As originally posted not by meiner Lieblingsfisch but by someone I don't actually know ...


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We got back from Comic Con and the San Diego Wild Animal Park two Sunday nights ago, exhausted, homesick and fresh out of Swedish Fish. I intended to write about our adventure immediately so as not to forget any of the little details that make an anecdote basically palatable, but unsurprisingly did not feel up to it at the time and now have forgotten 90% of everything that happened. In lieu of an actual write-up, some scattered points during lunch:

There were far more Stormtroopers at the Con than one would think necessary to keep order at what was, after all, a relatively modest gathering by intergalactic standards. There were enough Stormtroopers to scrape together a Million Stormtrooper March on Washington to rally for Stormtrooper-American rights. There were enough Stormtroopers to quell the violence in Darfur while replacing all US troops in Iraq and subjugating the indigenous population of Mars, leaving a battalion or two (determined by raffle) to service the hot, horny harlots that await the destruction of Earth from their 70's-styled civilization beneath the surface of the moon. There were more Stormtroopers, I contend, that one could shake a stick at. I noticed six or seven thousand Boba Fetts as well. I was hoping they'd organize themselves into an impromptu dance-off for dominion over the convention center, but all they did was pose for pictures. Wasted opportunity!

We stayed with Anna and her family in San Diego. I like them very much. In fact, I intend to steal them. Including the turtles. Don't think I won't.

I found that, like E3, Comic-Con is fun for the first few hours each day, after which point it becomes somewhat less fun than something which is not fun at all. Think "colonoscopy." As Anna also pointed out, after that critical third or fourth hour, the content of the Con tends to blur together and I have to concentrate to make out details. The floor is hard, the backpack gets heavier and heavier, and chairs are hard to come by, so it did not take long for my various bodily bits to begin screaming in pain. I was quite glad each day when it came time to leave.

Lis and I attended a panel on ... um, I really can't remember the theme ... something about fantasy and sci-fi and malt liquor and sagebrush and their impact on the Jewish stranglehold on international finance, or something. It was interesting, whatever it was! George R. R. Martin and R. A. Salvatore made up part of the panel. Both were funny and very entertaining to listen to, Salvatore especially. I read the first two books of his Dark Elf Trilogy in junior high, I think it was, and remember them kicking all sorts of ass. So I was inspired to buy and re-read them shortly after the con. I got about 2/3 of the way through the first one before I was reminded that I was half an idiot in junior high and evaluations from that period of my life should not be trusted now. The book is terrible. But the author is still pretty cool.

I went by myself to a panel on developing pen-and-paper role-playing games. A nugget or two of interest must have been revealed, but anything good to come of the experience was overshadowed by the panelists' insistence that they were very witty people. The first row of the audience was made up of co-workers and assorted other sycophants that laughed heartily and fed the egos at the front, encouraging them to say more and more really amazingly funny things that didn't happen to have anything to do with the topic. I'd like for someone to work out the percentages and come up with a pie chart on the Content to Pause for Expected Laughter ratio. Arrrgh!

The Dawn of War expansion is going to rock thy socks. I watched over the shoulders of three fuckers who didn't realize that their utterly inconsiderate 30-minute skirmish games were cutting into the inconsiderate 30-minute skirmish game that I intended to play, until my feet hurt too much to continue standing in one place. I left with the intention of coming back in a little while to take my place at the head of the Necron onslaught, but my direction sense is crap and I never found the booth again. Hrmph. The build animations look sweeeet. While a Necron building is going up, it's periodically blasted by a massive stroke of green lightning from on high. It's so C'tan, so Necron. I love Relic, they actually fucking get 40k. Watching the demo made me want to break back into that closetful of miniatures I shall never finish painting.

We stayed with more of Lis's cool, hospitable and air mattress-possessing friends James and Dyana on Saturday night, in Culver City. Their daughter Lili is the cutest li'l thang evar. I need to get one'a them childs, if only to teach it to say "down wif the 'stabwishment!" in a squeaky voice. For what it's worth, my first choice would have been a magical talking cat, but Lis is allergic so I'd better go with the kid.

