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2011-07-19T21:12:00.000-07:00

It has recently come to my attention that some people have been reading back over my blog, and potentially coming to some bleak conclusions about me.

Most of the content on this blog was penned many moons ago, and as with all things, I have undergone changes; changes for the better.

While I'm not sure if I will make a return to blogging (I've shifted to micro-blogging in the form of Facebook status posts and tweets), I had to decide if I was going to erase some of the more depressing entries contained in this digital space.

After a few days of thought, the decision I came to was to allow all the posts to remain on display for all. Even though I have become a far more optimistic individual, financially stable (and engaged to an incredible woman!) than the person who originally babbled this stuff that you see before you, it does in fact represent who I was and where I came from. Good or bad, it is me.

Take it as you will. Judge me or don't.

At the very least, ideally some of the posts are at least a tiny degree amusing. Especially when I talk about Craig and I working on our film, Land of Entrapment. Those are all posts from July 2004 through August.

*goes to read those again*

So, yah. Perhaps I'll post again, perhaps not. We'll see. Until then, keep up with my twitter at:
http://twitter.com/#!/DanteHicks79, or if you're lucky enough to be in my friends list on Facebook, watch out for my posts there.

freeze this moment a little bit longer

2008-05-10T11:22:00.000-07:00

the chinese have a curse that extends back several millennia, which says "may you live in interesting times," the idea being that sometimes life is really best when nothing is going on. as the yin/yang philosophy would dictate, there are two sides to this. while i can certainly agree that you don’t always want a whole lot going on (especially if it is bad – and usually it is), having too little activity in one’s life can quickly drive oneself to madness.

roughly a year ago, while sitting on the couch in the back of the control room to the scoring stage at skywalker ranch up in marin, i had uploaded what unintentionally would result in becoming my final blog post update in a long time.

so i figured it would only be fair to resume my blog with an entry penned at that very same spot.

once again, david has returned to the most awesome of recording studio facilities imaginable, and masato and i were granted the opportunity to go and join him for the session.

a lot has happened in the last year.

since my last post, i have seen the band rush perform live in concert four different times now (while wearing the same rush shirt that i got at my first show last summer with monica), visited vegas a couple times, bought a brand new toyota corolla due to my miata succumbing to an annoying laundry list of mechanical issues, been promoted to shift supervisor at work, purchased an iPod touch (which i absolutely love more than life itself), started a 365 project on flickr (where you take a self portrait every day for one year) and still have not yet moved out on my own or had any new promising romantic encounters.

throughout all of that, my financial status has bounced up and down nearly as much as a stray weather buoy that floats about in the ocean. in fact, i can’t help but dwell on the interesting juxtaposition of my immediately present situation. here sits i, in a room with an estimated net worth of several million dollars, and yet i am in possession of less than thirty bucks to claim to my name.

this current week has been of the crazy whirlwind variety. masato and i went out to the concord pavilion on sunday evening to see rush perform on the second leg of their snakes & arrows tour, and the following morning i set off down the california interstate system towards los angeles to spend a couple days visiting with monica, and again see rush at the nokia theater with her.

i returned to the bay area on late wednesday evening in time enough to get a few meek hours of sleep before working a seven am shift at the store, and am finishing off the week with a couple days here at the scoring stage while we record the monte vista high school orchestra and choir. yesterday afternoon, as we dined on tri-tip steak in the ranch house, the legend himself, uncle george entered the room, ordered something for eats, and asked the staff to send it over to the meeting room where it appeared there was some sort of indy conference going on.

as monica has pointed out, it seems like life for a lot of people has been a game of up and down, good and bad, oftentimes happening within a very rapid period of time. the roller coaster action of the universe seems to be happening at a bizarrely schizophrenic pace. quite frankly, i’m getting wary of it.

for the past four months, i have been living on the thin border between being completely broke and just barely getting by. during my stay in sin city for the nab conference last month, i was overcharged significantly enough by a restaurant in the hilton that my account was over drafted, and though the money was eventually returned to me, the process took long enough a time that i was penniless for the rest of the trip, left to bum money off of craig until i returned home.

at least if i am to lose all of my money while in las vegas, i would rather have it occur through at least the more conventional means such as gambling or getting shit faced at an overpriced casino bar.

or at a strip club. as spring marveled at when i informed her, the last time i got some naughty is almost a year and half ago. losing money on seeing exposed body parts of the opposite sex is far more preferable in my opinion than checking your balance and seeing that somebody’s expensive meal completely drained your account.

as those who follow my 365 photo stream are aware, not even four months after i had acquired my new vehicle did some inconsiderate soul decide i needed to deal with the bullshit hassle of filing an auto accident claim. on my commute to cupertino one bitterly cold december evening to operate a camera for a christmas program, the car behind me failed to stop after i had braked to avoid hitting the non-moving mercedes in front of me who in turn had stopped from a rush hour traffic jam ironically instigated by a different accident further on down the road.

what all this means is that even though the insurance company of the driver at fault had paid for the repair work, the deductible was my responsibility, and that amount has still not been refunded back to me as the driver’s insurance company is proving to be frustratingly difficult in negotiating my money back to me.

that inconvenience began a long pattern for 2008 of me having only slightly enough money to forage a less than ideal living condition. it’s actually a turn of good luck for me that i’m not living away from family, as i would have likely been evicted from an apartment for failing to produce enough rent quite some time ago.

some of you can probably imagine how disheartening it can be to work a strenuous number of hours and still somehow have almost nothing to show for the effort. especially when all of the plans and ideas that i have swirling about in my mind require a lot more money than i currently can budget for.

but the year is still for the most part young, and there are several more intense periods of busy work on my horizon. at the end of this month, i will be employed at the fanimecon once again, this year serving an official staff position in the artist alley, and then in july i will be a camera operator for the western states youth gathering down in anaheim.

i don’t make any promises that i will resume the frequent blogging status i once held, but there for sure will be more posts to arrive in the near future. right now, i am more focused with the 365 project on flickr, and being the adhd creature of habit that i am, there are only so many consistent daily tasks i can dedicate myself to upholding.

but i will make more of an effort, even if it is only on a weekly/bi-monthly basis.

it’s good to be back.

carried away on a wave of music down a desert road

2007-05-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

at the moment, the sun is out and shining brightly, there are lots of birds flying about and singing beautiful melodies, and i’m sitting in the climate controlled luxury that is the control room on the scoring stage at skywalker ranch up in marin county, smiling quietly at where i happen to be located on this the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the first star wars film in 1977.

yesterday and today, david has invited me to join him up here to record a few high school choral groups that are putting out some cds. the first group that we recorded yesterday had about forty voices, all singing a cappella. we were able to get about fifteen songs recorded before they had to take off for a performance that night in advance of their graduation ceremonies.

today, we are recording another choir of about forty-six voices, combined with a small orchestra consisting of piano, keyboard, a horn section with an alto and tenor sax, a contra bassoon, a french horn, several trumpets, and a rhythm/percussion session with a timpani and drum kit.

yesterday was a bit more fun, because today’s group was accompanied by a bunch of parents and chaperones that are currently taking up a lot of space in the control room. right now i’m sitting on the floor in the corner near the mixing console (which you can see pictures of on my flickr account), where as yesterday i was lazily sunken into the couch in the back of the room (which at the moment is overloaded with a bunch of kids listening to us record the track for a quartet vocal number).

there’s probably about twenty-five people sitting in here right now, and i’d much rather have it like it was yesterday, when there was just six of us sitting at the board. although yesterday my allergies were so bad that i had a hard time seeing through my extremely watery eyes, and at least today i am able to breath a smidgen more than if i had balls of cotton wadded up my nostrils.

each of our sessions began around 9:30 or so, after getting all of the kids warmed up (vocally), and today, with tuning all of the instruments, and dialing them into the mix to get a nice recording. there is hardly any equalization required when recording here, because the microphone selection (worth in excess of two million dollars) and the room itself combine to produce some of the most favorable acoustic conditions imaginable.

(i did take personal delight when anytime i was actually in the stage and i sneezed, that the room i was in couldn’t help but ensure that it was the most sonically perfect sneeze a person could ever hear)

on thursday in between recording songs, one of the engineers here, judy, took myself and another friend of david’s named brian on a tour of the foley stage, where the sound effects for a certain "yellow" project were being recorded, and then after the choral session we were involved with was over in the early evening, the other engineer dan took us on a tour of the ranch house, where some guy named "george" or something like that is rumored to have an office.

sadly, he wasn’t here at the ranch (rather he is attending a convention in la), but we did get to check out the prop case on display in one of the halls, which houses a number of famous lucasfilm memorabilia, most notably from the indiana jones franchise, as well as some other priceless pieces of film history, like the original hat that charlie chaplin wore in his films. we also got to see the lucas library, which houses a massive amount of research material and is topped off by an amazing gilded dome skylight (sadly, they ask that guests not photograph the library or the dome itself, otherwise i would have taken a number of shots).

it is kind of daunting to be sitting in a room that is literally worth several million dollars, but at the same time, it almost feels natural. if i was interested in spending the money and time on college courses for advanced sound design and production, eventually i could possibly get a job here, but i doubt that i have the ambition or follow through to be able to get myself to a point where i would have the privilege to count myself in the ranks of the employed at skywalker sound.

in all honesty though, as incredible an experience it is to come visit here as it may be, i would be way more interested in establishing my own company and constructing my own sound production retreat/facility. ideally, i’d love to setup some kind of remotely located all encompassing film production compound, complete with sound stages, visual effects house, recording studios, lodging, and recreational activities.

however, that’s way too far on down the road… somewhere between "never fucking likely to happen-ville" and "fat chance land." something like that would either require that i somehow earn an obese wad of cash (which won’t happen at my current job), or to have a lot of investors jump on board and risk the chance that i wouldn’t ever actually have possession of the studios in my own name. is that really so important for me? i guess so, because i dream of the ease of spirit that would come from standing outside of a pristine hideaway for artists such that skywalker is and knowing that all that i can see is not only mine, but that i don’t have to worry about making payments until i’m three hundred years in my grave.

now the entire group of kids are back in the studio and getting ready to do a full ensemble piece, so i’ll write more when time permits.

may the force be with you.

and the time turns around through the walls that surround, to the chimes of a jailors song

2007-03-18T05:02:00.000-07:00

once more again with the sleeping woes saga... i had the worst case of insomnia early friday morning. normally if i have a sunrise shift at work (any shift that starts between 6am and 8am), i do my best to get to sleep early enough in the night that i’ll at least wake up feeling somewhat rested, but let’s be honest.

usually i don’t go to bed until about 2am. period. every day. it’s just the way that i have programmed myself at this point. it’s my nature. however, i actually did roll under the sheets on thursday night just after midnight, having just taken a shower an hour earlier and watching futurama and family guy on adult swim. i then laid there for three and a half hours, twisting, turning, contorting, flopping… anything that i could do to get some degree of comfortness going on so that i could pass out.

it wasn’t happening. at all. i ended up texting with spring until finally i did crash, thanks in part to putting some music and the tv on. i figured that if i normally zonk when i forget to turn everything off, then i might be able to fool my body into heading into dream zone under more usual circumstances.

anyways. i ended up getting only two and a half hours of sleep before work (why bother?) and then somehow made it through an eight-hour shift. i was actually so exhausted that i was quite hyper and super alert, which definitely was a plus because i’ve also suffered many shifts where i got no sleep beforehand *and* i was drowsy the whole time. those days really suck balls.

after coming home and passing out for a nap that was a bit too short, a co-worker named chris and i met up and got some japanese food, followed by a showing of "premonition," which while a good film, was a bit too predictable for my tastes. i guess having studied films and been involved with the film making process has tempered my ability to be truly taken by surprise anymore, but even chris said he pretty much had figured it all out long before a typical movie goer should have.

although ask any of the fucking dumbass high school and junior high kids in the theater, and they probably would have stated the opposite. you wouldn’t think that that film would be the kind of thing the youngsters would all be heading out to see, but nonetheless, in addition to the film, i became quite versed in what half of the youth of san mateo have been up to, since not one single person under the age of eighteen in the auditorium would actually shut the fuck up.

and they were all really well dressed up, too. most of the girls were in long black dresses with make up and their hair all done up fancy, with guys that were suited up and cleanly cut. you’d have thought that they were all originally headed to a spring formal and the limo broke down, so they all just popped over to the movie theater instead. there were also a ton of cops hanging around, so chris and i wondered with no real satisfying conclusion as to whether something was going on around or what. it may just be my imagination, but at times i shake my head in amazement in just how lacking of common sense most kids in the younger generations really are, and how stupid they can be. is it just that i am getting older? possibly, although to be honest, i have always lamented that a larger portion of the population is significantly dumber than they really ought to be.

over the past week or so, i keep getting this strange sensation. i’ll be outdoors, either driving in my car, or walking around town, or something, and it just "feels" like i am in southern california – specifically in the beach cities, although occasionally i have felt like i was in downtown la, which can be tolerable if you catch it at the right time and day. hard to describe, but if you have ever just "felt" like you were somewhere simply by how the air felt, or that there was something certain and familiar drifting along in the wind. several times i have closed my eyes, and just for a moment really thought i was down along the beach.

