ham fisted theatrics

2003-06-13T04:01:00.000-07:00

IT LIVES.

Please update your links accordingly, all three of you.

2003-06-12T00:55:00.000-07:00

Moral dillema.

The new site is up and running thanks to Dean Esmay, but don't look at it yet, ain't shit to see. I can't decide whether I should go all-out with a new template, or stick with the old standard. Since it's on MovableType, though, and I don't know anything but the basest of HTML, I don't really know how to do either. Should be interesting.

2003-06-10T03:09:00.000-07:00

Pretty much everyone’s parents are divorced, it seems like, and like most problems it’s only going to get worse. I imagine my son coming home from his first day of school twenty years from now telling me about how they all had to share an interesting fact about themselves and one kid stood up and said his original parents were still married, and everybody was a shocked sort of quiet, and nobody talked to him for the rest of that all-important day, and I imagine telling his mother about this later that night on a long-distance call to Bermuda, where she’s having her honeymoon with her new husband Ricardo.

Since it’s the future, I will be able to smell how it smells on their honeymoon in Bermuda. Every movie portrays the future as full of holographic video-phones, but the movies’ vision of the future has never, ever come to pass. Which is why there will be smell-o-phones, not holo-phones. The home office where I ply my futuristic trade will suddenly fill with the scent of tanning oil and sea salt while I tell her the story of the outcast in our son’s class.

Halfway through the conversation my son will be on his way to get a glass of water and hear his mother’s voice through my office door, so he’ll knock softly on the door and of course I’ll let him in. She’ll say how much she misses him and he’ll say much the same thing, and she’ll ask how school went today and he’ll say good but he can’t wait for summer, because according to the terms of our divorce she’ll spend summers with him and right now it is very much winter where I live when I’m thirty-five.

Phones will have changed greatly, but guys named Ricardo won’t, he will be taller than me and more rippling with muscularity and vaguely Latino, and I’ll hear him enter the room in Bermuda as soon as my son leaves the room in America. I’ll have met him first at our Christmas party a couple years before this conversation, him being my wife’s personal trainer at the time. At the party, shaking his hand, I won’t have expected our statuses relative to the mother of my child to someday change this much. But maybe I should, it’s the future, and you will have been married to just about everyone by the time you hit the grave.

She will get up to help Ricardo with suitcases, and her head will bob towards the table with the phone receiver as she rises and sensitive futuristic instrument that it is, just for one second in my office a thousand miles away I will smell her hair.

We will exchange pleasant goodbyes, and I will hang up the phone, stand up, and go and clean the house, top to bottom, even at 11:45 at night, which is what forty-year old me does when he can feel his heart rebreaking.

2003-06-09T01:50:00.000-07:00

It was four AM, and if that Dashboard Confessional guy would've been there, I would've shot him through his goddamn heart. Through his guitar, into his ribcage with the more shotgun pellets the better. But he wasn't there, his music was playing loudly from an upstairs bedroom while I was downstairs on a leather couch trying fitfully to Sleep It Off. At first I'd had a blanket and a pillow, but Alyx and her boyfriend Andrew were curled up on the floor on the other side of the coffee table, and I was feeling benevolent, and warm. So I gave them the blanket first, then minutes later realized that I had the natural pillow of the couch, all they had was new carpet and each other's arms, so I gave them the pillow too, great humanitarian that I am. I tucked my bare feet in the couch cushions and went back to trying to sleep.

Borders are meant to be crossed. Limits exceeded. Records shattered. Toilets clung to. Kierkegaard said having a rule means you automatically have to break it, to prove you're alive. A clever t-shirt at my store today said "My drinking team has a wakeboarding problem." Another shirt said "Old No. 7." I just about wretched.

Matt Welch on blogging:

I was going to make some joke complaining about having to be on the record 24/7, but the truth is I’m glad there is historical evidence -- and lovely, at that -- of joyful days that my leaky brain is almost guaranteed to forget later.

Indeed. I just realized that, going back through my old blog entries, how many little things I would've completely lost if I hadn't written them down. Welch details a funny experience in Prague years ago he almost forgot, I'm talking about things that happened last week.

I'm going to the library tommorrow. What should I get? Please suggest below.

dcpierson.com will be up and running in a matter of days. My little blog-boy's all growns up. You're growns up and you're growns up and you're growns up.

2003-06-07T03:01:00.000-07:00

There, among all the other colorful produce, is the Angry Grapefruit.

There are other grapefruits, sure, but none of them have quite the same level of personality.

As you walk by, all the other grapefruits remain yellow, round, and respectfully quiet, but the Angry Grapefruit will tell you just what it thinks.

"Hey fatty," it might say, or, "Hey, ugly," or "How 'bout you go die, you fat ugly...uh..."

Occasionally the Angry Grapefruit will lose its train of thought in the middle of a long tirade of insults and swear words.

"Aw crap," it will say, "I can't think today. I need a smoke." It is not only the Angry Grapefruit, it is also the Smoking Grapefruit, on the occasion where it can convince people to buy it cigarettes.

"Come on," the Angry Grapefruit will say, "Just a pack of Camels. That's like $3.69 with tax." Then, as you walk by, inisting to yourself that you have never bought tobacco products for a fruit and you certainly aren't about to start now, the Angry Grapefruit will scream "Where you headed? You can't spare that? Too big a chunk out of the Food Budget, fatty?"

But you'll buy it anyway, even if you don't like grapefruit. Because let's face it, the Angry Grapefruit has personality.

2003-06-06T01:51:00.000-07:00

Forgive me if this comes out muddled, I can barely see the screen. Was just watching the replay of the MTV Movie Awards, and I think there were two Russian girls screeching an obscenely bad popsong, and I'm fairly certain there were thousands of shameless wannabe actress/dancers dressed as schoolgirls making out, but I honestly couldn't tell you because there was TOO MUCH FUCKING STROBE LIGHT. I was on the ground, thumping and twiching, and I'm not even epileptic. It was bad. It's as if they realized the American public could no longer be shocked, and decided to blind us all instead.

It's true, the American public CAN no longer be shocked. But MTV hasn't gotten the memo yet, which is why this year's Video Music Awards will be broadcast live from one of Christina Aguilera's ovaries. Which one? Call our 800 number now and vote!

Alright, Blogosphere, now we're going to play a little game. It's called "I blather on and on about how you should link my friend Guillermo's blog, and then you link Guillermo's blog. Deal? Deal.

Guillermo lives in what I'll describe here for the sake of you going and looking as a haze of booze and women, although he's trying to cut down on the booze, and fend of the women with whips and chairs. He's like Hemingway with skin pigmentation. Tony Pierce with capitalization. This majestic post features Charles Dickens, drunken old ladies, rancher's daughters, and nostalgia. This one, intoxicated escapades and faded love behind the scenes on a Disney cruise. A good portion of his archives aren't working (thanks, Blogspot) but what is working is worth a read. And if you like what you see, you should link him. I know links are like your special flower: you should only give them away to someone you love, or promises you acting work. But I think you could learn to love Guillermo. Don't you?

While I'm on the begging-for-other-bloggers tip, is Grandma's medication-she-needs-to-live money burning a hole in her pocket? Why not steal it while she's sleeping and give it to Treacher? Like Grandma, he's bone-thin, but his condition is caused by poverty and starvation, as opposed to extremely advanced, logic-defying, downright repulsive old age.

Come on, people. We're all in this Internet together.

2003-06-04T00:37:00.000-07:00

Blargh.

Tengo que hacer un otro "draft" de mi obra de teatro. Que lastima.

Sorry, we were speaking bad Spanish at dinner (not like this house is bilingual, it was just fajita night) and it sort of stuck with me. If you didn't take four years of high school Spanish to reach the pinnacle of linguistic comprehension that I have, I said I have to do another draft of the play, what a shame. And it is a shame, not that I have to do another one, but that I will probably once again put it off until the deadline, and it will both suffer and be bolstered as a result.

Basically, I've gotten into the habit of doing the real meat of my playwrighting in long, caffeine-powered late night binges, more often than not the day before deadline. It's good, because it forces me to do it, and if I didn't have that gun to my head I'd fart around endlessly and produce less-than-stellar work. It doesn't matter if I don't have it all figured out yet, I have to figure it out, hopefully before sunrise. And I do. Problem is, the frantic pace sometimes makes me sloppy, and while the resulting stuff is at least COMPLETED, it's sometimes a little rough around the edges. So it's two sides of a pretentious writerly coin. It's like if you discovered heroin enhanced your creativity. The good news: for whatever reason, it seems to help. The bad: It's HEROIN, dipass.

You can see my concern.

If Pixar were a woman, I would marry it.

If Pixar were a man, it could probably talk me into things I wouldn't normally be down for.

If the Bible were about Pixar, I would follow it religiously. (HA!)

Because you see, the thing about Pixar, that differentiates it from the opposite sex, or all-powerful deities, or life in general, even, is it never disappoints. Five movies they've made, by my count, and every one of them has ranged in quality from great (A Bug's Life) to obscenely wonderful (Monsters, Inc.) And while not every one of them has been my favorite movie in history, you'd be hard-pressed to find more perfect films, both in the technical and the classical sense. They take us places we've never been, they make us care about the characters, they make us "ooh" and "ahh," they make us laugh, and if you're a girly-man like me, they occasionally make you cry.

They could easily fall back on the milquetoast Disney formula, and trust the stunning visuals to keep the audience subdued (Wachowski Brothers, I'm looking at you.) Disney tried that, in fact. The result was called Dinosaur and it was a piss-poor excuse for a movie. Why? Because it has soul. Pixar's like James Brown: It's nutty, it's eccentric, but dammit, it's got soul. (Pixar has not to my knowledge ever gotten fucked up on PCP and threatened people with a shotgun for using its bathroom, but I'd probably forgive it if it had.)

If I were a modern Hollywood actor, I would loathe Pixar. I'd drive by their offices at night with a Mercedes full of molotov cocktails, because they were threatening my career. They manage to create, with a bundle of pixels and elbow grease, a multitude of believable emotions greater than the combined abilities of all the Freddy Prinze Juniors, Paul Walkers, and recently, Ben Afflecks, all of whom can barely muster one (naked desire for a paycheck.)

Finding Nemo raked in 70.2 million dollars this past weekend, and earned every last damn one of them. Compare that to Disney's last animated effort, Treasure Planet, which opened with 12 million bucks and dropped, fast. People trust Pixar to deliver good family films, ones they won't have to praise by saying "At least I didn't want to claw my eyes out!". People trust Pixar to tell a good story, and Pixar delivers. The same can probably no longer be said about Disney, who, Lilo and Stitch being the exception, stopped being about good stories a long time ago.

So, long story short, see Finding Nemo and remember it is that makes movies wonderful, and what miracles can occur when smart people do work they enjoy.

Also...this just can't come out soon enough.

UPDATED: Spanish at the beginning fixed. "Tengo que." Yea, I knew that.

2003-06-02T03:56:00.000-07:00

Do you hang with naked dudes and blog-gods? No. Know why? 'Cause you're not my boy Brian is why. Deal with it. (Archives not working, should be the top post.

2003-06-01T15:56:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase some famous British graffiti: TREACHER IS GOD.

2003-06-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

This is almost like Freshman year all over again, staying up all night and on into morning for no good reason, except there is a good reason: Finishing a painful rewrite, fueled by Diet Mountain Dew Code Red and a deadline. Then taking JP to hockey practice at 6:10, which my dad would usually do: There's no reason for more Pierson men to be up at this ungoldy hour than is absolutely necessary.

Aliens cruising at low altitude at 6:00 am on a Sunday morning would conclude that the human race consists solely of old people, old people's dogs, spandex-clad cycle enthusiasts, and guys in white trucks taking their little brothers to hockey practice.

That's where I am right now: the hockey rink, writing on a thick stack of "Hockey Summer Camp" flyers because this table is one of those molded plastic ones with all the holes in it, and the book I brought is too small to use for a writing surface.

I was going to write, in that annoying newspaper-feature-writer kind of way, "Taking the kids to hockey practice on a Sunday morning seems to be largely a paternal obligation," because it was just me and a bunch of dads sipping coffee, leafing through newspapers, until two moms showed up. I'll bet my dad knows all these faces by heart. Poor bastard.

Out there on the ice 27 skates back and forth, side to side, backwards, whatever the drill calls for, better at skating at 12 than I am at walking at 18.

I stole the pen I'm writing with from the table where I got the flyers. It was chained to a plastic box full of sweepstakes entries, I liberated it with every intent of bringing it back, but ten bucks and a night of missed sleep says I won't.

Ooh, a comprehensive drill...They line up at the back, behind the net, then one at a time skate down, pass to one coach, get the puck back, pass to another, get it back, then shoot on their goalie.

27 shoots...misses. Better luck next time, buddy.

This place is pretty Zen at 6:45 like it is now. Just muffled inter-dad conversation, the rustling of pages, coughs, the clattering of pucks we're two sheets of plexiglass away from.

Dig this, if you can: My girlfriend's parents are out of town this weekend and I haven't seen her since Friday, when I dismissed myself from a birthday party to go write. She's staying at her friend's house, which is a block away from our houses. I passed by it last night walking to the store to get Diet Mt. Dew and peanut butter, neither of which I needed desperately at 11:15 PM but I just had to get away from THE PLAY. I walked by on the way back, couldn't remember if the only window available for knocking on was her friend's bedroom. Cursed her lack of a cellphone, then my lack of a cellphone, then walked back home and faced down the Behemoth again.

33 is dangerous, fast, aggressive, and about three feet tall. He and my boy 27 make a hell of a team.

A lot of these kids have whole clans attending practice, three little brothers in giant sweaters accosting the switched-off arcade games. Why not leave them at home? Church after this, maybe? If at mass this morning there's a bunch of kids sitting next to you, one of them giving off the none-too-faint odor of sweaty fungal hockey ass, you'll know where they were earlier.

33 just shouldered a kid a little bit into the boards, he hit 'em and crumpled. There are coaches on this side of the rink now, surrounding the wounded. His dad's waddling out there now, birkenstocks on ice.

They're diving across the ice, now, sliding like penguins. Then push-ups. Suddenly I feel I've never exerted myself to do anything.

Practice ends at 7:30, he'll be changing 'till 7:45. Home at 8, screw the last nuts into place on this damn hell ass third draft of a play succintly titled "Skip," send it off saying I need a 2nd set of eyes to tell me if it's any good because after this long continuously with anything it's like a mouth of thoroughly chewed food, rendered flavorless by familiarity. Type this up, post it 'cause if not now, when? Bed by 9. 9:15 at the latest. Awake at 3 ideologically, 5 realistically. Dinner. Promised Dana and Nicole I'd come to game night, well, didn't promise, but said I would, and on my last day of school an embattled near-retirement wizened old Irish english teacher told me out of the blue in the hallway, "Your word has to be gold, because it's all you have."

27 shoots, scores.

2003-05-31T01:22:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time,

The End.

2003-05-29T02:45:00.000-07:00

I dip my hands in the Pacific Ocean to wash off all the blood. I’m bent over; a little wave laps up, and by the time it rolls out my khakis are soaked but at least my hands are clean. Now if I could find my sandals I’d leave, but I’m not so sure I’d want to go back to the party.

Tom Werring, I just basically reorganized his face outside Lisa Baxter’s house in what started out as a drunken crowdpleaser but turned into assault and battery. Shouting woke up neighbors, neighbors called cops. Blue and red whirling lights pulled me off of Tom and when everybody else bolted for their cars I made a b-line for the beach, which is just down the block because Lisa Baxter is fucking loaded.

I shook teeth loose from his skull and somehow end up feeling like he’s the lucky one. There are liquid parts of him on the pavement, and dribbling down the street, and until recently on my fists and just now in the ocean, making the Pacific one zillionth Tom Werring, a great big diluted blood cocktail. Actual cocktails, and straight rum, and keg beer, make this all make sense. There’s only me in me, and a little bit in Melissa, Tom’s sister.

I think that’s why the fighting, but I’m not sure and it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that in days an infinitesimal bit of Tom Werring will be washing up on the coastline of the French Riviera and that makes me jealous because I’ve never been to Europe.

2003-05-28T01:32:00.000-07:00

All better now.

Pretty girl plus Christopher Guest movie will do that.

Actually, to be honest, I wasn't too terribly fond of the movie. A Mighty Wind, that is. It was no Best in Show, which was no Waiting For Guffman, which was no This Is Spinal Tap. There were just too many damned characters. It seemed like Guest, in a rush to fit in all his (admittedly talented) improv buddies, forgot what made his previous movies so funny, that is, the audience really getting a feel for the people onscreen. Here, we just get caricatures, one or two-joke sketches of these folks before we move on to the next one. Does it have its moments? Sure. Does it have Parker Posey? Yes, but not enough. Is there such a thing as enough Parker Posey? Perhaps only time will tell.

And while I'm in a criticizing mood: Was anyone else left kind of cold by Matrix: Reloaded? It just-- (WOOT WOOT!) What's that sound? Why, the analogy train is comin' round the bend! Let's all hop aboard and see where it takes us!

We had to do this project in Creative Writing last semester, writing the first five pages of a screenplay, as well as an outline for the rest of the film. People got really excited by that prospect, the fact that they only had to actually write the beginning of something. The kids in my writing group would turn in these five densely packed pages, full of car chases and disguises and mysterious phone calls, flashbacks to god-knows-what, plane crashes, that sort of thing. Set-ups that would get the audience wondering what the hell's going on.

And naturally, I asked. Who's calling? Who's conspiring against her? Why a monkey?

Uhmm...I haven't really figured it out yet.

The Wachowski brothers seem to be having the same problem. They've set up this fascinating universe, and it worked, for the first film. They got it and so did we. But now they have to hang around, and they've realized they never set any ground rules. What Neo can do, what he can't, that kind of thing. So now, his ability, the crux of the whole film, is being dictated by whatever cool stuff they want to show us and whatever's convinient for the script. Instead of the character shaping the narrative, the narrative, and the desire to pack that narrative with Escalades and Superman-style flying and specteral albino Rasta-men, are shaping the character, and the world he inhabits. Who's the French guy? Why the keymaker? Why won't Morpheus just shut the hell up for one goddamned second? They haven't really figured it out yet.

The car chase scene was bitchin', don't get me wrong. The problem is that, a week after seeing the movie, I couldn't even begin to tell you why it happened.

Lileks says it better than I do. Of course.

They're going to do a staged reading of the play I wrote first semester at the ASU summer student-productions festival, Moondance. I met tonight with my playwrighting mentor and ex-girlfriend's current boyfriend AJ, who's directing it. At my ex-girlfriend's family's house. Surreal? Yes. Helpful? Completely. Fun? Surprisingly so. He's a good guy, and I'm proud to have him at the helm. I've never collaborated on producing something I've written, and I think it'll be good for the script, and, in turn, for me.

The upshot: I have to retool and restructure the whole 113 pages in four days. Hopefully it will be closer to 90 when I'm done.

If you were to say to me right now that life was a strange and yet strangely wonderful thing, I'd probably agree with you.

2003-05-27T01:03:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the pause in blogging, I was in California for Chuck's mom's wedding. That was fun.

I'm no longer in high school, as of last Thursday night. The last five days have been full of interesting stories but for some reason I can't muster the energy to talk about them. I think I might be sad about graduating, because I've been in a strange mood the past couple days, but I haven't thought a lick about that particularly. It's sad that my emotions are so strange and stilted even I don't know what I'm on about half the time. I have to poke and prod at my melancholy, looking for symptoms, probing for cause, like it's the flu or something.

I don't think I'm depressed, don't like being depressed, try to avoid it. I think it's a silly, self-indulgent thing to be, especially when you have it as good as I do.

Growing up: What the heck is the deal.

You should probably, no, definitely, be reading Guillermo's blog religiously, assuming you're not already.

NOTE upon reading this entry just after I posted it: Some people turn to the bottle when they're feeling down. Apparently I turn to commas. Sheeesh, look at 'em all.

2003-05-22T01:14:00.000-07:00

Things were better back then, they always say, the people who were around back then, and you’ve always been afraid to admit you believe them.

You hear these stories. Men coming over to the new world, getting a job doing something hot or dangerous or both, sending his meager checks back to his family, dreaming of bringing them over too, but not ‘till he can guarantee they won’t be coming over just to do the hot or dangerous stuff. And then he does. And maybe later he owns the place. And one of those kids that comes over, years later he takes another boat, but not back to the home country, to some foreign land to fight for the only somewhat less foreign land that he just left, and he does it with bravery, grit, and determination, concepts such as irony and adolescent cynicism shaken out of him by seasickness and later by mortar fire. Because anything less than steel nerves and blind faith would get him killed, his buddy killed, his unit killed. He makes it. He comes back, he has a kid. Years later, that kid has a kid, and years after that, that kid has you.

All you can do is read books about their time, the sooty-faced man in the hellish factory, his mud-drenched son crouched in a hole in distant Europe. The great men of their times, the Abe Lincolns, the Churchills, and the no less brave but certainly less renowned legions at their command, they knew what time it was. They knew right from wrong. Light from dark. And if there was ever a question, they’d go to a wise old man from an era where the clarity of good and evil was even crisper, and he’d point the way. They’d look down it, see it was perilous and rough, but they wouldn’t deliberate. They’d pack a knapsack, breathe in, breathe out, and start walking.

