May 2004 Archives

read this and pass it around. the web is good if you're feeling subversive.

last night, we went to see Cat Power at the great american. we missed the first opening act, but were in time for the second.

i think they were called Mt. Egypt and they were from the part of France where "to sing" means to reach down to the tired, unwashed depths of your soul, rumage about for last weeks used towels, and wring them out into a dirty bowl to make ear soup.

i have no idea what that means. but it certainly isn't good.

"I want them to hit everything," he said. "I want them to use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help out there, and let's start giving them a little shock."

Mr. Kissinger immediately relayed the order: "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves."

so i posted these pictures, and realized there was no way i could do that without telling this story:

when my brother was searching for a place to live, he looked at a place on albion street. the landlady walked him up to the third floor flat, pointing out the beautiful murals on all the landings. they were, she said, by a local artist who had passed on. a friend of hers, named snowflake. have you heard of him? no? lev hadn't either.

"If the ice age comes again, you know, I'll deal with it. I'll get by. It's always something."

okay. i will confess. i am not a very good scientist. i barely made it through high school chemistry with mr. lemeaux and the human evolution course i took at college had me panicked that i would fail.

yesterday, i proofed madhavi's final paper of the semester for her and was fairly exuberant that i understood most of it. it was, i believe, about fish. (*kidding!*) it was definitely about fish, and what factors might make a rare species rare, and what sort of experiments a scientist could do if they wanted to prove any of it. i think it is important to note that these are unanswered questions. scientists do not even have a clear definition of what "rare" means. jeez!

i'm just wondering:

are jell-o and speed-o related?

'cause that would be cool.

unless you got them mixed up at the pan-pacific swim off and low rent dessert fest.

i had a yucky day yesterday. feeling emotional, but without something definitive to blame it on. sometimes i felt scared. sometimes i felt sad. sometimes i felt fine. all over the place like one of those superballs hucked out a car window.

i felt a little crazy. a little nutsy-cuckoo.

madhavi took me in like a lost puppy and made me tea and baked me cookies ('cause she rocks), but i still woke up feeling blicky.

damian said something really wise last night.

we were on his back stairs, talking about relationships, and the migration of anger to sorrow, and the strange confluence of events that roiled the social scene last year. zay was there, kind of drunk, and he was speaking freely about what he sees in me and what he sees in madhavi.

no really. i'm not kidding. here's how it goes:

there are all these storm trooper guys (as in star wars goons, not nazis) standing up on a platform that's outside. there's a conveyor belt below them carrying round trays the size of kitchen tables. on these round trays is this alive-goo-stuff that vaguely looks like vomit with all these tiny mouths. there are also some vegetables, like potatoes and cabbage.

this is a good word i just made up. carploo.

see, i was going to type carpool, which is actually a word, but instead i changed my mind and typed carploo.

i think carploo-ing is like carpooling only it sounds better, and it's less organized. a carpool is what you take to work to save on gas money. you carploo when everyone's too drunk to drive except for jackie marbles.

which begs the question, how come i don't know anyone named jackie marbles?

madhavi called on my way out to lunch. she cancelled her big wanger dive trip this weekend because she is full of the ill.

she warns, quite logically, that i, too, may be soon full of the ill, but oh no. not me. you'll never take me alive, copper!

actually, i felt fine until she said something. then i noticed i was suffering from the symptoms she's got: queasy stomach, light headedness, giant mutant face boils, and an ability to see through time but, quite irritatingly, only to this bathroom stall in a condemned warehouse on future thursday mornings.
the grafitti there is bad.

will our hero get sick? will he be able to dress like superhero for the bar crawl for his brother's birthday (he's going to be "cell phone reception man")? will he save the damsel in distress by bringing her soup tonight and calling her wildflower?

stay tuned, valiant audience, and see. or read. or whatever.

see, it's like a prince song, just about ME!!!

so exciting.

busy, yet finding time to blog for you, the children.