especially at night. usually when i get home from work, i’ll sit out in my car with the top down for a bit before heading into the house, just to kinda give myself some wind down time and enjoy the outdoors. i tend to lock myself away in my room a lot if i am home, so i relish the chances when i get to be outside if the weather is nice.

there was always something about southern california that i loved. i really mean it when i say the air was different down there, and while most people think of the deadly santa anna’s, those really didn’t have any presence down by the water. manhattan, hermosa, and redondo beaches were free from all the pollution and terrible heat that the inland valley continually suffers from each year, and there are usually only a few days out of the year when the surf towns truly become unbearable to hang around in.

during those times lately when i sit out in my car in the driveway, if i close my eyes, it is almost as if i am back in middle school; hanging out after class in the shop room, drinking shasta and doodling around in the architecture program on the old mac IIci that mister halferty had setup for drafting projects. or bicycling around town, getting to know all of the paths and avenues of manhattan beach, and figuring out what the quickest routes from one point to another were. or waking up early in the morning in the guest room at todd’s place over the summer, the window cracked open and the sound of the ocean drifting in through the alley between his house and the neighbor’s as the tide rolled in.

the other day when it was really hot out, and i worked until ten pm, after i parked my car at home, it felt like the nights when i’d take my bike out and ride on the bicycle path along the beach from redondo all the way up to the oil refinery in el segundo, the sun having long since disappeared, and the oceanfront almost totally devoid of human activity (save the scattered teenagers who were either making out or smoking weed), and plenty of heat still radiating up from the pavement to keep you warm even as the cool pacific breeze wafted in across the sea toward land.

i’m not entirely sure why i have suddenly been feeling nostalgic for the south bay lately. while it is certainly true that from the moment our family moved up to the san francisco region i harbored a burning desire to return to the beach towns, a large part of that urge was due to my infatuation with erin. after a few years passed by, and northern california slowly became more of a home, the itch began to fade, to the point where even though i still love to go and visit where i used to live, always in the back of my mind does it feel like i am trespassing somewhere that i shouldn’t be; that i have stepped onto foreign soil.

by now we’ve lived in california for the longest period of time of any other state that we took up residence in during my life, and a few years ago, we passed the point where we have lived up around frisco for a longer stretch than we did near la. but, and this is where i get severely conflicted – neither place really feels all that much like "home" to me anymore, and even though the cost of living is so ass-rapingly insane here, i can’t really picture myself living in any other state. i’ve pretty much ruled out most of the other places that i have lived, and that’s saying something for me to dismiss any of my other former stomping grounds.

i tend to develop intensely strong sentimental connections with just about anything, whether it be a location, or an object, or a person, and every time that i moved away from someplace, i yearned desperately to return. albuquerque has been the only true place that i have made a journey back to (unless you count boston, but i only lived there for two months at the most and all of the subsequent trips there were to visit with relatives), and while i fell back in love with the southwest vibe and the atmosphere of abq, i noticed after the first month of the film shoot that i had a severe anxiety that i needed to get back "home." something just didn’t feel right, and even though there was a temptation to stay (mostly because i was then becoming stuck on monica and the cost of living in new mexico is pie compared to california), i knew that one way or another, i wasn’t gonna plant any roots there. as they say, california was calling.

it’s complicated. back in the last paragraph, i realize i stated that san fran doesn’t really feel like a home anymore. to some degree, it never did. i was so stubborn and torn from having moved away from so cal that i refused to acknowledge that nor cal was now where i lived. and i totally realize that just because my family moved up here didn’t mean that i had to follow, but in all honesty, i didn’t really see myself setting off and living by myself, or even finding roommates to split a rent with and keep on living near to the beach.

even now, i am a bit skeptical of the whole separate living thing, despite the fact that living at home with my parents is starting to drive everybody involved a little more insane each day. i’m only really willing to move out into a place with a roommate so long as i am living with masato, since he’s about the only person i would trust to share a dwelling with. it takes a while for me to build up enough confidence in another human being that just settling with some generically random roommate would probably give me either an anxiety or heart attack of terrible proportions.

the only real alternatives are if i could either afford a place on my own (which is beyond impossible at the moment), or if i was sharing space with somebody that i also happened to be engaged with romantically and sexually at the time. i doubt that masato is gonna be laying with me anytime soon (his girlfriend probably wouldn’t be too keen on that idea), and he has stated before that he both wants to move away from his parents (as they still enforce a curfew even though he is in his thirties), and that we should get a place, but the plan was originally to move in together sometime in january.

actually, it was way earlier than that… like sometime last year in the spring, but the date keeps getting pushed back and i’m slowly resigning myself to the fact that it’s not likely to happen by the end of this year, either.

what the bloody hell is happening to people in my age bracket? it’s damn near impossible for any of us to head off and forge a new path on our own without some form of assistance from the parental units anymore. just about everybody i know that graduated high school around the same time as me or earlier still lives at home with their family. it doesn’t seem to be an education level thing, either – half of us are graduated from college and the other half only have high school diplomas. it doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference, despite what teachers try to drill into the minds of eager and naïve high school freshman.

also, while i have more than once lamented the cost of living in california (earlier in this post as well as many others), not all of the people i know who are afflicted with this condition live in california; a rather large percentage of them are living in various other states across the nation. it seems to be a rather widespread phenomena.

credit cards, car loans, gas money, food, cell phones, all that shit. it just eats up what little income all of us are pulling down, and then some. it’s probably best that i’m not going out with any woman right now – i can barely afford to keep my head afloat with all the financial commitments i have to deal with, let alone having a few extra bucks handy to buy sentimental gifts or nice dinners for two.

it’s not that any of these things are expendable. the family gave up on paying for a landline to the house some months ago, and cell phones are the only communication outlets we have with the rest of the world at this point (except for the internet, of course). i’m also in a family plan with the rest of my clan, and getting a tasty discount through work as well, so it’s not even all that bad.

the amount of "rent" that my parents charge is laughable when compared to what i’d have to shell out at any other residence, and when i can, i am able to sustain myself with food obtained from whatever they have bought at the store. although, in the past year or so, i’ve moved way more towards buying my own food and paying for much of what i consume.

as far as the rest of my debts are concerned, i finished paying off my car loan last fall, and the only real major amount of money i still owe towards anybody is the purchase price for my new dell (which was justifiable since my laptop was beginning to slack on keeping my productivity strong). gas money is still a royal sting in the ass, since the price of crude around here has jumped up nearly 75 cents in the last two weeks. analysts are predicting that we’ll be shelling out four dollars per gallon by the summer around here, and even though some people might write that off as paranoid speculation, those analysts are the same people who were definitely on their mark two years ago when they announced their suspicions that three dollars for a gallon wasn’t too far off.

so where does all the rest of my money go, aside from for fuel? lunches when i am at work (food around my store is ridiculously expensive), parking for work (which i think is BULLSHIT; people who work in ANY town should be given FREE parking since the services they provide are what attract all of the consumer business to an area in the fucking first place), and other extraneous yet equally uninteresting details.

somehow, i end up totally drained and barely hanging on by a thread as it is. i would end up homeless in a month were i actually living on my own by myself, as the rent cost alone would end up emptying my bank account before anything else got a share, and obviously that would leave me royally screwed since i’d only end up further in debt.

the same is true for others, such as masato, who not only has several years of car payments left on his new cylon, er scion, but also some credit cards and a girlfriend on top of that. again, i’m left thinking that there is probably no real chance of him and i getting a place until sometime next year at the earliest, due to us both not having the savings to facilitate such a venture.

but once more, i go back to wondering why i keep dwelling on thoughts of so cal. the more that i think about it, weariness creeps into my mind, as i have my own inhibitions about moving back there. not only has the population tripled in the beach cities, making commuting a way tougher and more frustrating ordeal, but i have to wonder if by staking a claim down there would somehow compel me to re-ignite my obsession for erin.

i'm confident in saying that i’m completely over her, especially since she and i never went out and there isn’t even a past between us, aside from the occasionally idle glances she and i would trade back and forth over the couple of years that we schooled together. getting her out of my head was shockingly a difficult task, one that fills me with great embarrassment and shame. why did i fall so madly for her? i don’t even believe in love at first sight, so i like to think that all that was going on was some poorly directed lust.

her name flickers through my thoughts every now and then, but not nearly with the frequency that they used to. however, moving back to the los angeles are would also leave me in close proximity to monica.

she is a great friend, and somebody that i admire strongly, but there is still a bit something more sitting with me in regards to her that i need time to let go of. it would be totally awesome to be nearer to such a close companion, but i’m worried that i’m not over her enough to the point where i could stand seeing her on a regular basis and knowing that i wasn’t with her.

don’t get me wrong; i’m not some psychotic jealous asshole that would stand outside her window at three in the morning, blasting cassettes of sappy romantic eighties ballads. but i do still feel an attraction to her, much more than i should for somebody that i was with for such a short time and under the conditions that we were together, and since i tend to develop those customarily intense connections for people that i elaborated on earlier in this post, it would probably be best for me to keep my distance for a while longer.

even when i was physically with ashley for all of the seven days that i knew her in person, in the back of my mind, whether i acknowledged it or not, i was secretly comparing and contrasting her to monica. i didn’t do it hardly at all with meagan, as she was real and present enough (unlike ash who was primarily online and over the phone instead of face to face) that i got to know and really like at least the part of her that i encountered in the first few weeks that we were dating, until things began taking a turn for the worse and we both developed into stranger and confusingly more alien people than we were before.

what degree of serious infatuation with monica that might still exist in me is fairly small at this point in all honesty, but i’ve also always been one to play on the safer side of town and avoided placing myself intentionally into situations that might be questionable, regardless of how severe or minor they might actually be, perceived or otherwise.

to be fair, monica isn't the only reason keeping me from heading south, so to speak. it also has a lot to do with the fact that craig moved away from west covina back to albuquerque last year. a large part of why i wanted to live in the la area again was that craig had finally ventured out to california after years of my badgering him to do so, and even if we hadn't ended up co-habitating (a situation we later discovered only worked partially during the making of land of entrapment) it would nonetheless have been great to be living around such a good friend, and to hang out a lot. with craig having returned to new mexico, i don't really have all that many contacts left in so cal, seeing as how most of the people i knew have either moved on to other parts of the world by now, or those who still live there have been out of contact with me for so long a time that there isn't even really any common ground for us to work with anymore.

i wouldn't be surprised to discover that i am even more forgettable than i imagine i am, and that's neither a depressing realization nor a stab for pity. more like an observation that i don't really do a whole lot to leave an impression on the people i encounter, and if for some reason they do remember me, it is probably due to an odd quirk or something that i probably wouldn't want somebody to hold in legacy of their encounters with yours truly.

throw in the fact that i still have no idea what my long term career goals are, and you get one totally fucked up individual that is struggling to find any kind of solid ground with which to walk forward upon.

i don’t know. it’s an understatement to suggest that i am a tad confused about what direction my life needs to head in at the moment. when i was a child, i had such a burn to grow up and become an adult, with all these grandiose schemes and plans of which i would pursue on my way to gaining it all; the fame, the fortune, and most importantly of all, the women. i can’t hardly stress enough about the throngs of insanely horny women.

but i’m older now, and not necessarily all the much wiser, but definitely aware enough to realize that my ambitions and follow-through exist in two separate dimensions.

anybody out there know how to bridge the universes that repel each other?

anybody? i imagine stephen hawking knows. too bad he’s probably busy dreaming up hyper explosive quasars and shit that would warp all of existence into the shape of a duck-billed platypus.

i bet that would be really fucking cool, though.

using stars to light your candles

2007-03-11T19:12:00.000-07:00

my errant sleeping issues press on, as it were.

on friday night, after coming home from a dinner at red robin, i was so exhausted that i laid down at eight thirty pm, and passed straight out until noon on saturday. when i awoke, i was terribly frustrated that i had wasted so much time, and lamented all the things i had wanted to do in the time between that ended up not getting done.

earlier on friday evening when i had gotten home from work, i passed out in my car with the driver’s side door open, as i was halfway getting out of the car. it was so nice out, and i was tired enough, that i didn’t even really mind that i fell back into my seat and drifted off. for about a half hour, i sat there in a more or less unconscious state, only around one third aware of the world around me. my eyes were closed for the majority of the time, and as i sat there, passing in and out of being asleep, i listened closely to all the sounds that surrounded me.

just a year prior, i had attended a lecture at san francisco state university with david and ashley (who was in town for the week visiting me at the time) by walter murch, one of the foremost editors and sound producers in hollywood. at one point he had been speaking (ironically) about a book that once had read, written by an american on vacation in france, about sitting in his hotel room, eyes closed, and journaling everything he heard from outside the window. the tapestry of images he described of a bustling and living paris were conjured only by audio clues, and now a year later to the day after that lecture, i was in the midst of doing more or less the same as i sat in my car, exhausted by the eight and a half hour shift that i had just come home from working.