And that's all!

Mako is dead. Fuckin' Mako! Dead! Goddammit!

I don't think one can ignore how quickly and mercilessly time flies, when he takes inventory of the celebrities who have shuffled off this mortal coil within his lifetime. The latest one to croak on my watch is Mako, but I believe River Phoenix was the first big name I recognized to become significantly less alive than is generally preferred. I didn't notice any more dead celebrities 'til the one everyone'd been expecting to die since at least the third century of his life, George Burns. After that, it seemed a fly would drop out of the air every week: Brandon Lee, George C. Scott, Alec Guiness, Christopher Reeve, Douglas Adams, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, Mr. Rogers, Rodney Dangerfield, Joey Ramone, Marlon Brando, Ray Charles, Ronald Reagan, Tony Randall, Johnny Carson, Bob Denver (Gilligan is dead!), Don Adams (and Maxwell Smart!), Pat Morita (what happened to my childhood?!), Richard Pryor, Don Knotts ...

And now Mako. Tear off the horn! The horn is its life! Tear off the hooorrrn!

It won't stop there with Hollywood's favorite Asian-American-Actor-Who-Is-Not-James-Hong, oh no. In my lifetime, provided I'm not devoured by pigs, or set on fire, or mistakenly boiled, or ... well. In my lifetime, I will see Sharon Stone die. I will see George Carlin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eugene Levy, Ed Begley Jr. and Annette Bening kick off, and sooner or later I'm going to read a headline, "Gary Oldman Dead, 77." I'll see the end of Keanu Reeves. Pee-Wee Herman, too. Kirk Douglas and Donald Sutherland will die before I do, as will Michael and Kiefer. The entire core cast of "Seinfeld" and the few surviving members of "M*A*S*H" are going to expire before my increasingly wizened and despairing eyes.

I'll probably not manage to outlive Jonathan Rhys Myers or Angelina Jolie. The Olsen Twins will just have to dry their tears and move on with their lives through frantic nostalgic masturbation when they learn of my unfortunate but inevitable passing. For the most part, though, the immortals I've learned to recognize by name and face will turn to ash while I continue stumbling along. This is almost a discouraging thought, except that it means I'm also likely to see Pauly Shore go -- and that, I think, is worth the tragedy.

I intended to spend the evening making a long-overdue phone call to a friend, wiping and reloading the iPod, doing the laundry and packing the parts of it I want to take to Comic Con, buying tape with which to mount the temporary vehicle registration I obtained after spending four hours at the DM-thrice-fucked-V, buying spare batteries for the camera, locating my stereo's faceplate, and finishing doing the dishes.

I actually got as far as the long-overdue phone call to a friend. It was a good chat, at least.

Fortunately I'm not alone in this last-minute hopeless panic, and so it's been decided that we leave for San Diego a little later than originally agreed. This provides one additional evening in which to completely fail to get as much done as our noble intentions demand, leaving at least several threads unravelling at the ends. I am not cynical, I merely know. Road trip preparation inhabits a dimension all its own, completely apart from the trip itself, with its own rules and outcomes. No matter how well-plotted the list, and no matter how far ahead of time it's scrawled, virtually all of it will be thrown together in a whirlwind of pressure and frustration mere moments before departure, and a substantial portion will not actually make it into the car. Or so it seems.

Tonight I asked a fellow commuter at the platform what time it was. "9:40," she said after consulting her cell. "I hope there are still trains", I stated, quite unnecessarily considering we were standing on the very spot where people who hope there are still trains tend to gather. "Me too," she graciously replied. "I just talked to Jerry, who said there's another N 'on its way'. I hope he's right ..." I do too, I thought, and who is Jerry, anyway? I tentatively chose to suspect his identity was another piece of common knowledge that I, the eternal tourist, was not in on, and that the people who live around there were all on a first-name basis with Jerry even if I was not. Halfway into a spontaneous character portrait of Jerry as a local homeless man who wanders the length of the tunnel and helpfully gives regular reports on incoming transit to ingratiate himself into peoples' spare change, I experimentally punted: "yeah, well, he'd know." She grimaced after a moment's blankness. "What-ever," she said in exasperated disagreement, and looked away. I blinked exactly twice to indicate to my Invisible Audience that I was perplexed, and wandered off into the usual obsessive insanity that plagues me after something like this. Who the fuck is Jerry ..?

