Here I am in Bensenville, Il, waiting for Final Fantasy XI and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow to arrive. Currently, I'm sitting in a Starbucks (hooray for corporate coffee), which is itself located in a Dominick's, which appears to be a fairly upper end supermarket. In order to stay awake, I'm drinking coffee, typing in Notepad and listening to two Russian women...talk about stuff I can't understand, since I don't speak Russian. I think they're a mother/daughter pair. The daughter is really cute but is, of course, far too young for me.
The trip down was relatively uneventful. Picked up the truck from Penske and got on the road around 8:45. Lost radio contact with WUWM about 20 minutes further on, and scanned around until I found some music that didn't suck, which reminded me why I've eschewed commercial radio entirely. Seventy-five (Mapquest) miles later, around 10:30 a.m. or so, I pulled up. I've been told I made pretty good time, which is funny because the truck has a governor which kicks in at the ridiculously low speed of 72 mph and because I made a couple of wrong turns (fuck you, Mapquest), one of which put me perilously close to the vehicular bog which is traffic around O'Hare.
Jesus, fuck! I think I'm going nuts. The Russian mother/daughter team just left to be replaced by the Starbucks coffee counter woman, who is taking her break and is talking, in Russian, on her cell phone at the next table over.
(Note to self: research demographics of Bensenville area and figure out why so many native speakers of Russian are here.)
Okay, that's enough for now. I'm sleepy and I want to smoke and Perdido Street Station has taken this weird(er) turn, so I think I'm gonna go. Further bulletins as events warrant.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Sunday, March 21, 2004
...a title. Whee.
My brain feels like someone took a shotgun to my head. I've been running myself ragged for two fucking weeks--going without sleep, eating one meal a day, working between 50 & 60 hours a week--and it's caught up with me today. My thoughts are sprayed out in a fine mist of exhaustion. Unable to gather them in to me, they swarm around in a buzz of anxiety and failing confidence. And for what?
For someone else. Someone else is getting rich off my effort. Someone distant and unconcerned, who so unnerves his employees they speak of him in whispers. These people will, I believe, do anything at all to make this man richer, in the hopes that his cast off scraps will, though only offal to him, prove valuable to them.
Fuck.... I can't even look at this corporate culture today. Hellswine rooting through a mud of cold semen and crushed fetuses in the hopes that Great Mama Demonboar will turn her corpulent and necrotic carcass and shit out a nugget of pure opportunity. Those who settle just for suckling get a mouth full of clotted blood and the snickering disregard of those who know where the real meal'll squirt out. And god forbid you decide not to wallow; they'll trip you up as you struggle to your feet and drown you in their filthy hellstew.
Ah, no. Waking nightmares and sleeping reason and gibbering potential on the day they tear down the fucking Vet. That stadium was younger than I am, y'know?
People shouldn't outlive buildings that hold fond memories from childhood. Especially when the building is of such mass and magnitude...
For someone else. Someone else is getting rich off my effort. Someone distant and unconcerned, who so unnerves his employees they speak of him in whispers. These people will, I believe, do anything at all to make this man richer, in the hopes that his cast off scraps will, though only offal to him, prove valuable to them.
Fuck.... I can't even look at this corporate culture today. Hellswine rooting through a mud of cold semen and crushed fetuses in the hopes that Great Mama Demonboar will turn her corpulent and necrotic carcass and shit out a nugget of pure opportunity. Those who settle just for suckling get a mouth full of clotted blood and the snickering disregard of those who know where the real meal'll squirt out. And god forbid you decide not to wallow; they'll trip you up as you struggle to your feet and drown you in their filthy hellstew.
Ah, no. Waking nightmares and sleeping reason and gibbering potential on the day they tear down the fucking Vet. That stadium was younger than I am, y'know?
People shouldn't outlive buildings that hold fond memories from childhood. Especially when the building is of such mass and magnitude...
I mentioned something about a review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, didn't I?