(one of the under-age girls that works in our store had a unique comparison for how long my day was; she said that i might as well have been at high school with an hour and a half detention after class. accurately appropriate, i mused.)

with nothing else but sounds to go on, my mind began sliding around a number of topics and thoughts; the kind of things that might cross your mind as you are falling asleep with the tv on, or stoned out of your gourd and thinking you have figured out the meaning of the universe. none of them can i recall now, but i know that in the state of delirium that i was traveling through, nearly all of those thoughts seemed immensely important.

a low flying jet circling on approach to san francisco international roused me from my slumber, and i watched the giant silver bird glide slowly across the sky before putting the top up on my car and heading into the house.

i ended up wasting time for most of today as well. it was exceptionally beautiful out, one of the rare days lately where the temperature, humidity, and lack of the usual pervasively chilly wind all matched to make for a really gorgeous afternoon – instead i spent the majority of it indoors, listening to music and thinking that i really should get outside and go do something.

but that brings up to me the question of what exactly there is to do, even. while i would love to go for an afternoon drive, having to pay 3.29 per gallon to fill up my car is less than desirable. nobody was available for activities that require more than one person, such as frisbee or touch football, and i had to give back the nikon d50 on saturday to its more than generous owner, so while the lighting was perfect for a number of spots that i have been meaning to get to and photograph, the lack of a camera pretty much nixes that idea right in the bud. so begins my push to save up enough money to get a d80, that i might continue to pursue that which is the capturing of light and digitally saving it for future posterity.

i’m also rather saddened that my drumkit had to be stowed away in cases once more, since my grandparents are in town visiting, and the space it was set up in has now become the guest room for the time being. i suppose i could always drive down to bethel and bang away for a few hours on the kit down there, but that goes back to the whole gas price issue.

so, i sit, and listen to sabbath and blue oyster cult. an odd mix, to be sure, but one that surprisingly compliments itself nonetheless. a leisurely shower and bowl of nuked fettuccini alfredo helped round out the afternoon. i also passed the time by mindlessly browsing through funny pictures that the internet provided, reading up on the upcoming release of the new rush single and album, and losing a bid on an eBay auction for a copy of guitar hero.

whole lotta excitement there, lemme tell ya. my dreams as usual have been exceedingly vivid, but i’m finding that remembering them is becoming increasingly more difficult. this is a fact that distresses me greatly, as i rely on my dreams to both provide some insight into my life, and to supply me with entertaining flights of imagination that i otherwise wouldn’t stop to work on. since i happen to believe at least in part that everything happens for a reason, i am reasonably sure there is some point to me not being able to remember my dreams as easily as i could before.

or it could just be a sign that i am growing older.

for now, i’m gonna head off and see if there is any trouble i can go get myself into, because i’m reaching the tolerance limits for my boredom.

we feel the push and pull of restless rhythms from afar

2007-03-04T02:12:00.000-08:00

much as i alluded to on thursday night/friday morning, i ended up not getting much sleep, but that was resolved when i passed out on friday night sometime around ten, and woke up this saturday at half past noon.

which is good, because lately i have been having a few “episodes,” if you will. i’ll be sitting in my room, relaxing with the television on, and all of a sudden, it becomes clear to me that several minutes have passed that i have no solid memory of consciousness for. my sleeping patterns as usual have been less than ideal, and it’s taking a fairly vicious toll on my waking life.

at any rate, thusly i have concluded that there are two possibilities: either i’m skipping forward in time (which is doubtful), or i have some degree of narcolepsy. the only reason this is somewhat annoying is that when i get these lapses of awareness, it usually happens while i am watching CSI re-runs on spike tv. CSI happens to be one of those shows that exhibits two unique properties: no matter how many times you have seen a particular episode, it’s unbelievably easy to forget how it ended, and that if you turn away from the show for even five seconds time, some crucial detail might be brought to light that unless you were paying attention, is very likely to be the evidence responsible for solving the entire puzzle.

it never fails that either i’ll miss that key element to the story, or that i’ll simply pass out just before the ending, and wake up to find another episode running, without having gained any closure from the previous episode. as you can imagine, this is a tad frustrating, to say the least.

even as far back as 2003, when i very first started this blog, there were times when i would curiously find myself pulling into the driveway at night, having no distinct memory of the thirty minute drive home from san jose. at the time, i theorized that my brain didn’t really deem any of that time worthy of passing onto my long term memory, as i became so familiar with the route that i didn’t really even have to devote a whole lot of attention towards it, unless of course there was some asshole on the highway who didn’t know how to drive and was making for a challenging commute.

in fact, that has been happening with my drive home from work in the last month or so, especially if i take the same route over and over. i also tend to get rather involved in whatever music i have playing in my car (as this is the one time you will ever catch my weak attempts at singing), and i guess i focus more on the lyrics than i do on the road. i just realized that somebody reading this could become quite concerned at my driving ability, but since i don’t have any new dents or markings on my car, i am reasonably sure that i haven’t hit anything or anybody.

besides, that’s the kinda shit you don’t tend to forget too easily, unless you suffered some kind of head injury that fostered a pesky bout of amnesia. but i strongly doubt that.

also as i hinted at in my last post, i have been having a small issue with the management of my time lately. every now and then, i find that i have to keep forcing myself to believe that certain activities should only take so much time, and then when i look down at my watch, nearly double the time i expected to has passed by. on a few occasions, i have managed to hold some kind of control over my perceptions of the passage of time, and manipulate it to my advantage, but unless i keep it up for a significant amount of time, i tend to lose my ability to focus and time slips by way faster than i care for it to.

perhaps it has to do with my whole fretting about what i am supposed to do with my life.

no, wait. actually, recently i have been questioning why i even feel so strong a desire to do anything at all with my life. since i can’t quite come to a concrete decision as to what i even really want to do or what direction on the path i want to follow, i’ve begun to figure that there isn’t even really any pressing need for me to shit or get off the pot. at least, no real perceivable need. only the one that is in the back of my mind.

ultimately, i’m kinda happy where i am at, and in some ways, i am not. as far as my job goes, i’m not too displeased with pouring coffee for a living. it’s not exactly the most glamorous occupation to be in, but it’s also by far not the worst. i can think of several jobs that i would never want to ever hold (some of them i have already had the misfortune of working), and yet, what i am doing now doesn’t seem all that bad. customer service isn’t my ideal candidate for a career, but i seem to do fairly well with it, i sort of enjoy it, and i interact with people well enough (to a degree, anyways) that it is even fun most of the time.

yet there is of course the part of me that yearns for more. the part that daydreams about being a legendary film maker, or a world renowned rock star. i suppose that a lot of people have those kinds of aspirations, to be truly famous or fabulously wealthy. but, i began to realize that mayhaps that kinda destiny isn’t really in the cards for me.

of course, the philosopher would stand here all day and wonder if that kind of fate is held from me simply because i do nothing to reach for it, and instead accept mediocrity as my destiny. whatever. besides, spending all of my time pondering that kind of stuff would be pointless.

but not if i only spend a portion of my time.

although, to be honest, i haven’t made any real significant strides towards doing anything that would gain me some sort of recognition like that which i fantasize about. every band that i have joined or started has crumbled rather fast, mostly due to my inability to organize and keep on task, and while land of entrapment is for almost all intents and purposes done, i am so embarrassed by some of my contributions towards it that i question if i even want my name on the damn thing.

so, with no real effort to show for the goals i want to reach, i don’t suppose i have much room with which to complain.

but i will anyways.

it’s also kind of like how there is a part of me that seems to have forgotten how to be suave when it comes to dealing with women, and i keep returning to my pre-laid not-so-savvy ways. craig seems to think i am a total “pimp” since i have had several ladies in the last couple years, but in truth, i am anything but. there have been a number of comely ladies that have passed through my store, and while i have managed to flirt successfully with many of them, there are a couple that i keep acting like a total newbish tool around.

take for example the lady i am currently enticed by. she’s a nice enough gal, comes in early mornings and late evenings in between work, and orders the same drink every time (i of course have it memorized and prepare it for her as soon as i see her approaching). while she’s not drop dead gorgeous (few women are, and seem to think otherwise), she is quite pretty and has some intense brown eyes. anyways. for a while, i was able to keep some air of cool whenever she came in, but lately, i have been totally slipping. it’s probably because i am trying too hard, but i think it’s also because i have suffered a loss of confidence in the last few months or so.

a couple weekends ago, while i was in the last third of a really long and early-starting shift, she came in, and during the course of ringing her up, she inquired what i was going to be doing after work. in the sleep deprived state that i was running under, i totally missed that obvious hint and nonchalantly told her that i was probably gonna go home and pass out. about five seconds after she stepped away from my register over to the espresso bar area, i realized the error of my ways, and began mentally kicking myself in the ass for the rest of the afternoon.

ironically, i was beating myself up when i wasn’t even sure why. i mean, yeah, obviously. i totally blew a golden opportunity, and while i realize fully the ramifications of that action, i’m also not as devastated by it as i would have thought i would be. since i am currently single and not getting any, you would think that i would be a tad more concerned with hooking up again, as my character would lead you to believe if you have read any of the past couple years on my blog, but no.

it could be that in the back of my head, i have come to realize that while some opportunities i will totally blow, there are others that will come along that i will grab by the horns and take the gold. that is, if you hold onto the belief that the powers that ultimately be are so gracious as to continually extend other venues of possibility to those that are too dim to see what gifts they have been offered.

which is actually something that numerous friends have attempted to beat into my skull on multiple occasions, but was an assumption that i had waved off before because i at that point in time thought that i knew everything there is to know that i should. i of course still don’t know everything that there is to know, but at least i am a small iota wiser when it comes to some situations.

right about smack dab in the middle of this post, i went to the bowling alley with some friends for a few rounds (and to accidentally throw the ball back behind me on one frame, nearly hitting the company i was with), and there was this curvy blonde a few lanes down that i kept checking out. from what i could gather about her group, their ratio of girls to guys was equal, meaning that she was probably there “with” somebody, and yet, i kept looking on over every now and then. i even caught her glancing back in my direction a few times. on the way out of the alley at the end of the evening, she ended up getting into the back seat of a car with another girl and guy, which if i’m not mistaken, usually is the sign that she wasn’t with anybody, and that she was possibly single.

or her boyfriend was being taken home in another car because the two routes didn’t coincide and it was more convenient for them to split up and ride with different people.

either way, it’s pointless to second guess it all since the moment is definitely gone, and again, i’m not all that terribly broken up about it. it wasn’t really an opportunity to begin with, and besides that, there are others that will come along in due time (but likely not as due a time as i would prefer).

it definitely would be nice to find some companionship again, since, you know… SEX, but for now, i don’t really need it, and in some ways, it would actually cause more trouble than it is worth. not to say that the measure of one’s presence is problematic, but since i still live at home with family, i am drastically limited by my options when it comes to dealing with a member of the opposite sex. the fact that i own a convertible that lacks a suitable back seat (or any, for that matter) is also a bit of a hindrance to the whole pursuance of “gettin’ some.”

that situation would find some sort of resolution were masato and i in a position to begin scouting for a righteously bitching pad for which to call our own. credit card debts on both parts are currently holding us back, and while i hate to say it, with the way our lifestyles are patterned, it will likely be quite some time before i’ll be able to move out and begin anew.

in the meantime, i have been attempting to expand my devotion towards photography, and i’ve found that flickr is truly awesome. the previous gallery that i had, which still exists, was a bit too cumbersome and didn’t seem to get a whole lot of action, where-as i think can increase my exposure to a larger audience. ha ha, get it? i made a photography pun there. yeah, it was dumb. don’t justify it by laughing.

my interest in panoramic images has been renewed, thanks in part to using a camera that is actually capable of being manipulated to a degree that makes taking photographs suitable for stitching together way easier. sadly, the days i have to use the nikon d50 are numbered, because the owner of the camera wishes to have it back, and so i am looking at probably saving up some of my pennies to go towards buying myself a shiny new d80 with a 50mm prime lens.