ME: What's ... unnh! ... what's your name?
CLOWN: Mrphh?
ME: Stop for a sec. Stop for a sec. Your name ... what is it?
CLOWN: Mmf ... mm, um, it's Goo-Goo.
ME: Goo-Goo. OK. Oh, Goo-Goo. Ohhh, Goo-Goo. ... Look, that doesn't work for me. Could I call you Gonzo?
CLOWN: Gonzo?
ME: Yeah. Could I call you that instead?
CLOWN: Sure, I'll be Gonzo if you want. Whatever, honey.
ME: Thanks. ... Oh, Gonzo. Ohhh, Gonzo! ... Hey. Wait. Stop for a sec. Stop for a sec.
CLOWN: Mrrph?
ME: Could you call me Piggy?
CLOWN: ... You ain't some kinda freak, are you?
ME: Um, no. I'm not. Could you just call me Piggy?
CLOWN: Hmm.

I stopped taking French classes a few months ago. Not that I didn't enjoy it, quite the opposite, but some crunch time or other knocked me out of my groove and then I was sick for most of a month and eventually fell too far behind to quickly catch back up to where I'd left off. I could probably have gone back in and requested that Madame Dupont help me get up to speed before we resumed covering new ground, and it probably would eventually have worked out all right, but I'd essentially have been paying for the same lessons all over again and I preferred to freeze my account, and bail for the time being. Merde.

So, French at an end for awhile, Lis and I went to our first German class last night! We go to the same school where I studied before, ABC Language, in north San Francisco. They've got a little two-story building with lots of small classrooms (built to be offices), only a few of which ever seem to be in use when I'm there. I gather that most of their business takes place off-site, in the conference rooms of companies interested in teaching their employees to communicate in Spanish, Chinese and such. I've been studying German for ages, but speak very much at a beginner's level, a fact which I blame, reasonably I think, on never having had anyone to talk to. It's hard to stay motivated to learn to converse, when one's conversational partner is onesself. But now, I have Lis. Through spotty German banter over ICQ and then daily attempts at actual conversation, we learned that we're at about the same level of proficiency. We go to town on vocabulary, but come up a little short on grammar. I'm confident that this will fall into place with practice and real study. We're going to Comic Con next week, but the week after, the Deutschkurs shall resume and we'll be steeped in überness before you can scream, Ja wohl, Fraülein Strafvollzugsbeamte! Not that I can think of a reason why you might wish to scream that.

I'm doing a bit of crunch at work right now, fortunately not quite of the "shut down my entire life to accomodate" variety. The character I was pulling voluntary crunch hours to finish before I ditch the company for a week was coming along smoothly enough, until two concept revisions scuttled a lot of what I'd already done, forcing it to be rebuilt, not quite from scratch but damn near. I panicked, knowing I'd never get the guy finished by the time I departed, but it turns out it'd been quietly removed from the milestone schedule anyway. Dunno whether it's because of the revisions or not, but I'm not about to complain. Now I've switched gears, filing the model away in favor of a smaller texture-focused project I know I can finish with a few more easy-to-digest crunch hours before I go. It's been a long, long time since I did any texturing. I think the last thing I painted was a tiny Anachronox texture, in 1999. Eeek. I'm getting back into it, though, very slowly, and with an almost gooey amount of pleasure. Mmmm.

This morning when I got off the BART, there was a dude slumped in a corner by the stairs, guitar across his lap and case open to accept donations, providing a soundtrack to everyone's morning commute, as usual. But this guy ... this fuckin' guy! ... was playing the Ramones! With a thick Eastern European accent!

Beat on de brat
Beat on de brat
Beat on de brat vit' a base-boll bat
Oh yah oh yah oh ho

You're goddamn right I gave him my money.

My apartment is too fucking hot. This city needs air conditioning.

This Sunday I did FUCK ALL!