You know where your car is. Where your school is. Where your girlfriend is. The locations of all the things that are supposed to matter, you have a pretty good grasp of. But what you really want to know is where, over the years, where they hid the really important stuff. Where they hid Truth. Where they put Sincerity so you couldn’t find it. If Trust sank with the Titanic, if Loyalty was hidden under a canvas tarp in the tiny cargo hold on the Hindenberg. Why we let someone paint everything shades of grey while we were asleep. Why we let our grandparents die and take all the wisdom with them before we can take it all down and put it someplace safe.

You want to have somebody point the way but even then you’re not sure you’d follow the wrinkly, trembling finger off into the woods.

2003-05-21T01:47:00.000-07:00

I think a good epitaph for my grave, well, not like I'm considering dying, hells no, this not-having-school thing is way too much fun, but in case the unthinkable happens I want the following carved on my tombstone:

He always had some sort of crumbs on his face but he seemed nice enough.

I think that'd be appropriate.

I read a whole book today. Cover to cover. Stephen King's "On Writing." Not bad. His advice? Read a lot, write a lot. And don't use adverbs. I've already read two of the eleven books I picked up at the library yesterday. I wish this summer would never end, even though it's barely started.

2003-05-20T02:09:00.000-07:00

I'm this week's Madpony of the week and you're not so sit on it, G.

Happy housewarming, Kristin.

2003-05-20T02:05:00.000-07:00

Well, it's over.

Let's wrap this up front page USA Today color-graph style. Now presenting:

DC's HIGH SCHOOL CAREER by the numbers

Pounds weighed, Freshman year: 180
Pounds weighed, end of Senior year: 157
Months waited after legally able to get drivers license to actually get driver's license: 8
Stop signs run resulting in T-boning by Acura weeks after receiving license: 1
Number of times favorite band changed: 3 (KMFDM freshman year, Radiohead sophomore, Creeper Lagoon Junior, realized having a "favorite band" was kind of a waste Senior)
Plays acted in, mainstage: 12
Plays acted in, one-act: 12
Hairstyles rocked: 3
Years of Spanish taken: 4
Spanish words retained: 24
Obscenely hot English teachers had: 2
Crushes had on redheads Freshman year: 1
Internet answer-sharing scandals avoided by cheating old fashioned way (girlfriend's study guide): 1
Plays written, one-act and mainstage: 5
Freestyle competitions won: 1
Friends named Chelsea had: 5
Friends who play guitar had: 6
Friends named Chelsea who play guitar had: 2
Years spent in Marching Band playing sax: 1/2
Times awkwardly shot out of the saddle in front of some girl's locker: 1
Times girl didn't even realize she was being asked out, subject changed: 1
Years Prom attended: 4
Girls kissed: 5
Virginities lost: 1
Times I wondered why people thought high school was so bad: innumerable
People I wish I had gotten to know better: see above
Years I wouldn't trade for anything: 4

2003-05-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

2003-05-15T00:52:00.000-07:00

This is what a nerd I am: I get songs stuck in my head like everyone else. But I also get words stuck in my head. And we're talkin' SAT words here.

Tonight I can't seem to get rid of panoply or panopticon, neither of which I had any idea as to what they meant, until I looked them up to link them just now. Although "panopticon" is pretty sweet: A prison so contructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times, without being seen.

Words are sexy. I don't care what anyone says.

2003-05-15T00:32:00.000-07:00

Night 2 of recycling a creative writing assignment as a blog entry. If I was really smart I wouldn't tell you. But that wouldn't be very honest.

Regular posting will resume once finals are finito.

The cab driver was mumbling to himself in Arabic. Actually, I shouldn’t say it was Arabic because I don’t know for sure. It could very well have been Persian, or Pashtun, or Indian, even, for all I know. He was a brown guy speaking a different language than me, and not to me. To himself, under his breath, in the front seat of the cab at 2 am in New York City.

They call it the city that never sleeps but at this hour it could’ve fooled me. All the stores were shuttered, the only other traffic was the occasional garbage truck. If I would’ve rolled down the window and shouted out my accusation I’m sure the city would have jumped up with a start and insisted it was just resting its eyes. But I’m pretty sure cab windows don’t roll down.

At the club, the comedian had mocked me as I left the room with Melanie’s cell phone.

“Going to call mom and dad and ask for a curfew extension?” he said.

“No,” I shouted back, “I’m calling my grandma.” And I wasn’t kidding.

“I’ll be back a little late,” I said in the hallway outside. “Probably like two.” She insisted I take a cab back uptown, she’d reimburse me tomorrow. I didn’t argue, wasn’t in much of an arguing mood. After all, I was in a comedy club with a model I used to go to high school with. If her psuedo-boyfriend hadn’t been there, too, I probably would’ve asked for that curfew extension.

Then I realized he wasn’t talking to himself. He had one of those hands-free earpieces, he was mumbling into a cellular phone just like I had been doing in the hall of the Comedy Cellar. Maybe it was the dispatcher on the other end, but it didn’t sound like it. Someone was keeping him company. I imagined it was a woman, his girlfriend, maybe, his wife, maybe, waiting up for him. She’d be flopping around their terrible apartment in the Bronx, watching late-night TV, trying to stay awake ‘till he got home. And he was saying, in this unidentifiable undecipherable language, just one more fare, I just have to take this bourgeois brat uptown to the Waldorf Astoria and then I’ll go park my cab and count my tips and I’ll be home by two-thirty.

Or maybe she wasn’t in the Bronx, maybe he didn’t bring her with him when he came to the New World. Her family hadn’t let her come, or they didn’t have enough money for the both of them to make it, so he’s over here saving up so at this time of night she’d be ten miles away instead of ten hundred thousand. Maybe the meter running up my fare is being mirrored by the long distance charges, but on a night like this he just had to hear her voice.

We pulled up to the hotel. I don’t remember what the meter said but I gave him a twenty and told him to keep the change.

And I was thinking, if speculating on things like that and writing them down is what I want to do for a living, maybe here’s the place to learn how to do it.

Five months later, I was in another vehicle, mine. In my home state, in the parking lot of my high school. It was seven thirty or so at night, and I’d just left a dress rehearsal. There was no Arabic spoken in that vehicle. There was one word, in English. It had four letters and it shook my windows when I screamed it after realizing the reason my truck wouldn’t start is that I had left the lights on that morning, coming in at six thirty AM for rehearsal for another play.

Greg gave me a ride home, and told me how proud he was of me applying for schools besides ASU and actually intending to go to them if I got in. I explained the concept of Early Decision: whereby I’d have a better chance of being admitted to NYU if I applied, and probably get more money, but if they accepted me, I’d have to go. When he dropped me off, my dad and I went back to school to jump my truck. When I got home the second time, I finished my online application and sent it off. Yes, the dramatic writing program is great, and yes, the city is an education in itself, but that night I think the primary reason I wanted to go is that I wouldn’t have to drive in New York and if I wouldn’t have to drive I’d have no stupid trucks in which to leave the stupid lights on.

I hadn’t kissed a girl in six months and I had slept probably ten hours in the last week. People have done stranger things than applying Early Decision to their out of state dream schools under those kinds of circumstances.

2003-05-13T23:44:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the school year we had to write letters to our future selves in Creative Writing. We opened ours today. Here's mine.

Sweet Donny P-

Whatup homes. Not much, I hope. Or lots. Good things. I wonder what has happened in between today and the day you're reading this. Hard to predict, considering you're such a loose-cannon-pimp-daddy-2002. 2003, now, I guess. How are the ladies treating you? Are you going to NYU? I hope you are. Don't fuck it up for all of us, ya bastard.

Right now, if it interests you, "Favorite Things" is playing on the stereo and I have Advanced Acting after this, and my whole Senior year is ahead of me and it will only be a matter of moments before I'm reading this again, in the cosmic scheme of things, anyway. And in the way it will seem by the time you get to it. I hope this class is fun, and this year.

Remember this always:

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
-Winston Churchill

People without the open diaries and all the trappings of self-record, how do they know what they thought a year ago? Half this stuff we must completely erase because it gets to start sounding so stupid, how do they remember it? They are disadvantaged by their inability to look back and go, "Wow, I was an asshole!" Poor guys.

You, you will always be recorded, charted, and checked for further review later.

Peace.
-DC
8/12/02

2003-05-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged from the school library in a long-ass time and I figured now's as good as any, since I have simply become immune to schoolwork. Well, immune's not the right word. Physically incapable works better, I think. I tried to work on that stupid play this hour, and it's like my fingers just knew I was writing something for school. They were afflicted with temporary carpal tunnel, they hesitated and stumbled over the keys like a punch-drunk prizefighter past his prime. Kind of like me. I've been in the circuit too long, now I just have to take these last few punches, wait for the ref to hold the other guy's hand up in the air, spit out my teeth and duck the hell out of this ring.

All the library shelves are taped off, with handwritten Xeroxed signs reading "DO NOT ENTER: IF YOU NEED A BOOK-ASK FOR IT AT THE CIRCULATION DESK. THANKS!!" like they always are towards the end of the year. The other day we were in the computer lab in sixth hour and Trevor and I saw one of the more anal-retentive librarians actually measuring the distance between the shelf and the chair she was going to put the tape on, to make sure no one would even come close to their precious books in this late autumn of the scholastic season. The turnstiles full of young-adult novels isn't taped off. Neither is the reference section. Maybe I'll cop me a thesaurus and a crappy novel about dragons. Figure I've earned it.

Every time they hear the sound of the printer they swoop in from the so-called "Circulation Desk" to paw through the output. Probably because Drew in my sixth hour wrote something about the librarians being cunts or douchebags in Word and then set it to print 600 times. This was a while back. I see they still haven't gotten over it.

I think I'll go duck in to second hour Economics and see if they're eating. What better way to celebrate my last Tuesday of high school?

2003-05-11T23:26:00.000-07:00

I've been flopping around in front of the computer for what's coming up on two hours because this semester I was supposed to write two one-act plays for my Advanced Studies class and I've so far only written one and there's only a week left in this semester.

Yes, I'll have the Procrastination Special with an extra helping of Procrastination and a cup of Procrastination on the side for dipping, please.

The problem is, I've had numerous ideas for this thing I'm supposed to write, and I get ankle-deep in them, decide they suck, and run screaming to the kitchen or the TV or bed and put it off for another day, tonight being no exception. Repeat until Wednesday when this is due.

My last play at MPHS was this last week, and now the Theatre Co. belongs to a new set of kids. It's sad, but freeing, in a way. Now I'm not working for the benefit or glory of some overarching entity. Now it's just me and the big, indifferent world.

Hello, big indifferent world.

And you are?

There are stabbing pangs of sadness where my heart would be if I hadn't traded my heart for cigarettes when I spent that month in the slammer. Now I'm going to finish out my last week of school and get a crappy-yet-better-paying-job, probably in telemarketing, and then go to New York. People will kill for lives like the one I have (and people kill for the sums I'm shouldering to furnish it, but I'm trying not to think about that so much.)

Does everybody feel like their blog is the most boring thing since white bread, or is it just me? Actually, I think white bread kind of shows me up. Wonder Bread has that retro-style rainbow packaging, Iron Kids has those fresh-faced uber-adolescents acheiving athletic glory, and white bread as a whole has a kind of secret-identity thing going on, since you know it was bleached to its unnatural palor but the question, dear friends, is WHY? White bread doesn't write blog entries that start out whiny and self-pitying then scold themselves in that same blog entry for being whiny and self-pitying only to return to complain about how dull that whole cycle just was. Come to think of it, white bread kicks pretty significant ass compared to me.

But that said, I still won't eat it unless it's the only kind of bread in the house. Wheat for life, suckas.

2003-05-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

My eyes feel like ashtrays.

That make any sense? I'll bet it doesn't. Was up 'till 3 last night finishing this damnable synthesis project, but glory be, we did it.

Shoulda seen my first hour humanities class (the class the project was due in.) Like zombies, only less cheerful.

I'm going to nap my ass off this afternoon. Then I'll wake up, well-rested but assless, and ready to party. Or be in a play. You know, whateva.

2003-05-07T00:44:00.000-07:00

You can feel it in the air and vibrating through everyone's collective unconcious, summer's coming. Blogs make it even worse, because half of the ones I read are authored by college folk and so that makes it seem like everyone in the universe is chanting in unison, if only fucking finals were over.

Finals don't faze me, ours aren't 'till next week. It's this week, this week whose name should be wreathed in flame and have that fart smell of sulfur. This week ass-loaded with a huge Humanities projects and an improv show and a play and a play I'm supposed to write and an awards ceremony, filled with dramatic tension between things I've been putting off and am loath to even start and things I really do want to do but there are just so damn many of them.

But of course, come summer when I'll probably be putting in eight hour bagging days, I'd probably capital-K Kill for a week like this.

Oh, and I have something closely resembling strep throat but not quite, that makes it painful to swallow and renders my voice a gravelly sack of fun. In the surfer parlance that naturally accompanies my new hair: Bonus!

Also I got bitched out for missing my performance date for a Shakespearean monologue in Drama, even though as the seventh hour bell was ringing I was in a doctor's office a few blocks away, lying on my side on that paper they put down, waiting for Dr. Kerr to show herself, thinking, "I'm going to miss my performance and get bitched out." How prophetic I was this morning. Also very ill.

Prom was fun this weekend. God, was Prom fun. Pictures to follow.

2003-05-03T02:14:00.000-07:00

My little brothers' Easter candy bags are sitting out on the kitchen table, and out of one of them is protruding a big chocolate bunny in a box reading "Peter Candytail."

(Pulls from pocket disturbingly lengthy list reading "Possible Gay Pornstar Names." Makes note.)

2003-05-03T01:55:00.000-07:00

The best part of X-Men 2 is that it has Anna Paquin, Famke Jansen, Halle Berry, and a very blue Rebecca Romijin Stamos, and also a hot Asian girl.

The second best part of X-Men 2 is Wolverine, and that there's not a lot of Cyclops, and the third best thing is Sir Ian McKellen.

The worst part of X-Men 2 is maybe three-quarters of the way through where the theatre fills with white smoke and you run into the lobby thinking "WEAPONIZED ANTHRAX!" but it turns out it was just a jackass with a fire extinguisher. That part is not likely to still be in the flick when you go and see it, and I highly recommend that you do.

So we all got free passes but now I won't know the ending until probably Monday.

Tommorrow night is Prom, and when the DJ's playing some terrible Faith Hill ballad and we're rocking slowly back and forth and I look into my date's beautiful eyes, what I'll really be thinking is but what will happen to the mutants?

But ten bucks says she'll make me forget about Professor X and Wolvie and the rest. At least for the night.

2003-05-01T00:48:00.000-07:00

I dropped from Honors Chemistry to Regular back in January, because science makes me want to cry tears of boredom, and in Honors Chemistry, she probably would've made me figure out the chemical equations of my tears.

Somewhere between NaCl and H2O, I'd assume, but assuming always got points knocked off my lab grades.

So now I'm in regular Chemistry, and it's pretty much everything a lazy, lazy boy could ask for: half the time we don't even do anything, we just watch taped episodes of Forensic Files, and for the last couple of weeks we aren't even doing chemistry, we're doing a special unit on forensics. Right now, we're on fingerprinting.

Let me start off by saying I have the pimpinest right-thumb print in history. There's simply no doubt. We did an assignment where our groups would chose one finger out of our combined thirty (except for the Team Farming Accident, which had a meager twenty seven to pick from), put it on a piece of paper, attach it to cards with all our fingerprints, and trade with other groups to see if they could figure out whose it was. Our group selected my right thumb print, because as I said, it simply rocks ass. We traded with a group of girls, and I swear it turned them on. This is one sexy thumbprint we're dealing with here. The kind of thing you'd get tattooed across your back all big-like, but you wouldn't have to explain it to people because they'd be too busy being dumbstruck.

I've spent the last couple class periods staring into these loops and whorls, so perfectly transferred to paper, rolled with the delicacy of a seasoned fingerprinting veteran, not a smudge among them. And they're amazing. They look even better under a microscope, where there appears to be a good mile between every ridge. And if you stare long enough, one eye closed, it's no longer your fingerprint, it's an Aztec burial mound. It's an open letter from the time when we needed, badly, to keep our grip on things, namely branches as we careened from one to the next through the trees.

And if you stare long enough, you can see how we kept our grip when one of those branches snapped and it wasn't a branch anymore, it was a club.

And if Jimmy Buffet's playing softly on the lab stereo and you're the only one in here anymore but this is just more interesting than going to sleep on your desk back in the classroom, you can read the history of human civilization in your finger oils plus ink on a sheet of printer paper.

And the bell rings, and you recall that we have pattern-seeking minds: we read more into things then there are things to be read, and it's time for fourth hour.

The number 27 seems to be coming up a lot lately. Every time I look at the clock, it reads X:27. On MusicMatch Jukebox, 26 is too soft and 28 is too loud, but 27 is just right. The store I work at is Number 27. Everywhere I go it greets me like an old friend.

Am I a convert to numerology? No. I just decided to look for a pattern that wasn't there.

After I got my digital camera, I decided it might be fun, just for some artsy bullshit with no particular purpose, to take pictures of various manifestations of the number 27. My birthday, my brother's birthday, my stepmom's birthday, and my cousin's birthday are all December 27th. It's my brother's hockey jersey number, also his self-proclaimed lucky number. What better number could there be?

So I did. And like I said, it started showing up everywhere, to the point where I don't think, Another strange incidence of numerical repetition! I think, but of course. It's simply the best number there is.

Does it mean anything? Of course not. It's a double digit number, and there are only, what, ninety of those? Only sixty appear in the minute portion of the time. All those numbers are everywhere all the time, it only seems to be all over the place because I chose to notice it.

If it had been thirteen, it would be the same thing. Or guys named Steve. They're everywhere. Point is...

We naturally look for order in chaos. We want to see common threads running through all walks of life. And sometimes there are, that's when we discover things like relativity and gravity and that's when I fail science tests. And sometimes, the only threads are the ones we imagine. Sometimes, the noise of existence is just that: noise. This post was nothing but me enjoying rubbing nouns and verbs together, any meaning you got out of it was thanks to the gland in your brain that says all things ought to have meaning. And it would be nice if they did. But they don't, always.

And all you really have are your family, your friends, maybe, Springsteen and Paul Simon songs, and a lot of useless pictures of the number 27.

He says there's no doubt about it
It was the myth of fingerprints
I've seen them all and man
They're all the same

-Paul Simon, "All Around The World or The Myth of Fingerprints"

2003-04-30T22:52:00.000-07:00

Blogosphere, say "whatup" to Bloggin' Granny.

Only like five posts in, and she's already threatening the Supreme Court with eternal damnation. This could get interesting.

2003-04-28T23:16:00.000-07:00

She said I never could be serious and it took me 'till ten seconds ago to realize that that was bullshit.

I'm sorry, forgive me. It wasn't bullshit. She was half-right. I never can be serious. Correctamundo. She was wrong to make me think that's a bad thing.

I told her I wanted to write a play about infidelity. She thought that was cool because infidelity, that's something people actually do. Fuck around behind each other's backs, that is. It's serious. It's real. It's an issue.

Yea, I said, There's a married couple and the guy gets a kidney transplant from his wife, so whenever she gets sick she has to go to a hotel so he won't catch whatever it is (a girl in my second hour knows a couple like this, I guess it actually happens) and while she's there she gets seduced, by a fellow hotel person, by the Mexican son of the hotel owner, I haven't decided yet... and she said I always needed a gimmick like that. It couldn't just be about cheating. It had to be kidney cheating transplants and cheating.

So I didn't even bother to tell her was that the real reason she did it, the wife that is, is that she was egged on by her one remaining kidney, who, while it would really be representative of her internal desires and frustrations and things, would be played by an actual person on stage. In a kidney costume? I don't know. Hadn't decided yet.

Why couldn't I, she wanted to know, just write a play about cheating?

And at the time I didn't have an answer, but I do now, and that answer is, because anyone can do that. Any two-bit wannabe Mamet can right a play about pretty people screwing each other and wearing sweaters, making pithy pop culture references and before you know it Catherine Keener's in it, and it's just a whole mess. I could do that. But it would have been done to death already and really what's the point.

Why do I have to be funny? Why don't I just play it straight? Because life doesn't play it straight. Life is not deathly serious. Well, it is. But that's partly why it's so wonderfully fucking hilarious. Those theatre masks? Those are comedy and tragedy, and if we're going to accurately imitate life, we're going to have to incorporate both.

I could write a third-rate somebody else play, or a first-rate DC Pierson play. And DC Pierson plays have talking kidneys in them.

So deal with it.

Oh, and the husband's cheating too. Of course. And I can be serious. I just have this way of saving it 'till I need to make a point or need making out with.

2003-04-27T00:23:00.000-07:00

Dude, Susan Mernit is way too kind.

I heart blogging so much. An egomaniac couldn't ask for a better hobby. I had a sixty-year old grandma e-mail me to tell me she loved my stuff and ask how to start a blog.

And when she does, she'll be at the top of my links.

2003-04-25T22:42:00.000-07:00

If you're here for naked Michael Moore, and fuck, who isn't, he's right here. My permalinks weren't working when everybody linked to me. Bullocks.

How was your week?

Did you win a freestyle rap competition at school?

Did your improv troupe raise over $130 for Operation Uplink?