(i totally realize that spending that much money on photographic equipment will put me further away from getting my own place, but since i have some idle thoughts in the back of my head about selling some of my better photos, it could turn out to be a profitable venture on my part.)

anyways. that is the state of things, and they are likely to change from moment to moment. further continuing my whole dilemma of dealing with two wildly divergent personalities, there are times where i find myself totally calm, and zen; accepting the world for what it is and realizing my place in the grand scheme of things. do i really even need to say that the other side of me is a tad exasperated with everything and has a dire urge to completely stir shit up until nothing is recognizable anymore?

i realize this post is becoming rather lengthy, as my writings are often wont to do. this could be a worthy cessation point, and while i can’t guarantee anything, i haven’t completely given up on the world of blogging, and probably will have more to say at some point soon.

oh, but before i go, i did want to say that after listening to rush for the last three years, i have *finally* managed to trick my feet into doing complex syncopated patterns that are completely independent of what my hands are doing when playing the drums. go me!

taking the time away from me

2007-03-02T00:45:00.000-08:00

i should be in bed, fast asleep.

as it stands, i have about four hours time remaining to slumber and rest before i need to begin heading off to work. with that tiny amount of sleep, i doubt i’ll be in good shape at two thirty in the afternoon, fourteen hours from now, when i finally get out of there.

i should be using my time wisely.

but then again, i am not known for doing what i should.

like writing, and actually participating in my life. lately, i feel as if i set everything on cruise control, so that i don’t have to keep as active a part in anything that goes on. as i have commented in the last post, or couple posts… i don’t really remember what the hell i have written anymore, this year got off to a rather rocky start.

there have been some good times in between all the crap, but i think mentally and emotionally, i just kinda gave up once i realized that the first two months were rapidly evolving into uphill battles, and not the kind that inspire a rocky-esque self improvement montage set to rock-em sock-em 80’s pop tunes to gather up the strength and ability to overcome that which life attempts to sink you with.

i’ve known this, and a few of my friends know this, and i suspect that my family is beginning to notice.

thing of it is, i feel like i keep getting offered promises from whatever force that drives life that you might subscribe to; promises that i never asked for, and that eventually evaporate because either i didn’t invest enough of myself in them, or i invested too much and burned it all away.

i don’t know if this makes much sense. part of me doesn’t even understand what i am saying, and possibly another part of me is terrified of what i am saying.

and another part of me is wisely choosing to go hop in bed and wait until later to detail more about what has been going on with me recently.

in the caves the textures coat my skin

2007-02-03T20:10:00.000-08:00

in addition to providing for us a unique glimpse at humanity, and showing us that green alien women are the skanks of the universe, star trek let us know that things that end in an odd number, such as every single odd numbered star trek film, generally suck ass.

and so we enter 2007. the new contender for the year of suck, and here it is only a month into it (although, that month flew by rather quickly). 2005 definitely came off as one of the worst years ever, and if this year continues on the trend that it has been following, i have the most dreadful feeling that things are going to get much, much worse.

granted, not every moment has been all bad. there have been some positives going on, but in general, there has just been an avalanche of lame.

obviously my blog has fallen beyond the wayside for the time being, and i’m kinda in a state of flux as to what the future might hold for this space. on one hand, i want to keep this thing going and make a more concerted effort towards posting and updating. however, time has been traveling past me at such a high rate of speed, i can barely keep up anymore. as the genius comedian lewis black commented on during one of his hbo stand-up gigs, one noteworthy item pops out of the news for him to chew on, and by the time he has created any material worthy of that topic, ten other things have happened that completely trump the original subject.

then there is the fact that i get so few comments on my blog as it is, and really, while it is totally vain and not important or shouldn’t even be a factor in what determines whether i blog or not, it still does have a general effect on my attitude. i don’t know... i suppose that i like the satisfaction of hearing feedback from people that they actually read what i took the time to write, and that they have their own perspective to lean on it. when i see sites like becca’s that get forty comments less than six hours after she posts, and i barely garner six comments over a period of a month and a half, i kinda lose all hope that i’ll ever be a highly trafficked blog site. of course, i suppose that my lacking in posting directly affects how many people ever do return here to read my rantings in the first place, so touché internet.

for the most part in the month of january, i had a lot of fairly poor days. i don’t know how many times i’ve gorged on swiss cake rolls or kookaburra liquorice as a reward for having just simply *lived* through several days in the last couple weeks. or driven home by way of crystal springs road, which as i have mentioned before is off the beaten path and away from most of civilization, simply in order to have a few moments of wind down peace before i get home.

right after the first of the year, some members of my family got the brilliant idea to take all the boxes and random items from the shelves of the garage and dump them all in the middle of the floor, in an effort to go through all our belongings and pair down on all the crap that’s been taking up valuable space. normally this concept of spring cleaning takes place during... well... the "spring," and not during the rainiest fucking season of the year.

with the back window on my convertible top being cracked and useless, the garage was the one place where i didn’t have to worry about the interior of my car being completely ruined by nightly downfalls. although to be honest, it only rained six or seven nights out of the entire month of january, which has prompted a lot of the environmental agencies and waterworks to royally freak out, since if we don’t get more rain in the next few weeks, it’s going to be a very dry year in california. go el niño, i guess.

of course, right after the garage became off-limits for any vehicles until the mess gets straightened out (which as a matter of fact, is still a mess since nobody has had any free time in the last four weeks to get up there and make more than a fraction of a dent in the fray), i had to go and back my fucking car into the steel beam on the rear of an errant tow truck while leaving the parking lot at work after a particularly lousy day. the resulting collision shattered my driver’s side window and bent the frame to the convertible top enough that i have to exert some considerable effort to raise or lower the top, being that it doesn’t quite bend the way it’s supposed to anymore.

in addition to all that drama and noise going on with my car, i spent six hundred dollars on general maintenance in december (which wasn’t a bad price for spark plugs, wiring, vents, filters, new belts, and a general tune-up – something i have neglected to do with my car for the whole six years that i have owned it so far), and as i was driving to chipotles over in foster city one night to get some tacos (man i am addicted to that place), upon discovering that they were closed early that night for cleaning and reconstruction, as i drove home, the tail pipe on my car simply fell off in the middle of traffic. it happened at a rather inconvenient overpass, and i had to pull several u-turns and illegal maneuvers to get back onto that road so that i could run out to dodge traffic and retrieve the part.

even though my muffler assembly is still attached, my car is now significantly louder as i drive, making me a bit nervous that some cop at some point is going to cite me for having a noisy vehicle, as we all know that while the police do a lot of hard work in serving the public and making our towns "safe," california cops are also notorious for making lots of needless trouble when they have better things to go do.

things came to a total head with this last recent week, which i have deemed the worst week of the year so far for sure. i’ve been battling a terrible head cold *and* allergies for the last several weeks, and from monday on, it just got progressively worse. every single day this week, i had early ass morning shifts at work, it has been around or below freezing in our area for the last month or so every morning, and most of the customers annoyed me in some insignificantly trivial way or another. i was also angered by the fact that none of the closing crews this week actually did half of their jobs properly at night, and left rather inconvenient messes and other unnecessary situations for the morning staff to deal with.

highlights from this week included the morning i was carrying a box of coffee stir sticks out to one of the condiment bars, the bottom of the box dropped out, and every last one of the 100 wooden sticks (which are fairly rough and give lots of splinters) spilled out all over the floor in front of the twenty customers waiting in line. rather than get the broom and dustpan out to take care of the mess (which wouldn’t have worked, our brooms are shitty and don’t really do much), i bent down to pick them up, and subsequently pulled my groin muscle.

or friday morning, when on the first ten minute break early into my shift, i totally forgot that the cap to my odwalla smoothie was off the bottle, and when i went to shake it, doused the room, myself, and my clothing in blueberry drink. the rest of the day i had to walk around with parts of my hair crusted over since i wasn’t able to get all of the liquid out before it had dried and hardened on my head. even my co-workers did their best to try to cheer me up, since i wasn’t my usual goofy, chipper self this week.

i also over the course of this week managed to burn my hands and wrists numerous times by spilling espresso shots and steamed milk, as well as getting singed from the hot water tap, the coffee shuttles, and the steam wands on the espresso machines.

to top all this off, my sciatic nerve has been spasming out like crazy. it’s getting to the point where anytime i cough, sneeze, or stand up, i feel a shooting pain race through my left leg from my foot all the way up to my ass. it’s really quite the suck.

however, there has been some good, as i mentioned earlier. for starters, i ditched the sofa from my room and for the first time in five years, i have an honest to God bed. with mattress, springs, and everything. it’s quite something to behold, and i’ve been sleeping a lot better since i got it (although, i have been cheating myself out of a full night’s worth of sleep for some years now with the schedule that i keep).

masato and i also finally trucked over the motorcycle that he wanted to get rid of, so i now have a hog, man. a chopper. well, not really. it’s a 1974 honda 450 cb bike, and it needs a touch of tender loving care before i can actually use it, but it’s a start. at least until the day i can afford a harley fat boy or an indian. it’ll be fun to train on, and i plan on using it to cut down on the gas mileage that eats into my bank account by commuting to work on that instead of putting additional wear on my poor car.

also as i stated, i have recently become a raging addict of chipotles. the restaurant chain, not the actual pepper. in one week alone, i think i had it five or six times, two of those times being in the same day at different times, and i still get ridiculous cravings for it every once and a while. come to think of it, it’s probably been a week or so since i have last had it, which is a bit too long in my opinion.

at any rate. that’s the situation. them’s the bones, as they might say. dunno why i just said that, as i really hate lame clichés like that. don’t ask, and i won’t tell.

fair enough.

maybe i’ll post again soon, maybe i won’t. i hardly ever know what i am doing anymores… i think i am just sticking with the whole auto-pilot-through-life thing until something better arises. anytime i attempt to effect a change in my life, either something major happens that prevents me from moving forward (i don’t always deal with adversity in the bestest of manners) or i lose whatever ambitions i had and go back to being a lazy sloth.

one thing for damn sure though is certain. craig and i have set an ultimate deadline for the completion of land of entrapment. as of february 28th, whatever is not finished for the movie is a tough shame, because that’s when we are calling it quitsies. at least, that is my plan. craig wanted to call quits and declare the movie finished a long time ago, but i insisted on working more on cleaning up the dialogue in the film so that is actually understandable, especially in a few key scenes where the volume levels fluctuate so wildly that without any kind of fix, the issue is terribly distracting and ruins the entire scene. i’ve finally reached the point where i don’t care what we don’t end up finishing though, as it basically just needs to be done and over with so that we can finally move on with it and onto other projects.

that is, if craig even wants me to help out on future endeavors. i’ve probably dealt a huge amount of damage to our friendship by preventing a speedy completion to this film by holding onto it as long as i have, since i was technically given a locked print of the movie to work on the sound with a year and a half ago. there really isn’t even a good excuse for it, since i probably could have arranged my schedule to be way more conducive to working on finishing it up in timelier fashion, so i haven’t been feeling all that wonderful with regards to my weak foray into filmmaking lately, either.

that’s perhaps one of the most distressing things about 2007 so far. i’m starting off a new year knowing that i’ve pretty much ruined whatever trust that my best friend might have had in me.

i really do hope this year gets better...

in the meantime, i’m gonna go get some chipotle before i gotta head off to work.

its gonna be too dark to sleep again

2006-12-26T15:14:00.000-08:00

as it has now inevitably become tradition in our household (three years in a row means it qualifies), the downstairs bathroom clogged up and completely overflowed yet again, making this the seventh time total since we moved into this residence a couple years ago.

when i say that the house is flooding, i’m not talking about katrina style buried under several feet of water type doom, but i’m also not saying it is some easily dismissable affair. finally, exasperated with the whole thing, i took a bunch of digital pictures to illustrate to our landlord (and to you guys) just how terrifically awful these situations are.

again, no matter how many plumbing "experts" have surveyed our water system, every single one of them only applied at best a few stop-gap measures to tide things over for a while. essentially, it’s like putting a band-aid over a bullet wound – sure, the bleeding will be held at bay, but the internal hemorrhaging is still going to kill you eventually.

if you really aren’t the squeamish type, feel free to go have a look-see at the new flickr album i made of images from this latest travesty. the yack of the beast can be seen here.

the cause at this point is pretty much anybody’s best guest, because not a single damn person can figure out just precisely what the dealio might be. some of the plumbers have suspected that the root structure of neighborhood trees have broken through the decaying clay pipes, and that eventually they grow enough to effect some major blockage. a few others thought that perhaps our sewer main is getting slowly closed off heart attack style, with various solid wastes building up as plaque along the walls of the pipes until hardly anything can get through.

my own theories are a bit less orthodox, as i am becoming more and more convinced that our home is haunted by some spirit that really has it in for toilets and interior plumbing altogether. maybe it’s the ghost of a roto-rooter guy, having long ago drowned in a miserable tide of swill, or maybe this house once belonged to a man that soiled a plumber’s marital relations by making time with the handyman’s wife.

all i know is, somebody was taking a shower upstairs this morning, and a few moments after they began, most of the water that was draining out of that tub was coming right up out of the toilet downstairs. oh, but it’s not just fairly clean shower water. no, no. that would be too pleasant. instead, a rather furious mixture of toilet tissue, human waste, and other rather unpleasant and extremely foul smelling items force their way up into the unassuming porcelain chamber. well, see for yourself in the pictures. thankfully, none of that garbage actually left the toilet bowl *this* time, as it has been known to in the past.

