, which means i definately have to submit my story somewhere. crap. i hate that whole responsibility thing.

in other news, we're playing putt putt tonight. i think we're picking tony up from the metro and taking him to tenoya's afterwards. right? and sarah's got a ride with lori in the gothmobile. if i'm reading the commentary conversations right. so that's sorted.

i called up my grandmother last night and just talked to her. she's very lonely now, rattling around in that house by herself. she's coming down in the middle of july and we made plans to have dinner with her when she's here. that'll be nice. mom's also taking her to the spiritual retreats that my mother frequents - chatauqua and the monastary in erie. i think my grandmother needs the tranquility and space for reflection.

she's also bringing down all of grandpa's writings down with her. apparently there are a lot of boxes of paper. she's giving me a key to her apartment in wheaton so i can go over there whenever i want to and go through the stuff at my leisure. i figure that'll be one night a month, give or take.

it's odd, being in charge of someone else's work. to be able to make any kind of executive decisions that i want. if i want to get him published, that's my call. weird.

the other night i took some pictures of our speaker of memoriabilia and played with layer effects until i had two very nice, very interesting pictures. very different from one another, yet the familial relationship is visible, if you know where to look. what i like about them both is the fact that i was consciously trying to emulate dave mckean and, while i don't know that i suceeded, i had fun with the process. something different, for me. pushing my horizons for the sake of trying new things. i think that's good for me.

speaking of pictures, shannon had a good idea last night. i was noncommital when she gave it to me because i need to chew my thoughts a bit and develop them in the silent spaces of my head. but i wanted to give her credit ahead of time for a good idea. "hey man, why don't you listen to my great idea."

yeah. like that.

it must be wonderful to be a fundamentalist. to have such strong and firm opinions on so many things seems such a liberating idea.

my mind, for example, is filled with any number of emotionally charged ethical dilemmas that i have come to sincere conclusions about, based on rational thought and a compassionate examination of the issues involved.

just writing that description was a complex task. the actual thought process can take years and is never entirely resolved in my mind; the feeling that i have chosen the lesser of two evils in some situations nags at me.

for that reason alone, i envy fundamentalism for the absolute nature of the convictions it holds forth. there is no debate or concern about the murk of issues. thing are in black or white and that is all there is.

it must be liberating to not have to question yourself on a daily basis, to be unconcerned with personal right and wrong. it's no wonder that the people with these kinds of concrete opinions have the time to be worried about the actions of others.

indeed, there are those among us who bear no portion of the collective (or even individual) responsibility. it is comforting that there are those who are willing to step forward to take up the slack. make no mistake: where there are slackers, there will be slack.

i find the condemnation a bit harsh, though.

it's always important to remember that manners and morals are constructed, inherited, implied, expected, lived up to.

they arrive as the accumulated wisdom of generations of people living life. experiencing disappointment, responsibility, sexuality and tedium in equal measure. vowing to keep their children from making the same mistakes that they have made.

they are, perhaps, what makes us civilized; they certainly serve as a benchmark of civility. the point is, though, that civilization is learned behavior. hunger is universal.

the fun part about being adult is that you need not answer to a moral authority above your ken. you become your own moral compass. indeed, it is easy to get lost. it is easy to blunder, trip and fall.

but there are treasures in the wilderness of civility, you are willing to learn the nature of the beast. and that, i'd argue, is the fun part.

granted, there is little room for such petty concepts as fun in the fundamentalist worldview. i would argue, though, that any viewpoint that cannot handle the idea that contemptuous (yet fun) behavior exists will not survive the memetic evolutionary scramble without extreme assistance.

but that's me.

guilt may exist and i understand the concept, but i'm not buying it. not really.

i, myself, have done things that i wish i hadn't. that's personal guilt. but collective guilt because i want to have fun and the people around me disapprove in general? it is to laugh.

it is almost sado-masochistic to declare that an inclination to fun is somehow bad.

there are instances, though, where context counts.

for example, describing an erotic fantasy that involves a woman sitting on a man, the two of them in facing a mirror, watching and enjoying the pleasure that each takes in the other - that would be out of context for this essay and would, in this circumstance, represent a breach of civility.

but that is an extreme example and i won't use it.

like i said, though, it must be easy to be a fundamentalist and not have to worry about the relative ethical conundrum associated with such a fantasy.

or am i just talking out of my ass?