It felt GREAT!

I'm outing Lis as part of this slovenly venture. We'd originally planned to do productive things on Sunday wherein she'd write a bit, I'd animate a bit, and apartments would end up slightly cleaner than before. Instead, without necessarily making the conscious decision to do so, we met the slobbery kiss of Sloth with enthusiastically puckered lips and gave way to Gaming Zombiehood from approximately noon 'til exactly 2am. I bounced between Civilization, Dawn of War, and World of Warcraft, while she glued her eyes to Civilization (cinching an Indian stranglehold on her entire continent, ensuring a chicken bhotti tandoori in every pot and a Maruti 800 in every garage) and didn't look up 'til even I, the caffeine-laced night owl, started shuffling around, shutting things down and yawning with more volume than was necessary. Eventually my first gaming marathon in two or three months ended, and I went to sleep exhausted and deeply satisfied. Ahhh, Life. You can have your softball teams and family outings; this is what weekends were built for.

Last night after getting off the train, a kid who'd ridden in a car ahead of mine flagged me down and asked me the way to Hippie Hill. I pointed out that he'd gotten off the train a few stops early, and was delighted to be able to tell him how he could get to Haight St. and Golden Gate Park if he didn't mind the long walk (being that we'd just exited what was probably the last N-Judah train of the evening). Usually the best I can do is "um, I think it's sort of over there," or more honestly, "I have no idea where it is." I must disappoint tourists terribly. But this time I was able to give pretty solid directions and felt good about it. Then he asked, "do you know if there's a drop-in around here?" I had no idea what to make of that. I said I didn't know, and he replied that he'd just gotten out of Rita and they didn't give him anything. Rita? What the fuck is Rita? I wished him good luck and went on my way, wishing I'd swallowed my fear of being seen as Square (which I most assuredly am) and pressed him for enlightening definitions.

I'm sheepishly admitting now that I assumed both references were drug-related because, apparently, I am become my own grandfather. Anything uttered by a younger person which does seem to be in English but which I don't immediately comprehend must concern the Dope. Not even drugs, but Dope. My grandfather. I am. Him. Holyfuckingshit.

The curiosity drove me to ask on craigslist. Apparently, a drop-in is an overnight shelter, and Rita is the Santa Rita jail. OK, now I know, and now I'm totally a fuckin' townie. Ask me anything, I'll tell ya.

This weekend, a man with a keen interest in risotto and sunblock sold me a neat table and four neat chairs. Scant hours later, the Worst Teeth In The Universe sold me a neat couch and another neat chair (and then those selfsame teeth smiled a lot more than was really necessary and seriously challenged my fight-or-flight reflex). With the bookcases I've finally got that furniture issue licked, and will continue to run my soft pink tongue gently up and down said issue until I see something else I simply must have, consumerist whorebag that I am.

On the train this morning I saw a guy with the same model of backpack as mine. I got mine as a free gift with my laptop. It's silvery and blackish and has many unnecessary springy rubber things coiling off it. It occurs to me now that my first thought upon noticing the familiar bag should've been, "oh, I wonder if he and I bought our laptops from the same place," rather than what I actually thought, "hmm, if we set our bags down and then each accidentally picked the other's up ... he'd have my portable hard drive and I'd have his heroin and thus would surely begin a whacky action-packed chase across San Francisco culminating in my getting the girl and bringing the nefarious fucker to justice." Could I write shitty movies that everyone has seen before but which inexplicably manage to make bank? You bet your ass I could.

I've got the chorus to a song stuck in my head: "Fish hammer, fish hammer / Go go go go fish hammer." It took me a long time to realize that this wasn't spontaneous musical brilliance, but an inadvertant mucking-with of the Groovie Ghoulies' "The Lizard King" ("go go go go Godzilla"). That settled, I wish I knew what I meant by "fish hammer." Snuggly images spring to mind. Snuggly squishy images.