however, every towel in the house by now is sitting on the floor outside my room, sopping up the dank fluids that came on up like ah bubbling crude. those clothes can’t even be thrown up into the washing machine in the garage to get cleaned, either, because for some un-intelligent reason, every pipe in the upstairs of the house (except curiously, the master bathroom toilet and shower stall – they apparently have a different connection, or simply just don’t really go anywhere) passes through the drainage pipes for the downstairs bathroom before heading out to the main line. simply *running* the washing machine further exacerbates the problem, as all of the drain water from that appliance just ends up spilling back out onto our bathroom floor, beginning the cycle of suck all over again. the same goes for the garbage disposal in the kitchen – may the deities have mercy on whosever soul attempts to put more than water down our kitchen sink, as they will come to the frightening realization that any food particles that aren’t annihilated by the whirling blades of justice in the disposal end up being crammed with pressure through the drain pipe of my bathtub.

yeah, yeah. i don’t mean to go on and on about this shitty situation, but as i am of the obsessive compulsive mindset, and an extreme germophobe too boot, every time this happens i get sent into a terrible panic attack and my anxiety goes through the roof. my co-workers are already well aware of my curious mannerisms, since i’ll don latex gloves simply to change out the trash bags in each of the cans around the store or use napkins to pick up debris off the floor. i refuse to touch the handles of brooms or mops without suitable hand coverings, especially when the head on the mop at work falls off the handle (it’s a shitty mop), and i have to re-attach it.

of course, after having worked in the warehouse of a grocery store several years ago and being in charge of emptying out, cleaning, and maintaining an industrial size waste compactor, i’m not all too surprised that i have a slight neurosis when it comes to filth. but to be honest, i was always overly cautious even when a child, as it wasn’t uncommon for me to wash my hands twenty to thirty times a day.

and yet, my bedroom is a complete and utter sty. for somebody as anal about messes, germs and bacteria as i am, it is a wonder how i am able to tolerate my room at all. maybe i don’t, and just refuse to clean it all up in an effort to avoid the problem. or maybe it is just that i am that incredibly lazy. whatever the reason, there is only so much floor space that is actually still visible at this point, as i abandoned sleeping in there long ago, the deflated air mattress that i had brought in for support has been reduced to a storage area for yet even more of the crap (thankfully, not the stuff from the bathroom) that has steadily accumulated in my room. i’m reaching the point where i am half tempted to just shovel everything on the floor onto a pile outside, and set fire to the whole mess.

but on to more cheery, rosier topics. christmas was excellent in our family this year. it was a nice, quiet affair, with just the five of us hanging out for the majority of the day. there was roast turkey, mashed potaters, home-made cranberry sauce, stuffin’, sweet potatoes, snow peas, a peppermint and a pumpkin pie, and lots and lots of gifts.

i made off with some cool hauls – a new razor, a car charger for my cell phone (since i’m fairly bad about re-charging my phone), some books by neil peart (who, as well as being the most baddest ass drummer ever, is also a very eloquent novelist), and the fourth season of newsradio on dvd.

oh yeah, and candy. i loves me the candy. along with gold chocolate coins and a chocolate santa, mom picked up pez dispensers and giant six packs of pez bundles from the pez museum in burlingame. the day was spent watching the copy of life aquatic that i got for mom (she loves the movie, and i up to that point had not seen the entire thing all the way through), the pee-wee herman christmas special dvd that dad and i both bought for mom last year and had yet to be opened since then, and later on in the evening we watched our governator in his perennial holiday classic, jingle all the way.

dinner was served at around five, and we lollygagged on having dessert until we had overcome the food comas from the huge meal. as my parents began fading into evening naps and my brother took off for a friend’s house to deliver a few gifts, i sat back and began reading one of the new books i had got, this one about the experiences that neil had while touring american on motorcycle while on the road with rush.

before heading off to bed, caught an episode of west coast choppers where they were assembling a bike for bill murray that was caddyshack themed, which was to be sold at an auction to benefit a mobile urgent care unit and that bill eventually bid a hundred and fifty grand on.

not quite as serene as last year, when the evening was capped off by a freak thunderstorm while i sat back and read yet another neil peart book that i had received that christmas as a gift. similar enough of an end to the day though that i was satisfied and content.

now i gotta go clear out the space in front of my closet, and then *empty* my entire closet so that the plumber who is currently attempting to solve our issue can access the crawl space under the house. oh, and i gotta do all this in thirty minutes before i have to head off to work. i’m trying to not allow my mind to dwell on the knowledge that this dude’s gonna be hauling dirty equipment through my room and making an even bigger mess out of things. fucking eh, eh?

bleh.

i know she wants more than a party

2006-12-18T12:58:00.000-08:00

this post would have been written sooner had i not been spending the last two days of my three day weekend customizing the hell out of my new dell computer. even though i was at work on friday and couldn’t sign for the delivery, ups still gave me the option of showing up at their warehouse in san bruno to pick it up at 9pm on friday night.

so far, i have it just about set the way i want it. there are a couple remaining applications i have yet to install onto it, but for the most part, i am getting near to the point where it feels truly like my own computer and not a drone sent out from a factory.

the rundown on the specs:

she’s got:
* dual-core AMD 64-bit processors running together at around 4.2ghz
* 4GB of ram – yeah, that’s right. 4 gigabytes. i went all out on this.
* 300GB hard drive – originally i was planning on purchasing a 750gb drive to slap in here, but since there isn’t any physical drive space left in it, i’m probably gonna hafta make myself a dedicated raid array tower, which i’ll probably shoot for around 1.5 terabytes in storage space (i’ll definitely need it when i begin working a lot more with digital video, especially the uncompressed high def variety)
* 256MB ATI radeon 1300 pro – already tested out the high dynamic range lighting option for half-life 2 lost coast… and it looked fucking orgasmically gorgeous
* 20" widescreen flat panel digital display

additionally, i went out to fry’s yesterday after church and bought a 540watt battery back-up supply to plug the computer into. i figure that i may as well do all that i can to protect my investment here from the same fate that my last desktop computer met, namely having the power supply and video card blow up at the hands of a nasty power surge. i gotta wait another twelve hours before the battery system finishes charging up for the first time, after which i can plug it in a socket in my bedroom and hook up everything to it. until then, i’m not chancing things by leaving it on all the time.

programs like photoshop and after effects launch in no time at all. the extra memory really does make an amazing difference, recalling the joy i felt the first time i got a system with what was at the time a huge amount of ram, 128megs back in `99, and how fast version 4.0.1 of photoshop loaded and executed changes to images. i’m sure that cs3 or whatever future version of photoshop that adobe cranks out will probably render my system obsolete, but for now, i am quite thrilled at having a lot more power at my fingertips.

i did actually take a break from enjoying my new system on saturday when we went to go pick my brother up from the airport. his flight home from college was a good three hours late, and while hanging out in the terminal, dad, the other eric and i checked out a book store just off to the side of the security check-in. i found it rather disturbing that the display table of books in the entrance of the shop right next to the x-ray machines were all about the september 11th attacks, the war in iraq, and the modern age of terrorism. that’s a bit of a mixed message, if you think about it. any of those topics spoken aloud in an airport will instantly flag you as suspicious and certainly attract the attention of security, yet you can buy books right there in the terminal that deal with the exact same subject matter without raising any ire.

which led me to wonder what would happen if al queda or some other terrorist organization ever threatened to hijack aircraft using weapons that were stitched into the lining of their garments which were undetectable by x-rays or other scanning devices. given the knee-jerk reactions of those branches of the government designed to "protect" the average citizen, would this mean then that clothing would be placed on the list of banned items on flights?

hey, i bet a year ago, if you told people that you wouldn’t any longer be granted the 'luxury' of bringing bottled water onboard a plane, they would think you to be a total loon.

generally while i’m not one to naively believe in global warming one hundred percent based only on the facts that al gore and his ilk have been all too happy to be spreading about, i do have to acknowledge that there is obviously some screwy climate action going on lately. at a time when the east coast has been unseasonably warm for this time of year, we here in northern california are bundling up with a rather brisk thirty two degree winter’s night.

essentially if it started to rain again, it would likely either come down to us as hail or sleet, or even more remotely, snow. two years ago, a week before christmas, it began snowing on a sunday morning, totally shocking the entire bay area, even though it only lightly dusted the peninsula. it was still enough to get the point across that this is not the normal weather we are accustomed to.

i’m rather mixed on the whole debate. there has been more than a wealth of information provided by those taking posts on both sides of the argument, almost to the point where there is slightly too much to process and interpret correctly. when doctors started putting eggs on the list of extremely negative foods and then removing them almost on a yearly basis, i rapidly lost faith in anything that anybody who claimed to be an "expert" happened to say, regardless of what the field of topic is or even how reputable the person is. global warming is no exception, and while i am obviously no creditable source of information regarding it, i still exercise a huge amount of skepticism about the whole thing.

after hemming and hawing about the decision for nearly three months now (actually, it’s really due to my simply not having any free time to have done it before), i finally signed up for a flickr account and have begun posting images there. in fact, you can check out my brand new purty computer, which i am of course using to put this blog post together on. i suppose that a link would help, eh?

here ya go: dante’s flickr account

huzzah! now go and comment on my pictures, damnit! i need mad props if i am gonna conquer the flickr world.

in the meantime, i’m gonna go re-rip all of my cd’s at a higher bit rate in anticipation of eventually buying a new iPod sometime next year, especially if i end up getting part-time hours at the local apple store and can work the employee discount thing.

three posts so far in december... i must be going mad!

rewritten by machine on new technology

2006-12-12T22:48:00.000-08:00

dude, i’m getting a dell.

while i totally cherish and adore my laptop with a love that a computer and a man can never speak aloud, i have become increasingly anxious about trying to push my portable too far. a lot of what i do computationally lately requires a massive amount of power and puts out a significant dosage of punishment on hardware, which in turn makes me feel like an abusive bastard when asking my good friend to do all that i have requested.

stuff like working with hd video and incredibly large image files (we’re talking about 3gb+ photoshop documents that need five minutes alone just to open, never mind the amount of time any amount of manipulation can take) has become a bit of a burden for my beloved hp, and so i finally broke down and got a dell credit card.

i had been kicking the idea around the past few weeks, especially since i have been solely using the laptop as my primary computer for the last year now. the older desktop that i have still works, but ever since the previous video card installed in it went all hiroshima on me, that system has had numerous issues. mostly it just hard locks up at random, either five minutes after booting or after up to four days of running effortlessly.

usually when it comes to computers, i’ve for the most part settled for second best. my hp laptop has been the first computer where i went for the ultimate in what was available at the time, and so far i have been most pleased with it. thusly when i ordered my dell, i decided to spare no expense. i maxed out every single possible option for the system i am getting, so that i won’t have to worry about trying to do too much from the get go.

also in the past, i usually have steered towards building my own system by hand in order to have full control over what components it has, and how everything is configured. embarrassingly, i could probably recite the bios settings for every custom computer i have built up to this point. what made a dell so attractive was the fact that i could apply for credit through dell, meaning that i don’t have to pay for everything on this computer right up front. my closet is filled with unused components and system hardware that was purchased in earnest with the intent that someday, i would build the ultimate computer that would bow to my every whim. sadly, that day got delayed so much that most of the money i invested in the technologies that still sit in their packaging was poorly spent, as nearly everything that i have yet to use is more than obsolete at this point.

not too mention, for some reason, the 20” digital widescreen monitor option was curiously $50 less than the packaged deal 19” standard definition screen. incidentally, should i choose so, i can hook up an hd tuner box to the screen, and use it as a flat panel hd television. tell me that isn’t totally boss.

originally my new computer was supposed to be ready by the fifteenth and delivered between the nineteenth or the twenty-third. immediately after placing my order, i realized that with the holiday season in full swing, the chances that i would actually take receipt of this system would probably be greatly delayed. wrong. i got an e-mail today stating that it has already been shipped, and this evening ups called to inform me that it will be delivered on friday. the only hitch is, somebody has to be present in order to sign for it, and i work from 7am until 3pm. however, the delivery window is until 7pm, so hopefully i will be given the opportunity to call ups and either schedule them to make a return visit that night, or i can go and pick up the packages from their delivery center.

the fact that i have this saturday, sunday, *and* monday off from work makes me more than excited, as i essentially have a three day weekend completely free to spend pimping out this computer and configuring it as i desire.

so yeah. you just read a blog post by a geek totally getting wet off of the prospect of a new computer on its way. go you. or you didn’t, either way. i posted something, and i’m making more of an effort to blog a bit more often, so you and i both win there.

i likely imagine that the next post will be written on the new computer. keep that in mind when you check back and see my next entry.

by the way, i am totally naming it "the x dimension."

w00t.

far from the hills of the sea-swelled carolinas

2006-12-05T03:16:00.000-08:00

tonight as i drove home on crystal springs road, a long, meandering path that circumvents a fair amount of civilization and offers a nice patch of isolated forest as a trade-off in exchange for the added amount of time it takes to get from one end to the other, the moon was out and full, with a sky so clear that practically every constellation could be easily identified, and i was able to shut my headlights off for a few moments, forging along whilst guided only by the illumination of the moon and far away stars.

it was definitely a serene moment in an otherwise curious day.

started off with me having a fit of dreams that even now, many hours later, are still bothering me to a slight degree. well, perhaps not bothering. that might be the wrong word.