Did you get linked by some of your favorite bloggers for making what amounts to a pixelated fat joke?

Because if not, I'm totally making you look like a slacker right now, friend.

The handsome Puma headgear, 100% old school hip-hop, which I'm sporting at right, I won for being the bestest battle rapper in all of fifth-hour lunch. I wouldn't say I rocked the mic, but the mic might tell you differently, and the crowd might as well, since they picked me as the winner. In a duel of derisive rhyming, I vanquished the following:

- Black kid who was WAY better than me

- Asian kid who was also WAY better than me, but screwed up

- Trevor, who is sort of like a Run DMC for the twenty-first century, only ripped as hell, white, and one dude instead of three

- Wade, the previous champion, fellow Anglo-American who bites all his rhymes from 8 mile

...and long story short, thanks to a couple humorous couplets about how so-and-so likes guys, I have a cool headband, and I wear it like Baumer, with the hair on the INSIDE.

And then last night we had an improv show, all in all probably our best one of the year. People gave us $136 for the effort, which we're donating to Operation Uplink. All this despite the fact that the lights were jerry-rigged and Kenzie physically had to PULL the plug from the wall every time we signaled for a black-out, leaving these long dark stretches between scenes while she fumbled to find the plug again. Oh, and some eigth-grader, who was apparently drunk off his ass, threw up in back in the middle of the show, although we had no idea someone had left a big pile of rum-smelling vomit in back 'till the end.

Then we went to Sonic. Pretty good day, all told.

Today, thanks to Instapundit and Jeff Jarvis and many, many other idols of mine, I got twenty times my usual amount of traffic. If you're wandering around in here as a result of their link providence, I won't beg you to stay. I'll just let this quote speak for itself:

If you read only one blog written by a high school senior who does theater, writes plays, has half-baked libertarian political ideals, invented rock and roll and would like to grow up to be James Lileks some day, make it this one!

- Fictional P. Guy, Editor, "Overenthusiastic Jacket-Quotes Quarterly"

I couldn't have said it better myself, if I hadn't just said it right there, using a hilarious alias.

Have a good weekend, kids. I plan to.

2003-04-24T23:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was whining about the Dixie Chicks being called "brave" just for whining. I would never, ever whine about the nudity, though.

After all, it could be much worse. Observe:

Full Disclosure: I'm pretty sure this was not my idea. I think I read somewhere in the blogosphere about being glad Moore wasn't doing what the Chicks were, but it was second hour this morning and I've forgotten where it was. If you're the orignator or know who was, please let me know so credit can be given where it's due.

Further Disclosure: I do Photoshop like Moore tells the truth, that is, sloppily at best and not at all most of the time. But I never let a lack of talent get in the way of making a cheap fat joke, that's my motto.

I think I was fairly generous with the proportions of the obese torso, don't you?

UPDATE: It appears Mindles H. Dreck may have been the pointman on this one.

Thanks to wise men of the Blogosphere Jarvis and Reynolds for the links.

UPDATE v. 2 Scrappleface also gets a hat tip. Or should I say, a share of the blame.

Thanks for the link, Outside The Beltway

2003-04-24T00:07:00.000-07:00

We are so, so lucky to live in a time where all you have to do to be considered "brave" is insult a wartime president. We're incredibly lucky to live in a society so safe, so stable, so sensible that dissent is less a necessary check on an actual oppressive government and more a fashion statement, fuel for sputtering careers that have always thrived on the trendiest controversy. Be grateful we live in a time where the "revolutionaries" carry microphones instead of AKs.

I'm starting to think that when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and severed our ties with England, it wasn't because he'd had it up to his powdered wig with British tyranny. It may just have been because his latest pamphlet wasn't selling.

Ha. Revolutionary-War-inflammatory-literature jokes. They kill at history teacher conferences.

I'm participating in a freestyle battle at school tommorrow. The funny thing is me and T-money have already pretty much established that we're better than every black kid in the building. Not to brag.

D to the C,
makes your girl scream louder
first on the mike
still whiter than clam chowder
make you wanna drizzle my rhymes
and lick 'em off like honey
but The Pony called Big L
could give me a run for my money
step to me, G, I'll have you
runnin' off, screaming curses
kinda sad, it took me ten minutes
to write three verses

Clearly the black kids at our school aren't very good.

Dude, 3rd Leg...did you die or something?

2003-04-22T22:45:00.000-07:00

The deed is done.

The emo-hair deed, that is.

Results are at left. I tried to look souful and emo-y and I just ended up looking pissed off. Oh well. I'm not really feeling the deep girlfriend-left-me vibe right now, I just dig the look. Although it needs to grow out a little more, and I have to train it to have that unkempt look. Too bad sweater weather just left us.

Hair-blogging. Weeping Jesus. Pathetic.

In Why-I'm-The-Coolest-Cat-Ever news, I already ordered my tux for Prom, I went to the gym tonight for the first time in two or three weeks tonight (T-Square and I are starting in on a program given to us by an Army Ranger guy, aw hells yes), tommorrow's a half day, and to make sure I actually go to bed tonight, about a half an hour ago I took two Diphedryl and I can already feel...the...effects...zzzzzzzzzzz

But first I'm going to read The Bleat and eat a Cadbury Creme Egg. It's good to be the king.

No Achewood this week. Bummer.

2003-04-21T23:05:00.000-07:00

I invented rock and roll.

I didn't want to mention it, because once I reveal it, people don't want to talk about anything else.

You really invented rock and roll?

Yea, yea I did. So you were saying about your cousin--

Like, the whole musical genre?

No, not the music. I'm not a musical kind of guy. Not in the bars-and-bass-clefs sense, anyway. There were guitars before I was around. But not the attitude. And it's the attitude that matters, wouldn't you say?

Oh, definitely.

Before me, nobody rocked the leather. People wore it. But nobody rocked it.

Cowboys.

Oh, yea, they wore it, like I said. Cowboys are kind of rock and roll. But they had the wrong music. It was all twang twang twang. I took their guitars from them and said shhh...listen... And we sat their in silence for several minutes, their eyes closed, listening to the desert wind whistle through plateaus and mesas.

I see. And that was Rock?

Hell no. I used that time to steal their six shooters and their bags of cowboy loot and be halfway to the Rio Grande by the time they opened their eyes and realized I pulled one over on them.

And that...that was Rock?

No, it was petty theft. When I shot an indian for looking at me shifty-eyed...then...THEN it was Rock.

But it didn't come around until the Fifties, right?

I didn't think America was ready to give it birth. Imagine if the Confederacy had gotten a hold of the two-minute guitar solo and used it at Gettysburg. We might be living under a very different flag.

Wait, how old are you?

Like all people who truly have the Rock inside of them, I'm ageless.

With the possible exception of Kurt Cobain, Joey Ramone, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Joe Strummer, Elvis...

Yea. Except them. Tom Jones is going strong, though.

Like I said, I didn't want to tell anyone. They just ask too many questions, and if you have to explain, it ain't Rock.

2003-04-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

It's not my fault I never update, I'm a product of my environment.

The environment where my dad's computer, the hub of the whole house network, the conduit through which all Internet-ly goodness flows, is getting replaced with a newer, faster computer he's assembling like a third-rate Frankenstein in the upstairs office. That means no blogosphere and no Instant Messenger until he's done. But it'll be worth the wait. The glorious new Internet hub will have a CD burner that works, and there's people that need mix CDs. Badly.

Until then, I'll just have to rely on The People's Computers at school. Like I am now.

Hi, People's Computer.

Good morning, Comrade.

Did you have a good weekend? I did.

2003-04-19T03:41:00.000-07:00

I'm tired, but not tired-tired, I'm just had four (five, maybe? Why am I asking you?) diet Vanilla Cokes at Matt's tired. You know, that kind of tired. Like propping up a dead guy and putting sunglasses on him and a drink in his hand. You know deep down you're tired, but you have all the appearances of being bright-eyed and bushy tailed.

I'm going to go take an off-brand antihistamine (Diphedryl, anyone?) and drink a bunch of milk, then come back and finish this.

In my secret heart of hearts, I desperately want emo-hair. I was just up in the bathroom, and often in front of the mirror, I'll brush it forwards with my hands just to see how it'd look. It's long enough now that I can do that. I don't know, I think I wash my hair too often for it to work, if I leave it like that for an extended period of time it settles in and then I look like a fucking Von Trapp child rather than a deep, soulful screechy-voiced guy.

But I AM wearing a sweater, and for just a second, I turned away, turned back, and it looked kinda tight. If I had thick glasses, it would be ON. I don't have any glasses on hand, though. I tried doing the Junior-Birdman thing with my hands. It doesn't really have the same effect.

I either need to get a damn haircut or start wearing it like this all the time, 'cause the in-between look is killing me. KILLING me with sticks and leaving me in a ditch.

Mel is staring at me from the preview Blogger window underneath the space where I'm writing this post. Stop distracting me. Stupid model. (By the way, thanks much to Tony for sending folks my way to help her get elected Mayor of Hometown-Honeyville.)

High school's end is rushing up all too fast for my taste, and it's going to be a busy last three or four weeks. Two improv shows, the senior show, writing that second one-act I've never started for Advanced Studies, doing a ten-minute video for Humanities, trying to secure a more lucrative job for summer, Prom...Frantic, but I wouldn't have it any other way, now would I?

No, no I wouldn't.

I taped a note to a girl's locker today, because how much longer am I going to be able to do that? And then I came out to the parking lot after rehearsal and she'd taped a note to my car, and yes, she will go to Prom with me. And tommorrow I'm going to ask her to go see Ghostbusters with me at Madstone and I bet you she'll say yes even if she hates Bill Murray and Harold Ramis beat up her dad, because she so totally digs me.

One year later, back in the saddle. 'Bout damn time.

You tell me you're blue
you're just confused
it's that you haven't been this happy in minutes

- Hey Mercedes, "Haven't Been This Happy"

2003-04-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

There comes a time in every boy's life when he must use his web-jounaling device for something greater than himself.

This is that time. And that something, or more accurately, someone, is pictured at left.

I know I've mentioned her on here before, but to refresh your memory, Mel is the one of the best model/actresses I've ever had the privilege of going to high school with for two years. She's somehow found herself in the running for FHM (2nd rate Maxim)Magazine's Hometown Honeys contest, where their website visitors vote for their favorite...umm...honey, and then the winning girl gets...I don't know, I'm not exactly clear on the details, but I do know that if you're greatful for everything this site has done for you (remember that time my blog helped you move 'cause you threw out your back?) you owe it to me, to Mel, and yourself, really, to go over there and vote for her. There's a big matrix of thumbnail model-faces, she's five from left and five down.

It's about time smart, funny, well-read French-speaking models got their due, 'cause lord knows they've gone virtually unappreciated up until this point. Come on, kids. Get out there and rock the vote.

Hosemonster, Tony, you guys are great appreciators of barely-covered feminine beauty. Pitch in. You won't regret it.

The Nerdy Friends of Hot Girls community thanks you.

2003-04-15T23:29:00.000-07:00

There's been a couple times when I've speculated on the nature of Hell.

But tonight, I stared it right in its fiery maw. Speculation over: Hell is a high-school district board meeting. Now I know why I can never go into business, or education, or politics, because if I have to sit through one more PowerPoint presentation or hear anyone use the phrase "M&O" (which I still don't understand) I will tie a rope and swing myself from the rafters, neck first.

I guess that's the game you have to play, though, if you want to make impassioned speeches to rile up overprivileged "gifted" kids.

So I played the stupid game, and now I'm going to bed.

2003-04-14T00:50:00.000-07:00

There are times in my life where I say do this or you'll regret it.

And always when that something involves a stage and hot lights and a crowded auditorium, I do it, and I do it pretty well, so they keep asking me to do it again.

And usually when that something involves a girl, I let opportunity slip right through my fingers and consign myself to another lonely evening.

And this weekend, both opportunities swam by and I didn't just seize them, I grabbed them by their tails and swung them 'round my head and flung them off into the next county and watched the dust clouds of their impact drift over the horizon seconds later.

This weekend was the musical, How To Succeed.... The last mainstage production of my Senior year, meaning my last chance to fill that auditorium with my voice, the voice I hate so much when it's coming out of my big ol' skull in social situations but I for some reason love to hear echoing back pretending to be someone it's not. It wasn't last time I'll act, or even the last time I'll act at MPHS (there's still the senior show, which will go up in the much smaller Drama Room), but, as unimportant as it seems to the uninitiated, it was the last time I'll act beneath that proscenium, on those hallowed planks repainted black so many times.

There are things you do over and over knowing there'll be a time you never get to do them again. But the knowledge doesn't make it any easier when that time comes.

So I said Let's not think about it. And I tried not to. But it was like a conversation with a terminally ill guy where you're trying to pretend everything's normal and just the way it was. Only with more singing and dancing and stuff.

I'm coming off morose, but I'm not. I loved every glorious second of this show, every rehearsal, every show night, every wonderful scene made me remember just how lucky I was to be here, every time the lights went out and they pulled me on my rolling platform offstage I giggled with glee because it was just so damn much fun.

I could feel history rushing around me. Not history, George-Washington-cherry-tree history. My history. A thousand joyous moments rushing around me, reconvening as I realized the factory where those memories were produced was shutting its doors, boarding up its windows. Well, not really. I was just being transferred out of the factory. Time to go to another town and build a new one. The smokestacks will keep puffing, God bless 'em. There's a picture of me up on the wall somewhere in there. Promise you won't forget, because I won't.

It was very sad. I won't lie to you.

That other opportunity. The time when I usually say nothing at all, this time I said "You wanna?" and she said "I'd love to" and it was great.

Her smile kills me. Somebody file a police report. Fit me for a toe tag. I'm dead.

Asking is better than not asking. Teachers are always say they'll never punish you for asking a question. Two girls in the past month or so have seemed to live by that same philosophy. Remind me of this sometime.

I apologize for the incoherence, I used up all my cogent sentences on this Ayn Rand essay I finished only a third of, which has to be postmarked on Tuesday. Like my taxes, which I have finished but still have to send.

Ty says it better than I did anyway.

2003-04-09T22:10:00.000-07:00

I had a pretty good day, all told, it was long and tiring and we ran the show twice, but it opens tommorrow so I guess that can be forgiven.

These people had a better day.

When 5 million people simultaneously have the best day of their lives, I bet it sends so many good karmaic vibes out into the universe people up on the International Space Station can see them flaring out into space, big multicolored waves of sheer human elation.

I was going to use this entry to make some big point, but I think the point is made pretty nicely by itself.

One thing though...If we would have given the inspectors more time, the statue would still stand. There would still be manacles on the wrists of 100 kids. Oil-for-food dollars would still be going to keep rapists and torture artists on the payroll.

I'm not saying if you're anti-war, you're Hitler, or that you hate kids. There are many well-intentioned people with objections to the actions we've taken. I just want you to realize what condition several million people would be in had we taken your advice.

There would be no cheering in Baghdad. Maybe it would sound like cheering, from several blocks away, but only because it would originating from basements, underground. And it wouldn't becoming from crowds, but from individuals. Individuals who had questioned the will of a mustachioed man who would still be very much in power.

Now he's the one quite likely underground, and everybody else is up on the street, hollering their lungs out into air that's free for the first time in decades.

And if that doesn't make you happy in the least, I'm afraid I don't want anything to do with you.

Thanks to Sheila of Redheaded Ramblings for one of the best and most thoroughly complimentary plugs HFT's ever gotten, and thanks to Tony for leading her here

UPDATE: More of this type of stuff. Absolutely wonderful.

2003-04-07T22:39:00.000-07:00

Strained Metaphor Time, Grapes Of Wrath Edition

The prarie wind blew through the squeaky, clattering screen door, rustling the pages of a gas station calendar fastened to the wall with a tack. He couldn't believe it. Coming up on a year, 365 days. 365 squares on the gas station calendar. 365 times the sun had shown brightly through a clear sky and hit the wall of his one-room sharecropper's shack, then traced a path along the plywood walls and the dirt floor. And if one day it didn't shine quite so glaringly, he'd know the wait was over. Rain would fall. Things would grow. But that square of light had made that mocking journey 365 times without a cloud or a curtain to obstruct its path. The old radio played swing tunes only half-received from an AM station counties away as he stared out the window, eyes stinging with silt.

Funny thing, as his hunger got sharper his memories got better. The more defined his ribs, the more defined his mental snapshots of the glory days. Of long hours hoeing dirt so rich he barely had to plant any seeds. Of grey thunderheads looming like the chassises of old Fords over the windswept valley, nearly bursting with lifegiving rain. Of the way, with a good harvest behind him, life seemed full of prosperity and peace of mind.

He got so wrapped up in the memories, staring out that one square window, for a moment he was back there. He inhaled deeply, like a man for whom breathing was a joy and not a chore, and instead of the expected scent of glorious damp life sweeping in off of his majestic fields, all he got was a couple lungfuls of dust.

The song on the radio finished up, and the announcer came on with the long-term forecast. "Clear and breezy on through tommorrow," the announcer said, "and you'll be darn lucky to see a drop of rain the rest of this week." In the middle of his coughing fit, he could've sworn he heard "for the rest of your life." But his ears were dusty too.

He was starting to forget what he promised himself, that he'd only plant on land that he'd loved and tendered and cared for. Now he was about willing to throw down seeds wherever the rain would fall.

2003-04-07T01:52:00.000-07:00

Congressman Hayworth says, Come! Learn about me, and through me, the entire legislative process! Document the committees I have served on! Find out when my newsletter is published! This and other factoids are at your fingertips! Then, when you're done, be sure to do the same for my Arizonal congressional associates, Jon Kyl and John McCain, and then turn all of these facts in for a one hundred point project in your government class!

And I wave my college acceptance letter in his face and say, Uhhm....no.

And he gets pissed.

But fuck 'im.

Let me hear you say 2003 Awwwhellyes.

2003-04-02T21:05:00.000-08:00

Day 3 of London.

At this point, Day 3 of London happened two weeks ago and change, and I'm still recapping and it's taking forever, but I figure hey, people still write about the Civil War, and that happened way more than two weeks ago. So here goes.

Day 3 of London was Official History Day. For days we'd watched history pass us by through a bus window. Now it was time to get our hands all dirty and dusty and historical.

The morning was free, and all the girls in our group wanted to go shopping. The fellas opted for a tourist trap called the London Dungeon, because it was bound to involve way more blood and people's intestines being eaten by rats than, say, Harrod's. We were not disappointed, although I was disappointed that my camera crapped out of batteries just before we got inside. You'll have to go without visual aids for this part. Just imagine a lot of dummies covered in red tempra paint, their computerized voice boxes screeching at regular intervals. Also imagine a bunch of theatrical types who, for whatever reason, can't get a gig in one of London's ten thousand play houses so they spend their days demonstrating ancient instruments of torture (an inordinate number of which seemed to focus on the testicles) on well-paying tourists. You'll have a pretty good idea of how we spent our morning.

That afternoon, we looked up History in the phone book, and we went and hit it up where it lives. The British Museum. I assure you, it was home with all the lights on.

I was still out of batteries, having had no real chance to recharge back at the hotel. But Ashley was nice enough to loan me her spare, because Alecia, Ashley and I all have the same camera (Brian does now, too). There are benefits to being in the cult of the Canon S200. The new battery was just in time, too, because slumping reluctantly towards the front gate, waving bloody placards, followed by a gaggle of museum security and police, were a bunch of real-live authentic...

HIPPIES!

I almost ran faster than I did after Martha Stewart to greet these brave voices of dissent. I swear I was giggling, which is I think why the bearded fellow is giving me that look. I was excited, these pictures are going in the scrapbook so I can say, Look, kids, there was a time when all the great idiocies of the world (radical Islam, oil paranoia, record store employees) congealed into one great mass and converged on the British Museum wearing bloody sheets! And your father was there to capture the whole thing!

I do like the font on that sign, though. Kind of reminds me of Thriller.

No, the guy holding one end of the official "Stop The War" bedsheet isn't Ralph Macchio, the Karate Kid, don't let the headwear fool ya. I was just as disappointed as you are. The young lady taking a bold stance on "Wars of Mass Destruction," despite the fact that this has been, so far, one of the least destructive conflicts in history to the civilian population (although granted, this was a couple days before the war started, and there was no way of knowing if Bush and Blair were just gonna go Wild Bunch on the motherfucker, YEE-HAW), is carrying a blanket. I later found out why. Apparently all these lone voices of reason in had gone and lied down in the Assyrian exhibit, near the museum entrance. Assyria, being, of course, where Iraq is today. They were supposed to be the civilian casualties we will no doubt inflict in our unilateralist oil thirst. Why they haven't been lying down in the Assyrian exhibit to protest the purposeful killing of 275,000 Iraqi citizens from the modern-day Assyrian emperor is beyond me, but hey, let's not talk politics here. What I love is that she brought her blankie. I want to show my solidarity for the helpless Iraqi people crushed beneath the wheels of imperialism, I want to feel their pain. But museum floors are so cold and Mummy says I must have proper lumbar support.'

I like the fact that if you "show solidarity" for imaginary Iraqis by laying down on a quilt and then getting nicely asked to leave by the cops, you're brave, but if you put your life on the line to feed, clothe, and free real Iraqis, you're a murderous bully.

But there I go again. Politics.