I think the first hit of antibiotics has made a noticeable impact on the hateful Enemies of Freedom™ crawling around my lungs, but I'm still out sick today. I don't feel quite up to doing much, the cough syrup having fucked me up fairly completely while sortofkindof suppressing my cough; this is not like the truly amazing shit they put me on in North Carolina at all. I can only concentrate in short bursts, severely drawing out the journalizin' (third hour, second paragraph, zero content, eek) but giving me a good excuse for absentmindedly picking at old models and animations while making no attempt to really put a dent in them. I should resume denting, though. Goddamn, I have a lot of unfinished work on my computer. I like to pretend that I simply don't have time to do work on my own, and am reminded that this is a lie when I regard the mass of unfinished art which could be completed were I to bother to apply the same amount of time toward the finishing as I did to the starting. As soon as I'm sober again, I should -- nay, I shall -- do something about it. Go go go!

Lis is the coolest girl in the universe. You think you've met someone cooler? You're fucking wrong. She gave me a Kelli Nelson original, the beautiful bluetiful Bluebird of Crappiness. I'm not sure where to hang it yet, not living in a place with any decorative precedent except for the lack thereof, but we're thinking it should go above some lightswitch or other. I think there's a soft They Might Be Giants reference there. I said she was cool, yes? In return, I bought her an entire pony. Shhh! It's a surprise!

A nice Chinese man with a warty lumpy thing on his eyebrow told me I have bronchitis. I was glad to hear that my lungs are in such poor shape, because that means I get antibiotics and prescription cough syrup and a prescription decongestant and will be well again in a few days. Weeee!

*cough*

Last night I met a couple people from Lis's acting class. They're doing a three-person scene together. I asked, without thinking about what I was saying, "so, do you need to be off book by tomorrow, then?"

"Off book"!!!

I haven't heard, much less used, that phrase for years and years and years. It means, simply enough, to have memorized your scene to the point that you don't need the text in front of you, but the words hit me like something solid! It added another cupful to the flood of theatre nostalgia that poured into me the weekend before last when we went to see a show at a little theatre downtown. The big rattling phrase that night came from the usher, when Lis and I were standing around waiting for the cast and crew to vacate the stage and let the audience in: "the house will be open in five minutes." The house! I remembered the house. Once inside, I remembered the glow tape-edged risers, painted gloss black and scraped by several seasons' worth of heels; I remembered that nonprofit theatre seats are often purloined from the scrap heap and tend to be comfortable but battered and unsightly; I remembered that a long pause followed by an awkward-sounding query from one actor to whichever other actor looks most distressed, usually means that someone has forgotten his line and is having it fed to him in the form of a question. I remembered how I feel about theatre floors: if it's painted, I appreciate the effort even if I don't like the artistry, knowing how involved it is to get a crew of volunteers pointed in the same direction on such a big canvas; if it's unpainted and neutral, the scrapes, scratches and dents of a dozen productions left intact, I appreciate the history of the space and all the magic its supported. Most of all, I remembered that I love this shit.

(Not that I want to get involved again, or at least not soon. I'm going to keep telling myself that until it sticks)

I've been sick for most of the past month. The first signs of unwellness came after a particularly hellish workout in the midst of E3 crunch. I must've pushed myself too hard after such a long break from the gym. Fortunately it passed in time for Bay to Breakers -- the very night of which I started feeling sick again. Goddammit. That eventually passed from real sickness into a nagging little cough, which has once again turned into a full-bore goddamn cold. I'm getting stuck in coughing fits that sound like the braying of a donkey, and continue until I gag. It's getting very old indeed.