of course i don't have much to say as i've spent most of today putting together fed ex packages and doing laps around the building. but i'll think of something interesting.

okay, i had some weird-ass dreams last night.

see it's like a prince song? just about you!!

aren't you excited? good. now stop being such a lazy bastard and update your freakin' blog.

what? you think i have nothing better to do all day at work than WORK? how am i supposed to properly procrastinate if you do not update your blog? i mean, Jesus H Christ! do you think i feel like blogging all the time? no. no i do not. but i do it for the kids. think of the children.

the power of christ compels you

yesterday, after he bought me lunch, jack said, "your heart is not in it, but you do such an excellent job!"

i serendipitiously ended up eating at mandarin villa at the same time as the audio crew. the behind the scenes guys who hang mics and run cable and engineer the audio. they waved me over to join them and jack ended up buying us all lunch.

i went to the dentist yesterday.

after a somewhat angsty tuesday, i actually woke up feeling not-sore yesterday. this is big news as i've been extra-sore for like, forever. physical therapy is working! or maybe it was the ibuprofen i took before bed (can you say, "drinking?")... but in any case, the soreness, not around for a change! it did not hurt to hold the toothbrush!

sigh. it usually hurts to hold a toothbrush? man. that's lame. good thing i'm stretching regularly and starting acupuncture and taking it seriously.

i don't often spend a lot of time or energy thinking about how i fit in amongst the general male population. when i'm faced with a more or less random cross section of my peers, however, i find it vastly discomforting.

last night, it happened. me, in a room with eight other men of about my age, discussing energy bars for an hour and a half. let me just tell you this: bleh.

okay. so one guy, and i'm not making this up, was wearing a ratty black hat with -- and i swear i'm not making this up -- an ace of clubs in the brim. an ace of clubs. what does that mean? is he applying for a role in the next lewis carrol book? i am afeared. and this man was only one of nine and, even scarier; i am also one of nine. god save me!

i've become addicted to death cab for cutie.

specifically, their album Transatlanticism and even more specifically the song Transatlanticism. it's all sad and beautiful in just the way i adore.

the lyrics go:

the atlantic was born today and i'll tell you how:
the clouds above opened up and let it out.

last night, after making madhavi watch The Producers (she only kinda liked it), we wuz flopping around in cuddle-land and i told her about the pizza cutter dream.

i used to have this dream every so often when i was younger. i really can't recall if it was younger like eight or younger like fifteen and no idea if i had the dream three times or twenty, but it was reoccuring.

in the dream, i'm asleep in my bed in my room which is not my bed and not my room, but happy and cozy none-the-less. the door to the hall opens and two men wearing white whirlpool repairmen-style uniforms come in. they've got a big pizza cutter. they roll me over, open up my back, and take out my spine.

then i thank them and am sooooooo happy!

i posted some new pix of kendra and me kicking around this weekend. enjoy.

talking with my father about the state of orchestra funding, i wax pessimistic. there's just no money for symphonies these days. audiences are aging quickly, a lack of music education is strangling future subscribers, and the musicians... well they study their whole lives and have immense talent so they deserve big paychecks. plus you gotta have special halls with good acoustics. it all just adds up to a fairly grim prognosis.

my father expresses disbelief. he thinks there will be support for live symphonic music long into the future.

last night, madhavi and I slipped up close to the stage to see ben kweller rock out at the fillmore. i had put a song of his on a mix for her eons ago and, well, we crush on him musically.

he's like beck, but just out of high school or something.

i am wearing my lobster disguise.

this is what happens when you sit outside on the lov-er-ly back deck of your flat in the unusually roasty-toasty san francisco sun drinking coffee, eating bagels and swooning until the new york times sunday crossword is done.

can i get a big shout out for the sun? yeah, dog. the sun. word. sun is in the hizzouse!

weekends like this reinforce the whole "get the hell out of dodge" side of my personality. so yes. the weekend was succulent. like a just slightly overripe peach.