intriguing me, would be more like it. while normally my dreams are so vividly realistic that i tend to confuse them for reality at times, these snippets of a dream were only vague, foggy images that presented themselves with deeply intense feelings. instead of being a visual dream, it was more of an emotional experience.

in between the sight of a ship laying on the floor of the ocean, my eyes peering at the stern end of a great ocean liner’s rudder and half of a propeller buried in thick mud, i sensed the voices and deaths of numerous individuals. the dream kept surging at me in very much a wave fashion, with each tidal approach proceeded by a period of time where i awoke, confused and disoriented, after which i would lapse back into sleep and this strange vision would continue.

towards the end of the dream, before i finally did wake up for good and forced myself to get out of bed, i came to realize that the images i was seeing in my mind were those of the rms titanic as she has been depicted in deep sea dive photography of the shipwreck. i hadn’t really been consciously thinking about titanic, it felt more like a post-hypnotic suggestion from all the banners i had seen up in the city on sunday advertising the artifact exhibit in town on display at the metreon. i’ve had a few paranormal experiences before in my life, but this one was very intense. there was definitely a feeling of despair and fear, as if the lives that were lost were calling out to anybody that could hear, and when i awoke i didn’t really know what to make of it. even as i sit here now, i’m still puzzled as to what that had been all about.

when i got into work this afternoon, under the assumption that the first part of my shift was going to be learn how to count out, assemble, and organize the tips, i discovered that the store manager had completely forgotten sometime between when the schedule was made and today that i had being assigned to do that, and already had asked somebody else to handle them. instead, i was supposed to take care of something that he also forgotten i had done not but three days ago. so, that was a bit strange, but at least i scored a good parking spot right out in front of the store.

the rest of the evening was fairly non-descript, save for my fantastically botched attempt at asking a gal out. she has frequented our store a lot at night lately, usually to sit and study or read a book, and i had thought that generally she was sending me a couple specific signals that she was single and that i should give it a shot. stuff like making sure that i was checking her out whenever she walked by (which isn’t hard by a long shot – she has an incredible body), or her shy act while expressing interest in me whenever i rung her up for a drink. in fact even tonight, when she came in with a group of guys, and i began wondering if one of them was her boyfriend, during the small talk at the register after her friends had left and she ordered a tea, she made it suggestively clear that she doesn’t really have a boyfriend at the moment. the way that she said it was a bit misleading, as if she was almost silently implying that she was wondering why i hadn’t made a move already. what she neglected to tell me at the time was that she has a long distance type thing going on, a fact i didn’t come upon until finally getting up the nerve to ask her out later on in the evening – although as you read on, mayhaps you might believe as i kind of do that that may have just been a line, due to the circumstances under which this information was made available to me.

as my friend/coworker kelly and i discussed over doughnuts after closing up the store, i like to think of myself as having a bit more courage when it comes to initiating something with the opposite sex, but i have noticed that whenever a woman i have never met before comes into the store, i’m generally very chatty and flirty, and with women that i have known for a while, it seems that i become very self-conscious around them and have a bit of a tougher time making anything happen. which definitely fits the pattern of the last several women that i have gone out with, in fact most if not all of them. i had only known them for very short periods of time, or had just met them, and was a bit more confident in approaching them and just chatting and flirting.

anyways. i totally screwed the pooch with the choice of approach i had settled on. as she was leaving the store, having finished her drink and study, i asked her over to where i was standing at the bar, and casually dropped the bomb. it was a pretty bad bomb, because as soon as i said what i had, i instantly regretted my choice of words, which, while not terrible, were far from being nearly as suave or chill as i had originally planned them.

i’m not all that torn up about it, but i am a bit disappointed in myself for having been such a tard with how i went about doing things. i’m old enough and have had enough experience to know better, and to think that i really thought at the moment that that was the best that i could have done annoys me slightly.

oh well. just felt like you all would benefit from reading the follies regarding my pathetic attempts to score a date. there are still a couple other women that i know that i have been thinking about pursuing, albeit now with a totally different approach as far as making my move is concerned, given the frank lesson that i re-learned tonight.

as previously stated before at some point on this blog (don’t ask me when, as i don’t exactly recall the specific post), my life is very much dictated by and focused upon music, and lately i have been checking out the group decemberists, a band that is being promoted through the music service that plays in our store. their sound is pretty interesting, as they somehow manage to pull off a very british feel to their material (at least, in my opinion), despite hailing from the state of oregon, and their lyrics are definitely something to devote attention to. pay particular regard to the song ‘yankee bayonet (i will be home then),’ as it probably is one of the few modern pop songs i am aware of to deal with a relationship torn by the american civil war, as the protagonist has already fallen in battle and left behind a widow and child. the poetry to the words is really quite stunning, and the tune itself is annoyingly catchy.

in addition to them, i have also declared myself a zero 7 fan, becoming prey to their songs a few at a time. so far, ‘home,’ ‘red dust,’ and ‘warm sound’ have got me occupied. while i usually have rush loaded into the cd player in my car, i have begun creating a series of bizarrely random mix discs to listen to. anything is pretty much game, from phil collins and genesis (‘cinema show’ is the best non-rush progressive rock piece i have discovered so far), to fleetwood mac, devo (‘girl u want’ has an awesome beat), boz scaggs, talk talk, soul asylum (gotta rock the ‘can’t even tell’ after work in homage to clerks), marvin gaye (get my motown on), zeppelin, dressy bessy (the name is dumber than hell, but their stuff is pretty sweet), sting, jullian lennon (hey, the guy had *a* hit), and hall & oates (the undisputed masters of blue-eyed soul). my musical tastes lately have been oddly eclectic to say the least.

upon arriving home, my garage door opener remote began wigging out on me, triggering the door to move anytime i merely touched the casing on the damn thing. our garage door doesn’t work properly anyways; anytime the temperature drops below sixty, which is fairly often since the san francisco bay area is notoriously a bitterly frigid climate to live in, the opener struggles anytime you want it to open, and simply gives up multiple times, halting the door at various different heights and forcing us to play a game of hitting the button to make it reverse direction, and then immediately pressing it again to make the door start upwards again, this time with the assistance of somebody physically pushing the fucking door up until there is enough clearance to get a car through.

it has been a point of contention in our family, as my parents aren’t all that thrilled that i usurp the garage for my car (the back window on my vinyl top won’t zip up anymore, and is cracked in several places anyways, making my vehicle a perfect nesting ground for any stray feral animal whenever my car is parked out on the driveway), so they don’t really consider it a pressing issue that requires any attention. given that i usually work closings, and that by the time i get home the temperature has dropped to about thirty five degrees at night in the winter time, i’d say that removing the hassle of me having to get out of my warm car in order to push open a door that has a device specifically designed solely to do just that is more than enough reason, but i have yet to convince my parents of this.

alright. time for me to go sleep so that i can wake up in a few hours to do this whole ‘life’ thing all over again.

except this time, i’ll think twice about how i work the mojo on the pretty ladies that stop in for coffee.

but i can see the fire's still alight

2006-11-28T01:44:00.000-08:00

seriously, what is up with me in the past few months? used to be that you couldn’t pry me away from my blog even you tried your hardest, and now lately... lately things have been rather quiet in my corner of the intar webs.

maybe it is just that i don’t really have anything interesting or personal to say. well, maybe. that could be a lie. i actually have had tons of thoughts stewing about, but like most, by the time i actually sit down to compose my thoughts, they all vaporize and float off into the ether, leaving me to sit dumbly in the tragedy that is wordlessness.

the same thing happens lately whenever i visit wikipedia. i have a huge laundry list of topics in my head that i am desperate to check to see if they have been wiki’d yet, and as soon as the site finishes loading (which is pretty damned fast when one is connecting at close to 4mbs), my mind goes blank and i end up getting lost in a trail from the front page into some random articles about slippery rails and autolysis. honestly, it is amazing how bizarrely random some of the paths you can take on wikipedia are. or how some seemingly unrelated topics end up to be quite connected with each other. i guess the information world is small as well.

thanksgiving was good. instead of bowing to tradition and carving up a giant dead bird to feast upon, we figured we should go get lost in newark for a half hour before finding the shelter that we were going to provide assistance for thanksgiving dinner. we ended up getting there in time to help out with the cleaning crew, and largely in part of the fact that nothing or nobody seemed totally organized, we kinda stumbled around trying to find things to do. in the end, i felt a bit cheated, because we didn’t really get to do a whole lot. it’s an interesting situation when all of the shelters and soup kitchens you call turn away people looking to volunteer because they have already too many hands to help out as it is.

the night before, an odd spell of rain brought along a nasty drop in barometric pressure, setting my sinuses into a frenzy of pain. it doesn’t help that i have been suffering from a rather nasty toothache the past several weeks, one that i am reluctant to visit the dentist over for fears that the resolution would require excavating half of my jaw and many hundreds of dollars of orthodontic work. really, I fucking hate going to the dentist. any time anybody has said that a particular procedure wouldn’t hurt, they were lying like fatherless bastards through their perfect teeth. bullshit my ass it won’t hurt. lemme just shove a drill bit through your skull and you tell me if it hurts or not.

my pain all came to a head on friday night, when after spending an extra three hours after closing at work hanging out in the fucking cold with some people on the benches of the nearby doughnut shop, i got home and put in a mouth guard i had purchased some weeks ago and have seldom used to help prevent myself from clenching my jaw and grinding my teeth whilst i sleep. ideally, it should have worked, but seeing as how I have an overbite worse than any groening character, all it did was oddly position my teeth so that some of them were grinding when others were not, and at this point there was hardly any relaxation when it came to what my jaw was planning on doing.

sometime around six am on saturday morning, with the muscles in my jaw and neck stretching and contracting so much that it felt like i was simultaneously being punched in the face and strangled, i jolted from my bed (the floor) to take some advil to relieve the pain. bad move. my blood sugar was beyond poor, having last eaten about twelve hours prior, and because i wasted no time in leaping up and scurrying about our frozen house, my blood pressure took a nosedive and i went into shock.

yeah, the kinda shock that one goes into after a traumatic injury like being shot or watching the view.

i began to shudder and shake like crazy, my mind went completely delirious, and i paced back and forth in the kitchen for about five minutes, wondering if i should wake up my parents or if i was going to die soon. waking up the rents prevailed over the alternative, and they set about burying me under blankets and heat pads while feeding me hot tea and soup in order to raise my body temperature. having calmed down, and after finally scoring a few hours of somewhat decent sleep, dad took me to the urgent care facility to get a prescription for muscle relaxant medication, so that i can actually go to sleep without worrying about my jaw clamping shut on me and making me wake up with all sorts of hideous mouth pain.

oh, hey. i guess i did have something to talk about, after all. and i even managed to resurrect a tiny amount of my usually fucked up syntax. huzzah!

later on today, after i get some sleep, i plan on running by best buy to pick up copies of clerks 2 and evening harder with kevin smith, and spending the afternoon basking in an orgy of all things view askew. it should be most glorious.

sitting here and writing this bit has made me long for the days when i couldn’t *stop* writing material to paste on up here, so perhaps i will make more of an effort to post.

i know that i always say that, and it usually ends up being a lie, but i suppose that tickling my keyboard could become a fairly enjoyable habit once more.

or will it?

out of touch with the rhythm of my own reaction

2006-11-07T15:10:00.000-08:00

yikes. i posted only *once* in the entire month of october.

how disappointing of me.

for those who expressed concern about my having to work on my birthday, i ended up calling in sick that night, which, ironically was the suggestion my boss extended. so, yeah. ended up driving to the city to meet up with masato and stacy for a late showing of “the prestige.” it was quite excellent. almost better than usual suspects, and i am a hardcore suspects fan.

since my final car payment was in september, i have now been able to actually hold onto a paycheck instead of sadly watching from afar as it drifts gently up into the night sky, so i am totally glad about that. means that i can afford to drop little bits of cash here and there on what would otherwise normally be considered luxuries – dvd movie films, memory sticks for the camera, and other assorted knick-knacks that if i took a moment to think about, i probably don’t really need to get by in life.

at the moment, an extended mix of “say it isn’t so” by hall & oates is playing in the background. before i began writing this post, i was watching the track “la villa strangiato” off the “rush in rio” dvd. yeah, i just totally name dropped. go me.

over the past two or three months, i have developed an unhealthy obsession with the film “waiting…(.)” i don’t think i have fallen this deeply in love for a movie since “clerks.(.)”