romper stomper bomper boo, in my magic mirror, i saw you: allie, joshua, carrie, rachel, andy, karon and what rhymes with rachel? thus endeth the pome.

so many things to talk about. where to start, where to start?

first off, it was great to see everyone who was out last night and to finally meet allie. i've talked to her and commented on her entries, but it was really nice to put a face to the name. now i just have to meet cheeze and amy and my collection will be complete. (insert mwaha as appropriate.)

there were a lot of people out at dremo's last night. and the city morgue is really good this time around. the fact that i have an article in it influences my opinion not at all, really. i just wonder what people will think of it. hrm.

i lied yesterday when i said that shannon pronounced my story very good. what she actually said was that it is one of the best things i've ever written. high praise indeed. i'm trying to figure out where i should submit it. playboy? nerve? i'll figure something out.

i was going to post it as next week's souvenir koan piece (as i alluded in this week's piece) but i'm just going to put it up as a temporary page instead. go here. read it. tell me what you think of it. i'm curious. honestly. it'll be down on monday, though. sorry, but it's just up so people can read it and i don't have to send it to several dozen of my friends.

i have a new topic for next week's souvenir koan, though. i put a book in my bag last night and then certain events of last evening threw odd shadows at me. so i'm going to write about it. life has been throwing odd echoes lately. when you drop a rock in a still pond, what do the ripples mean? or are they just there and that's it? i wonder about these things, too.

i'm finding this new book to be very odd. around about page 35, though, i found a couple of passages that jumped right out at me. "...an interest as much in the idea of making love to her as in the physical pleasures of the sex act itself." and "These descriptions seemed to be a language in search of objects, or even, perhaps, the beginnings of a new sexuality divorced from any possible physical expression."

read my new story and then reread those passages and you should start to understand why this book is throwing odd shadows at my life. there are other echoes, too. but i'll make those clear on tuesday.

in other news, the contract negotiations are proceeding apace. there were some machinations that went down yesterday, but nothing major. this is going to be fun. not.

lunch with valerie the merciless today. and leah is going to be in town next week! yay! conversations about my books, woo! my favorite topic. well, one of them. sex and literature. those are my favorite topics. okay. enough for now. work calls.

and i want it to shut the fuck up.

finished story. pronounced 'v. good' by s. not really erotica, though. more of a think piece. with explicit bits. a good short story, though. pointed. one idea, elaborated upon.

dinner at honolulu with the hoovers and eccles was fun. goofy, thanks to 'tai mais.' dremo's tonight for the city morgue.

quiet day.

hands down, the best line i have ever seen in an instant messaging conversation comes from tony: "there is a fine line between pleasure and, DEAR GOD I'M ON FIRE."

i'll never get to use this, but i think the best euphemism i've ever come up with for throwing a tantrum is "stomping around like a retarded ostrich."

there's something new on the souvenir koan today and it requires some audience participation. if you want to see the piece i'm talking about, let me know. i know what constitutes a critical mass and, if i get it, you'll know next tuesday. (the genre is sorta-kinda erotica, if that helps. well, it has explicit bits in it, okay?)

i got a note from my grandmother last night (which reminds me that i have to print off calendar pages for july and august). she's going to bring down my grandfather's papers and keep them in her wheaton apartment and let me come in and read or work on them whenever i want to, even when she's in new york. i thought that was really nice of her.

eccles came in from new york last night. of course amtrak is the idiot older child of american transportation, so his train didn't arrive until four hours after it was scheduled to. i'll let him tell the story (it's his story) but i went to bed at 10:30, fully aware that i'd be awakened in a couple of hours to go get him. sure enough, at 12:30, we got a call and off i went.

except that 395 was under construction (midnight is a good time to put up a bridge in the mixing bowl, i guess) and the car in front of me overheated. so i took 495 to van dorn street and hauled ass up to seminary road. except that i took the wrong way around from van dorn to 395 (which is ironic because i lived at that intersection for three years but oh well) and then into the city.

and, of course, 14th street was under construction on the way out, so i took 395 from independance. it's actually quite pleasant to drive in the city when there's no traffic. anyway, i have other things to write, so i'm off. for now.

so many of my friends are not doing so good. i feel bad about that. lori, shawna, batty, michael's wife. i may not be leaving vampire-inspired comments on your posts, but i do feel for you. for what it's worth.

on the good news front, though, jenna got a job! yay! i knew the pugs were good for something.