After the oppressed truth-speakers dispersed, we met up with our tour guide. She gestured with her hands A LOT. And when you have to have words to accompany your gestures, so as you may imagine she talked A LOT. But who can blame her. When you have to recap all of history in two hours for a bunch of teenagers, half of whom couldn't care less and just wanted to go back to the hotel and take a nap, you have to make those words count.

Saw a lot of this. The guide would charge through the crowds, duck in and out of a bunch of huge rooms, each containing things we wanted to see but didn't have time for, then would thrust this hand up in the air and wait for every last straggling unneccesary picture taking one of us to trickle in before she'd start talking.

Above: Fast-talking tour guide with frieze of The Parthenon. She explained the whole story, all etched in stone that stretched around one of mankind's greatest architectural achievements. I don't remember any of it now, but I'm reasonably certain it involved horses.

What they don't teach you in Art History: A good deal of Greek architecture was adorned with the upper torsos of older Korean ladies. Strange but true, kids. Strange but true.

After the Parthenon, guide lady let us free in the Egyptian section. It was big. You'd think these guys made irreplacable contributions to the world as we know it, or something.

This was a continuation of the surreality of the whole London experience. Here we were, inches away from the kind of history you usually only read about. Gold-plated sarcophagi. The Rosetta Stone. Objects the eyes of Antony and Cleopatra may have glanced over. Stuff that makes you seem temporary, or makes you want to make things worth putting behind glass and keeping for all time. Makes you wonder how people can devote their lives to this stuff, the whole time looking backwards when to you all these things say, look forward, go out, do. But then you're glad there are people who devote their lives to these things, who put them on pedestals and behind triple-thick glass, because what happened yesterday matters.

And then you realize the tour guide and your travel companions are three rooms ahead of you while you're still gaping at a bust of Marcus Aurilieus. And you start looking for that hand.

Also makes you thank Ra for proper dental care. Did I mention that?

I could've wandered around for hours, but others were less enthusiastic. Jack, Tim, Alecia, and Ashley split early and went back to the hotel. Then we went into another room, the guide babbled about a chest full of gold for five minutes, and said, that's the tour, see you later. So after a brief stop at the gift shop, we said goodbye to the British Museum and pretty much all the important objects mankind's produced, ever.

And the museum was like, See ya.

And the objects were all, Don't be a stranger.

And we were out.

That night, while my camera rested deservedly in the hotel room, we went across town for some stereotypical Brit food: Fish and chips! It was disturbing, not just because it wasn't very good, but because the place reminded me of an old-timey ice cream parlor and it just throws you for a loop when you're thinking ice cream and you're tasting mediocre fried whitefish.

Then we did what everybody back home kind of assumed was the whole purpose of the trip because we're, you know, theatre kids: We saw a play. My Fair Lady, to be exact. The parts I was awake for were stupendous. A highlight, (I don't know if it was ad-lib or in the original script, and it's been two weeks, so I'm paraphrasing): I told you not to go to those fancy French places. Why didn't you go to a nice English shop? At least there you can be certain everyone's on our side!

Uproarious applause, from everyone except the hot French girls sitting behind us. I was going to bust my extensive francais at intermission, but I didn't think they'd want to know where my baguette was in relation to the Eiffel Tower, or that I had a big fish. Oh well.

Not to backtrack, but at dinner, Kenzie took the only good picture of me in existence.

From right to left: Matt, Jack, SUAVEST MOTHERFUCKER ALIVE LOOKIN' ALL GQ AND SHIT, Tim.

I'd do me.

We saw a lot that third day. But the best of all the artifacts was sported by an Indian guy handing out flyers on Oxford Street. Not to generalize based on a small sample, but the Indian people in England rock. First Sanjay, greatest waiter alive, then this guy, rocking this hat:

Really kinda says it all, doesn't it?

2003-04-01T23:00:00.000-08:00

One thing they oughta have is significant-other detox.

Get in a bad breakup and can't get that girl out of your head? Wouldn't you like it if you could go to a pleasantly furnished, sterile environment, pay a small fee, and they'd lock you in a room for, oh, I don't know, a week or so. It would be awful, of course, those initial hours. I don't know how withdrawl came to be known as "cold turkey," because I love cold turkey, but no one would love this. There'd be crying, of course, but you'd be all alone so you wouldn't mind letting it out. Then every eight hours or so nurses would come by and give you drugs, and surprisingly good food, and say nice things about your hair and how sexy you look, so you'd think there was a future beyond that significant other, maybe even with these nurses. Then after 48 hours, you'd pee into a cup, and they'd put in a couple of drops of blue liquid, swirl it around, and if it turned, I don't know, let's say puce (the official color of heartbreak), they'd say, see you in another 48. But if it turned clear, they'd know she was out of your system. You wouldn't know what was in those drugs, but really, would you care? Then they'd send you back into the world, ten pounds lighter just for having dropped off all that emotional baggage. Ready to get your game on.

I'm not saying they'd make you forget. I'm just saying they'd take all the hurt out of remembering.

Hot nurses are a plus, too.

Another thing that they need, well, it's not really something that you could invent. It's more something they missed out on adding when they, whoever they are, were building the universe and putting humanity into it. When we spit words into the air, they shouldn't just hit the ears of whoever and whatever's in listening range and then be dead to the rest of the world. Bad move, universe-creators. All spoken word, however trivial, should float up and get trapped, like a helium balloon in your living room. Every ceiling ever built should be covered thin invisible layer of every syllable ever uttered under it. Then before you moved you'd pay guys to come in and vaccuum them off, run them through a decompressor in their van and burn them to a CD. None of us would want our own CDs, though. I think, numero uno, half the things I said would be painfully dumb in retrospect, and two, I hate hearing my recorded voice, I think I sound like a bumbling cartoon walrus. But we'd also get to hear everything ever said under that roof before we lived there. Instant history.

Oh, and we might want to put a net around the Earth, since some of history's greatest lines were uttered outdoors, like the Gettysburg Address, or most of what Jesus said, Buddha as well, probably, and on a more personal note, maybe your dad asking your mom to marry him on a hillside where they'd set up a picnic back in Spring 1978. People bitch about recycling but no one bothers to think of all the auditory gold we send drifting off into space.

Aliens have probably figured out how to do this already, and they're sitting on the dark side of Pluto with headphones on, giggling at the fact that we can't even stick to the rules of grammar we all agreed on.

They're also wondering who this "DC Pierson" character is all the female voices of Earth keep speaking about in such reverent tones.

Right here, guys.

2003-03-31T21:31:00.000-08:00

In a flash, all your friends are gone.

One second they were there, all of them, and now you fucked up and vamoose, no more friends.

But that's only if you're a dumbass like me and just deleted your entire AIM buddy list. Fuckity fuck shit fuck. I must've been working on that thing for years. It was a finally attuned list of people I'd need access to at any given time for any number of reasons. People who are good reference sources. People who know if something's going on tonight. People who know if stuff is due tommorrow. People to whom I can tell my deepest, darkest secrets. People who are Alecia, which is just kind of a reason in itself.

I thought I was deleting just one person, someone I don't remember why I added them in the first place, don't even remember who they are, and I didn't stop to read the box that said "ARE YOU REALLY SURE YOU WANT TO DELETE EVERY SINGLE SCREENNAME HERE, DUMBASS? IS THAT REALLY WHAT YOU WANT?" and click, anyone categorized under the incredibly specific and elite heading of "Buddies" was gone. "Co-workers" is still there. And still empty as the day I downloaded AIM all those many years ago.

Maybe someone's telling me something. Maybe this is my chance to turn over a new life. Start anew. Only after disaster can we be reborn...like that movie with Ed Norton and Brad Pitt. You know. 3 Ninjas: High Noon At Mega Mountain, I believe it was called. Now's a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-evaluate who really matters to me. Gone are the petty aquaintances and superficial "friends." In their place, my true blue compadres, and any petty aquaintance that has given me five bucks in exchange for a spot on the exclusive list of people I need to be able to send text and emoticons to instantaneously, day or night.

Or maybe someone's telling me I need to go to bed.

Yes, that could be it.

Semi-related 3 Ninjas note: No matter what the gender of my future children, I am naming them Rocky, Colt, and Tum Tum. Any babymother that disagrees with me had best to get her head right before she winds up in divorce court.

2003-03-30T22:22:00.000-08:00

Strained metaphor time.

Once upon a time there was a little boat. Actually, in the beginning, it wasn't a boat. It was just lumber and nails and cloth sitting on the dock. But over time, with much hard work and carpentering skills, it began to take shape, and look like something resembling a seafaring vessel.

All day, while under construction, the little boat would watch the bigger boats head out to sea. It looked dangerous out there. They'd get battered by waves, strewn on jagged rocks. Some would come back with sails torn and rudders dashed. Others wouldn't come back at all. But the little boat knew that as long as he was in the harbor, being built, he'd be safe from all those things.

Boat-building takes a long time, but the days of watching the other boats unfurl their sails and head out seemed to get shorter and shorter. The sun would disappear into the distant ocean horizon more frequently than it ever had. The little boat was almost ready. It was freshly painted, its sails were hung, the crew was boarding.

One older boat said, "Can you believe you're about to graduate from high school, little boat?"

And the little boat said, "Fuck no."

2003-03-30T00:49:00.000-08:00

One problem I have is stealing the focus.

When other people are getting attention, I want attention too.

But sometimes you just have to give credit where credit is due, and let the spotlight shine where it should, and right now its luminous diameter should be just big enough to fit in Hosemonster and a man I'm very proud to call friend, Guillermo.

They are, as they say in the hip-hop community, killin' it. And we're all very lucky people to have their writing just a click away.

2003-03-27T18:23:00.000-08:00

See, this is how brain dead I am.

On the last episode of London, I said that we went back to the hotel to sleep, 'cause my memory was foggy. Alecia was kind enough to correct me. Now I remember the gut-wrenching debate: Go to sleep, or go out and wander aimlessly after dark. To the best of my recollection (which has already proven itself incredibly unreliable) Matt and Jack opted for sleep, and me, Alecia, Ashley and Tim asked how often are we young and in London, and after several seconds of silent contemplation, came up with the answer, "not often enough to waste a whole evening on shuteye."

So we hit the pavement.

Long story short: We took a bus and didn't pay, tried to get into a club but couldn't, and walked back home. Had this taken place in Tukee, it would've been a painfully lame evening. But this was London, and as a result, public transportation and bouncer rejection were a tremendous adventure. Like everything that happens thousands of miles from home.

Good morning, London, deserted at 8:30 Sunday morning as we walked to the nearest store to get milk.

Good morning, Astor Court Hotel.

Good morning, inferior breakfast pastries that greeted us upon our return that I still had three of because hey, it's vacation.

We converged in the lobby at nine to board a bus to the town of Windsor, containing the conveniently named Windsor Castle. Rob took a backseat as tour guide for this part. This leg of the journey was presided over by an older woman who's name I don't remember. What I do remember, though, is that she had a wealth of knowledge around the scenery whizzing past the windows, and how that knowledge related to the patent inferiority of America and its people.

We past some boarded-up rowhouses lining the highway. "In such-and-such a year," she said, replacing, of course, the such-and-such with an actual year, "the British government decided to halt the expansion of London and widen the roadways, so people were moved out of houses like those and they were condemned. Then a new government came in and decided to put a stop to that program, and now we're going to spend that money on a war, then, aren't we?"

Obvioulsy someone is not a Blair booster.

Later on the road to Windsor, when things were getting more and more rural, we past some cows. "Those are cows," she said, because we were paying her lots of money for just that sort of insight. "Here in England we drink creamy whole milk, not that watery skimmy stuff like you bloody Yanks." Okay, she didn't addend it with "You bloody Yanks." But I read between the lines. Thanks to this woman's incisive political commentary, I promised myself that as soon as I return home to the states I'd make it my mission to reverse our imperialist foreign policy that so hampers British road construction and perhaps more importantly, our pansy-ass dairy consumption habits.

Other than that, she was really good.

Then it was like, hey, look, a castle.

A castle not built by chewing-gum millionaires or theme park magnates, but a real-life castle, built so many years ago by people who actually needed the things a real-life castle provides. Like slits in the stone walls where your archers can loose their arrows and be protected from enemy fire, and vaulted ceilings encrusted with gold, and throne rooms. Actual fucking throne rooms, with thrones.

Monarchy: what a concept!

There's a thing I think she said was called the Long Walk, a path that stretches up to the castle door that cars aren't allowed on. And rightfully so, I think. The way it is now, you can still imagine a lone, ragged knight riding up the path, carrying a message, his coming heralded by, well, heralds, with trumpet fanfares and everything.

The thing about London is, you can be a nerd like me and imagine this stuff, and chances are something a lot like it actually happened. History has to be their number one export.

Monarchy was in the air, in the water, and in the waterfoul.

Good morning, Queen's official Royal Swans, tampering with whom will get your hand cut off and fed to the remaining swans, or so I understood.

We value our hands a lot, so we just fed the Royal Swans the finest bread we had available and used "Sir" or "Madam" when addressing them, speaking only when honked at.

I stayed behind near the river to get a few more pictures (story of the trip) while everyone else made their way towards the castle via a footbridge. When I finally got up there, everyone was pointing and staring amazedly. Apparently, Martha Stewart had just passed by. Tim's mom said "Hi" to her and she gave a very friendly "Hello" back. I rewarded Martha for her compsure by chasing after her to get a picture.

Good morning, embattled media icon, homemaker tycoon, and accused stock market swindler Martha Stewart.

I have to say, for the first celebrity photo cameo here on HFT, I was less than impressed by Martha's showing. A little kid and a old guy with a lame scarf who resembles the "I lost my marbles" guy in Hook: what a lame posse you roll with, Martha. I couldn't even tell which one was her hype man.

Windsor Castle is surrounded by shops. Restaurants, souvenir stores, mostly tourist type stuff, and I found myself wondering whether the marauding enemy troops hid out in Burger King or McDonald's before storming the gates. Made me wonder at what point my imperial military strongholds will become nothing more than tourist attractions. Our guide took us around the entire thing, and left us at the entrance, telling us where to meet her and when, and what exit would take us there the quickest. Then she disappeared to wherever it is frumpy tourguides go when they're not begrudgingly leading around groups of rowdy Colonials, and left us alone with the Queen's sometime residence.

Did this mean she was in? I didn't have the heart to ask. I tried to cut down on the swearing and smoking once inside the walls, you know, just in case.

I heard one or two Alaska kids say how much it looked like Hogwarts, and while I have to admit the resemblance occured to me I was glad they were the ones to say it, so I could continue looking down my nose at them. "They're our forty-ninth state," I wanted to assure the UK citizenry. "You can see why we waited so long."

I thought my job sucked. These guys march into place, stand perfectly still for four hours, then march back inside. Either they are the most Zen, one-with-the-universe people in existence or no one in England has a richer sexual fantasy life. I'm going to go with a little of both.

We weren't allowed to take pictures inside the castle, suffice to say there was a lot more of that imagining history unfolding all around you stuff. Vaulted ceilings. Coats of arms. Suits of armor. A wall full of dueling muskets, making me wonder how many guys in buckled shoes and powdered wigs each one had claimed in scuffles over honor and dames.

Matt said it was too nice to be real, he felt like he was at Universal Studios. I agreed.

Tim said it would be fun to play paintball in. I wondered how many British teenagers fantasize about playing soccer on the South Lawn of the White House. Then I agreed.

Then we were outside, walking towards where the tour guide told us to exit. It was at the bottom of a steep cobblestone incline. I forgot to mention how many things there are to trip on in England. America is one nice big flat walking surface compared to the bumpy jutting terrain the UK seems to be composed entirely of. I almost tripped every other step.

We got to the bottom of the hill, to the gate. It was fenced off and full of cops. They scolded a couple who tried to go in ahead of us. It looked like we'd have to take the long way.

I only mention this because on the way back up, Jack offered to give Katie a piggy-back ride, since we were all whining about the walk. Must have been all the old past-expiration-date chivalry in the air. Well, she hopped on, this girl weighing...well, I won't say, because I'll guesstimate wrong and word will get back to her and she'll think I think she's a cow. She weighs about the same as a medium-sized kitten. Maybe a kitten and a half. So she hops on, and before he even takes a step, Jack groans and folds like a shitty house of shitty cards. They tumble. Hilarious.

Resulted in some of my favorite pictures of the trip. Tell me you wouldn't carry this girl on your back wherever she wanted to go.

We ate lunch at a place called Little Italy across from the Palace. It was here we uncovered the two truths of Dining Out in England, which are as follows:

One: The drinks are tiny, and completely lacking in ice

and Two: The wait staff barely speaks English, and if they do, they still don't have much of an interest in satisfactory customer service

This is one point where I'm going to be completely culturally insensitive, discard multicultural relativity, and plant Old Glory in this motherfucker: When it comes to service, America is just plain superior. The price is lower. The portions are bigger. Unlike British food (I'm not just talking traditional British fare, I'm talking everything over there on a plate) the food doesn't taste like it just had the soul bludgeoned out of it at Flavor Re-education Camp. The Italian restaurants don't serve you a stupid little upturned Don Quijote helmet of spaghetti unfit even for Chef Boyardee and charge you seven pounds (mostly 'cause they don't use pounds.) Call me an imperialist unilateral cowboy if you must, but I would've taken the Olive Garden any day.

"So, is this a family-owned restaurant?" said Tim to our waitress, trying to make conversation. She gave him the foot-stuck-in-the-tracks-oncoming-train look, gestured strangely, and said, "Ehhh." Fair enough, ESL waitress. Fair enough.

Needless to say, we stopped at the Windsor Burger King on the way back to the bus for a little liquid reminder of home.

From the mountains...to the prairies...to the oceans...white with foam...

Good afternoon, hat I found on the ground on the way back to the bus and promptly discarded.

Good afternoon, field where, from what I gathered, the Magna Carta was signed. Like I said, history everywhere. Here's the place where a lot of people agreed that human freedom was important enough to put down on paper, and then have everybody agree to abide by it, and then keep that agreement. The noise they made here echos in the Constitution. When the tour guide pointed out this field, there were a couple of boys out in it, kicking a soccer ball around, and playing with their dog. A high watermark for government by the people, for the people. Now the people play soccer on it. That made me smile.

We spent the rest of the afternoon on the bus, looking at the historical sights we wouldn't have time to see individually.

There were, as you might imagine, a few.

And that night, we hit the town.

We followed Rob's bald spot all over the place.

All the way to Tandoori Nights.

There, I was reviewing my pictures, and the waiter crept up behind me just as I was on this one:

"'No War,'" he said. "That is right. Your Bush is mad." Let it be said that you can say pretty much whatever you want about my country and my president, so long as you keep bringing me delicious Indian food. And he was. So criticize away, Sanjay old boy.

There was still no ice in the drinks, but some things we just have to forgive.

I forgive you, Sanjay. You're alright.

Alecia didn't eat her Indian food. But she did spend twelve pounds. The legal drinking age is 18. I'll let you guess the rest.

Goodnight, London, which at this point I really never wanted to leave.

2003-03-24T22:16:00.000-08:00

Probably won't blog the next installment of London tonight, 'cause I'm six kinds of beat. But thanks for anyone who's read the first two painfully long episodes and left kind notes, especially Londoner Pete, to whom my cultural ignorance and insensitivity were a beacon, allowing him refocus the parts of his hometown he takes for granted.

You know what's cool? I don't have to go to school tommorrow.

You know what else is cool, that I just realized? How Anti has a picture to go with everybody on his blogroll. It's the dude's own webpage and he's sharing it with all our ugly mugs. That's awesome. Cheers, pally.

London part tres tommorrow (most likely.) Be there.

2003-03-23T15:23:00.000-08:00

...and all at once, we were in London.

(If by "all at once" you mean a seven-hour flight sitting on the far end of one of those planes with eight-seat rows in three columns, next to a cigarettey old woman who all my friends, who were sitting on the other side of the plane, were convinced was a man.)

Apparently, on the video screens in the seats, they had every movie ever made and plenty of TV shows, including The Muppet Show, so I could've spent the flight reliving my favorite childhood television program, but instead I spent it sort-of-sleeping and waking up to eat the rubbery airline chicken. I think we met the sun halway over the Atlantic, and England was bathed in mid-morning light by the time we were flying over it. I wanted to go back to sleep but I really felt like I should be soaking in my first foreign-country experience, so I looked at the checkerboard British countryside and found myself wondering...where they filmed certain Monty Python sketches. sigh.

Filled out my immigration card with the pen cigarettey old lady let me use. Filled in the "Country of Birth" space with unabashed pride. Forgot to write in capitals, as instructed, thereby fufilling the stereotype everyone has about people from my country of birth. Then I enthusiastically deplaned.

The official "Enthusiastically Deplaning" face

My impression of London Gatwick airport is that it's the Tucson of London airports. Smaller. Flatter. Smellier. Of course, I have no basis to make this judgement, as I've never been to Heathrow and it wasn't on the tour. But Gatwick IS in the middle of a bunch of farms. If a cow would've wandered through the baggage claim, chased frantically like a guy looking like the farmer in Babe, I wouldn't have been suprised. But no such luck.

