arghfuckkill

Mytwo Thingsmeme.

2006-08-30T17:47:30Z

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

1. Yourself
mostly harmless

2. Your boyfriend/girlfriend:
wed fwaggle

3. Your hair?
fairly uncooperative

4. Your mother:
means well

5. Your Father:
means little

6. Your Favorite Item:
lich robes

7. Your dream last night:
typically absent

8. Your Favorite drink
rots teeth

9. Your Dream Car:
includes chauffeur

10. The Room You Are In:
anxiously departed

11. Your Ex:
probably imaginary

12. Your fear?
sightless mindless

13. Where you want to be in 10 years?
sans yoke

14. Who you hung out with last night?
warm girl

15. What You're Not:
overly concerned

16. Your Best Friend:
comfortingly similar

17. One of Your Wish List Items:
CD-ROM Wörterbuch

19. The Last Thing You Did:
fought gravity

20. What You Are Wearing:
favorite grey

21. Your Favorite Weather:
steelshrill thunderdark

22. Your Favorite Book:
still shogun

23. The Last Thing You ate:
extremely regrettable

24. Your Life:
getting there

25. Your Mood:
fuck this-ish

26. Your body:
slowly improving

27. What are you thinking about right now:
vegetable soup

28. Your Crush:
naturally strawberry

29. What are you doing at the moment:
shirking work

30. Your summer schedule:
unusually extant

snip snip snip

2006-08-01T20:33:06Z

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!

R.I.P.

2006-07-28T00:32:11Z

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.

Cabbages ... knickers ... it's not got a beak!

2006-07-18T09:17:41Z

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 ..?

My First Time.

2006-07-13T20:46:49Z

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.

The Worst Level Design Evar

2006-07-01T00:58:23Z

I escaped from the Dungeon of Thatdarnsatan!

I killed Pixelfish the leprechaun.

I looted the Armour of Nuclear War, the Wand of Communism, the Sceptre of Post-apocalypse, the Dagger of the Vandals and 45 gold pieces.

Score: 70

Explore the Dungeon of Thatdarnsatan and try to beat this score,
or enter your username to generate and explore your own dungeon...

Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, Tommy and Stanislav

2006-06-29T16:45:37Z

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.

Bitch bitch BITCH bitch bitch BITCH BITCH moan moan MOAN moan MOAN moan BITCH moan

2006-06-23T02:07:38Z

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

geek wet dream

2006-06-20T08:04:07Z

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.

The Dope

2006-06-16T20:30:10Z

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.

klogg

2006-06-12T17:15:46Z

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 love italics.

2006-06-09T19:14:23Z

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!

Typhoid Johnny

2006-06-08T20:33:23Z

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*

Cinematic Wonder Movies! Play At Your Own Pace!

2006-06-06T18:40:41Z

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.

Absolute: World; Offset: Screen

2006-06-05T22:59:08Z

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.

Who killed the cheerleader?

2006-06-05T18:46:09Z

(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.

"Haaaappy. So haaaappy," taunts the scary Chinese man.

2006-05-31T18:16:32Z

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!

urinary anxiety

2006-04-18T16:35:18Z

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.

sitting more comfortably

2006-04-12T17:28:02Z

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.

sacre bleu!

2006-03-26T03:27:51Z

I went to my first French lesson today! I'm doing one-on-one sessions at a language institute a gentle 30-minute walk from my place, on Saturday afternoons and Wednesday nights. My teacher is as I somehow predicted, a smooth, sophisticated and downright sexy Frenchwoman who is fortunately married and a decade and a half my senior or I might have a great deal of trouble concentrating. She started the session by asking me some simple questions to try and figure out how much French I actually knew, stuff like "why do you want to study French?", "do you smoke?" and such. I was pleased to realize that I understood the gist of almost every question, probably a consequence of having studied a few languages already and recognizing words I technically haven't heard before. Still, this gal was my very first ever French conversational partner and I found I couldn't answer anything without a great deal of stumbling, so expected her to start me out at the very beginning with "bonjour" and "je m'appelle John." Not so! She decided she had a good feeling about me and switched to a more difficult book, of which we sped through the first two chapters in under an hour. I have a fair amount of review and homework to worry about over the next few days, but we went through a significant amount of new material in no time at all and it didn't even kill me. I think there's something to be said for having a teacher, after all. This language nerd stands corrected.