(i'm sure that flare is acutely aware of the fact that she owes me some mail. but that's okay. life first, then fun. i understand. believe me, i understand...)

tangentally from that subject, halcyon seems to attract people whose identities are questionable at best, which throws an odd light on what's going on with the story i'm writing right now and portions of my life in general.

i'll start with the generalities. i'm on a mailing list that's filled with people from around the world. we take it as an article of faith that everyone is more or less who they say they are. to be certain, we have the odd person who shows up claiming to be something completely unusual, like the giant komodo dragon, or hotteenchix. but we understand that these are people playing a role. the masks are clearly delimited as such and we don't go much beyond a surface enjoyment of the playacting.

but that's the way we are. we also see each other fairly often (which is quite a trick for a group that's scattered all over the planet). for example, shannon and i are currently hosting eccles for a week-long holiday. we'd met him in london and we encouraged him to come out and visit america. fairly straightforward stuff, but again, that's the way we are.

which brings me back to my original point about my friends going through rough patches versus people who don't exist. i know the people i'm talking about when i mention them. i've actually seen them and given them hugs. (except michael's wife, but i know michael.) it would unsettle me to a great degree to have someone misrepresent themselves to such a degree that they have to halcyon. that just seems like a really shitty thing to do.

which brings me to the question of why i'm writing the story i'm writing. i'm not quite done with it, so i'm going to withhold the actual content/twist of it for now. but it does seem poignant that this story idea would occur to me when such deceptions keep cropping up.

there is nothing new in fiction. i'm convinced of it. maybe this just reinforces that idea. yet again.

okay. let's backtrack to thursday night. we went out. there were tons of girls wearing next to nothing. tons of cleavage. it was good. i impressed shannon by saying "hey, isn't that a gallery serpentine corset?" (so i pay attention, so sue me).

i got to sleep at about one. i was at my desk the next morning at 7:36 am. i figure that i got up, took a shower, got dressed, ate breakfast, read the paper, took the metro to work, read 105 culture list emails (and replied to a few of them), did most of my morning work, talked to carrie for about twenty minutes, sat through a meeting and then woke up at about 9:40. and i was surly when i woke up, let me tell you.

but i wrote 2000 words on friday because i'd actually got my brain locked into "write write write" mode before i woke up and once it's there, that's it for the day. i mean, i was even writing on the metro on the way home, that's how locked in i was. so that's a good thing.

friday night we went to george's and our party of twenty loud, obnoxious freaks was sitting next to a wedding rehearsal who decided that we were too loud for them to enjoy themselves, so they complained. hell, we had a great time. my friends rock. officially. we took eva home so she could sober up, then drove her back to her car. (i won't mention what she did to poor eccles while she was at our place.)

saturday i woke up way too early again and putzed around until the early afternoon. then we took the metro into the city and saw the monuments, which was actually very nice. we walked around a bit and felt like we'd done something. so there was that. saturday night at catacomb was insane.

we took over a table by the corner and played spin the bottle, drew on each other with a blacklight marker (the photos have yet to be downloaded) and just generally got drunk and rowdy. i stopped drinking before we actually got to the club and was fairly punch drunk by closing time. but that's okay. we went home and got to sleep at about 3 am. and all was well in the world...

for father's day, i offered to play golf with my dad. i wasn't able to get the tee time because of this long rigamarole about an automated tee time system that the fairfax county golf courses have signed up for, so we decided to play it by ear. when we got to the golf course this morning, there was a space for us to play and we signed up for the father-son golf tournament.

we went over and hit a bucket of balls at the driving range and i discovered that my reflexes are actually pretty good, considering that i haven't played golf in a dozen years. i have this problem with hitting off to the right that practice would probably clear up. anyway. we went out and played with another father and his twelve year old son who was so much better than i was.

we didn't win the tournament, but we had a great time and that's the important bit, i think. on the way home, my dad said something to me and i went "huh?" which prompted him to ask "are you still not awake?" "i don't think so," was my response. and i'm still not. but that's okay. i really haven't been awake since thursday afternoon. sometimes life is like that. it doesn't make things any less meaningful, it just distorts your perceptions of them just a tad.

anyway. that was my weekend. in abridged format, of course. stuff happened, i didn't sleep much. all in all, though, people had fun. so i had fun. yay people (enjoy that statement now - you're hardly likely to see it again in the near future...)