Truly we were in a foreign and mysterious land. They spoke the same language, but we had entirely different vocabularies when it came to snack food. Observe:

This greeted me across from the currency booth after we went through about seven different customs checks. Walkers Potato Chips? What the fuck? Everybody knows that Frito and Lay invented the potato chip in their cabin in the Mayflower on the way over to the new world, and they've had the patent ever since. Lion? Munchies? Who comes up with these things? The most disconcerting of all the candy bars in the bottom right: The Drifter bar. When I think of Drifter, I don't think of dessert. I think of a scuzzy stubbly dude who ambles into town, passes out in the gutter, makes his home in an abandoned barn then gets run out of town when old man McGunderson's chickens start disappearing. The word "Drifter" comes attached to words like "Nameless" and "Menacing" and "Smelling Of Gin," not "Delicious" and "Just The Right Amount of Nuts." Unless of course...(Insert obvious having-sex-with-the-homeless joke here.) The only isle of familiarity in a sea of vaguely threatining British snacks was the KitKat bar, and even he was dressed up in a retro costume that made him damn near unrecognizable.

I was a long way from home.

After engaging in a Seinfeldesque discourse on the differences between American and British candy, I went and exchanged my money. Pops gave me a hundred bucks spending cash, which was nice because I hadn't expected anything at all, and I had twenty bucks in my wallet just 'cause, which meant I had a hundred and twenty dollars with which to paint London red. I also had my ATM card, but the idea of seeing my balance, already puny in dollars, expressed in pounds, made me want to cry and hit things. I gave the lady a hundred and twenty American, she gave me sixty-five dollars in fancifully colored tissue paper and bits of metal in strange shapes.

British money doesn't feel like money in your pocket. Good ol' greenbacks have thread woven in them (I think) and so when you reach down in your pocket you immediately know what's your meager funds and what isn't. Not so with five-pound notes. But the coins? The coins I love. There's a fantastic array, they have about fifteen more than they probably need, but they're doing a good thing by not whittling them down in the name of effeciency. The fifty-pence coins are fun to flip, and make a satisfying "smack" in the palm of your hands, like a Kennedy half-dollar. The one-pound coins are the best. They just FEEL valuable.

I wuv you, British monetary system.

There were no cows in the baggage claim. But there was my bag. Hello bag.

Whatup.

We made our way through the place where they ask you if you have anything to declare. We tossed around ideas for funny things to say. My favorite was "our independence from YOU!" but none of us had the balls or the desire to be held up at the airport all morning 'cause of one smartass comment. We wondered if anybody ever declares that they're gay.

Then we found our tour guide among the bunches of people holding up placards. He was a spritely gent named Rob who looked just completely and totally...well, British, I guess, is the word. Bad teeth. Balding. Flushed complexion. You know, British. Anyway, Rob informed us that there were going to be two other groups on our whirlwind tour of London, one from Alaska and one from Florida. The Alaskans, he said, had flown in the previous night after twenty-four straight hours of flying. I guess it's worth it if where you end up isn't Alaska. He gave us ten minutes to walk around and go to the bathroom while we waited for the Floridians.

In one duty-free drugstore, I noticed that there were condoms. Lots of stores have condoms, but it's a rare store in the US that has them just chillin' by the register. Usually they're all locked up, because if you're going to wrap it up we want to encourage you to do so by making find a store manager to have to unlock the damn pharmacy case for you. But there they were. Clear as day, in a wide range of wonderful colors and maybe flavors, although I didn't look close enough 'cause we had to meet Rob. But I was heartened by this display of contraceptive openness. They may have strange candy, but dammit, they know where to keep the rubbers.

Then we went and got on a bus, or a "coach," as they call it, and we headed away from Gatwick Cowtown and towards central London.

Rob talked, in that pithy British way that stole my girlish heart.

Alecia and I admired the British countryside. That is to say, the concrete turnpikes and strange European cars. She noted that it looked like Utah. I've never been to Utah, but if I ever have to describe it to the blind I'll now know to say "It looks like that part of England between Gatwick and London, silly blind person."

Everyone else...

...you can pretty much guess.

First impression of London proper: So THIS is why Radiohead is so depressed. Maybe it was the fatigue or something, but the outskirts of London were sort of dreary. Mile upon grey mile of identical rowhouses, punctuated by the occasional GIANT APARTMENT MONOLITH, every other living space with a satellite dish. We have our own depressing suburbs, but they're ours. This was foreign to me. And things that are foreign are naturally bad.

Actually, some of them were really cool. The concept of a house that's been standing since before 1950 just blows me away, considering pretty much all of where I've grown up grew up with me. But here were these comparitively ancient houses, all drenched in ivy, with chimneys you half expected Dick Van Dyke to come dancing out of any second. He didn't. Our loss.

LOOK! Over there! People playing soccer!

I think this was the subject of the most ooh-and-ahhing of the entire coachride. Somehow it just wasn't England until we saw some people engaged in the sport we seem to have somehow missed out on.

Then we got to the hotel. Keys were distributed in the lobby, and we all scattered, with instructions to meet back downstairs at one.

The hotel, the Astor Court Hotel, to be exact, was a refurbished old apartment building, I think. Rob had warned us not to expect much, at least not to expect American hotels. He then described his first Holiday Inn experience, where he ran around the room the entire time because he couldn't believe how big it was. Well, Rob underestimated our culturedness. There's nothing we wanted more than an oddly shaped room with the toilet (complete with pull-chain) in a different room than the sink and shower (which had no shower curtain, just an inadequate plastic barrier covering maybe a third of the tub). I'm serious. It was awesome.

But that wasn't the best part. Oh no. The best part was found down a strange L-shaped hallway leading from our sleeping quarters to another part of Room 27, the splendor, the extravagance, the sheer hip London swank that was...

The Lounge.

We knew immediately that if any, and quite possibly all, of London's finest and most nubile "birds" were to find their way back here they'd be ours, easy. And they'd leave in the morning with the knowledge that what happens in The Lounge stays in The Lounge, right under the flimsy cot, or next to the TV with only four channels.

Then, at one, we embarked on what I like to refer to as Rob's Everything-All-At-Fucking-Once Walking Tour of London. The closest landmark to our hotel was Oxford Circus, which is not actually a circus, in the traditional sense. It is not a circus like Barnum & Bailey's is a circus. It is a circus like Circus Maximus in Rome is a circus, that is to say, big, and circular, and too pretentious to be called a "circle" and not square enough to be called a "square." From there, we walked to Picadilly Circus, which I had seen in An American Werewolf In London, a fact which I have no justification for mentioning. Rob said that, at the statue of the Angel Of Christian Charity in the middle, you're more likely to meet someone you know than anywhere else in the world, or so legend has it. I didn't see anyone except the people I came with. And I hate them.

Then we walked some more. There were fifty-odd people in the group, what with the Alaskans and the Flordidians, but Rob simply refused to act like he was leading a tour through the ubercrowded streets of a major metropolitan area. He'd walk as fast as he liked towards wherever, stop occasionally to grin bemusedly at stragglers, then keep right on walking nondescriptly. If you lost sight of his bald spot you were pretty much screwed. I kept up, you can bet.

After Picadilly, we ended up in Leicester Square, where there are not one, but I think three movie theatres, all facing each other, glaring contemptously. Rob pointed out where Kevin Spacey had stood not but a few nights ago as he showed up for the premier of Life of David Gale. It was at this point I realized that it was Fucking Cold. Well, at that point it was more just Ass Cold, which is cold, but I had a sweater, so were were good. It would later go from Ass Cold to Fucking Cold.

We gathered around a statue of Shakespeare while Rob rattled off places we could go for lunch if we so chose. His advice: "Don't eat British food. We don't." We (meaning me, Matt, Jack, and Tim) pretty much stopped listening once he mentioned a pub that had reasonably good food. Legal drinking plus cultural experience plus food equals four happy American teenage boys.

Jack and Timmy ordered up half-pintsof their finest lager. They didn't take traveller's checks, so Matt was SOL. I wasn't really hungry, and I'm not a beer man, so I just soaked up the casual atmosphere. And ate Jack's fries. We all agreed that London, or at least its liquor laws, were pretty much the best thing to ever happen to mankind. I listened to an old British man describe Catch Me If You Can to his old British friends.

Then Jack got up to go to the loo, leaving the last half of his steak-on-baguette unattended.

Big mistake, friend.

Matt ate most of it, I swear.

Then Matt had to exchange his traveler's cheques for tissue paper and metal scraps, so we tracked down a place for him to do it. We met back up with the group at Leicester Square, then did more of the frantically-trying-to-keep-up-with-Rob thing. Saw Trafalgar Square. Rob says if you're British and you fight the Americans, you get a little statue. If you fight the Germans, you get a medium statue. And if you fight the French, well, you get a HUGE statue, and in the case of whoever's in the middle of Trafalgar, you get your own damned square. We all posed on the giant lions, and then my camera ran completely out of batteries. Not bad considering I hadn't charged it since Phoenix all those many days ago.

Eventually we ended up in Covent Garden, which is like an outdoor mall, only one with street performers who harrass you and old hippy ladies shouting monologues about social injustice. And good opera singers. It was there, as the sun went down, that things went from Ass Cold to Fucking Cold, the shivering, take-refuge-in-any-crappy-shop-with-a-heater kind of cold. It was also there that I found an Internet cafe to e-mail my dad so he'd know I was alive (we don't believe in the telephone in my family), and get in touch with Kristin so we could figure out whether meeting up would work or not. We (the guys) spent most of the rest of the time sitting in the lounge of the internet cafe, in comfy chairs, debating whether our desire to see the sights was outweighed by our desire for warmth. The sights won out after twenty minutes or so. We're morons. It was so cold.

The day officially ended with unsatisfying bangers and mash (greasy sausage and the worst mashed potatoes) and a trip back to the hotel, and a promise that although we were going to sleep, this wasn't over yet, London, oh no, not by a long shot.

2003-03-20T20:14:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there was a boy whose parents said over dinner at Outback, "We were thinking of getting you a laptop for your graduation present."

To which he responded, "Wow, I kind of figured going to college was my graduation present, but hey, whatever you're into."

"But if you want to go on this London trip," they said, "then we'll pay for it, but that'll be your graduation present."

His head was filled with images of nice new laptops broken, stolen, or just plain forgotten somewhere, along with the realization that memories of venturing outside the country (which he'd never done, save for Canada, which barely counts) with some of your closest friends over Spring Break your Senior year can't be lost, broken, or stolen, barring the onset of amnesia or Alzheimer's.

And even then, he thought, you'll still have pictures.

This is his story.

Thought you'd never ask.

I actually packed the night before. I will let that stand as a testament to how excited I was to go on this trip, since I never, ever, pack the night before for any journey of any length. But for some reason, this was different. Maybe because there were certain things, that if I forgot them in a rush of morning-of get-to-the-airport fury, would prevent me from getting out of the US, or into the UK. And it's hard to go to England for Spring Break if they won't let you the hell in. So I packed the obscenely big monogrammed LL Bean duffel bag my grandparents got me for Christmas full of clean underwear and clean socks and...I did laundry for this trip too. I never do laundry and I never pack the night before, but I did both, and it was all for you, sweet sweet United Kingdom.

Matt's mom was nice enough to pick me up, since my parents were both at work. Then we went to the airport and met up with the London Posse, the principals being Alecia, Ashley, Kenzie, Katie, Jack, Tim, Tim's mom Penny, our sponsor Ms. Idler, and her husband Kurt. And Matt. It's not like his mom decided to drive just me to the airport. Tickets were distributed. Passports were put in their secret travel wallets and whipped back out again really for no reason, just to make us feel like purveyors of international intrigue. Purveyors of international intrigue with dorky bulky zipper-pouches hidden in our pants and under our shirts.

Matt was maybe a little too mysterious, so they searched his ass. Didn't find anything.

Oh yea. They searched his bag too.

We must've cut a comical figure, lounging in the international terminal, all the bourgeouis suburban kids with their headphones on. Tim loaned me Death Cab's You Can Play These Songs With Chords, which I have no good reason for not owning, and I in turn loaned him OK Computer, which no one has a good reason for not owning. Alecia read a book Tony Pierce recommended. I read a book the Ayn Rand Foundation recommended I read, then write an essay about by April 15th, if I want 10,000 dollars for college. I broke into my travel provisions: a bag of cheddar Goldfish, a box of strawberry Nutra-Grain bars, and the quinessential travel food, Twizzlers. I spilled half the Goldfish on the seat next to me, which was thankfully unoccupied. We sat and waited for the plane to Philly.

We all sat more or less together on the flight to Philly. I sat next to Ashley, which was nice, not only because she's pretty and sweet and smells good, but also because she's all of four feet tall and doesn't take up too much room when she sits next to you in coach. Too bad the same couldn't be said of the guy in the aisle seat, who was three-hundred pounds of mystery-novel-reading asleep-falling olditude. We made the best of it. She slept on my shoulder and I took pictures like this one.

At the gate we'd all talked big about how we weren't going to sleep on the four-or-so hour flight to Philly, because we'd need all that fatigue so we could pass out over the Atlantic Ocean on the big hop.

We're all talk.

Except me. I was too busy being way too excited about having a new camera, and taking gratuitous pictures of myself in the bathroom mirror on the one occasion my tremendous need to pee coincided with the old guy on the aisle actually being awake. Then we landed.

The Philidelphia Airport was a lot like I expected. Big. Full of planes. In Philidelphia. The Roots are from Philly, as are The Starting Line, but apparently, neither of them hang out at the airport on a Friday night. Which is too bad. If I'd have seen either one I probably would have bought them a cheesesteak. But as it was, I didn't even buy myself one. We showed the lady at the gate our passports out of our secret travel wallets and boarded the plane that would take us to England.

to be continued...

2003-03-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

Promise I'm not spending my entire vacation on the internet.

Promise.

2003-03-15T08:47:00.000-08:00

ENGLAND IS COLD.

I'm in an e-cafe in Covent Gardens and I can barely type. But I'm paying for this so I figured I might as well update.

Brrrr.

2003-03-13T22:29:00.000-08:00

...seven...six...five...four...

I got the danged camera.

And boy, is she ever a beaut. She set me back a pretty penny (twenty-five thousand pennies, to be exact) but like they always say, you've gotta spend money to make money, or in this case, make no money but have nice visual aids for your blog posts. It's the same camera as Alecia has. I also bought her 128 megs of memory, which means she can take 271 medium-sized pictures at the highest resolution.

Oh, and a couple seconds of video. But if that's what I wanted I would've gotten a digital video camera. Or just not broken the one my family had my freshman year.

So when I get back you'll all be able to see the UK hella two-megapixel style.

I'm really going, and I'm really excited. Which is weird for me. I'm not often jumping-up-and-down excited about anything that often. When I get really excited about something I get this strange sort of emotional vertigo, I get woozy and want to back off. Caring about things entails disappointment. And I don't like to be disappointed. Most times I just get by on shutting my eyes, holding on and doing the damn thing. Like buying an expensive camera I'll probably break or lose. Or applying Early Decision to NYU. Sometimes you have to spend money you don't have to have the life you want.

I keep damning the consequences. Someday the consequences are going to come back with knives and electrical tape. Oh well, fuck 'em, girl.

It's funny and kind of sucks for England but for a day or two next week the prettiest girl in London won't even be from there.

And neither will the suavest motherfucker. (Points to self)

(Does the Sammy Sosa chest-thump-kiss-peace sign thing)

(Goes to bed)

See y'all next week. Be good.

and if a double decker bus
crashes into us...
to die by your side
well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine

...three...two...one...

2003-03-12T21:52:00.000-08:00

Y'ever wonder how many opportunities you miss in the average day? Any time you make a choice you miss an opportunity: every time you reach for the Honey Nut Cheerios in the morning you have completely wasted an opportunity to have Lucky Charms. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the big opportunities. Job offers. Life partners. That kind of thing. How many do you think you totally biff a day thanks to inaction or spinelessness or ignorance of their existence?

A bunch, I'll bet.

And then I'll continue to bet that if for whatever reason you end up in Hell, it's nothing like the book we just read in Humanities. It's all the opportunities you missed today, and every day before today, and every day after.

My hell will be a stadium full of girls I never talked to. Well, that'll be the lower-deck seats. The upper tiers will be girls I never asked out. And one by one they'll get up and I'll see each one of their pretty faces on the Jumbotron, mocking me, and they'll talk about the life they went on to have.

Three time Pulitzer Prize winner...

First woman to walk on Mars...

Heiress to a superwealthy Bavarian aristocrat...

and because it's Hell, every speech will naturally end but I was eventually treated for my nymphomania. And because it's Hell, I won't be allowed to cry.

So every time I don't say "Hi, I'm DC," what I'm really saying is, "I'll see you in Hell." I'll be the one at the fifty yard line in the manacles getting poked by imps.

It's a good thing I don't believe in that kind of thing.

London in T-minus ten...nine...eight...

Guillermo needs to write more and here's why (long but oh-so-worth it)

2003-03-12T08:58:00.000-08:00

We are now forty-eight hours away from ANARCHY IN THE U.K., as I like to call Spring Break 2003.

Had a huge crisis last night. A crisis as big as all outdoors. I thought, If this turns out alright, it will make one hell of a blog post. And if it doesn't, all the blood from my wrists will make it hard to type anyway, so--

But I seem to be out of those woods, only now I'm in the woods of four hours of sleep and an off-book speed through of the show today for which I am, at best, poorly prepared.

Oh well. I like these woods better. And besides, soon they'll be clear-cut, razed and burned to make way for SPRING BREAK 2003.

Just playin' the other night. I know exactly what to think of webcams. Does a smile count as a thought?

2003-03-10T23:42:00.000-08:00

There's this game we play. It's called post really fast so you can read The Bleat and eat some cereal and go to bed.

I will now write a post in two minutes.

(Runs over to microwave timer.)

Hey what'sup.

Musical rehearsal today was lame because all we did was constant speed-throughs and no one's even off book yet

Went to the gym for the first time in a week, Iron Don is back

Webcams...don't know exactly what to think exactly

Digital Camera...must...buy...now

My little seven-year-old brother made a Pioneer Ten out of aluminum foil. Not for school or anything. How awesome is that? Very awesome, is the answer, in case you were wondering.

Boy, do I ever need a haircut. I mean, seriously.

Pitch in money. We're going to move New Jersey next to Cuba.

BEEEEP.

Time's up. Thus proving that nothing good ever gets done in two minutes. Ask any girl.

Treacher says never apologize for not blogging, but I feel like I owe you guys more than this. You guys, you.

2003-03-10T01:51:00.000-08:00

I'm going to get a digital camera this week. London will not go undocumented.

I would write more, but I told a girl I'd go to bed.

And I'm a man of my word.

2003-03-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

Hi, I'm a balding, mustachioed man on the wrong end of fifty-five. My life hasn't worked out the way I wanted it to (note the fact that my wife has more wrinkles than a whole box of Sun-Maid Raisins and my shirt is fucking retarded) and as such I feel it's my privilege, hell, even my duty to belittle and verbally abuse the bag-boy at my local grocery store. Man, I can't wait for him to bag my produce in the bag in the wrong order (Oranges first, THEN apples! I mean, come ON!) so I can berate him. In fact, I'm going to phrase all my special bagging requests in the form of an exasperated disappointment, as if he should have known my particular bagging preferences at birth. And then, get this: I'm going to further put him down when he attempts to accomodate my aggresively-stated whims! HA! That'll teach him who's boss.

My intent is to leave him trembling with barely contained rage, his head full of images of smashing my stupid pumpkin pie, profaning my bananas and running me down in the parking lot with his truck. Certainly that will make up for my shitty childhood and less-than-satisfactory adult life. I can't wait for when he says "Have a nice day!" like the company he works for requires him to, even to the most loutish and undeserving of puckered-anus-faced customers! Oh, and here's the best part: when my rumpled burlap sack of a spouse and I head for the exit, I'm going to glance over my shoulder and scowl at him just long enough to catch him mouthing expletives to the cashier, who no doubt sympathizes with his anti-cranky-old-people sentiment. But who cares what he thinks? I'm a nearly retirement-age upper-middle-class male! I've earned the right to deride everyone who doesn't meet with my impossible standards, because apparently I've lost the right to a natural erection.

So have a nice day! At least one fewer person will be, thanks to me!

2003-03-06T21:26:00.000-08:00

You can learn a lot about a person by reading their blog. Or at least I hope you can, because for this very brief moment in history, everybody I know has one. About half the people I've made social contact with in, let's say the past 72 hours, I was just able to go through and read exactly what they were thinking when last we met.

Well, okay, not exactly. Let's face it, if that were true, if everybody's blogs and journals consisted of exactly what they were thinking, their uncensored highlights interior monologues, it would either be the most boring thing in the world, or it would be too good to be true and we would never stop reading. Probably a combination of both.

Unless it were my blog, in which case, on the average day, you'd learn not a damn thing.

We're all driven by our wants and needs. T-Murder wants to get laid. Tom wants his mysterious identical twin to stop getting laid. Hosemonster wants somebody to hire him. Tony wants somebody to hire him to do what he does for free every day. Alecia doesn't want a long term committment, wait, no she does, wait, yes she doesn't. People don't have to put this in banner headline across the top of their pages for you to get it. But tonight I realized, reading this, unless you know me personally you probably know fuck all about why I get out of bed in the morning.

People are always doing getting to know you type surveys, so here's the official HFT comprehensive everything-you-never-wanted-to-know-but-weren't-afraid-to-ask one-question survey to end all surveys:

What do you want?

Thought you'd never ask.