(the reason for the periods being surrounded by parenthesis is due to both of those films having either periods or ellipses in their titles)

seriously, i have probably watched “waiting…” a good forty times by now. something about it just grabs me. not sure. it probably has a lot to do with vanessa lengies and kaitlin doubleday, since they are both smoking hot.

at any rate, yesterday david and i trekked back up to the foley stage at the school to work on more sound stuff for land of entrapment. sadly, we hit a bit of a snag before we even got started – some tool had completely re-wired the control room and didn’t bother to leave a note stating what had been changed, so it took us a good three hours before we were able to straighten it all out and get things working again. i wasn’t all that happy at having lost so much time, but checking out the righteous student bodies at the cafeteria when we went there for lunch helped make things a bit better.

after that, we were able to get quite a bit done. as far as foley footsteps go, we have only half of a reel left to do, and then we have a few instances of minor sound effects to record on the stage. hopefully we only need one more trip to the studio, since, while i do like hanging out in a recording studio, i want to get the sound work for loe over with.

tonight we have our holiday planning meeting for work, and we have a lot of noobs that need to be edumacated on what to expect for the next two months, and then i work until closing after that. *then* i come back at seven am in the morning time, to work a full eight fucking hour shift. i rightly expect i shall be quite exhausted by tomorrow afternoon, and i would totally nap until south park comes on later that night, but since we had to cancel expanded cable due to the ‘rents being in a bit of a monetary tight spot, i’ll hafta wait a couple days and just download the episode off of iTunes.

more shall be posted soon, promise.

won't you help me sing

2006-10-19T14:52:00.000-07:00

so, before we proceed further…

go check out the land of entrapment trailer! again!!

come on, you know you want to!

not much is going on, and at the same time, way too much. still working on getting the rest of the sound work for the film done, and trying to schedule a time to shoot the green screen stuff of masato to work into the film, and finishing up the opening title sequence for billy’s film. in between all that, going to work, coming home from work, eating, and sometimes if time permits, sleeping.

at least financially i am in a better place than i was a couple months ago, and for the first time this year, i’ll have a sizable amount of cash in my bank account after my paycheck goes in tomorrow. which i suppose is one of the better birthday gifts i can receive tomorrow.

i don’t really *feel* like i am twenty-seven. since this now places me within three years of turning the big three oh, i have been trying to figure out why i don’t feel like an adult. maybe i am, and i just am refusing to acknowledge it. or that i am still far too immature to personally be granted the rights to call myself an adult. either way, i look at college age kids, and curiously identify with them on some levels, and on others, i feel totally disconnected. same goes for people who are older than me, i keep looking up to them as if they are way older than me than they actually are, like i am still a young child or something. but in some ways, i look at older people, and i feel like to a degree that i fit in with them. i suppose that since i know so few people who are actually *my* own age, displacement would not seem too unusual.

the last few months for me have been odd, internally. i’ve felt out of place with just about anybody and anything i know. like i’m not quite on the level, or something. it’s hard to explain, but it has been coupled with a general malaise and apathy. on the days when i do get sleep, it is usually for ten to twelve hours at a stretch, and then i’ll go several days after that with a few naps that generally last no longer than three hours. i suppose that could be part of my problem.

but for the most part, my odd sleeping habits are a result of my trying to reclaim some “me” time in between everything that i have forced myself into doing over the last couple months. i’ve also had some oddly scheduled shifts at work lately, so that has thrown me for a loop as well lately. in time, hopefully it will resolve and i’ll be able to re-align myself with a normal sleeping pattern.

for the meanwhile, i just feel totally unmotivated. really, this hasn’t affected my progress on any of the many projects i signed onto, but it doesn’t help, either. i dunno. lately i’ve been trapping my mind with lots of riddles and paradoxial questions. is there really any point to doing that? i’m not entirely sure.

regardless, i have to go get ready for work. not only do i work until closing tonight, but i am also scheduled to work a closing shift on my fucking birthday tomorrow, which is pleasing me none too much. somehow, even though i put in the request to have the day off several months ago, my name got skipped over, and instead of getting wasted or hanging out with friends, i gotta deal with the shithead high school kids who will be flooding our store with tons of drink orders as soon as their friday night football game gets out. fucking great.

let’s just hope i’m not doing the same thing in another twenty seven years on my birthday.

bleh.

at the late night double feature

2006-09-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

craig has put together the first trailer for our film, land of entrapment. we originally hosted it as a quicktime movie on both the 505Films site, and our myspace page, but some people have experienced issues with it not playing, so i have also thrown it onto youtube as well.

you can view it here: Land of Entrapment Trailer

we're getting closer every day towards finishing this damn film, and moving on to another project. hope ya enjoy!

all my nerves are naked wires tender to the touch

2006-09-17T00:16:00.000-07:00

ok, so as i had stated at one point in one of my last posts, there has been a lot going on.

for starters, meagan and i are no longer. really, it’s for the best, since we work a lot better as friends instead of something more. in fact, the day after one of my last posts was when we finally came to a mutual decision to call things off.

after my failure in that relationship, i am coming to realize that about the last thing i need is to commit myself to a serious relationship, especially since it has been illustrated so obviously clear that i am not really ready to handle something along those lines. for now, i am focusing on keeping anything that develops between myself and any future potential romantic interests fairly light and jovial, in order to get a bit more experience with just having fun dating and not rushing into such a deep relationship.

i’ve also been working a lot, and when i say a lot, that is an understatement. normally i am usually assigned shifts that are anywhere from four hours to eight hours, with no real consistency as to the length of time i am scheduled. however, since my finances have been less than pleasant these past few months, i requested more hours so that i can help beef up my paychecks. over the last three weeks, i have been working at least eight hours a day, if not more. while that may not seem like a lot, compared to people who normally work a full eight hour day, keep in mind that i’m on my feet *and* moving about all day. wah, wah. yeah, i know. i bitch way too much, but since this is my blog, i feel the prerogative is mine to say what i wish.

a nice development at work: i am being considered for a promotion to a supervisor. i’d have more responsibility, and some authority, which is of course fairly exciting. the one major thing i am worried about is the cash handling, since i suck completely at math. like, badly. i could sit and count a stack of bills and come up with several wildly different totals, so i have a feeling that i’ll be sextuple checking all my numbers for a while. although admittedly, part of it is that i tend to rush things and go a bit too fast, but even still. i’m always worried that i’ll fuck up some detail or forget to carry a one and end up hosing things supremely.

anyways. this monday i will have my first day off in the past eight days, and instead of using that time to sit back and rest for a while, david and i are heading back up to the foley stage at sf state to start working on the reels of the film that craig sent out to us on dvd. we’ve already been back once again (on my last day off) since the first time a few months ago, and this last time we were able to tackle about ten minute’s worth of the film, sound effect wise. i’m also (as of this writing), sitting in david’s office down in cupertino, working on editing the dialogue for the first reel.

it’s a really painful process of trying to find the absolute best recordings of the spoken lines that we have from all of the production audio, in order to help make the dialogue a bit more intelligible. so far, it is slow going, but with the help of some incredibly badass filters and plug-ins for protools, we are moving steadily along.

the only reason my monetary situation has been so shitty lately was that as i stated before, i had originally planned on being on the crew for a film that a friend of mine was shooting in los angeles, and from which i would have been paid quite handsomely. since that fell through, and i had foolishly assumed that i would be in possession of far more money than i ended up not having, my own dumbassness landed me royally screwed.

this weekend brought some good news, however. the mailman today delivered the pink slip of my car to me from the credit union, which, if i’m not mistaken, means that my car loan has been paid off and i no longer need to keep making auto payments, since the title is now in my name and not theirs. i’m not entirely one hundred percent sure, so on tuesday after i get off work, i’m gonna head over to the credit union and double check. if this is the case, than i get to save an extra two hundred fifty bucks a month from my paychecks, which will aid considerably when masato and i go out hunting for our own place in january. my car loan was originally supposed to be up last year, however out of desperation with computer woes, i tacked on an extra amount to the loan in order to purchase my laptop (which was one of *the* smartest decisions i have *ever* made).

so, that definitely brightens things up a bit.

additionally, i have been working on the opening title sequence to another film that billy, one of the actors in land of entrapment, made. the bit is entirely animated in after effects, and it has been taking way longer than i cared for it to. the majority of whatever free time that i have had in the past month that didn’t involve me making lattes or passed the fuck out has been spent animating this credit sequence. i’ve encountered a number of really annoying issues in the process; having to use photocopiers to scale down the background material that needed to be scanned in (so that my scanner could actually scan the entire page), assemble a rather large collage in photoshop (at the moment, an image that is close to 1gb in file size), and mess with some of the animation pre-sets in after effects that only work half the time. not to mention, in order to time everything to the music just right, i have to create 1khz marker tones at each significant point in the audio in order to see my key frames in the waveform view of the music track in the project, since after effects won't preview a project in real-time until after it has been completely rendered. if i can get this sequence to do two thirds of what i want it to, i will be happier than a pig in shit. it’s been taking altogether way too long to get it done, and i feel like a total deadbeat for not being able to provide some solid results to my "client" in a much more timely fashion.

a few weeks ago, i began talking with a customer who comes into my store daily, and who happens to be a professional web designer. he and his wife have expressed interest in taking over the changes and revamping that craig and i wish to see happen to the 505 films website. for a while now, the administrative back end has been less than functional, and we both feel that the design needs a bit of an overhaul, especially since we plan on doing a lot with the site in the near future. in the next month or so, you can expect to see some drastic changes to our film site, as well as some cool new material to check out on there once everything is done.

and then of course, there is my blog, which has been more than neglected. i feel terrible that i have left it to the wayside, and while i would love to promise that there will be more frequent posts, there is really no guarantee. there just seems to be too much going on right now to be able to comfortably manage it all. although, the more comments that i get, the more inspired i might be to post more often…

as if that all weren’t enough, i am in fact also working on compiling a video blog post. i shall offer you no promise as to when it will be done, but i am doing my best to make sure it isn’t another month or so before you all get to see it.

one side note of interest: while going back over and listening to all of the production audio from land of entrapment, i am getting a rush of specific, fond memories. it’s quite amusing to hear all of the odd banter that we passed back and forth between takes, and the time the boom operator fell over backwards and yelled out a string of obscenities that sent the crew into fits of laughter. makes me a bit nostalgic to go back and make more films (once land of entrapment is done and over with, of course).

in fact, that is yet one more final item that has begun consuming my time. in between everything else that i have going (yeah, i do take on a bit too much at times), craig and i have initiated a contest to see who can get their screenplay finished first. i am going back over and re-doing the script i originally penned last year for my film about people working in a call center, to see if i can get a decent story out of it, and craig has started work on his western piece. whichever script is finished first becomes the next project that we shall work on, and the person who wins gets to be director.

cross your fingers that i can work magic with phonies, because unless lighting strikes the pages and somehow creates an awesome story out of thin air, i’m up shit creek without a paddle. considering the way the screenplay looks currently, i figure it is going to take a lot of effort to turn it into something usable.

more to follow soon...

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2006-09-04T22:39:00.000-07:00

i am not dead, nor gone from the world of blogging.

just supremely busy at the moment. update is coming to you all very soon... please stand by.

funny how i blind myself

2006-08-09T02:52:00.000-07:00

there is a new playlist of music in the normal rotation at work, consisting entirely of songs from the 80’s. being an 80’s music nutcase, this is incredibly excellent for me, but at times it does feel like i am stuck in a john hughes movie.

as far as what is going on in my life? i dunno anymore. at this point, i am just going from day to day. the whole crash and burn thing with the relationship isn’t really getting to me as much as the monetary woes, but it sure doesn’t aid things any. the good news is that i’ve been getting a lot of hours at work the last couple weeks, so my paychecks should be seeing a rather promising increase, which will help immensely with keeping unkempt goons from seeking me out in order to break my thumbs and kneecaps.

craig and i are developing some real frustrations due to all the delays we are encountering with getting our film finished. the most current stumbling block is that neither david or i have any available free time to dedicate towards hitting the foley stage with a vengeance to get all of our sound effects recorded. at best, it’s gonna be several weeks before either of us has enough time to devote to the task, and even after that is done, we still have a huge amount of work to do with shooting the green-screen material of masato to matte into the film.

so much to get done, and not nearly enough time to do it all. several months ago, when masato and i helped out at fanimecon, there seemed to be this ubiquitous synchronicity abounding in the world, and now it would appear that it has turned against everybody. in order to get the sound work on the film done, i will need to take less hours at work, but doing so means that i will have smaller paychecks, with which i would barely be able to take care of all of my expenses – expenses that are surprisingly high, despite the fact that i still live at home.

it is all a very delicate balancing act. there are some days when i wonder what i am even doing, and if i should even bother with anything. back a couple months ago, it seemed like everybody and everything was just flowing together, and there was this beautiful harmony to the universe. at the moment, i feel like life is a rowdy, unrehearsed symphony of individuals all playing their own solos, and none of it is complimentary to anything else. it is a deafening cacophony of noise that has no form or grace. does that analogy even really make any sense? reading it over several times, i’m not sure that i am articulating myself properly, an issue i continue to struggle with.

ironically, despite how depressed or stressful what i post may sound, i’ve actually been in this oddly tranquil state, personally. in some ways, i feel a lot like lester burnham in american beauty. while the whole rest of the world seems to be dissolving around me, i am content in the knowledge that things will eventually work themselves out. from time to time, i fall prey to the same trap that many people do; i momentarily focus only on what is directly in front of me, and ignore the big picture. in the last year or so, i feel i have been doing a better job of keeping my eye on bigger and brighter lights than those that shine directly in my eyes. but i have come to realize in the last twenty seven years that all things eventually pass, and order is restored once more. the main obstacle to keep in mind is that the balance happens at its own pace, and not necessarily in line with when i would so wish for it to.