it's too fucking early. my brain is still half-asleep. i can tell that this is the case because i spent the entire metro ride in composing portions of a nice update and, now that i'm sitting here trying to write it all down, all i'm drawing is a great big blank.

the hives work better than caffeine, though. at least they get my body moving.

speaking of bodies, nation was fun last night. eccles brought the weather with him, apparently. the joke was that it went from light drizzle #42 to light rain #3 (according to the official british guide to precipitation determination), although nobody really got the joke. oh well, we thought it was funny.

the usual assortment of bare skin was in evidence, much to the delight of our visitor. it really is a scene that is custom-designed for maximum visual enjoyment.

i started writing something new yesterday on the theory that i had an idea, a first line and a title. honestly, though, i'm hoping that it's just a short story and not a full novel. i don't have the time to devote to a full novel. (please god, just ten thousand words.)

i keep forgetting to mention this. shannon and i were in target the other day buying soda and this lady was in line behind us with her daughters. one was maybe nine and the other was about six. the older sister was getting a pair of spongebob swimshoes. "but they didn't have any in her size," the older sister said, referring to her sister. the younger sister lifted up her shoulders, shook her head and gave a deep sigh. "nope," she said. "none for me."

we lost it and so did her mother. that's a drama queen, right there. "such a heavy soul, for one so young," i said. and that's about the age that i sort of feel most drama queens present themselves to be, when they act like that. nothing more to add, except that i've been meaning to write that up and just haven't had the time.

(fast forward through yesterday's saga of the parking meter and the reports that required a reboot of the intranet server. they also crashed the page server and, when i went out to put money in the meter, i only had one minute left! it was a whole thing.)

i went out to the airport and picked up eccles during what turned out to be the hottest part of the day. i stood and watched passengers from dusseldorf, zurich, milan, paris, munich, amsterdam and some place called manchester come through the gates because i hadn't brought a book to occupy my time. (of course, i keep picking up books and putting them down, which is probably indicitive of something. i just wish i knew what. maybe my attention is just wandering...?)

anyway. we drove home and eccles got the driving tour of the virginia suburbs, which included traffic ("look, 66 is a parking lot!"), arlington cemetary, the military installations outside of the pentagon and a nice view of rosslyn and crystal city, which is far more exciting that it sounds.

we actually got home before shannon, which was surprising to me. we were listening to the god save the queen single that he brought over when she walked in, so that was cool. we talked for a bit and then went off to bennigan's, where our favorite waiter failed to impress eccles by switching a fish and chicken order.

then we were off to dremo's (now with air conditioning!) for david bowie night. we introduced eccles around and he and i talked about banks (for something new and different) and a couple of other topics. it was a pretty nice night, actually. i got vlad to play the man who sold the world, even though i had to run out to the car to get it for him. it helps when you know the dj and the fact that vlad is fairly laid back helps, too.

we didn't win the raffled (poo!) but we did get to see tony. i understand why he won't be able to make it out tonight, but that doesn't mean i won't miss him.

the same goes for the city morgue people, too. (i place the blame squarely on carrie's shoulders for making them behind schedule. yeah, right.) actually, i'm just being a petulant six year old about the fact that my friends can't stay and hang out with the cool kids because of their obligations. so don't mind me.

and now it's thursday.

ugh. on-street parking sucks. so does driving up the highway into the city. how do i love the metro? let me count the ways...

still, driving in with shan this morning was fun, even if it meant cursing at the other drivers for ten miles. i found a spot with a meter next to my building, but it means that i have go down there every hour and feed the meter. luckily, my boss is the motherlode when it comes to change. i bought $3 in quarters off of him. cool beans.

i drove in this morning because i'm going out to dulles this afternoon to pick up eccles. yes, the merry wanderer arrives today. just in time for another projected code red day. welcome to dc! (adrian's going to have it tougher - he arrives for a week in august.)

i have to admit that i was a little surprised at the positive reactions (all both of them) that i got to yesterday's souvenir koan piece. even as i was writing it, it felt a little harsh to me. maybe that's just because i feel slightly bad that that's all the feeling i can muster about a decade-old memory? who can say?

speaking of ten-year-old memories, ren and stimpy is getting new episodes. interesting...

the last of the photorealist pieces (for the time being) is going up today, exactly one year to the day that i made it. the next few will probably be a grab-bag of whatever abstracty stuff that i'm impressed that i've made over the past months.