Last night Lis and I went to see Pretty Girls Make Graves at the Great American Music Hall. It was my first time in that space, and I think it's a good'n. There's a lot more seating than "limited seating" seems to imply (not that we got to sit down because we only had Foot-Hurtin' Tickets, but at any rate GAMH has a lot more seating than its close counterpart Slim's, whose capacity is, um, limited). We didn't especially want to remain standing for three hours, so left late to miss the opening acts and got there perhaps even a bit later than intended, a third or so of the way into PGMG. It was a good show, though it took me two or three songs to recognize them. I've never seen a picture of the band and have only listened to one of their handful of albums, y'see. Other than a wee li'l engagement at Cafe du Nord not long ago, this was my first non-punk show, ever. I suppose I'm less musically diverse than even your mom, but at least *I listen to *good music. This show was somewhat different than I'm used to. There was no pit despite a few very appropriate songs, and though many people were doing the minimum-spec head-bobbing, hip-swaying thing (us included), there was a lot more actual dancing in the crowd than I'm used to seeing. Didn't they realize that people could see them doing that? Exhibitionist weirdos. I was also a little surprised at the end when the band left the stage after finishing the song which they declared ahead of time to be their last song. At punk shows, "this is our last song" from the main act means, precisely, "we have at least three songs we're going to play after this," and everybody knows it so everybody stays put. Top-billed punk encores are obligatory, not driven by anything as crude as the desire of the audience. Anyway, we had a good time despite both being at least 30% more exhausted than we let on. Two live shows in four days have convinced me that two live shows in four days isn't enough! My ears still function; need more noise. Raawwwr.

I just realized that I've had a file checked out of Perforce for almost two weeks. This is a bit worse than leaving clothes in a communal dryer overnight. This is pure negligent bastardry. I intend to submit myself to the duty torturer immediately.

(this entry posted days late, because I am a lazy ass with a lazy ass)

The Nekromantix played Slim's tonight! I hadda show up a little late because before the show, I had an appointment with Mr. Trainer Man to stomp my ass into something resembling applesauce. This was indeed how it turned out; it was an isometric night, with 30 second-long reps. The session was murderous but man, you should see my guns. I will be sad in the morning when the pumpedness has worn off. I snarled through it, and limped off to Slim's as soon as I could. By the time I arrived, the line was more or less nonexistent and I didn't have a chance to make my traditional awkward conversation with an underage drunk girl but on the bright side, the second band, Shark Soup, had just started and happened to kick a lot of ass. So showing up late wasn't a big deal. And the Nekromantix were insane. I love those creepy Danish fuckers more than the fact that I haven't yet sloughed my intestines through my anus. And that's saying something.

I've seen some amazing bands here, like the Soviettes and Strung Out!, and enjoyed them very much. The Nekromantix, though, are one of my favoritest bands evar. I've still got the coffinbass thumping under my skin. I mean, thirty minutes after watching Kim fret the fuckin' thing with his tongue -- with his tongue! -- I can still barely keep my limbs under control and my lips won't stop mouthing the words: "I gotta something something / It's evil I can something / Something something bloody holiday." I realized I was more inclined to freak out like a teenaged girl over my musical idols than I thought, and therefore was far less cool than I thought, when I saw Kim and Troy at the Three Deuces merchandise table during Shark Soup's set and felt my knees go weak. Could it be that even I am prone to shitting myself over celebrities? Meeting John Romero or Warren Spector didn't freak me out even a little, and Cliffy B. is cool in his cuddly Cliffy way but he's definitely the regular Joe I figured he was, even back when I was a young unemployed Unreal junkie. But dude ..! Standing in the same room as the Nekromantix was like experiencing the presence of divinity. I would tattoo their autographs onto my skin. I would have their babies. They could have aaalllll the kidneys they wanted.

I just recovered from a prolonged and wet coughing fit, which produced two errant phegm-coated eyelashes. Yep, that'll do it.

Last night I dreamt that I was being broken up with. The girl was nameless and fictional, but I liked her and didn't want it to end. She phoned me from a museum. I know this only because my dream-self was partially omniscient and watched as she delivered the bad news, shuffling as if recently lobotomized or currently sleepwalking before a row of unintelligibly modern paintings, the phone held weakly enough against her ear to be almost dangling. She'd met another fella while commuting, I gathered, though she put it vaguely enough: "who'd have thought ... you could really hit it off ... on a train?" Of course my masochistic ear craved details, but she was not interested in providing them so abruptly ended both the call and my special vantage point. I spent the rest of the dream racing from one grocery store to the next trying without success to find her. My failure to find the girl I knew to be at a museum in one of several non-museums can only be surprising in a dream context where irrationality holds comfortable sway. I tried my sad little heart out, and woke bearing the shame of failure and a crushing loneliness. Fortunately there was still an hour or two before daylight, so I went back to sleep and had a much happier dream about running from the police who knew I filched some money from a homeless man's corpse I found jammed backward into a shopping cart earlier.