Shortly after she introduced French's strangest curve so far -- the replacement of the indefinite article with "de" if a noun's been negated: "dans mon bureau il y a une chaise" -> "dans mon bureau il y a pas de chaise." Wtf? -- I told her about my strange little block, smoothly negating sentences. She bore good news, in that the annoying "ne" preceding a negated verb is optional in all but formal conversation. One should write it, but doesn't need to say it. She then proceeded to earn her pay for the entire session by explaining the varying degrees of mangled that a sentence might go through from high formal French to actual conversation, without losing intelligibility:

Je ne sais pas. "I don't know", in written and job interview-spoken French. The "ne" and "pas" are intact.
Je'n sais pas. The "ne" is smashed onto the end of the pronoun.
Je sais pas. "Ne" is just dropped. I like this.
J' sais pas. Now even the pronoun is getting sliced up for the sake of getting through this conversation quickly and efficiently.
Chais pas. So beautifully condensed, we're left with a totally new word. And who needs pronouns, really?

Viva le français!

Scenes from a street:

2006-03-24T21:06:55Z

A fat kid turning a rickety Muni sign into music. These signs are made of a pair of light metal frames with paper or plastic inserts held lightly between, and rattle when they're bumped. They make percussive music when you bump them just right. His rhythm was simple (about 150bpm, slaps and rattles in eighth-notes: S r r r r r r r S r r S r r S r ) and beautiful, like a good loop in a shooter, like a techno track that's easy to work to. A few passers-by seemed annoyed by his racket. I smiled broadly, both in appreciation for the performance, and for the fact that not everyone could understand why it was so cool.

A woman brutalizing a little girl for anticipating their Walk sign and stepping off the sidewalk into traffic. She smacked her on the head, on the back, shook her by the shoulders, smacked her in the head twice more, all the while spewing reproach like vomit into the poor girl's hair. Eventually her victim wriggled free and stood sulking with downcast eyes several feet away while the harrangue continued unabated. Being on the other side of the street, I didn't hear much but saw everything. I accept that kids need to learn to stay out of the street for their own good, sure, but the bullying set something off inside me, something that wanted to give in to a rising fury and save the girl from her well-meaning but vicious chaperone. Something that wanted to hit back, to draw blood. It was an uncomfortable, psychotic urge, and it's made me wonder about myself. Like, what scene from my own childhood am I not quite able to recall right now?

Two men doing Fred and Lamont from "Sanford and Son" so well, I recognized both characters even though I did not recognize the scene they were doing and in fact have not seen the show for twenty years. These men were beyond good imitators; they must have been possessed by the spirits of Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson. IMDB tells me that the latter isn't actually dead yet, but that doesn't rule out voodoo or a wacky misadventure with a mind-transfer device. 'Twas a damn fine example of guerilla theatre.

Tips 'n' Tricks

2006-03-23T09:24:59Z

#46. When standing at the crosswalk, before you think at the guy five feet away from you, "yes dumbshit, now it's safe to cross," do a safety check to make sure you've switched to your "inside voice" from the "low but completely audible whisper" you've been repeating French phrases in for the past twenty minutes. Inertia just might get your ass pummeled one day.

/mortified_shudder

They actually ... slosh ...

2006-03-20T03:11:47Z

Escapism has become crucial to my not going insane, with mostly positive results. I've been reading far more than I ever have, am continuing to enjoy the gym, and have kicked myself back into language study.

I love languages. It started in high school when my friend Chris mentioned he'd once tried to learn German on his own. I'd failed Spanish twice in junior high and thought I'd had enough of this foreign language business for a lifetime. However, the idea of studying something on one's own that seemed so impossibly difficult while under someone else's authority appealed to my wish to show Señora Robeson that I wasn't such an idiot after all. Not having any idea what I was doing (and receiving no help from Chris, whose accomplishments may have been a little less than he'd let on), I got a book of German phrases -- no grammar, no culture -- from the library and set out to piece together an entire language. Surprisingly, I was totally unsuccessful! I confided my frustration to a German teacher I did community theatre with, who graciously hooked me up with a high school-level textbook, and the rest is history. Not a very distinguished history, mind you -- I don't know how to say "distinguished history" in German, as an example of how far I've come -- but I've learned enough to flirt with girls who speak about as much German as I do, and that's what it's all about, you know?