(for the completeist, though, the picture from today is the one that is on the back of my favorite t-shirt. you know, the one that says "don't put your hand where you wouldn't put your face, she said." people love that shirt.)

what else? not much.

i had a great story idea yesterday. i just wish i had time to write it. i don't even know if it's a novel or a short story idea. (i suspect the latter.) usually the best part about having ideas like that is finding out how long they're going to be. not this time. well, not right now. maybe later, when i can enjoy the process. it's difficult to do when your day is predestined to be chopped into managable little hours. i hate watching the clock. but it's better than getting a ticket.

is anyone else starting to get pissed off at yahoo for putting "vocal" ads in their mailbox? the att one in particular is starting to make me question yahoo's status as "the best free mail service on the web."

i'm really sick of things breaking down first thing in the morning. shannon has a point when she says that she'd prefer to have to do all of her work first thing so she can have some time in the afternoon to relax a bit, but it's trying. hooo boy, is it trying. especially when there are 165 culture emails in your inbox. the list would choose right now to get really chatty.

and, of course, the archives on the souvenir koan decided to flake out on me. blagh.

oh well. we got our new monitor hooked up and we're evaluating it right now. heavy.

and, on suggestion from friends (all both of them), i'm starting to read some erotic literature with an eye towards seeing if that's a genre i could actually do something in. (yes, i'm reading under great duress, let me tell you.) and that's it. for today.

good news: i was able to get everything done that i needed to for the package that's going out in the mail tomorrow.

the bad news is that work just kicked my ass from 9 to 10 this morning. there should be a limit to the number of people who can call at once. and for such silly reasons! bah.

so right now, i'm just letting my brain decompress. it's not posed to be this compressed on a monday.

ah. this was a good weekend. i left a little early on friday because the management left early and i needed the extra time to get a head-start on my errands. i got my comics (murder mysteries! yay!) and went off to the mall to get my hair cut (the such portion of friday's post). unfortunately, i think i ended up with a haircut that would be more appropriate for a lesbian. it works well with gel, but there are aspects that i'm less than satisfied with.

dollhouse was fun. tim and i discussed the social ramifications of what would happen if the backstreet boys conducted a demographic shift and suddenly started blatantly marketing themselves towards the gay audience by making a village people tribute album. there would be chaos. forget about the situation in isreal! the future of american culture hangs in the balance and might well turn on a feathered headdress. this is what passes for conversation early on in the night, before the women start arriving.

there were other conversations as well, but that was the easiest to remember and repeat. (or something to that effect.)

we woke up early on saturday and made it down to graffix in time to meet up with fish. we putzed around the studio with fish for a while as he set up and woke up. i ran and got him breakfast and he did shan's tattoo first. i ran down to get money from the atm down the street and, by the time i got back, he was almost done.

mine, on the other hand, took two and a half hours. it turned out beautifully, though. it's a tryptich from dave mckean's particle tarot: the sun on top, death in the middle and justice on the bottom. the fact that dave mckean collaborates a lot with neil gaiman means that i get a reference to both within the same piece. (i also realized that all three of my pieces are british in origin. odd.)

the hoovers were nice enough to give us a monitor, which i still haven't hooked up. as of right now, it's still in the trunk of the car, making clunking noises every time i make too tight a turn. tomorrow, probably.

saturday night was interesting. we haven't been to catacomb in a while, so there was that awkwardness. on top of that, there were demographic groups present that aren't usually represented in the crowd: sikhs (with turbans), a collective noun of lesbians, short women sans undergarments and under the drinking age punk/ravers. (pravers?) we were unable to find the pink cd in the car, though, to fish's disappointment.

we got home and had an interesting conversation about interesting conversations.

this morning, we woke up early because fresh tattoos don't make it easy to sleep. we went up to maryland and had lunch with my parents because my mother's birthday is tomorrow. we talked briefly about my grandfather and the family's reaction and i received the unlikely news that my uncle roy died a month ago (the speed at which the news reached me should indicate exactly how important crazy, stupid uncle roy was to me, personally.) all in all, it was a good time.

after lunch, shannon and i drove down to georgetown. we were going to see the ziggy stardust pictures at the govinda gallery, but decided to go shopping instead. we went to the body shop for more cocoa butter for the tattoos, reconstruction hardware for goggles, commander salamander (have you been in there since they rebuilt the place?) and the pleasure place. fun.