I want to be a writer. I would like to get to a point in my life where my day job consisted of what goes on between me and the keyboard. Plays, screenplays, short fiction and long. I don't think it's too arrogant of me to say that at some point I might be able to make a go of it.

I also want to act in whatever venue, professionally. And direct, for both stage and screen. Time was all I wanted to do was be a movie director. But my tastes expanded, and rather than change my one overriding goal I just sort of...added to it. And now, of course, I feel like I'm overloading my plate at the buffet of Life's Passions, and who the hell knows if I'll ever be able to eat all this. Some people couldn't honestly name one thing they wanted to do for the rest of their lives, and here I am, in typical arrogant-douchebag style, with three or four. But as I've said many times, it's not like I want to be a pearl-diver and curate the Whitney Museum. My career choices are all kind of in the same arena, that is to say, the Arena of Touchy-Feely Drama Crap.

Of course, while I picked out a bunch of possible careers I also had to pick out the hardest ones to succeed in, where most of the time it's not how good you are, it's who you know. I won't have a good fallback career. But it's not a feeling I'm unaccustomed to, by any stretch. Most of my life is improvised, and my back-up plan always reads something like, "Uhm...change my name and try again, I guess." Breathe in, breathe out, and here goes.

I want my blog to load quicker, goddammit. I hope this is just a temporary phenomenon. Oh also, I want to know exactly what to write in here every time I sit down. As opposed to never knowing what to write, which is really starting to get tiresome.

I want to get married, someday. And kids. Maybe this is a weird instinct for an eighteen-year-old male to have. I'm not saying I want that right now, or in the forseeable future, in fact, there's nothing I'd like less. They would just put a damper on my swingin' bachelor M.O. But sometime around thirty or thirty-five, I want to have this being-an-individual thing down pat enough where I can stop worrying about myself for once and start working on minions...I mean, uh, kids. I blame Lileks for this. He glorifies the house-husband lifestyle like it was sex or violence.

I want game. I talk a good game about having game, but let’s face it, B, I got no game. There's apparently a stage after casual flirting, and I know I've been there but lord knows I can never retrace my steps. To flog a painfully overused sports-cliche, I can never take it to "the next level." I need someone to draw me a diagram. I need that guy in the Navy commercials on the deck of an aircraft carrier with the incandescent vest and the big orange wands, waving in the jets like he was conducting the London Philharmonic. I need that guy to wave me in. Give me the "OK" sign. I need game.

I want a vehicle where the radio stays at one constant volume. Instead of one where sometimes it's rattling the windows of the cars around me, and then I go over a speedbump and suddenly it turns off and can't be resurrected. But then I'll be having a heart-to-heart conversation with someone while I'm driving them home...

"So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm willing to leave my modeling career behind and have me and my nymphomaniac twin move in with you. I guess what I'm trying to say, DC, is that I love--" (radio crackles to life) ONE WEEK ONLY SALE AT AUDIO EXPRESS YOUR HOME home home OF THE ONE DOLLAR INSTALL

"Wait, what was I saying?"

Yea, that would be nice.

I want someone to go to movies with.

I want to be a better person.

I just want someone to bite my earlobes. Is that so much to ask?

2003-03-06T01:09:00.000-08:00

I don't live in Pacific Standard or Mountain or Central time. No sir. I only set my watch according to one Time Zone. Procrastinators Standard Time, that's the one for me. The clock has fifty-nine notches that read "Chill out. Eat some cereal. Watch TV." Then the sixtieth, and LAST minute, says "HOLY SHIT DO EVERYTHING YOU HAVE NEGLECTED TO DO, WHICH SURE IS A LOT."

But I wouldn't have it any other way. The first fifty-nine minutes are fun, and if you do the last minute right, you feel like a bad ass. And after it's over, you've got fifty-nine more minutes to chill out. Eat some cereal. Watch TV.

2003-03-04T22:42:00.000-08:00

There are kids, and trust me, I know because most of them go to my school, who'll crash their tricked out Audi A4s in ditches, and as punishment, their parents will buy them Escalades. Happens all the time. Of course, I no longer have moral superiority over these people, which simply kills me.

Because last night, my blog passed out at the wheel and slammed into a retaining wall called my commenting service. And today, I went out and bought it Blogspot Plus. Spare the rod, spoil the blog, that's what we say here at HFT. Fifteen bucks later, I have no advertisements but if I try to reload the comments my page won't open at all. Any webheads out there have any idea what might be wrong? I don't think it's a BlogOut-end problem, because lots of people have it and they're all loading just fine.

Then, this afternoon, drunk on the power of eliminating the banner ad from the top, I decided to put a banner up there, since it looked sort of...bald. You may have seen it, it was up for about five hours. I realized after I came home that it only loaded about half the time and was kind of an eyesore when it actually did come up correctly. So I took it down again. Still wondering what to do with all that space up there.

Some people's blogs are finely tuned animals, streamlined, built for speed. I like to think of my blog as a gorilla. Subhuman, but it gets the job done. And if some people's coding is God creating the universe in six days, mine is the occasional bellow of HULK SMASH!!! as I rearrange the room with my fists.

And while this blog implodes technically, other people's are going nova emotionally. Say it ain't so, Ward!

Naturally, while the HTML on this site fractures and recongeals Pangea-like, I had one of my all-time highest hit days, thanks to Listen Missy, proving definitively that stalking always pays off.

I broke down and got another commenting service. But I really hope I can get the old ones back...nothing is a worse tragedy than losing a bunch of ego-stroking praise to your own web incompetence.

My new favorite lyric of all time, from the Death Cab lead singer's tremendous side project The Postal Service. And I quote:

DC sleeps alone tonight

They say the best lyrics are true. Don't they say that?

2003-03-04T00:24:00.000-08:00

Nothing to keep a boy up 'till 1:30 like TOTAL BLOG MELTDOWN.

I was in the middle of composing the posts to end all posts (end them all through sheer mediocrity so all the other posts get bored and want to go home, that is) when the truest playa alive IMs me to ask why my blog is being all retarded. He may not have used those words, exactly, but the blog was being just that. I asked Alecia to try and load it on her computer. Wasn't happening.

Something was amiss. I undid and re-applied my format about ten times, tried taking out the header picture, even considered, gasp, PAYING for Blogspot Plus just to get my poor blog to be something more than a blank white screen and the little blue bar that's supposed to indicate progress but in this case, to me, just indicated my total failure as King of the Entire Internet.

Turned out it was BlogOut, my commenting service, screwing things up. So comments are temporarily disabled.

But if you know of anything else to keep a boy up 'till 1:30 AM, possibly even later, you know where to find me.

2003-03-03T01:40:00.000-08:00

Facts about Missy

by DC Pierson

She dances.

She lives in a city named after me.

She likes good movies.

She appears to have the Pi sign tattooed above her hindparts.

She appreciates the much-underappreciated 25th Hour (see the above fact about liking good movies.)

She authors one hell of a blog.

The question now becomes: Will she marry eighteen-year-olds, namely, me?

2003-03-03T01:26:00.000-08:00

Facts about About Abraham Lincoln

by Matthew Pierson

He live in a woold caben

He dident have a cimnea

He tall black hat

2003-03-02T01:51:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not ignoring you.

If you should happen to IM me and I don't respond, and the box should sit, unblinking, for a long, long time, I promise I'm not ignoring you. I'm ignoring my computer. Something shiny or loud has just happened elsewhere, and I'm not right in front of the computer to answer your query/insult/proposition right this very second.

At the gym, the treadmills have those little things you can clip on to your shirt so if you should get too distracted by, oh, I don't know, The Golden Girls, and go flying off the thing, it stops automatically. I need one of those with the computer and Instant Messenger. Because I leave that thing on for untold hours at a time when I'm at school, at work, and sometimes in other time zones completely.

So today, after auditions, I took a FAT nap (three hours) and got out of bed sometime around seven to see a bunch of those blinking boxes saying "Congratulations!" Well, cool, that means I got a part. But now a bunch of people think I'm a conceited Internet jerk who has more important things to do than respond to their sincere good tidings. And while I was doing something better, (I love all y'all, but sleeping trumps anything else hands down) I still could've had the common courtesy to get a gal-darn away message or something.

So, long story short, if you IM me and I'm not there it doesn't mean I hate you. If you IM me and I respond "What the fuck do you want, fucking cuntwad whoreslut? GOD do I ever hate you!" well, that doesn't mean I hate you either. That just means Grandpa's hi-jacked my screenname again.

At a party tonight, myself, a slightly intoxicated Trevor and a really intoxicated Guillermo discussed that most light-hearted of party topics: how fucking cosmically unjust it was for Mr. Rogers to go and die on us. Other bloggers have already eulogized him better than I could, so I'll dispense with that. But I do think it's interesting, that after the Columbia disaster the media wondered where all the great public sorrow was. And granted, Columbia was a terrible tragedy, but I think my generation has been infinitely more affected by Mr. Rogers dying. Even kids you'd normally dismiss as heartless tools were heard to utter "Mister Rogers, man...what the fuck?" It just seems so wrong. If you had to designate a couple of people to be granted eternal life, the man who kept the Trolley to the land of make-believe running on time would be pretty high on the list of nominees.

We actively throw away pieces of our childhood all the time. We trade in the allowances of youthful inexperience for added priveleges, the lack of responsibility for ignorance of responsibilty. But we still want that warm core of memories to look back at, anchors that remind us that a few short years ago, we were innocent. Not too long ago, we voluntarily woke up at eight AM to watch a man feed his fish and play with a tiger puppet. So while we can't wait to put aside childish things, we get rather upset when they get stolen from us.

Man, I said I wouldn't eulogize and I totally did. And then I ended up sounding like a bad valedictorian speech. Oh well. Some things defy irony and cynicism, and the fact that we just lost the nice man the nation's kids spent their mornings with, that's one of them.

2003-02-27T22:31:00.000-08:00

Katie the pirate says her ass sometimes looks good.

And I say, Katie, that's just a gal-darn shame, because you know what? My ass ALWAYS looks good. And I do mean always. Go to sleep, wake up, roll over, still looks good. Cover my eyes like you'd do playing peek-a-boo with an infant and say "Oh no, where's DC's ass? Where's DC's ass" then pop out and say "there it is!" and it still looks good. Even in death, I imagine I might still have dumps like a truck. This is just one good-lookin' ass.

The problem is, it doesn't always look good on me.

I'll be driving around town, when I'll see it walking down the street, a couple of superfine ladies on each arm...well, cheek...looking so nice that for a second I'm too busy admiring it to realize that it's mine, and that THAT'S why the bench seat in the truck is so harsh on me today.

I'll walk into my room and wonder when I got such swanky bachelor decor, only to realize that my ass has completely redecorated on one of its out-of-body sojourns. How do I know this? Because my room is full of hipsters in denim jackets two sizes too small for them, waify Russian models, and trendy techno musicians with names like Orbit and Penumbra and DJ Nunkicker. And at the center of it all, there's my ass, looking just comfy as hell in a bean bag chair, talking to some architecht or performance artist.

"Hi ass."

Can I do somethin' for you, man?

"Uhmm-- can I have my wallet? I was gonna go buy some gum."

Yea, that's cool. Sergei! Hand this man his wallet.

Sergei the architect reaches into one of the pockets in trendy wrinkled jeans I'd never buy my ass, and withdraws my wallet, which is looking worse for wear.

Oh, snap, hey, I forgot, I sorta spilled martini on it last night. Things got a little wild down at the lounge, y'understand. Hope you don't mind.

"No, hey, it's cool. So, see you tonight, I guess?"

But he's already gone back to discussing The Stooges with Sergei and I leave, only to hear, over my shoulder Hey everybody, who's down for some naked hot-tubbing? followed by what can only be the trademark whoops and hollers of a bunch of hip artists and models who've just been entreated to engage in wet-n'-wild hot tub shenanigans by some guy's disembodied ass. And I die, a little.

Then it'll be the middle of the night and I'll be sleeping, assless, as is becoming more and more common, and my phone will ring. I'll wake up, still assless, and answer it.

"Hello?"

Hey man it's your ass.

"Yea...Jesus, what time is it."

Hey yea I don't really know but I'm kinda in a bad part of town and I don't really got a ride home so you think you could, uh, you know, maybe swing by and get me?

And I'll sigh and say yes in a tone that's supposed to come off as scolding but I think it just comes out more desperate. And then I'll get into the truck, and drive down to wherever his reckless partying has taken him this time, and he'll climb in like nothing happened. And I'll half-heartedly chastise him and I don't think he's even listening. What I really want to ask is if maybe I could sit on him and things could be the way they were, if only for a second. Before bed he'll utter some boilerplate about how he's going to change this time, really, and I don't believe it, but I want to.

Because seriously. That is one fine-looking ass.

2003-02-26T21:25:00.000-08:00

When I was little, I don't remember what grade, but there was going to be a talent show at school. This was elementary school, I know that. In middle school I woulda been WAY too cool for that kind of thing, and by too cool I mean too busy playing collectible card games about wizards in basements with this kid and a bunch of Asians. I wanted to be in the talent show, because my parents had somehow convinced me that I was special and worthy of attention. I told my mom as such.

"You know," she said, in her most placating maternal tone, "you can't read in the talent show."

I don't remember what my answer to that was. In a lot of ways I think I'm still answering.

She also told me to try my best in everything. Which is why the bottom of every post says "DC Pierson dishonored his family," because quite often, these posts are examples of what happens when you don't try your best.

But anyway, now I know what I would do. I just discovered a new talent I never knew I possessed. If I could hop in my time machine and go back to that fateful day in that fateful grade, the one I can't quite remember specifically, and get up on that stage, all the kids would say, "Holy shit, you're tall!"

And I'd say "Shut up and sit down, I'm about to be talented here, you little snots."

And they'd sit back down on that cafeteria tile that always smelled like chocalate milk, as I cued the drum roll. Oh, I forgot to mention that. I brought my drummer back in time with me too. My personal drummer Tito. Tito, blog audience. Blog audience, Tito. Anyway, Tito would give me a good snare roll and he'd do a rim shot and the crowd would gasp as I deftly began to wiggle my ears.

Grades K through five would rip up in applause. The cafeteria ladies would weep. They would all be astounded at this nearly-full-grown eighteen year old who'd travelled anywhere between eight and twelve years back in time to share with them the gift of a couple of well-wiggled ears, and his personal drummer, who smells like Pomade and cigars. Then some bratty red-faced fat kid in the front would stand up, and would quell the torrent of applause with this declaration: "So what? I could do that too!"

The kid didn't bring a drummer so he doesn't get a dramatic snare-roll like mine, but he tries anyway. And so yea, his ears wiggle, but he's only doing it by moving his jaw around. And I'd tell him just that, and the whole school would laugh and point at the kid who dared challenge the master ear-oscillator. Then I'd take everyone out for ice cream, and then I'd have to take Tito back home to the present so he could catch Sabado Gigante.

Because we'd put a ripple in the space-time continuum, some of the girls in the audience who were forth graders would be my age now. And they'd walk up and remark, "Hey, weren't you that guy who did that ear thing and then we all had ice cream?" and I'd say, why yes, it seems like such a long time ago. And they'd ask, "why are you wearing the same clothes."

To which I naturally wouldn't respond. I'd just press my finger to their lips, as if to say, Shh, let me take care of questions of temporal distortion and masterful ear manipulation. You just make sure your parents aren't home this afternoon.

2003-02-26T13:46:00.000-08:00

The world is its most photogenic when viewed by the man with no camera.

Today we were in the scene shop seventh hour, and I went out on stage just for a second. There, at center stage, was a single music stand, and a trombone, standing naked in the lights. I'm not a big trombone fetishist or anything, but for some reason it was fantastic. One of those things, like girls or laughter or The Beatles, to which clunky words do no justice.

Stupid broken camera on this stupid gorgeous cloudy day.

2003-02-26T00:56:00.000-08:00

Spent all night writing epic verse about elephants. Don't ask. Then I read the Bleat and ate Special K with Red Berries and now at two AM I'm going to sleep.

It's a good thing my friends are such good writers.

There were no more elephants in the Bronx Zoo,
The creatures were nowhere to be found
At the Albany Zoo, they’d gone missing there, too
There was just a big hole in the ground.

2003-02-24T22:19:00.000-08:00

Filled up the other tank tonight.

The truck has two gas tanks, sixteen gallons each. I filled up one the other night, for roughly what most small countries spend on defense in a year. Figured I'd better fill up the other one, before the price of unleaded goes from "Buttfuck" to "Total Unlubed Ass-Blast From The Philidelpia 76ers." I remember a month ago, where it was merely "Sort Of Unsatisfying Bang With No Call The Next Day." Those were the days. Hamburgers cost a nickel and ten cents got you into the movie-house where you could watch flickery filmstrips about trains almost running over fair maidens all day. And if a man had a handlebar moustache and one of those bikes with the one huge wheel, well, he was doing alright. I miss that.

Trevor's dog Pepper goes under the knife tommorrow. I have known Pepper just about as long as I've known Trevor, that is to say, eight years. And he wasn't a puppy back then, either. This is an old dog. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a better one.

Anyway, the important thing isn't how long I've known Pepper. The important thing is, Pepper has known me just as long. You see, every day for a summer or two back in elementary school, T-murder and I would adjourn to his house after a summer theater program we did. And like all growing boys must, we'd eat. His mom makes a fine peanut butter and jelly sammich. I ate like I did, and still, for the most part, do everything: with great abandon, and great sloppiness. Pepper didn't take long to learn this, and had me all staked out before long. Whatever crumbs didn't lodge themselves in the crevasses of my enormous shirts were all his.

Now, on the rare occassions I eat at their house, he's there, hovering. Waiting for me to return to my old habits. I've grown a couple feet and lost a couple pounds, but he knows my scent at that fundemental canine level, and dammit, the scent means tasty morsels of whatever the people are eating.

And tommorrow, the wonderful dog that appreciated my fat middle-school ass probably more than anyone is getting surgery to remove some boils, and he may not make it out. But I think he will. That schnauzer's got moxie.

Pepper, you's a warrior.

I think one thing you could get every nation to agree on is that dogs ought to be granted immortality. All of them going to heaven isn't good enough.

2003-02-23T00:05:00.000-08:00

Oh shit, dawg.

Imagine the smartest person you know.

Then imagine that person could snap your neck with a flick of their wrist. And wrote poetry. And was Mexican, and bald.

Then imagine they just got a blog.

And you'd have Guillermo. But you wouldn't know what the hell to do with him.

Mr. Meyer, my Humanities teacher, is just ridiculously cool. Case in point, we're doing a synthesis project, where we have to pick one thinker, one artist, and one activist and tie them all together. He broadened the parameters of "activist," though (it's not his assignment) because all the suggestions tended to be Left-leaning. So now it's anyone who takes ideas and actually puts them into practice (businessmen and such), rather than getting petitions signed and formulating clever slogans. When asked why, he said, and I quote:

Well, the Right doesn't really HAVE activists. They all have jobs. They're busy during the day.

And in that moment I knew he was the best teacher that ever there was.

Incredibly productive evening tonight. I toasted a turkey sammich, then I ate it. I turned on the TV and watched it. I opened The Fountainhead, then read it. Some of it, anyway. I've hit the Vague section of the book. People entering rooms and speaking to each other and one asks, "What do you mean?" and the other says, "Oh, you know exactly what I mean!" and then one of them gives a look of cold resignation and Ayn Rand tells me that, that was the greatest defeat of all, or something. Then somebody gets raped, and it's somehow okay. I mean, I get it. I like Rand. But Jesus, when you only have like one or two points you'd think it would take you less than seven hundred pages to, you know, make 'em.

The entire cast of The Simpsons was on Inside The Actor's Studio tonight. Fantabolous. Harry Shearer gave the best answer I've ever heard to one of James Lipton's trademark questions. The Question: "If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you get there?" Shearer replied:

The show starts in half an hour.

Almost makes you want to go to Heaven, that does. Because that is pretty much the best feeling in the world. Half an hour before the show means there's all kinds of crises to be resolved and there probably aren't enough programs, and it's the sort of thing that makes you think back to Health class and learning about how there are two types of stress: good stress and bad stress. And half an hour before curtain, well, that's the best stress. That night's show is a story that has yet to be written. And the fact that the velvet hasn't yet parted means you get to do it at least one more time.

Auditions for the musical are this week. Think I mentioned that before. I'm excited.

2003-02-21T23:23:00.000-08:00

Think I'm drunk enough to drive you home...

Name that band!

2003-02-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

Don't look. Don't look. Don't watch the cents turn to dollars. High gas prices are like Pennywise the Clown. If you don't believe in them, they can't hurt you. Just swipe your card, pretend it's connected to the International Monetary Fund instead of a bank account a couple bucks away from resembling the year of Christ's birth.

I never, ever, ever fill up an entire gas tank. But tonight, I did. Because I have a card now, so I didn't have the tactile sensation of actually being robbed blind that actual paper money tends to provide. I could pretend the Conoco manager was just compin' me the gas for being such a class act, and that the numbers rushing by before me were actually representational of my skyrocketing self esteem.

Then, driving home from the gas station, seven o'clock or so, the rim of the sky still had a touch of light blue, just skirting the mountains. That wouldn't have been there a month ago. Warmer weather with the early warning. This year will have three seasons: Spring, Summer, and New York. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited, or scared. And I wouldn't be lying if I said I couldn't believe it was already almost March.