It's gonna be a great day, I can tell.

Yesterday my friend Aileen, who's been planning to move to the Bay Area as soon as next month depending on the speed of her job transfer, phoned to say the transfer has been put off indefinitely. I have fewer friends in this city than I've ever had anywhere else, and was looking forward to the imminent arrival of one of my Oldest and Dearest with more than a little of my heart. Fuck United Airlines and its silly bullshit.

Job news! I'm currently making a high-poly model to match a high-poly model that's already been modeled! The concept art I'm working from is a rendering of the other model! People who thought I was insane to leave my last job can feel free to point and laugh now!

Sometimes I wish there were an attendant in the men's room at work. Usually the concept of such a service disgusts and horrifies me, implying as it does a regular presence in a room I require to be completely clear of other life before I do appropriately nasty, squishy things in it. But I think with the proper motivation, I could manage to corrupt an attendant to my own agenda. I'd slip him a $20 bill and my phone number. This would have to be done with utter discretion, of course, considering the scandalous assumptions often made about men who provide cash and contact information to other men in public restrooms. I'd also give him instructions to notify me on my cell the moment the restroom was empty. He'd nod, look away and say something like, "it's your money, pal." I'd chuckle lightly, wishing there were a way to inject an edge of cautionary menace into a light chuckle ("yes, but do not think to cross me, Mr. Bathroom Attendant"), and return to my desk to await the Call. I would sit uncomfortably as usual with my bladder growing and stretching, pressing other organs upward and displacing those previously installed. But it wouldn't be so bad, because I wouldn't also be fraught with the anxiety that comes with running off and checking the restroom for human presence every five minutes. Will it be empty this time? Will anyone notice what I'm doing? Will my officemates wonder why I can't sit still? I would have nixed that part of my restroom-visiting process, and this would satisfy me profoundly even as I squirmed in agony. The Call would eventually come. The attendant would say, simply, "it's clear" and then the line would go dead. And then my business would be done. Fuck yeah.

Oh yeah! Journal!

I went to Walgreen's this morning to find, among other things, ass-cream. I'd written it on the back of a receipt-turned-shopping list as "ass-creme", which was momentarily confusing when I consulted it because anything-creme looks more like dessert than Rapid Soothing Pain Relief from Painful Burning, Itching and Discomfort. Fortunately I figured it out before reaching for those LifeSavers® suppositories. Try as I might, I could not locate the famous preparation that I sought, which distressed me because I was feeling slightly embarassed about having a need for such a product and didn't want to have to ask for help. That would have been humiliating, unlike, say, telling the internet about it. Eventually I grew tired of wandering the aisles, passing the same paid-to-look-suspicious security guard so many times that my former shoplifter's guilt compelled me to suck it up and inquire. A nice woman with an unintelligible accent but comprehensive knowledge of Walgreen's showed me to where my goal should've been found, but oh!, it was out of stock! Apparently swollen orifices are popular 'round these parts. When the woman wandered off, I briefly considered trying one of the other brands available, but this seemed risky considering I'm new to my affliction and wanted to go with the best, or best-advertised. So I stormed off with the huffy and completely verbatim thought, "fuck these clownboats, I'm going to Rite-Aide."

Mm-hmm, I actually thought the word "clownboats", without irony, without intent to entertain. Yea, I am become teh Intarweb.

Yesterday I saw Public Urinator VIII. He was the best yet, a small, bent man with a bushy iron-grey beard and standard-issue lunatic eyes, looking something like the bomb-throwing Red anarchist in old political cartoons, peeing parallel to the sidewalk in broad daylight. I saw penis. So did many many other people (so I'm not just hallucinating this shit). It was a beautiful urban moment. Public Urinators VI and VII were far less individually bold, facing into buildings with a minimum of decorum, but were pissing on the same wall simultaneously and without seeming to be socially associated or consciously synched. So they were pretty cool too.