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February 28, 2005

my ______ wants to kill ______

My guitar brain wants to kill your mama me.

I've been so overwhelmed with helplessness and emotionality this past couple of weeks that I've had the distinct feeling of my brain actually wanting to leap out of my skull and attack me!

I've just been so aware of my shortcomings and so powerless to mitigate them. I feel ineffective and a menace to all those around me. It's like someone is walking around holding up a mirror to my face. What makes it worse is that although it's painful, I know how forgetful I am, and I know how easy it is to go back to just living like the gentle bulldozer that I am, and just pretend that everything's okay.

I think: Should I just go to a fucking psychologist? Should I set aside more time to practice dharma? Lay in bed and sleep every minute I'm not working? Should I hole up in a clock tower and do something that will get me shot? Drink to oblivion? Should I play Frank Zappa really loud until my brain is forced to drizzle gently and harmlessly out my ears? Should I tell my brain to "bring it on"? Should I start walking towards Canada? Should I just shun all human contact so no one gets burned? But instead I just blunder on.

I'm actually doing a pretty good job of fronting. Considering I think I've had strep throat for about 2 1/2 weeks now, and the whole brain thing. Here's today's Zen question, what's the sound of one person's brain reaching out and slapping them? When is this going to calm down!?

Oh yeah, and Loverzan put up her latest series of cool emotional landscape paintings. They're quite potent and cool.

February 25, 2005

the 100 names for snow, demystified

huantla: special snow rolled into "snow reefers" and smoked by wild Eskimo youth

Also indespensible is the shift key FAQ.

And, when, exactly did the Weekly World News start sounding like The Onion?

word.

February 21, 2005

some stupid stuff

arm_muscles.jpg

I weighed myself the other day, and saw with a shock that I am at my absolute top weight ever, at 137 lbs. This evidently means I am no longer an official lightweight. From now on you can refer to me as a Super Lightweight, or as is my preference, a Junior Welterweight.

Oh yeah, I have a little story too.

I went to a friend's house with Nate to kick it supa-mellow and watch some Chappelle's Show. Not having a TV, cable shows are still kind of a delightful novelty for me. We were there for a few hours, and finally left late in the evening.

There was frost on the ground when we left, and about 30 kids standing in a big group down at the end of the street. It seemed like a strange hour...and I could hear some kind of interesting noise so I wanted to go check it out. As I got closer I saw the core was one group of about five guys huddled up next to each other. I could only just barely hear, but it sounded like they were making some kind of music. The rest was mostly stragglers and one group of girls giggling off to the side.

I was a hair intimidated by their street presence on this suburban street, but man, if there's some kind of street rhyming going on in Shoreline then I want to hear it. So I went right up to them and circled around a little, but they were just kind of wrapping up the rhyme they were doing, and I didn't end up hearing anything.

I looked up and saw that Nate had thought we were parked this way and had just kept walking towards the end of the street. I called out to him and the core group of guys finally looked up at me and asked me what I wanted. I said, "I just wanted to hear some rhymes."

The ringleader-lookin' guy gave me a raised eyebrow and said, "You got five bucks?" I thought about just telling them to piss off and seeing if I could goad them into rhyming, but then I realized I did indeed have five bucks and like...what the hell...what was five dollars to me?

I pulled it out and gave it to him, and it was like flipping a switch in their attitude. "You wanna flow?" one of them said. I probably couldn't rhyme my way out of a paper bag, so I just said, "Hell no, I want to listen. Shit, it's my five bucks!"

So they circled up and fully three of them started beatboxing as one. I was just so sad I didn't have anything to record them with...one guy laying down a thick, heavy amazing beat that filled the street, and the others doing some strange clipped kind of sporadic percussion.

As two of them started to rhyme I was dimly aware of a car pulling up and talking to one of them. I didn't hear the exchange at all, but evidently it was come kinda signal to break the party up. Several of them just stopped and started walking behind the house they were near...into some kind of backyard shed.

"Hey wait," the man I had given the fiver to said, "he gave us five bucks. We can do it a cappella!" The bassy beatboxer said something dismissive and kept walking.

Only this guy, and one short beat boxer stayed. They looked at me for just a moment and then the beat boxer started a quiet, whispering, clicking beat, and the one remaining rapper busted one last fierce rhyme. I don't remember a word of it, but it seemed spontaneous by the way he had to pause and fake a couple of times...but mostly he just rocked it out.