Now I'm studying French. Mes amis Jim and Melanie are fluent, and I like Amèlie and City of Lost Children, so why not? Though it's been the bane of my study since I began, it seems that I'm starting to get the hang of French's overwrought method of negation. Je suis américain, je ne suis pas américain! It still looks like there's just too many words there (and let's face it, you Gallic bastards: there are), but at least I'm stammering it all out. My grasp remains weak and infantile when it comes to applying negation when a pronoun and verb would normally be contracted, like, j'ai un chat -> je n'ai pas un chat. I've taken to recording negated sentences in my own voice, phrasebook style, and drilling myself with the iPod while walking to and from work. Inspired by the gym experiment, I'm also throwing away my tradition of self-study and signing up for four weeks of French group instruction about a mile's walk from my place. I'm all excited!

...

And that reminds me of the blood-soaked psycho who would have beaten me up last night, were it not for the intervention of a fast food shift manager who doesn't make nearly enough money to get involved. Bless 'im. I stopped at Burger King on the way home, because I am committed to fitness and healthy eating. Standing in line, I looked around and was aware, as I often am in my neighborhood, that I was an ethnic minority of one. No, I'm not colorblind, it's true -- I'm not particularly bigoted, either, but sometimes I can't help noticing. So it was difficult not to make eye contact and form a casual, "oh, you too?" kind of mental connection with the other white guy who came in, a few minutes after I did. He seemed not to be ordering food, only arguing with the employees at the other end of the counter. Not nearly interested enough to eavesdrop, I assumed he was being told for the twelfth time today that no, he couldn't use the bathroom, and so I returned to pretending to read the menu, the warning that the coffee machine dispenses liquido caliente, and the "Employee's Must Wash There Hands" sign. [Sic], and [sic].

The line moved and I found myself next to the dude, looking less wholesome up close than from across the room, whose argument had just ended with the visibly-exasperated shift manager's disappearance into the back. Our earlier mutual recognition had apparently qualified me as his default confidente, for he launched immediately into an already-in-progress bout of confiding:

"You know? I don't fuckin' think so, man. It's bullshit. Would you?" he asked.

"Uh?" I prodded, reasonably.

"Would you!" he repeated, annoyed that I hadn't been paying attention to a conversation that wasn't any of my business. Perhaps he'd expected solidarity from his white brother. "Would you pay for the motherfuckin' tetanus shot? You know? Why the fuck should I?"

He turned toward me, and that's when I noticed that his right hand was cut and dripping. Fresh blood spattered the hem of his shirt, his pants, and the floor. I suppose he'd sliced himself on a door or fixture somewhere and had been demanding that the Burger King's hapless subject arrange to pay for medical attention. The cut certainly had something to do with his annoyance, but he seemed to think of it more as an excuse to cause trouble than a genuine problem in itself. He wasn't cradling it like a decent, pain-feeling person, nor trying to staunch the flow in any way. My impression was that he'd decided to let it drip-dry, so casual was his attitude. I'm no hypochondriac, but much of the San Francisco I've experienced is rather dramatically scummier-than-life so I'll have to assume that any open wound is invariably crawling with little festering plaguelings, all hungry for my lungs, liver, or as-yet uncompromised immune system. Therefore, I wanted to keep this guy away.

To that end, I decided to be sympathetic. I suppose this wasn't the most obvious or direct path toward putting a minimum of three city blocks between us, but at the time, I think my most immediate concern was to not agitate him further. "Hell no," I said. "Not if I don't have to. Not if I'm not responsible for what happened."

My clever plan broke down as soon as it was conceived. The steadily-gushing maniac didn't hear my words, only a mandate from his audience to please keep on ranting because it's ever so interesting, and so he continued. "Motherfuckers got no right!" His already slightly-screechy voice pitched upward. "They got -- no -- right!" It seemed that he was more pissed off at me than whomever he believed was actually responsible for his troubles, but maybe that was just a function of my new perspective. He leaned in. His nose was full of blackheads. "They can't fuckin' make me pay, man. I'm not gonna." He leaned in further. His blackheads were full of blackheads. "Fuckin' cocksuckers. Would you pay? I wouldn't."

I felt a fleck of spit land on my cheek. That is, while hanging out in a bad part of town, I felt saliva from the unsterile gob of an intensely scary little man (engaged as he was in a tirade about tetanus while sprinkling the ground with a bloody hand) strike my exposed skin. Damn right I flinched. I cringed, too. I may even have shuddered. I definitely took a step away, winced tightly, swept a sleeve across my cheek and showed him my palms in an "OK, that's quite enough right there" gesture.