Well, tough titty, kids. The movie didn't inspire me to come home and write about it. It inspired me to come home, drop Wilco into Fritz the Amazing Monophonic Stereo, pour myself a glass of port that's been breathing since the 16th, and write about the kind of stuff that really matters. So, in lieu of a proper review, I give you three (3) facts about Eternal Sunshine:
1) You ought to go see it. If you don't, fuck you where you breathe;
2) When the house came down I was weeping. Not just crying, mind you, but riding my way through wretched, throat-clutching sobs as silently as I could while tears streamed down through the fingers I had clamped over my nose in an attempt to keep the snot from pouring down my lip and onto my chin;
3) Damn it! I forget...but it was something important. It wasn't just "Passion of the Fucking Who?" or "Charlie Kaufman is a genius," or "Kate Winslet is really fucking hot!" or "Christ on a unicycle, Jim Carrey really can act!" No.... No, it was something much less tangible. Something about memory, maybe. Or identity, and the way it can simultaneously imply difference and similarity.
Anyway, enough about movies. There's real life out there, folks. And it simply must be lived.
I fell in love today. Serious, breathtaking, worldchanging love. I have no idea what her name is, but she's way too young for me and has the most lovely long and glossy dishwater blonde hair, bright and liquid blue eyes, flawless skin, no upper lip to speak of topped by the faintest feathery fuzz of a blonde fem-mustache. Her mouth was small and her cheekbones were high and her neck was long and her body was compact and curvy and looked like it was soft and generous in all the right places. She was direct and wellspoken and looked me in the eyes unselfconsciously while we spoke and she smiled but didn't giggle or fidget and she had a British accent--my god!--a melodious and lilting British accent that made my heart fly against my ribcage like a moth against a lamp and during our whole conversation of three minutes--and for 20 minutes after! Twenty-three brilliant and coolly glacial minutes!--I could think of nothing but how I loved her more and more purely than any woman or person I'd ever met in the entire world. Twenty-three minutes of sheer, wondrous bliss at her beauty, and at the thought that my heart could still react to that beauty. Twenty-three minutes of a perfection that, for all that it's gone now, continues to make me grin like a fool when I remember it.
Will I ever see her again? No. Will I ever feel that exuberant in her presence again? Most assuredly not. Do I love her, right now? Hard to say; it's impossible to separate my current emotions regarding this absent woman from the memory of the 23 minutes of joy I felt this afternoon.
And, truth be told, I don't care to.
Well, tough titty, kids. The movie didn't inspire me to come home and write about it. It inspired me to come home, drop Wilco into Fritz the Amazing Monophonic Stereo, pour myself a glass of port that's been breathing since the 16th, and write about the kind of stuff that really matters. So, in lieu of a proper review, I give you three (3) facts about Eternal Sunshine:
1) You ought to go see it. If you don't, fuck you where you breathe;
2) When the house came down I was weeping. Not just crying, mind you, but riding my way through wretched, throat-clutching sobs as silently as I could while tears streamed down through the fingers I had clamped over my nose in an attempt to keep the snot from pouring down my lip and onto my chin;
3) Damn it! I forget...but it was something important. It wasn't just "Passion of the Fucking Who?" or "Charlie Kaufman is a genius," or "Kate Winslet is really fucking hot!" or "Christ on a unicycle, Jim Carrey really can act!" No.... No, it was something much less tangible. Something about memory, maybe. Or identity, and the way it can simultaneously imply difference and similarity.
Anyway, enough about movies. There's real life out there, folks. And it simply must be lived.