so now we've finished eating dinner and we're looking at the fading sunlight with an eye to how well it lights up the apartment. eh.

tomorrow's going to be busy, though. i have to complete a list of items for writer's relief (don't ask if i haven't told you or simply google if you're curious), which i have to send out asap. and then i have to get the monitor sorted. but the apartment is clean and things are good there. but the other hotline operator is on vacation this week, so the workday is going to be tight. fun fun.

see you when i see you.

first off, sorry to anyone who finds me to be a wordy bastard. that's who i am. i probably shouldn't apologize, but i wonder how many people are coming here expecting updates on my daily life, only to find some weird rambling idea-laden sort-of-an-essay about whatever's on my mind at the moment. oh well. that's what passes for updates on my daily life, really.

having said that, there are actually things going on. weekly meeting about the status of our contract today. probably no news, which isn't encouraging. but it is payday. so that means i have cash to buy comics and such. (the such part is a surprise).

mmmm.... comics.

what else? for some reason i keep referring to this new chat application as trillium, but that's not it's name. trillian. different beast altogether, apparently.

shannon (and her power base) is down in the dumps right now, so everyone has to be encouraging tonight, okay? tonight, you say? yes. because it's dollhouse! whee. a hot, packed club night. with good music. so there are tradeoffs...

and on that note, i have things to be doing.

eh. so there's another post in here that i didn't bother to link on lj. it's unfinished because the point kinda slipped my mind between the time i wrote it and now. (i posted what i had to save it while i helped with dinner.) scroll down if you care.

so anyway...

trillium is fun. i've got it set up now, so that a prim little message window pops up when i get mail. that's nice. and today was just an im convention. claire, michael, sarah, carrie. the only person that didn't throw words at me today was tony. (i still say go with the black power fro, man.) i don't know which is stranger: talking to tony when he's about to crash because he's been up all night or talking to claire just before she's heading to bed because she lives in melbourne.

eccles is now less than a week out. groovy. and dollhouse is tomorrow night.

today felt like friday for some reason...

where do the lines of art and artifice disolve? holy fire has a section about a theorist who offers an item for examination and asks for an estimation of it's value based on itself. then he modifies that value based on a manufactured history, which he changes and changes again, until the point is made that the value of a thing can have no more intrinisic value than it's history. what it is, a story. not what it is, an object.

that same theorist also offers up for examination a picture of a sunset. is it beautiful? is that beauty in any way modified by the fact that it has been digitally enhanced? is it any less beautiful now that it's authenticity has been sullied? does the fact that it is a photograph (a digital photograph at that) detract from the fact that it is not the real sunset, but only a captured record of a portion of that event?

this would-be socrates asks outright, what is art and what is artifice? (artifice being the use of tools necessary to produce the art, in my dictionary). it's a good question. at what point does true appreciation of the art require a comprehensive (or even cursory) mastry of the tools needed to make it? would someone who had never used photoshop appreciate a subtle tweaked photograph? would they recognize the art that it had become? (would they call it art?)

in many ways, modernism leveled the playing field of artisitic appreciation. the notion was floated that there are no philistines because the critical tools that were previously needed to judge the artistic merits of a piece no longer applied. which meant that anyone's opinion of any given piece was valid. from the junkie in the gutter to the impeccably up-to-date haute couture queens. and the housewife. and the college student. and the rabbi. and the imam. the list goes on.

it's a liberating idea and a little scary, because the moron down the street from you shouting drunken insults from his car window has as much right to his opinion (and it is as valid) as the opinion of person you really seek the most approval from. but hey, once you get past that, you're golden. what matters is how willing you are to seperate the bile and anger from the genuine critical points. and how willing you are to admit to your failures. but i digress....

especially now that a technical hierarchy has grown up like digital coral. anyone who has ever designed a webpage knows how difficult it is, which means that

insecure, what ya gonna do?

there were thunderstorms over dc and rosslyn last night as we came up 395 to get to dremos. the lightning was spectacular. several wonderful, brilliant bolts that stood out against the night sky, paused in their brief, incandescent glory.

so i've been thinking about songs about thunder and lightning all morning. underworld came to me first. now i kiss you dark and long.

but now i'm listening to james. sometimes, when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can see your soul. the rain makes a great sound on concrete.