I don't remember what the rhyme was about, but when he wrapped it up a few short minutes later, he gave me a bit of a worried look. I chuckled at him, "I got my money's worth," and he smiled as I walked off.

Best rap show I've ever been to in Shoreline.

Then the next night I went to a crazy 80's roller skating party. So it was a pretty good weekend, really. I think the hokey pokey really is what it's all about.

February 16, 2005

down down down to oly

Playing with Cara's electronic toy.  An LED flashlight, of course!  What were you thinking?

A good friend of mine went to Evergreen State College a few years back, and so I have sort of a strange satellite friend group in Olympia, Washington. Also known as Oly. It's the capitol of the state, and home to one of the most notoriously hippie schools in the state...so it's this weird mix of students, hicks and politics.

There are several plots of land where students and other sweet ne'er-do-wells congregate in makeshift structures so as to afford books or beer or both, and the Bog is one of them. Chickens and beasts abound. Luckily the place is well protected.

No one here but us.

The place is littered with tenderly constructed makeshift houses, which I have been informed are all built strictly to code, using only the most state-of-the-art building materials. Of course, these houses are supported by the finest amenities.

Damn...I didn't get pictures of the Bombay Sapphire window upstairs!

As well, there is all manner of useful and/or nonsensical stuff lying around, and the idea of personal property here is evidently a bit loose, if a bit distressingly at times. (Dear Cara, I "borrowed" some butter.)

Really I came down here to see a good friend of mine off to Arizona, and to see her pretty new pit bull pup.

We were going to see another friend's band, Head For the Hills play some amazing bluegrass at a brewpub in Oly called The Fish Bowl, but we showed up quite late for his set. I was bummed. I've heard him play guitar, but never seen him play banjo. We hung out and drank a beer, and the band invited us back for a nice little personal set. Sublime.

You try to get a good picture of a pit bull trying to pick up a bowling ball in the dark!

(Note: Yes, the dog did pick up the bowling ball, and drag it around.)

February 13, 2005

tinylj 2

I'm starting to have a little LiveJournal community, but those LiveJournal people are so insular that they only read blogs via their friends pages. Even my good buddy Busta doesn't read my blog because it doesn't show up on my friends' page.

So, I spent an afternoon installing a MovableType plugin, so I could make my posts replicate over in LiveJournal land, and show up on people's friends pages. But no dice! They would show up on my LJ , but not on the friends pages.

Bah! An afternoon wasted! But finally I had some determination the other day and contacted livejournal about it. They gave me a useful suggestion and now I can actually make my entries show up on the friends pages.

So, this is a Hi there! To LJ people, and an invitation to visit the real tinyblog, or just read my entries on the friends page.

I've been writing the tinyblog since 2000, and have written some crazy-ass stories about myself and other people, and posted some links to some truly worthless things, like articles about squirrels that can waterski, and recipes for twinkie sushi.

I wish there was a way to unify the comments, so I didn't have two different sets of comments, but oh well. Welcome!

February 7, 2005

only the most important supplies

Nate and I went on a trip, and we brought with us:

An albatross,
a ballistics manual,
a cephalopod,
Daschle comma Tom,
Ecclesiastes,
Farfegnugen,
GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan,
Heat-in-a-Can,
the Imperial Guard,
a Japanese exclamation: Bonzai!,
karma accumulated since beginningless time,
a laser gun,
a Motley Crue t-shirt from the girls, girls, girls tour,
Narcolepsy,
an obstrician,
a pomegranate,
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy season 2 5 DVD set with all the special features including in-depth cast bios,
the Refuge Tree (om ah hung),
the Science Project of Nate (involving red food coloring and baking soda),
a Torque Wrench,
an unspecified undulating unguent,
velour of the finest quality,
a waterbed,
eXistenz, the movie (it was either that or a Xylophone),
Yertle the Turtle, and
a zamboni.

February 3, 2005

oddities for ya pleasure

Twinkie Sushi is so wrong it's....still so wrong. (via some canuck blog I can't remember)

The Nerd Watch Museam proves that Douglas Adams was so, so right. (via mefi)

Seanbaby has a bunch of writing about old video games that makes me pee my pants it's so funny, especially his article about the 20 Worst Games of All Times

Learn about Angband, the semi-retarded old UNIX game that Rowan and I are obsessed with.

And then in the weird outdated games category, check out some of Adam Cadre's cool Interactive Fiction.

Weapons made out of office supplies.

Tony Blair has lips like a baby.