I fell in love today. Serious, breathtaking, worldchanging love. I have no idea what her name is, but she's way too young for me and has the most lovely long and glossy dishwater blonde hair, bright and liquid blue eyes, flawless skin, no upper lip to speak of topped by the faintest feathery fuzz of a blonde fem-mustache. Her mouth was small and her cheekbones were high and her neck was long and her body was compact and curvy and looked like it was soft and generous in all the right places. She was direct and wellspoken and looked me in the eyes unselfconsciously while we spoke and she smiled but didn't giggle or fidget and she had a British accent--my god!--a melodious and lilting British accent that made my heart fly against my ribcage like a moth against a lamp and during our whole conversation of three minutes--and for 20 minutes after! Twenty-three brilliant and coolly glacial minutes!--I could think of nothing but how I loved her more and more purely than any woman or person I'd ever met in the entire world. Twenty-three minutes of sheer, wondrous bliss at her beauty, and at the thought that my heart could still react to that beauty. Twenty-three minutes of a perfection that, for all that it's gone now, continues to make me grin like a fool when I remember it.
Will I ever see her again? No. Will I ever feel that exuberant in her presence again? Most assuredly not. Do I love her, right now? Hard to say; it's impossible to separate my current emotions regarding this absent woman from the memory of the 23 minutes of joy I felt this afternoon.
And, truth be told, I don't care to.
Friday, March 19, 2004
My computer has been resurrected. The story of its death is tragic and also annoying. It can't possibly be unique.
Once upon a time I had a website. I had enough time, money and internet access to maintain it, and it gave me an excuse to learn some neat web design tricks. It was a vanity site, sure, but it was a fun toy to have and I make no apologies for it.
Then I quit my job to move to Milwaukee. I gave up a fair amount of money and, in order to make ends meet, I dropped my internet access. So my website sat idle. Then the hosting died. Then my domain registration died. Then somebody bought the domain name and filled the site with porn and pop-ups and spyware and an ungodly amount of hellacious and evil crap designed to make the antitechnological arguments of Luddites seem reasonable in the face of a neverending cycle of dialogue boxes that won't take "No" for an answer.
I know this because I went there.
Sure, it was morbid curiosity. I wanted to see if somebody had moved in or if the site was just sitting idle. Now, when I ditty-bopped over I hadn't yet installed a firewall, or antivirus software, or pop-up blockers. Essentially, my computer & I walked in naked, were brutalized and raped, then shoved back out into the internet never to be the same again. I emerged stronger. My computer was a wreck, and wanted euthanasia. I set my jaw, blinked back tears, and I wiped my computer and reinstalled.
I was a wiser, sadder man, knowing that I can never go to my homepage again. But entities have died, and I must honor them.
In other news, I'm going to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind tomorrow night, probably by myself, possibly with a friend, but almost certainly without a date. Seeing this movie breaks one of my most important moviegoing rules: never pay for a movie which stars Jim Carrey. However, Charlie Kauffman pretty much trumps everyone else, so while the decision was painful, I made it with a minimum of hesitation.
Expect a review tomorrow night.
Once upon a time I had a website. I had enough time, money and internet access to maintain it, and it gave me an excuse to learn some neat web design tricks. It was a vanity site, sure, but it was a fun toy to have and I make no apologies for it.
Then I quit my job to move to Milwaukee. I gave up a fair amount of money and, in order to make ends meet, I dropped my internet access. So my website sat idle. Then the hosting died. Then my domain registration died. Then somebody bought the domain name and filled the site with porn and pop-ups and spyware and an ungodly amount of hellacious and evil crap designed to make the antitechnological arguments of Luddites seem reasonable in the face of a neverending cycle of dialogue boxes that won't take "No" for an answer.
I know this because I went there.
Sure, it was morbid curiosity. I wanted to see if somebody had moved in or if the site was just sitting idle. Now, when I ditty-bopped over I hadn't yet installed a firewall, or antivirus software, or pop-up blockers. Essentially, my computer & I walked in naked, were brutalized and raped, then shoved back out into the internet never to be the same again. I emerged stronger. My computer was a wreck, and wanted euthanasia. I set my jaw, blinked back tears, and I wiped my computer and reinstalled.
I was a wiser, sadder man, knowing that I can never go to my homepage again. But entities have died, and I must honor them.