(shannon's gonna give me shit because the lyrics i quoted are all over the place from two or three different songs. but i love the words that tim booth wrote...)

don't mind me. i'm feeling the effects of reading too much bruce sterling. holy fire is such a good book. not his best, but i like it for very particular reasons. couture. art, not artifice. meditations on why junkies are the exact antithesis of wisdom and control. and so on.

i have things to do today (and i'll actually get them done, too).

- lunch with kyle.
- tweaking the contrast for the flyer.
- install and setup trillian.
- send the article to joshua.

anything else? if there is, it's not on my to do list...

okay, programmers who have time on their hands and/or want to do something interesting.

i have a challenge. it would be really helpful if, in livejournal, there was a radio button that i could click to tell the browser (leave a cookie, presumably) that i have read a particular entry. if that entry gets comments, the "read/unread" setting defaults back to unread. that way, i can go through my friends list and see if there are any new entries. and the ones i've read aren't there anymore.

my network administrator at work likes to say "anything can be done. the question is how difficult is it to do?"

so there you go. how difficult would it be to implement this?

this morning i made plans for lunch with my family for my mother's birthday. and i made plans to go play golf with my dad for father's day. i think my dad almost dropped the phone when i suggested that we go play golf, he was that shocked.

my golf clubs (which i haven't touched in at least a decade) are still in my parents basement. and i'll have to wear shorts, i suppose. do i even own shorts? i should check on that.

oh well. it means a lot to him and that's what father's day is all about.

warning - topic shift

i was thinking about the strip mining of culture (again) because john seabrook used that exact phrase at the end of nobrow. "strip mining of subcultures." i think it's an apt description, really. nostalgia and pop culture have become yet another subculture that exists to be strip mined, i think. which makes sense, if you consider that nostalgia highlights those aspects of the past that were popular, meaning that strip mining them will produce proven numbers. it's all about the numbers...

i figure that the first genuine subculture that really got screwed by strip mining, though, was disco. i have nothing to support that. it's just an idea that i feel like throwing out there. we'll see how that bounces, shall we?

warning - another sudden topic shift

when i was thinking about the whole self-esteem thing, i was also thinking about conformity (we conform to what our own, internal ideas of what we should be, even though we tend to blame that conformity on others. i think. it's an idea that's still in progress...)

and, i was thinking about the difference between drama and a saga.

dramas have endings. that's what makes them dramatic. they are definable, finite stories. this happened, this is the ending.

ongoing storylines are something else completely. those are sagas. and i decided yesterday that if you're going to tell me about your ongoing saga, you really shouldn't expect much of a response from me unless it's in old english rhyming couplets. of course, having said that, i probably won't stick to that rule, because who really has the time to rhyme while things are going on?

still, you get bonus points for a) singing b) musical accompanyment (saxophones or bagpipes preferred, but a cello will do in a pinch) c) sonnet format.

that's all. now go back to work. slacker!

wow. my dad just sent me my grandfather's obituary. strange. eerie.

first off, the post has a great review of the hives album veni vidi vicious. the band is playing at the black cat on june 15th. they are fantastic live. short show, but full of energy.

second, starting today, i'm putting my last dregs of purely photorealistic stuff up on the right click gallery. i only have a week's worth of material, so the next seven days will be fairly explicit stuff. you have been warned.

everything past that starts to get into the realm of more abstraction. from slightly abstract to completely off-the-wall stuff like what i posted yesterday. you might say that i have range. if i considered myself an artist, that is.

i am a writer, though, which means that i have that irrepressable urge to move things around until they make sense. to that end, i was considering the order of what i've written and i decided that not fish; duck is a follow-up book, but it makes more sense as a follow-up to weapons of devotion, not the podium.

so, to make sure this is clear to my readers (both of you), here's the handy guide. i wrote what the thunder said first. then the podium. then not fish; duck (which has elements of what the thunder said in it). then weapons of devotion.

the order you should read them in is the podium, weapons of devotion then not fish; duck. (what the thunder said doesn't stand well on it's own and isn't included in the rotation as a seperate novel, in case you were wondering.) is that clear? good.

finally, something i've noticed over the past few months is how many of the people i know have severe self-esteem issues. gradually, i've come to the conclusion that everyone has self-esteem issues. this should be self-evident, i suppose, but it really isn't. i mean, so many people don't seem to get the fact that they have self-esteem issues that they miss the point that they are no different from anyone else.