He took my ungracious reaction to be the most deadly of insults. After a short pause to size me up, he forced his eyes into a wide-open fierceness and jacked the rest of himself into full-bore affront. "What the fuck's your problem, motherfucker? I ain't talking to you, motherfucker. You need to mind your motherfuckin' business." The bloody hand was now a bloody fist, and its owner was officially In My Face. It took me a moment or two to understand that he'd become genuinely physically threatening. Though one can't possibly lose his recognition of such things, it's been awhile for me, and my crisis-response reflexes have atrophied from disuse. His had evidently not. He was gonna hit me, I finally realized, and there wasn't going to be much I could do about it.

Fortunately the manager -- let's call him Deus -- returned ("ex") from the back, a.k.a. machina, a cellphone in his hand. I expected him to say that he was calling the police, but instead he ended the call and told the guy he'd write him a note. "But then you need to leave here!" The Scary Guy switched off instantly. His glare didn't even linger on my face with a suggestion that I got off easy this time ... "but next time, your ass is mine!" Nothing. He simply shut his mouth, turned to the manager, and forgot I existed. It was a startling and altogether welcome reversal.

I think the last time someone (of my own gender) tried to start a fight with me was in college, a decade ago. It was the night before garbage day and I was hauling two or three weeks' worth of my roommate's and my trash out to the alley. There was a group of drunks present, my age, probably also students. The odds being four against one, it was inevitable that the drunkest, most moronic of the band should try to lure me into a fight. "Hey pussy! Puss puss puss puss!" Um, right. That was like a ??-level Alliance pansy flagging PvP and hanging around you on the off-chance that you accidentally lay a thunderclap on his silly ass. Pathetic. But that was college, no more than five or six years out of junior high where fighting was at least a weekly tradition, so I was distressed about it but not surprised. Now I'm 31. If someone had asked me, "are people in their thirties still so fucked up as to try and start fights in, say, Burger King?", I would have rolled my eyes and suggested that the vast majority of us are too grown-up for such nonsense. That may still be true, but my response would feel differently after last night ... more like a warning than a vehicle for eye-rolling. There's always a chance that the fella next to you in line is some insane fucker itching for violent confrontation. It's not quite a reason to run out this second and take a self-defense class, but it's not a comforting truth either.

Not long after the crisis was averted, my head still spinning over what had happened or nearly happened, my savior shuffling through a three-ring binder for the relevant policy while my would-be assailant patiently bled, my food came up.

"Would you like ketchup?"

seasons greetings

2006-03-15T07:26:14Z

Fuck!

Arrrrgh, fuck fuck fuck, fuck goddammit, Jesus Fucking Christ.

Fuck fuck fuck, arrrgh, fuck, fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

*pant*

(fuck.)

Sincerely,
--Yours.

P.S. I edited the above spew three times.

myStr += 0.45;

2006-03-13T06:38:48Z

Mr. Trainer Man kicked my ass today. He beat me. Flogged me. Annihilated me. Made me into Nothing. He provided me the blessed oblivion that my job no longer provides. I love Mr. Trainer Man.

Mr. Trainer Man made me jump rope. I haven't held a jumprope since I was a child. He told me that everyone says that. Mr. Trainer Man is reconnecting disappointed, cynical adults with their wide-eyed and dreamy childhood selves. He does this because he wants everyone in the world to be happy. I love Mr. Trainer Man.

Mr. Trainer Man gave me a new diet, based on my food preferences and energy requirements and goals and all that. He thinks I should be consuming close to 4000 calories a day. Being that I currently try to stay under 1800 calories a day, a strategy that caused me to lose 40 pounds, I had to wonder whether Mr. Trainer Man had temporarily departed this reality for one made entirely of cheese sandwiches and superhero animals. But he explained that my life as a Sex Object-In-Training requires much more fuel than my previous incarnation as a piece of office furniture. This made some amount of sense, but even so, I suppose I don't completely trust Mr. Trainer Man's judgement in this, or more especially that of the software which gave him that figure to give to me. Still, I agreed to try and work up to the esophagus-bursting recommendation over time, because I love Mr. Trainer Man.

Oh! I watched someone throw up on the way home from the Happy Place. Dudley. I don't know his real name, but I like the idea of a skinny, stringy, craggy-faced, toothless drunk named Dudley so that's what I have decided to call him. I've seen Dudley throw up before, on the same street corner, but he's really good at it and it never gets boring. That's something special, y'know?