I've decided not to get another job until after the musical. I need green like a rainforest, bread like a bakery, but I also need to kick it one last time on the stage where I first said what's up to the person I am now. And if I can do it while singing like a moron, well, even better for everyone involved. Still bag-jockeying at the F-R-Y on the weekends, though.

Sir Monster Of Hose tonight composed what may be one of the seminal blog entries of this or any other time: A way for the ladies to evaluate potential mates based solely on their feet, and not in the standard old "You know what they say about a man with big feet" way either. Oh no. This man is all about science. The most enlightening part is exceprted below:

We’ll start with the right foot. Check the first digit in from the big toe (...) The index toe on your foot indicates your level of intelligence. A long index toe indicates an enhanced level of intelligence.
(...)
Let’s switch to the left toe. On the left toe, you will find a very important source of information. The index toe on your left foot is the revered Sex Toe.

Go through the same index toe analysis described above and pray you find a long one. If you find yourself a man with a long Sex Toe, you’ve found yourself a tiger in the sex. You’ve found yourself a guy who knows his way around your body (...)You’ve found yourself a guy with deft hands and a great rhythm. (...) You found yourself a dedicated chauffeur to take you to Happy Orgasm Land.

You can't argue with Hosemonster Logic. Which is why from now on, my new motto is as follows: Two long index toes and a lot of free time. Trust it.

THE ROOTS IS COMIN'. That warms the cockles of my whack-ass whiteboy heart.

On these seventy three keys, the ivory and ebony
I swear solemnly to forever rock steadily

This entry updated...no, Alecia, I still have my old job

2003-02-19T22:17:00.000-08:00

Feb. 19th, 2003: The Post My Computer Apparently Doesn't Want You To See, considering the bitch froze up on me three or four times before I even started then deleted the whole thing halfway through. But maybe it's the consistent freezing-up that makes me love this bitch so much. (Note To Self: When the time comes, write own wedding vows.)

Break out the champagne and spray it on the nearest authority figure. HFT, a blog that rose from humble beginnings to become a blog that makes it humble beginnings look really classy by comparison, has just breached 10,000 hits. 9:30 tonight was the time. Someone on a Mac was the culprit. If you'd like to come forward, you'll be handsomely rewarded.*

*(Handsome reward may not actually be handsome and may be in fact quite revolting. Handsome and/or revolting reward not valid outside the Continental US, you damn dirty Eskimos. Guests of HFT stay shivering in the vast and bitterly cold chasm of loathing that is my soul.)

Damn. Ten thousand. That's more people than paid to see A Guy Thing. Okay granted, ten thousand people haven't visited this site. But I know it can't just be one guy in his underwear who's been hitting "reload" ten times a day for the past six months, either. Dude offed himself in December after I filed the court order.

Seriously, though, I'm now getting anywhere between sixty and a hundred hits a day, and it's all thanks to the grace of people I've never met in the flesh, people like Hosemonster and Dan the Goose and Kool Keith and the Madpony girls, and several more, to boot. Thanks, ladies and gents.

This blog is, in a way, exactly what I don't need: One more excuse not to go to bed. One more outlet for my self-absorbed cleverness. But in a way, it's exactly what the world needs: A chance to bask in the nourishing light of my brilliance. Drink up, world. I swear there's more where this came from, and if there's not, I plan to fake it until I can figure some way to embezzle money out of this whole scheme.

You keep reading occasionally, I'll keep writing underwhelmingly. I tell ya, kid, we can't lose.

You can add this to the list of "Things I need in my life that were also the recent cause of controversy in the NFL" (along with keeping a pen in my shoes to sign autographs after a touchdown): Instant replay. I need someone to fast foward really quickly through, oh, I don't know, the past six months. Then I need John Madden to reach over, stop the tape, and then, all the while drawing on the screen with his white pen, say: "STOP! Right there. Right there, Pat. That's the exact moment he turned into a jerk. Whoa, Nelly." If he could scribble a lot of circles and lines and things to explain how such a thing happened, that would be nice. Because today I wondered, nearly aloud: When did I become an asshole? It's not all the time, and half the time it's not even conscious. I'll just be walking along, thinking happy thoughts, when all the sudden I'm mentally wishing someone severe physical deformity. If someone could tell me when exactly my inner monologue took on such a spiteful, jealous, defeatist tone, that'd be great. And if there's some sort of camp in the woods where inner monologues can reconnect with themselves, I might just have to send him.

I'll send you...TO THE ASS OF A GREAT BIG FAT PERSON!

See? What did I tell you?

2003-02-18T22:18:00.000-08:00

This is just way more entertaining than I'll probably be tonight, so I'll just defer to the laugh-or-you'll-cry brilliance of The Tard Blog.

T-Spot introduced me to it, and I believe he found it via The Ward.

Such good times. See you tommorrow.

2003-02-17T22:38:00.000-08:00

Add me to a strange situation, and it'll no longer be strange. Now it'll be just completely fucked up.

2003-02-17T00:36:00.000-08:00

One, two, three and to the four.

D to tha motherfuckin' C is at the door.

I wouldn't be here 'cept for I promised you a post in that last scant post about me and Arizona not gettin' any sweet sweet love. Sweetheart, you oughta know by now that I break hearts, not promises. And not the good china, either. It used to be my great grandmother's, you know. If I break that, we won't have anything to eat off of when company comes.

My parents have been gone all weekend, and Friday night was Valentine's. It was, for some alternate-universe me that exists three dimensions away from ours, a perfect situation. For the me of this lame dimension, it was not much more than an excuse to stay out late, play music loud, and pee with the door open. Anyone who says they don't take every opportunity to pee with the door open is a DIRTY STINKING LIAR. You can relieve yourself and still keep track of what's going on on Fox News in the other room. The words "what heaven must be like" come to mind.

So the weekend wasn't a total loss. And there's one day left, thank you very much Mr. Washington and Lincoln. Although since my grandma brought my brothers back tonight, it will be a day with decidedly less open-door-pissing.

Several bullshit theories keep my life afloat.

One of them is that there's a nebulous conspiracy of timid girls who are secretly in love with me but are too intimidated to say anything. A code of silence and fear of humiliation keeps their secret...well, secret. What they don't realize is that I'm all too accommodating of nubile young girls who are head-over-heels infatuated with me. But they'll never, ever know. Poor imaginary bullshit in-love-with-me girls. Tragic, really.

2003-02-16T20:01:00.000-08:00

And now, to premier a new feature here at HFT, behold the succintly and catchily titled:

A line from one of DC's friend's blogs taken completely out of context, with a snarky comment added on at the end.

Today's line is from Jaclyn's 2/13 post.

Probably because Arizona never gets any.

Dude, Arizona. I sympathize.

Full post later. Promise.

2003-02-15T01:18:00.000-08:00

Alecia is always making with the drunk ass posts, I figure I might as well join the party.

WOO! Party.

In case I have later regrets, this was fun.

MATT: "Now you're not saying things you're later going to regret, are you?"

He drove me home. Good man.

2003-02-13T21:35:00.000-08:00

I could blame my bad mood on the holiday tommorrow. But who the fuck wants to be that guy?

I could blame my bad mood on the fact that I just came from a fantastic improv show, but that's like blaming your infection on penicillin. That is to say, that's nuts, G.

I could blame my bad mood on the rain, but I like everybody else here in the Valley of the Sun, I love days that make that name seem terribly ironic. I love it when the mountains our suburbs grow from are shrouded in fog.

Why am I in a bad mood, fog-shrouded mountains?

Beats us, homes.

Okay. Thanks anyway.

I could blame my bad mood on the fact that I'm accompanying my bad mood with nothing but slow Death Cab songs and Kind of Like Spitting and every aching bit of music in my playlist, but...shut up. I've earned it.

I could blame my bad mood on the fact that it seems a bunch of determined nutjobs seem to want to kill me and everyone born under the same flag as me. So be it. Call me naive and jingoistic if you will, but there's no team I'd rather take one for. Let them give the greatest military in the world an excuse to play rough. Come get me, suckas.

I could blame my bad mood on the fact that unless I do something drastic, going to NYU is going to require me to shoulder an unbelievable amount of debt that I'll be lugging around for a million years, and if I do something drastic, it will require me only to shoulder a slightly unbelievable amount I'll have to lug around for a hundred thousand years. But it's not like I'm paying this money for a car I'm just going to wreck. I'm paying for the opportunity of a lifetime, and however outrageous the price tag, it looks worth it.

Nicole is always begging me for honesty in these things. Well, not really, she begged me, maybe once but I kept talking to her about it because it stuck with me, this whole "honesty" idea. And I think maybe the reason I don't document my every tiny shift in mood is because usually, ten minutes later, they seem trivial and kind of like an insult to all the great things I have.

Or maybe they're not that, I just pretend they are sometimes until they come back, like tonight, with big shiny teeth and sharpened knives.

There's a smile that's not accompanied by a laugh. There's a smile that's not "you're funny" and there's a smile that's not "this is a placating expression and I think I see my friends calling me." There is a smile that says you have just made me happy, by some other means than a joke about retarded kids. This is a smile I haven't been given in a long, long time.

I could blame my bad mood on me.

And for once in my blessed life full of dumb luck and blank stares, I'd be right.

2003-02-12T22:32:00.000-08:00

In case you ever need a bunch of emergency hits to your blog, I urge you to write profusely on the following subjects:

Aaliyah
Pictures of Aaliyah
Herpes, as we've already discussed
Welders
Hilarious pictures of welders

Oh, and if you ever want to get a bunch of really creepy hits, usually from the German version of Google, be sure your blog's name has the word "fisted" in it. They hate disarming Iraq, but they love the idea of putting an entire hand in to somebody's pooter, or bum, depending. Other cultures are so interesting.

I got pop's Navigator tonight because it's my folks' anniversary, so they went for sushi and I picked up my little brothers from Religious Education. Then I took the Navigator to the gym, and then took the long way home in the rain, listening to Nicole's fabulous mix CD. And I thought: You know, Ahwatukee is not a terrible place to be young, smart and devastatingly attractive.

Because I have friends like that, and they seem to be having a good time.

I don't know if you've seen the news lately, but apparently the sky is falling and breaking up into little tiny shards and the shards are then lodging themselves in everybody's eyeballs. The terror alert, I believe, is now on Puce: We Don't Know What It Is Exactly, But It Is Ugly And Scary, No Doubt. That's why everyone here at HFT would like to remind you to take a look around, and take stock of what's important. Give your kids a hug. Give other people's kids a hug. Make cookies for old people. We could all be dead tommorrow, and who knows if you're going to need a last-minute cache of good deeds to avoid eternal damnation. If you don't believe in that sort of thing, make cookies for yourself, and eat them in front of old people, making loud noises of satisfaction. Boastfully display your full set of teeth, as they probably don't have those.

And most importantly, these are times of dire need and unknowable danger. So from all of us here at HFT, a reminder: When the shit hits the fan and you're left picking brown flecks off of everything in the living room, don't just rock. Rock Harder.

2003-02-11T22:47:00.000-08:00

Running On Empty

A play thought up in the car on the way home from the gym by DC Pierson

SETTING: The dashboard of a 1983 F-150. More specifically, the fuel gauge.

CHARACTERS:
THE FUEL INDICATOR NEEDLE- Indicates how much fuel truck has. Orangish-yellow.
THE "E" LINE- Indicates the truck has almost no fuel. White.

AT RISE: The FUEL INDICATOR NEEDLE stands directly in front of the E LINE.

NEEDLE: What's up, E-line?
E LINE: Hey, Needle! Not much, bro.
NEEDLE: Nothing's changed since I was last here?
E LINE: Nope. Just chillin'. Waiting for you to come back.
NEEDLE: You had to know it wouldn't be long.
E LINE: Is it ever?
NEEDLE: No, I guess not. I guess I keep hoping someday he'll become a millionaire or something, and the furthest down here I'll ever get is the half tank line.
E LINE: Less work for you, I suppose. But then we wouldn't get to spend days at a time in close proximity.
NEEDLE: I wouldn't worry about that too much. What with the war about to start and all, and gas prices are rising like...
E LINE:...a twelve year old pawing through a contraband Playboy?
NEEDLE: Awesome similie, E-line!
E LINE: Thanks, Needle.
NEEDLE: Man, it's so great that we spend THAT much time together...we're even on the same wavelength when it comes to figurative speech. Quarter or Half-Tank would never bust out the adolescent erection comparison.
E LINE: That's why I'm glad the owner of this vehicle is such a cheap prick.
NEEDLE: Well, I gotta admit...Sometimes I hop around just to confuse him...when he gets up to fourty or so, I'll hop up to almost the quarter tank line, which feeds his petty delusion that he has more gas than he actually does. Once he's seen that, he'll drive around for days while we just chill here like two peas in a pod.
E LINE: Man, another similie! We are just the literary comparison fuckin' MASTERS today!
NEEDLE: That one was pretty trite.
E LINE: It's cool, we're gonna have a whole 'nother week to work on it before he fills up the damn tank again.
NEEDLE: Hey, you're right! I'd hi-five you, but I don't have arms!
E LINE: That's okay, Needle. You're still favorite indication device on this whole dashboard panel.
NEEDLE: Aw, you're just sayin' that.
E LINE: No, for real! I used to be down with the fifth number on the odometer, but after a thousand or so miles he really changed.
NEEDLE: Oh, man, E Line, you are TOO funny! With jokes like that, I wish the buildup to war in Iraq and its attendant skyrocketing petroleum prices would never end!
E LINE: Me too, bro!

BLACKOUT. CURTAIN.

Yes. Yes, NYU will accept just about anyone into its Dramatic Writing program. Thank you for asking.

2003-02-10T22:31:00.000-08:00

Two of my favorite Chelseas have now killed their blogs. The other Chelseas don't have blogs to kill, that I know of. Bringing the Internet representation of the vast constituency known as Girls I Know Called Chelsea down to zero.

Man, that's cold, Chelseas.

Then I post that story for Creative Writing after much begging and pleading (well, Brian asked me to) and get a paltry two comments (one saying it's too dang long to read.)

Man, that's cold, Blogosphere.

I saw D-back allstar Junior Spivey again at the gym. This time T-Murder and I were sure it was him, because he had a big tattoo reading, in no uncertain terms, "SPIVEY." I wanted to say "Hey, neighbor," because dammit, he is. He lives right behind me, in fact. But he was already getting harassed enough by other gym patrons, and besides, what would I say after, "Sorry to bother you, but I live right behind you, and..."

And what? And...what?

Man, that's cold, Arizona Diamondbacks second-baseman Junior Spivey.

Sigh. I wonder if he's writing about me in his web log. I doubt it. It's always, fantastic parties with beautiful women this, drive white Escalade XLT to BOB to play major league baseball that. Whatever, Junior. Someday you're going to need a neighbor's house to play video games at and I won't even be here.

Me and Tony Womack will be scoping the fly bitches at a posh disco. Or possibly test-driving rocket-powered cars only major league baseball players and their pasty white teenage sidekicks have access to. Tony and I haven't decided yet.

2003-02-09T21:03:00.000-08:00

There are three coats of paint on the upstairs bathroom walls of the Shopwell house, that the Shopwells themselves know of. That’s because they put them there, one in 1954, one in 1967, and the last in 1988. If you were to get some paint thinner, apply it lightly, and take off the current shade of eggshell, you’d find a less-than-pleasant lime green, and dark red stain. Take off the green, and you’d get to a sort of beige, and another stain, this one further up, near the towel rack. The beige was applied by LeRoy Shopwell Jr. with a wide natural-bristle brush. He applied the stain later with a ten-gauge shotgun and a sizable portion of his head. Underneath that, you’ll find the original wood-grain, which would really enhance the value of the house as an antique if it weren’t for all the blood.

Mrs. Shopwell tells me all this matter-of-factly, like she greeted us at the door and like she ordered her brother to take our bags upstairs. She leads the way to the guest room, but Ellen stops me before I can follow. “What she failed to mention,” she says, “is that that last coat of paint didn’t go on for three months.”

“Yea,” I say.

“Can you imagine taking a bath for three months in a room with your cousin’s blood on the wall?”

No, I say, I can’t. I never really had to deal with that sort of thing in my family. Then again, my family isn’t the Shopwells.

“We mopped most of it up,” says Mrs. Shopwell from the other room, where she’s waiting for us. “You could barely see it, that wall was so green.”

“I just tried to stay focused on the rubber ducky,” Ellen says. Ellen, my fiancé. My fiancé with the family full of suicides.

Ellen grew up in a house that had, at any given time, between thirteen and, once, for the entire month of December and halfway through January, thirty-four people in it. That sounded like a dream to me. I grew up in an apartment with two cats and half a father. She explained to me that no, it wasn’t a dream, and it wasn’t just the mutual use of two bathrooms or sharing a full bed with three sisters until she was eighteen that made it a nightmare. But she was always vague on any details after that.

I believe we gain wisdom throughout our lives and it’s our job to pass that on to the next generation. So I will tell my son, or daughter, assuming I have either: If your significant other evades questions about her family’s deep dark secrets, be sure you get some clarity on that issue before you, oh I don’t know, ask her to marry you.

They used to call it the Shopwell Solution, Ellen tells me.

“Who?” I ask, wondering who ‘they’ are.

The town, she says.

“What do they call it now?”

“What?”

“You said they used to call it that, implying they don’t call it that anymore.”

“Well, I don’t live here anymore, so now I don’t know what they call it.”

Probably still the Shopwell Solution, I think, but I don’t say that.

“Oh,” I say.

“Shh,” says Ellen's Uncle Ernest from inside the bedroom Ellen’s sticking her head out of. “Some of us have work tomorrow.”

“Uhnghhghuuggh,” says her Aunt Wendy, from where she’s lying next to Ernie, Wendy’s husband, on one of the two beds inside the bedroom Ellen’s sticking her head out of. The other bed, across the room, Ellen’s supposed to be in right about now at one fifteen AM the first night of our visit. Me, I’m not supposed to join her. That point has been made very, very clear.

“Ellen,” says Mrs. Shopwell around the dinner table earlier that night, “you can sleep in Ernie and Wendy’s room, and I suppose, Sam, you can sleep with Shane.” I say around the table like the table itself round, but it’s really more of one long bench populated with twelve Shopwells and myself. So Mrs. Shopwell says this butted up against one end of a very long bench on which there’s food, food that makes me think maybe the dual culinary ideals of down-home and country-fried are overrated.

I’m sleeping with Shane, and at dinner, butt aching on this stupid bench, I’m thinking, if there’s one person I had to figure was next to try the Shopwell solution, it would be Shane. Jet-black hair, clearly from a tube since the rest of the Shopwells are straw blonde, Cure shirt, black nail polish. At the mention of his name, Shane gives me a nod and returns to bludgeoning his mashed potatoes with a fork. And I’m thinking, there’s more fat on the plate than on the kid. But Mr. Shopwell, the patriarch, beats me to the punch.

“You gonna eat your food or you gonna beat it in a staring contest?” he says from his place at the head of the bench.

“The food doesn’t have eyes, dear,” says Mrs. Shopwell from the other end. “We have Wendy to thank for that.” Ernie’s plump bride grins from her seat across from me. I pick at my chicken thigh, just to make sure. And I’m thinking of Ellen telling me about all the safety precautions Randall tried to put in place.

Randall, some Shopwell Aunt’s second husband.

“I bet I can guess what happened to the first one,” I say when Ellen first tells me this, wondering if it’s okay to poke fun at the girl hardwired for suicide. Ellen doesn’t laugh, but she doesn’t go hang herself in the closet either.

He, Randall, I mean, moved in with the family and took all the locks off the doors. Snuck all the steak knives out of the house one by one. Got all the Shopwell men fancy electric razors for Christmas one year. Thought he was clever, top-secret, covert.

Meanwhile, his new wife was top-secretly slipping her every meal to the family dog under the table. You’d think someone would notice her gradual transformation into a bad Halloween costume, but you’d be making the same mistake that Randall did. The Shopwells, Ellen tells me, have resigned themselves to the fact that most of them seem to have a switch. When it’s flipped, all the counseling and all the happy-pills and all the force-feedings in the world won’t turn back the inevitable.

“It’s not that they wanted Claire to waste away and die,” Ellen says. “It’s that hundreds of years of this have given them the hint. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done.”

I’m thinking of Claire and the dog while I watch this country-bumpkin-wannabe-Goth fiddle with his potatoes. And I’m wondering if Mr. Shopwell is dispensing some gentle paternal ribbing, mocking the skinny kid, or if he’s trying to turn back the inevitable. Un-flip the switch. And I’m wondering if it’s ever something I’m going to have to do.

The first night, after I kiss my fiancé goodnight and go to my room three doors down, Shane is already asleep. Although that’s not the first thing I notice. The first thing I notice is the utter lack of anything that would ever tell you a teenager lives here, especially one of this sort. I miss immediately the Cradle of Filth and Marilyn Manson posters, there’s not even a token portrait of Morrissey. Just wood-paneled walls and a couple of beds with itchy quilts.

The window has bars on it. Another manifestation of Randall’s failure to understand all this, I think, staring out into a snow-covered moonlit field. I sympathize, Randall. I don’t get it either. You just didn’t want some poor Shopwell kid hurtling out three stories face first into a night like tonight. You didn’t realize that they’d actively seek an alternative. Maybe just trudge out into the snow, lay down, and wait for morning in not much more than their hand-knit underwear.