we are all fucked up people who don't think we're good enough. once you grasp that, i think, a lot of what people do starts to make a lot of sense. maybe.

good morning. not much to post right at the moment. my knee still hurts. i'm tired and six feet under was really, really good last night.

i got a positive response from writer's relief and i sent off a request for their new client package. so i'm that much closer to actually doing something with my writing. (at the same time, i'm fairly close to calling not fish; duck a complete wash and not ever bothering with it again. for the third time.)

there's a new piece on the souvenir koan today. and the picture on the right click galleries started as a portrait. i'm very happy with the way it turned out, though. very abstract and in the mode that i've been working with lately.

more later, when my brain wakes up.

first off, thanks to everyone who has expressed their condolences about my grandfather. he's been going for the past four months, but this was the end and i'm actually kind of happy that it's over. he was tired and it's not very fun wondering when someone is going to die. especially when that person is a very good friend of yours. i miss him.

we went to the hives in baltimore last night, which was fun. (the alternative would have been to watch the season finale of six feet under and i don't think i would have been able to handle that show. not yesterday.)

the hives show was, as usual, spectacular. they were only a few short feet away from where we were standing and they were fantastic. they played die, all right, which was one of the two songs i really wanted to hear (the other being metric system in time). all of their songs are good, though, so i wasn't at all disappointed by their choices.

the show was being taped for mtv2's concert series, which was interesting. look for us in the crowd.

the theater was hot (but not godawful hot, if you know what i mean). still, the band is from sweden and obviously are not used to the heat/humidity combo. the rhythym guitarist looked like he was going to pass out at any second from heat exhaustion.

one really cool thing they did was at the end of hate to say i told you so, where every member of the band just stopped cold and held the pose for a full minute. that took practice. showmanship. that's what makes the hives great.

of course, during the concert, i fucked up my knee. i woke up this morning and it make a noise somewhere between a snap and a pop (but no crackle) when i extended it. that was nice. so i'm hobbling around the office today. whee.

my father called this morning, waking me up to tell me that my grandfather died this morning. according to my mother, he had been comatose for most of the week and simply stopped breathing this morning. at least he died peacefully, in his bed. i don't know when the service is going to be, but my mother is going up there for a few days.

i'm not as upset about this as i thought i would be, but i've dealt with and grown accustomed to his passing (and he did pass away. slowly.) over the past few months. still, the idea that i'm not going to get intelligent, witty notes or calls from him makes me sad. he's not going to ever talk to me about writing again. that's sad. i miss it already. i really missed talking to him about my trip to london. things like that are what i'm going to miss. who he was, warts and all.

i've got other news, both good and bad, but i'm not going to worry about it right now. now is just time to wake up and face the day.

we threw away paper today, in anticipation of eccles, who arrives the week after next. (and dan arrives in dc the day after eccles leaves. and adrian will be here in the middle of august. we're just the culture list crash pad this summer.)

there were four trash bags full of paper that went by-by. and i organized all of my various piles of crap. in doing so, i discovered that i have seven rough (some are very rough) piles that each represent a story idea. sometimes it's just a seed (like the information about the apothocaries) and for some it is forty or fifty pages of notes and references that i want to work in. of course, that doesn't include the notes about the next revision of the podium (whenever that will be) and the notes about not fish; duck. i even have a pile of notes that wouldn't fit into not fish; duck and will probably inform an entirely other story. at some point.

so i guess i shouldn't worry about what to write next, huh?

i'll skip the extended "when will i have time to write?" histrionics. take them as read and let's move on.

we went uptown to the textile musuem, which is in a really nice area north of dupont circle. it was a beautiful day in general and everyone was doing stuff in the outside garden. maying tie-dyed fabric and weaving and using printing tecniques. lots of kids.

the gallery they had was very interesting. basically, people had made digital images and then used digital looms to create fabrics that were print-outs of the images. really cool stuff. great textures. (the museum is free.)

when we were in the gift shop of the musuem, i was looking at yo-yo ma's book on the silk road cultures, but decided that $25 was too much for a book that i was only marginally interested in. there was a neat book about different costumes that had been made up by contemporary designers. that was great fun. the great part about the fifth element were the costumes that had been designed to let you, the audience member, know that this was the future. i think a better written movie with the same attention to costume detail would be a very interesting experience. maybe. when i have a million dollars.