In other news, I'm going to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind tomorrow night, probably by myself, possibly with a friend, but almost certainly without a date. Seeing this movie breaks one of my most important moviegoing rules: never pay for a movie which stars Jim Carrey. However, Charlie Kauffman pretty much trumps everyone else, so while the decision was painful, I made it with a minimum of hesitation.
Expect a review tomorrow night.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
So...yeah.
These templates kind of suck a bit. Not complaining, just not especially happy with the selection. Of course, the price is right, so I'll quit my bitching.
Currently I'm hanging around in the living room, enjoying the portability of my new (as yet unpaid for) laptop and wondering what the fuck I should do with this space. The software installed on this new baby is bare bones at best: XP & its associated constituent parts, Yahoo! Messenger, Adobe Reader, ZoneAlarm and approximately 700 mb of porn. No Office. No Quark. Just Wordpad, Notepad and Blogger. For the time being, Blogger presents the most learning possibilities, so Blogger wins.
Self-referential bullshit like the previous two paragraphs always annoys me. We have amazing technology at our fingertips, the ability to communicate anything we wish to any number of people willing to take the time to seek out our thoughts and yet we waste it on frivolous drivel about what we had for dinner (steak, shrimp & Guinness), what we're doing (typing, watching TV and not sleeping) and the boring lives we'll lead tomorrow (work at five-unfuckinggodly-thirty in the morning, freelance business card design for the late morning and my D&D campaign from late afternoon 'til 10 p.m.). Where's the thought? Where's the wonder with the surrounding world? The desire to observe, comment and maybe even improve our surroundings? Or our lives? Culture is the conversation of human civilization, but instead of contributing most people seem content to change the subject to chit-chat or obfuscate the issues with gossip or, even worse, assume an open dialog is actually a monologue, that the symposium is a stage where drama and the desire for attention take precedence over logic and pure, simple talk.
Funny thing is, I hate preaching, hyperbole and clumsy attempts to riff off cliches almost as much as I hate self-referential bullshit. It's impolite to bitch about your neighbors' yards while your pet elephant shits in yours. And yet....
Anyway, let's raise a glass (of port, in my case) to hypocrisy, one of the small, reviled portions of human nature which allows us to communicate meaningfully all the same.
These templates kind of suck a bit. Not complaining, just not especially happy with the selection. Of course, the price is right, so I'll quit my bitching.
Currently I'm hanging around in the living room, enjoying the portability of my new (as yet unpaid for) laptop and wondering what the fuck I should do with this space. The software installed on this new baby is bare bones at best: XP & its associated constituent parts, Yahoo! Messenger, Adobe Reader, ZoneAlarm and approximately 700 mb of porn. No Office. No Quark. Just Wordpad, Notepad and Blogger. For the time being, Blogger presents the most learning possibilities, so Blogger wins.
Self-referential bullshit like the previous two paragraphs always annoys me. We have amazing technology at our fingertips, the ability to communicate anything we wish to any number of people willing to take the time to seek out our thoughts and yet we waste it on frivolous drivel about what we had for dinner (steak, shrimp & Guinness), what we're doing (typing, watching TV and not sleeping) and the boring lives we'll lead tomorrow (work at five-unfuckinggodly-thirty in the morning, freelance business card design for the late morning and my D&D campaign from late afternoon 'til 10 p.m.). Where's the thought? Where's the wonder with the surrounding world? The desire to observe, comment and maybe even improve our surroundings? Or our lives? Culture is the conversation of human civilization, but instead of contributing most people seem content to change the subject to chit-chat or obfuscate the issues with gossip or, even worse, assume an open dialog is actually a monologue, that the symposium is a stage where drama and the desire for attention take precedence over logic and pure, simple talk.
Funny thing is, I hate preaching, hyperbole and clumsy attempts to riff off cliches almost as much as I hate self-referential bullshit. It's impolite to bitch about your neighbors' yards while your pet elephant shits in yours. And yet....
Anyway, let's raise a glass (of port, in my case) to hypocrisy, one of the small, reviled portions of human nature which allows us to communicate meaningfully all the same.
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