I want to ask Shane if that’s his plan. But he’s already asleep.

The next morning, it doesn’t look like the next morning, at all. It just looks like the same dark world I laid down in. Maybe because it’s the dead of winter and maybe because only four or so hours elapse between the time I close my eyes and the time Mr. Shopwell wakes me up to go hunting.

After a shower that makes me think maybe the belief that the country has cleaner water than the city is a dirty brown lie, I meet Mr. Shopwell in front of the gun cabinet downstairs in his study.

“This one used to be Jimmy’s,” he says, handing me one of the shorter rifles, in a manner that makes me think that this wasn’t something Jimmy just outgrew. “Pretty good for a first-timer.” I know nothing about guns.

“Yup,” I say. “Looks like it.”

We trudge off into the woods to the north, across a snowy world over which the sun has not yet risen.

We barely talk, and we’re both holding guns, and by the time the horizon is getting pink I’m wondering why Ellen thought this would be such a great time for me to inform Mr. Shopwell that I’m going to marry his daughter. Especially since the tradition is, usually, to ask the father before you pop the question. And especially since, like I said, you know, the guns.

Mr. Shopwell fires his gun three times the entire morning. Every time he does we end up with a pheasant. I fire my gun once, when I see something rustle in the bushes. The gun cracks and the muzzle flairs and to that something rustling in the bushes I think: next time tell me your family has a history of fucking suicide before I fucking ask you to fucking marry me. The squirrel gets away.

“It’s alright,” says Mr. Shopwell. “You’re just got the jitters.”

“Yea,” I say, now that we’ve broken the silence. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

The upstairs bathroom of the Shopwell house doesn’t have a lock on it. Neither does the downstairs one in the hallway. These are all Randall reformations. But the other one downstairs still does. The one adjoining Mr. Shopwell’s study. The one he’s been locked in all morning since we came back from the hunting trip.

“What did you say to him?” Ellen asks. Her mother is pounding on the door, Ellen and myself and seven or so Shopwells are all gathered in the study.

“I just…I just told him we were getting married, like you said.”

“You guys are getting married? Oh, why didn’t you—Congratulations!” shrieks a female cousin who’s name I’ve forgotten.

“Who’s getting married?” says Aunt Wendy, whirling around from her place by Mrs. Shopwell at the door.

“Ellen and Sam!” the cousin says.

“ROGER, ANSWER ME!” Ellen’s mother screams into the locked bathroom.

“Well, did he say anything after that?” Ellen asks.

“‘Good for you.’” I say.

“I think we get a group rate down at the funeral home, so it’s no big deal,” Shane says.

That night, the second night, Shane’s not asleep. We’re both lying awake, looking at the circle of light the lampshade makes on the ceiling, and smoking some cigarettes he had stashed in the folds of one of this room’s many quilts. Most attentive future husbands would probably be spending this time comforting their soon-to-be-spouses, assuring them that their father has gone on to a better place. But that would be hard, since my soon-to-be-spouse went to the movies with one of her sisters, and I wasn’t invited.

“He just died, he didn’t, you know,” Shane says, making the gun-to-the-head motion. “But it’s pretty much the same thing. Either way, he won’t be at breakfast tomorrow.”

“Yea,” I say, as the smoke wafts through the light-circle from the lamp. “I see what you’re saying. So when the time comes, do you think you’ll…you know…” I say, mimicking the motion, finger-gun to the head.

“Ha. No. That’d be kind of like, you know, buying into it? You know? Like if you come from a family of Marines and then you go be a Marine, or…I don’t know. Lame shit like that.”

“Shane,” I say, “you have just become my favorite Shopwell. Maybe even moreso than the one I’m supposed to marry.”

“Oh, shit, you guys are getting married? I didn’t know.”

“Well, neither did your grandfather,” I say, “and look what happened to him.”

And we laugh and smoke more and I’m not really sure when Ellen comes home.

I’ve just met Roger Shopwell, so it was no surprise that I’m not crying at his funeral. But neither are people he provided one half of the genes for. In fact, I don’t think a single tear is shed in that entire church that day. The priest says a few words, and we just sort of mosey out to the parking lot. Me following Ellen following her family.

I look at Ellen’s back, the back of the black dress, the black of the shoulder-length straw-blonde, and see a tearless funeral for me in fifty years. I look at her back and I think, hard and loud: I will never kill myself. I will try my damndest never to die at all. Just please let this mean something.

Then I think, hard and loud, of my family, with our two cats and half a father and our custom of abandoning each other in the emotional, legal, and physical sense, and how somehow we seem downright traditional.

And then I look at my fiancé’s back and the backs of all the Shopwells, and think of how tradition seems sort of overrated.

2003-02-09T00:56:00.000-08:00

I read Alecia's blog and it's all, like, "Oh how wonderful it is, to not be tied down romantically to anyone person! To skip willy-nilly from one drunken make-out partner to the next!" and I can do nothing from sympathize. Jesus, it's a relief not to be committed to anyone. This way I can divide my time between taking naps and staring blankly out the window. A girlfriend would really get in the way of that.

This girl in my Creative Writing class scoffed when I defined myself as "sensitive." She didn't scoff, actually. She laughed, like oh, silly cynical boy making a silly joke characterizing himself as sensitive. How ironic, silly cynical boy. I have never been more hurt in my entire history of being secretly sensitive. I always figured that was maybe my one asset, that I didn't seem like the type of guy who would ditch you on Prom Night for your best friend. I thought I seemed like a listener. Apparently not. Apparently you can't make dead-baby jokes and be a listener.

I am though. I promise. In fact, I think the fact that my sensitivity is not immediately apparent makes me all the more sensitive. There are layers here. And as any patron of citrus fruit will tell you, the fact that you have to peel something to get at the goodness inside makes the goodness all the more rewarding.

With that said, peel away, dammit.

Then she mentioned Coldplay a couple days later. "Coldplay," said I, "I love Coldplay," 'cause I do.

"Oh, really?" she said.

"Yea," I said. "BAM! Sensitive. See? Sensitive!"

And I wasn't kidding either. For fucking once in my life.

After the show last night,this kid's mom said to me, "You never stop acting, do you?" And it was one of the most unintentionally piercing things anyone's mom ever said to me. That, and the time Trevor's mom called me fat. But that's a story for another day. Today's story is Goldstein's mom summarizing my biggest flaw in one second of casual conversation. She sort of meant it as a compliment, too.

It's the sort of thing that makes you want to put the mask down. Stop joking for just one precious second. Grab someone by the hands and say...things that will leave me taking naps and staring out the window.

I want a commitment to be in fear of. But I've only ever done that dance once and I've already forgotten the steps, and I'm afraid I was never that good to begin with.

2003-02-07T22:22:00.000-08:00

This, friends, is a good post.

The kind you won't find here tonight, so don't bother looking.

I stayed up all last night finishing a short story for Creative Writing and I'm just wrote out and my bed is calling my name and interspersing it with colorful imaginary swears like "fendoozlefuck." So read that post. And think about it.

I think if I were really honest, it would kill me. And you, too, if you're one of those people who are clinically allergic to honesty, like that weird guy on Extra that one time. Honesty makes me break out.

I keep teasing you with it. One of these days, I'm going to say what I really think. First I have to figure out what that is, though.

2003-02-05T22:36:00.000-08:00

Last night I got fucked up on the Recommended Adult Dose of Nyquil and passed out and the hour hand went around the clock once, twice, ten times. It was only supposed to go around eight, because by the time it had gone around nine-and-a-quarter I was supposed to be in an uncomfortable desk a mile or so away. But I figured, I'm sick, I've earned it. So I called my stepmom, got her to call me in sick, then closed my eyes and let that clock spin, baby. I ended up getting out of bed around two, and showed up at school around three-thirty, to see if there was any last-minute crew stuff to do. There wasn't, but I hung out 'till six anyway.

I was sitting in the boy's makeup room bathroom, shooting the shit (the rhetorical kind, not the literal) while people were getting ready for dress rehearsal. Matt asked if I wanted some makeup to put on just 'cause. Smartass. He was right though. I guess my presence smacked of desperation...I'm used to looking in the mirror, ceding my masculinity, and slathering on some foundation, then tromping off beneath the lights for a couple hours and going home late. Am I bitter that I don't get to do that this time? No, not really. Let other people have the chance, I say. But just because you don't begrudge someone the opportunity to do something doesn't mean you don't miss doing it yourself.

This has been humbling, not being in a show. Building the set for once instead of just taking it for granted. Cleaning paint rollers 'till my fingers are black and not being able to think of something I'd rather be doing. The phrase what it's all about comes to mind. I know I have a tendency to over-romanticize this whole high-school-theatre thing, but when something's so romantic to begin with, paint-rollers and all, it's not hard to push it over that line.

Musical auditions are at the end of this month. Graduation is in May. Then I get to go do this shit for real. Sometimes I think that hour hand goes around too fast.

You owe it to yourself to read everything Dan the Goose has written in the past week

2003-02-04T21:49:00.000-08:00

I didn't get that stomach thing that was going around because I was too busy catching a raging syphlitic whore of a cold. My head feels like something you'd have to claw your way out of to breathe.

Nyquil now. Bed soon.

2003-02-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

I am tired of having nasal allergies and putting things off. One is not related to the other, but they're both things I could get rid of if I could.

Wait, no, I don't not like putting things off. I love it. It's pretty much all I do. Eighty percent of my day is time when I actually should be doing one thing but I've deferred it to a later date. So I guess I oughta say I don't like the consequences of putting things off. Will I keep doing it? Do the Japanese do hilarious English subtitle translations of some of my favorite films? (The answer is a resounding "yes" on both accounts)

Went to Nicole's game night last night. It was nice to see their house and cat and everything else I've previously just had to imagine. My team lost at Trivial Pursuit, proving once and for all that if there is justice in the universe, it was bleeding and broken in the gutter somewhere when the clearly superior blue team had victory stolen away by the otherwise less-than-stellar greens. But all was not lost: surprisingly literate candy hearts were eaten (one exhorted its consumer in the trademark pink letters: "Let's Read," a really good mix CD was given to me by Nicole, and people who I haven't seen in a long time I...well...saw. All in all, a night more fun than the one I had planned (doing homework, watching Futurama, falling asleep.)

Ever see someone walk into a room, get a weird feeling, then chalk it up to the fact that you made out with them in a dream last night?

No. Me neither.

I need to see this movie again. I had almost completely forgotten about the lovely big golden noise-ships. But I could never forget this part:

If I had a nickel for every time a dwarf said that to me, I'd have no need for student loans.

Thanks to Ben for bringing this to everyone's attention

2003-02-03T20:00:00.000-08:00

"If there were no children on this Earth, if someone announced all kids were dead, I would jump off the balcony immediately."

- Michael Jackson

2003-02-01T17:29:00.000-08:00

Today was full of highs and lows.

High: Getting a Superior rating and winning "Best Actor" at the State One-Act Competition

Low: The Space Shuttle blowing up on re-entry

Crazy world.

2003-01-30T22:27:00.000-08:00

Some Automotive Notes tonight.

To the asshole in the car behind me making a hand motion to his girlfriend next to him indicating the lopsidedness of the back end of my truck, then cackling: Man, fuck you. At least I don't drive my lady around in a hatchback then pretend like my vehicular shit don't stink.

To the moron rollerblading down the MIDDLE of a poorly lit street holding hands with two friends who had the relative good sense to stick to the bike lane: You owe your life to the fact that my headlights hit you a few seconds before I did, and that the word "Manslaughter" went through my head before the words "Natural Selection." You earned a good ol' thump-n'-squish. Be thankful I gave you a swerve-n'-honk instead. Dumbass.

Some Positive Notes tonight.

I don't have to go to school tommorrow! Instead I get to go watch one-act plays at the state competition, at which we're performing on Saturday. Wow, that was a horrible sentence. A horrible, wrong sentence, that's almost too much of a monument to grammar gone wrong to delete. It'd be like killing a rare three-legged toad. Squishy. Anyway, no school tommorrow. Pretty-eyes Hogwarts girl from last week will probably be there, too. Yee haw.

What was the other one? Oh, right. We had our first improv show tonight. Matt and I switched off hosting and playing duties, a good time was had by all, or at least it would seem that way. There'll be another show in a couple of weeks, if you're in the Phoenix area, or plan to find yourself in a high-school drama room in the near future, or whatever.

Well, I'm going to hit the sack. You owe it to yourself to read all the Achewoods from the past few days, if you're wondering what's been missing from your life. Besides mah love, that is.

2003-01-29T21:44:00.000-08:00

Everybody's sick.

That's right, everybody.

Yup, him too.

Everybody, that is, except for me. My family's doubled over in gastro-intestinal woe. My friends are staying home from school. And here I am, a rock of immunity in a sea of Pepto-Bismol-guzzling invalids. I never seem to catch half the crap that goes around. I'm so hardcore.

Then I got home tonight from the gym, and felt almost like dinner wanted to pay me a follow-up visit. Now I feel kinda woozy...

hardcore hardcore hardcore...

2003-01-28T22:29:00.000-08:00

You grew up and the sights you saw most during that time were probably the faces of your mother and father, the ceiling of your room as you wondered why all the adults were still up having fun, the television screen on Saturday mornings. Terrence Metcalf grew up and his world was all tail-lights and off-ramps, and his father’s face illuminated every couple of seconds by yellow street lamps as the Union zoomed by all around them, from sea to shining sea.

Terrence liked the Atlantic Ocean better. Definitely. There was something about it, especially up in New England, that said it was just allowing North America to be there on a whim. The Pacific was sky-blue and showy, like how a billionaire might build his own private sea if he had the time. The Pacific was for people having a better time than you. He had seen the Pacific six times and the Atlantic five, and they were heading back to the east coast when his father pulled the old Accord into Wharton, Ohio. But first things first.

He was all curly sandy blonde hair and had to be the only kid in America with a right-arm driver’s tan, from those long stretches of blank prairie when he’d stick his hand up to the window to block out the sun. Then, when they’d get to Oklahoma and the sky would cloud over, when the radio would start playing an endless loop of the Charlie Daniels Band, he’d put his arm down, stick both arms behind his head and watch the rain fall on the windshield. He’d pick two raindrops and watch them race them from the front windshield to the end of the passenger window, knowing that as long as the rain fell, the race would never end.

They lived out of the trunk and every Goodwill store between San Bernadino and Cape Cod for three years, and, by Terrence’s count, three shoe sizes.

They were out on this inter-ocean expedition under the pretenses of Mr. Metcalf looking for work. But all Terrence knew was that Mom had left, Dad used to be a gas-station attendant and before that, a truck driver, and for some reason nobody was paying for the line of work he was looking for.

They pulled into a little Virginia village one afternoon, and while Terrence’s father ducked into a bar for a drink, Terrence headed down the block under the pretense of buying some jerky at a corner store. He ended up in the town library, not so much out of a voracious need for literature but the desire for free entertainment: he had done three whole Mad Libs books on this particular leg of the trip and somehow stories that started “So I walked outside my house of CHEESE and lifted up a car with my EYEBALL” had just ceased to amuse him.

He was warming to the idea of a narrative for which he didn’t have to provide all the adjectives and verbs when the space designated “ADDRESS” on the library-card application stopped him dead. Worse yet, the librarian told him that if he didn’t know his address she would be more than happy to call his mother. A number he didn’t know to find an address that didn’t exist. He settled for a dusty clearance copy of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea that lay on a shelf between the Help Desk and the faint twilight of the Virginia town.

It was too dark to read every night, so Terrence would count mile markers ‘till he fell asleep, because if he was lucky, once or twice a week, he’d wake up in a motel bed. He’d dream he was deep beneath the Atlantic, wrapped in cold blue, darting in and out of the legs of a giant squid, thrusting his way up towards the surface and hearing the roar of waves. But when he would always awake to find that it was the engine, not the waves, that were roaring, and the ocean’s surface was now a seemingly endless prairie sky.

One night he went to sleep and woke up in bed in a farmhouse in Wharton, Ohio, owned by grandparents he’d never met, who were downstairs making breakfast. The Accord wasn’t in the driveway, just a beat-up old truck that would one day take him in to town to buy school clothes. He would try to grow accustomed to a stiff desk instead of a bucket seat. It would be hard (the desks didn’t have a cupholder and never reclined.) And some afternoons at school, during geography, his classmates would pull out their textbooks and trace their finger along a cartoony map of the United States, in accordance with some assignment. Terrence would just stare out the window, secure in the knowledge that not only did he know his states and capitals, but he could tell you how to get between any two of those capitals in the Continental US, how to navigate the New Jersey Turnpike, and could draw from memory the winding stretches of the Pacific Coast Highway. He had seen these flat, awkwardly colored shapes spread out before him, one continuous mass from the wise old ocean to the showy arrogant one.

Small town life would eventually settle him, with its promises of a permanent address and all the books the Wharton Public Library had to offer. His father never returned, and neither did his lust for highway life. Eventually, he’d find himself wanting out of the one-horse town, but not wanting to make the journey to get there, for fear of wandering until he regained his driver’s tan. He hoped someday to find a place of his own, where he could fall asleep and dream of asphalt receding under headlights to the tune of six cylinders, and wake up to realize it was only the ocean.

2003-01-27T22:20:00.000-08:00

I'd never read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." Only heard about it and seen it parodied in places. And apparently the post that got me all those hits from Carnival of the Vanities is very similar to it. But I'd never read it. So when my Creative Writing teacher said, "Who's read Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery?'" I didn't know I wasn't supposed to blurt out "Is that the one where all the townspeople get together and kill each other?" I thought everyone knew what it was about, but apparently I ruined the big suprise ending for a classful of seniors. Should of read it before. Buncha bums.

It reminded me of that line from Dogma, about being bludgeoned to shit with big fuckin' rocks.

Man, I just can't contend with the past two days, where my blog featured, in rapid succession, two teenage girls making out and legendary rapper Flavor Flav. Which is why instead of me writing an actual post, we're going to conduct a Reader Poll, and then, you, the reader, are going to take the poll. Here goes.

OFFICIAL HFT READER POLL
I, loyal HFT reader, would like to see more of the following in DC's daily posts:

A) Chicks totally making out
B) Members of Public Enemy just BUGGIN'
C) Chicks totally making out with members of Public Enemy, perhaps on some sort of Japanese game show

Answer eloquently in the comments below, and I'll see you tomorrow, sunshine.

Credit where credit's due: Monkey-on-monkey action found via Ken Layne

2003-01-26T22:25:00.000-08:00

Just for the record, MTV's Made is the best show in history.

I may be hasting in making that declaration, especially considering I've only seen two episodes, but damn, is it ever some watchable shit. It's as if the TV Gods asked, would you like to see pathetic layabouts struggle endlessly to acheive their seemingly impossible dreams? and I said, Well, yea. But will there be a five-alarm flaming cheer coach? Or a whiny kid who resembles a stick and a terrible attitude doing Suicides and falling all over the place? and they responded, You bet your sweet ass, G! and then the TV Gods and I did a slow-motion high-five, and the sound produced by the meeting of our hands...well, that was MADE.

And it was good. Was it ever good.

I almost feel bad describing it. If you ever woke up in the morning and wish you could watch physically ungainly teenagers be tortured by coaches shouting trite motivational slogans, you owe it to yourself to tune in. The first episode I was privileged enough to catch involved a fat Drama girl attempting to make her school's cheer squad. The highlight might have been her friends: buncha awkward bucktoothed girls insisting that all cheerleaders were snobs. I wanted to say, wow, you go to one of those high schools? With the jocks and the goths and the hitting and the locker-putting-in? Poor bastards. We have cliques and muscular guys stealing wormy band kids' Magic cards and things, but I guess it never seems that bad. Or that ugly.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Good show, though.

Someday I will go to sleep and wake up as Flavor Flav. And until that day, the slowly growing stash of giant clocks on necklaces will sit in my closet, gathering dust, until I awake one day, ready to implore the masses to Fight The Powers That Be.

Uhm...let's see...let me pull out the topic checklist...made is a good show...wake up as member of public enemy (flavor flav, if not, prof. griff, despite antisemitism)...

Apparently, a plug from HFT is the kiss of death. On Wednesday, I linked Katie Hall's joyous wonderfully well-written if spottily updated blog. And days later, this: No more blog. No explanation. Not even a cursory "let's-just-be-friends." Poof. Kate is no more, blog-wise. This is a late blog. No wonder I have friggin' abandonment issues.

One of my other favorite bloggers, Jim Treacher, hung up his spurs a few weeks ago under vague and ominous pretenses, but he took them back down from the Wall of Spurs again, and is currently making jokes about the Hulk's skin care. Good for him. Meanwhile, Kate's spurs just hang there, without explanation, waiting for the return of their gifted owner. What's the deal, Kate?

I was shocked when she told me. "There's no milk! Not a drop left," she said, ashamed. I could tell she was in disbelief as I saw her look back into the refridgerator numerous times, hoping a gallon of milk would suddenly appear... but no luck. "Where could it have gone?" Umm, we drank it, Grandma. I drank it, you drank it, we all drank it. It's... gone.

Ha ha. Kenzie is funny. Hopefully me linking her will not result in the immediate demise of her blog. Although, at least I know her and see her every day, so if such a thing does happen I can grab her shoulders, shake her, and say "What the hell, baby?" Not that I would do that. Naw. Although Flavor Flav just might.