consequently, i really hope that my neighbor doesn’t try to make a move on me, and then shoot me in the back of the head for rejecting his advances...

hence, i have been attempting to step back from everything, and figure out what i need to do for my part in order to make things work. unfortunately, this has left me alienating a few individuals in the process, but sometimes i feel convinced that those sacrifices are necessary in order to maintain a forward direction in life.

or not. who knows? all i can see when i read through what i have just written is a bunch of pretentiously self righteous bullshit. the humble part of me wants to smack myself for making everything out to be so much more than it actually is, for being such a drama whore starved for attention. perhaps that is my plan for getting through that which strives to drag me down? again, i have no idea.

ultimately i am keenly aware that none of what i say or think is truly relevant in the grand scheme of things. the words i speak are not earth shattering revelations or brilliant observations. i suppose that is part of the reason as to why my presence in the world of blog has diminished over time. should i ever post even if i don’t feel any need to do so? what end or purpose is served by my using a public forum as a proving ground for the mixture of stuff that goes on in my mind?

oh, don’t fret. this isn’t some declarative statement to indicate that my blog or myself shall disappear from your reach. no, i feel that if nothing else, it does feel a bit rewarding to sit back and know that other people spend time reading what i have to say, and reflecting upon my thoughts, perhaps even sharing their own interpretations of what i think.

today is a new day. i wonder what shall happen, and what shall i reflect upon when the end of the day comes, and i find myself sitting in my room with the laptop comfortably keeping my legs warm. this is like the moment in a movie when the sun rises after something major has taken place, and you know that the story will go on, but you’re not quite sure how just yet.

guess i gotta wait another twenty-three hours to find out.

i might even fill ya in on everything after the fact. ;-)

as the children of the sun begin to wake

2006-08-02T14:14:00.000-07:00

once again, i let this thing slip by the wayside and now several weeks have gone past yet again.

i’ve been fairly neglectful of a lot of things. my blog, my finances... my girlfriend. er, rather, ex-girlfriend now, it would seem. i’m not really sure, since the only discussion we have had of this development has been solely through e-mails at the moment. but, since she has changed her myspace profile back to "single" instead of "in a relationship," i’m taking that as a fairly definitive sign.

what really happened? meh, too much to go into. let’s just leave it at this: i fucked up – or something. i’m not even really sure at this point, because lately meagan has copped a bit of an attitude and decided not to take anything i say seriously anymore. i understand that i made a lot of mistakes, and i’m willing to make up for them, but it is difficult to do so when she doesn’t seem willing to offer a branch of forgiveness for events that i’ve apologized for that happened several weeks ago now. i ask you, my blog readers: how long would you keep holding mistakes over your partner’s head before you relieved them of their debts?

i doubt there is any gesture that i can make on my behalf that would satisfy her at this point. that doesn’t mean that my happy memories of when things were better with her are tainted in any way. just makes me sad that things are ending on a bit of a sour note.

what has really been bugging me lately is that each time that i keep looking in on myself to figure out where i am going in my life, i keep drawing a blank. my mind has all these great ideas for projects and stuff to help work towards making my mark in the world, but none of them ever really seem to pan out. few of them are ideas that i can fully develop entirely by myself, so i’m able to work as far as i can on my part, and then when i need the assistance of others, i hit a brick wall. how can i advance in life if the help that i need never exists?

i’m not really talking about financial aid, although an influx of large sums of money *would* be fairly sweet. i’m just talking about people helping out in general with their own personal skills, skills that i lack. i figure that if i suck at one talent, it’s better to find somebody else who excels at that one talent and inquire of them their aid, in order to better facilitate my schemes. but that never seems to work out. quite frankly, i’m wondering if the only things that shall hold me back are my own limitations... and if i need to do more to rise above my own limitations to break free of this invisible prison that binds me back from seeing my dreams fulfilled.

what gets me are people like seth macfarlane. by the time he was my age, he already had a huge cult following of one of the most successful animated franchises ever. not only did he manage to sell three million dvd copies of a show that was cancelled, but without even really having to actively lobby on his part, get his television series re-contracted and back on the air – with incredibly successful ratings.

so what exactly have i done by now? i had a hand in creating what craig and i on some days feel to be an embarrassment of our talents, a waste of video tape and a laughable demonstration of our efforts. in the end, land of entrapment sometimes feels like it would be better off buried in the desert, forgotten about, and waved off nonchalantly anytime somebody dare ask us "whatever happened to that movie you guys made?" truly, there are days when craig and i wonder if we even should bother with putting our names on it at all, as if the only purpose for having those titles present would be so that people would be savy of whom to blame.

if nothing else, at least we both got some valuable learning experiences out of the whole ordeal, and the memories we made while shooting the film are excellent. it’s not that we had a bad time working on the project (well, except for when we had to deal with our lead actor and actress), but that the final result is less than satisfactory in our eyes. although, it could be just that we’ve dealt with it so much in post-production that we’re now both sick of it. in the end though, we made tons of friends and good contacts, i got laid for the first time, and we in general just had fun for the most part.

ultimately, we’ll still release it. i sincerely doubt that any film festival is going to see it as a serious contender, especially in light of all the vast amount of finer talent out there, and the infinitely better films that loe would be going up against. perhaps we’ll take it to some small festivals, and see what kind of response we get. if things look positive, then maybe we’ll shoot for something higher, but if we get a poor reception, we’ll probably just drop the whole festival idea thing. to be honest, i’m not even sure i’d want to be present when the film screens in front of a large audience that is charged with judging a film on its merits.

the other big problem i am facing right now is that i have a wealth of ideas to flesh out and develop into short films, or feature length projects – but i have no clue as to which one to pursue. each one has their own appeal, and i want to work on every single one of them, but the impatient side of me wants to get all of them done at once and multitask like a mofo so that i have a huge wealth of material to present to the world when i am finished. i’ve come to realize that i am fairly bad at writing a decent screenplay, since none of my scripts so far have any real defined story that plays out in a proper arc. dialogue wise, i am doing ok, because i seem capable of writing fairly believable conversations – ironic, since whenever i wrote in story form, the thing i always hated most was having to make my characters speak. i also seem to be able to develop strong three dimensional characters that people can identify with.

the tough part is making all of my ideas into actual stories that have a point and entertain. it’s not that i have a shortage of concepts. just no way to filter through them and decide where to go for now. it’s all very annoying.

to top things off, the nightly dreaming about airports continues. just about every time i go to sleep, i have a dream that involves an airport in some way. whether it be waiting in a terminal for a flight, arriving from someplace else, driving around the parking structure, or walking around outside the building. i get the message that i am supposed to *travel* somewhere, but i’m not sure where i am supposed to go. it would be nice if my dreams would help fill me in on where exactly i should voyage to, but no. i just get these vague suggestions that perhaps i need to physically be someplace else.

i’ve also dreamt a lot about cats lately, too… go figure.

so. what have we learned today? aside from the fact that i’m a shitty boyfriend, and am too indecisive about what i should do with my life, i need to go buy a cat and get on an airplane to "somewhere."

or maybe i’ll just go to work for now.

meow.

up from the ground came a bubblin' crude

2006-07-19T01:04:00.000-07:00

fuck.

i hate being broke.

it’s really beginning to piss me off just how much gas costs lately. people outside of california don’t seem to feel it quite as bad, but for the last year and a half, we have been over three dollars a gallon. it’s dipped below that amount maybe once or twice over the past eighteen months, but only by at most five cents.

granted, that’s hardly a drop in the hat when you consider that the suckers living in europe are shelling out close to eight dollars for roughly a gallon’s worth (since they buy liters due to being on the wacky ass metric system), but what the fuck?

i’d be willing to bet a fairly reasonable sum of money that after bush steps down from office at the end of his term, there is going to be an enron-style shakedown of the oil industry. after all, exxon mobil alone made close to thirty six billion dollars worth of profit in just one fiscal year. thirty six *billion* dollars.

that’s not gross. that’s net.

and yet, we’re all forced to pay up the asshole for some of that righteous crude. it’s not like these companies are exactly hurting for operation fundage. they’re doing just damn slap happy. every single one of the major oil companies have been posting ridiculous profits despite the fact that they claim to be “suffering” due to the current cost of barrels of oil.

forgive me. i’ve been a bit irritable lately for a number of reasons. chief of them being that i am beyond fucking broke. it seems like for the past couple months now, i barely even have enough money to squeak by, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. at this point, the last of my finances are going towards paying off this month’s car payment, and then i have just enough set aside to catch one viewing of clerks 2 this friday night with the gang.

i know, i shouldn’t blow what little cash i do have left on something so frivolous, but damnit. i’ve been waiting for this fucking film ever since information on it first became readily available to the grimy public. it means so much for me to go. to not go and see it would seriously leave me feeling defeated. i am determined to see that movie on opening day with my friends.

it also doesn’t help that i was originally supposed to be in los angeles at this point working on a film as camera crew (paid rather handsomely) but that that opportunity has currently fallen apart. two days before i was ready to head south, i got an e-mail from the director telling me that two of the actors bowed out in favor of some better paying gigs, which means that until this piece is re-cast, everything is on indefinite hold.

which also means that the two weeks that i requested off from work leaves me royally screwed, as i am scrambling to cover other people’s shifts wherever i can in order to end up with paychecks that don’t laugh hysterically at my face.

bleh. sorry for the bitch session. i’m just feeling a bit ragged lately, and to top it all off, the last time that meagan and i got to hang out, i was so exhausted and stressed with everything else that has been going on that instead of getting down with our bad selves, i passed out and snored for the whole fucking night, keeping her up and annoying the piss out of her.

it would be swell if i could just win the lotto or something. obviously that is fanciful thinking, and quite harmful a train of thought to possess at that. i can’t rely on bullshit gambles like the lottery to solve my problems. what i *really* need to do is come up with some clever way of making large sums of money.

the problem is, i’m not all that clever. or at least, i’m not feeling anywhere near to being clever lately. for a spell, i contemplated selling the majority of my belongings, but there is hardly any value in anything i own, making that idea a waste. even if i did sell everything i owned, i’d either end up owing money somewhere, or i’d make less than my average paycheck. the amount i’d gleam from offloading all of my possessions would be so insulting it’s not even worth the effort. if i weren’t so far into the hole at this point, at least stocking up on hours at work and beefing up my paycheck considerably would be most beneficial, but until i can get out of the financial rut i have dug for myself, it’s really just a bleak landscape of scrounging for change to do even the most rudimentary tasks like eating meals and filling up my car with gas so i can even get to work, let alone go visit my girlfriend.

sigh.

enough of my ranting. if you’d be so kind, hop on over to my cafepress store and buy some shit so i can at least say that i made some kind of profit on it after having it for over a year without any business what-so-ever?

or not.

i'm ready for my close up, mister demille

2006-07-16T00:14:00.000-07:00

i suppose that now is just about roughly the possible time to provide those diligent readers of you that you be with an update on how things have been progressing on the film land of entrapment.

you know. it’s that film. the one that craig and i started working on two years ago. yeah, that one. the one that *still* has yet to be completely finished.

here’s why:

i suck.

no, wait.

that’s not right.

i swallow. ;-)

in all seriousness though (even if i am hardly ever serious), the film is nearing completion. the major things that are left to takes the care of is the rest of the foley/sound effects work and dialogue editing, and then the mastering of the audio for the entire film. aside from that one day when david and i were at the foley stage, no other sound effects work has yet been done for the film, mostly due to david and i being in possession of conflicting schedules. hopefully in the next several weeks, we’ll be able to take the rolls of footage that craig has sent us on dvd, and get everything taken care of.

the other major hangup is a last minute decision that craig and i made a few weeks ago. up until about a month ago, we were still fine-tuning and tweaking the film through various minor edits, trying to do our best to save several points in the movie that were suffering. in particular the biggest item that stands out for now is that one of our extras (who also was our lighting guy for one or two shoots before he hit the needle again) totally blew every single take we shot of one scene, and since we can’t go back and re-shoot the piece, the scene as a result takes a major hit. however, we have a bit of a solution worked up.

we are going to digitally insert my good pal masato into the movie to play the part of the pathetic extra and do his best to fix the overall suckiness of the scene. this means several different things. the first is that we have to completely remove the original extra from that scene, so that we have a background plate shot that masato can be composited in on top of. this translates into many many long hours of work for me in adobe after effects, working with several digital still frames from the original segment to blend and construct a shot of the room with nobody else in it but our main actor.

then we have to photograph masato in front of a green screen so that we can extract him from the green background and place him in the after effects session on a layer that is on top of the background plate.

finally, we have to seperate out our main foreground actor from the scene, so that his section of the frame will be floating on top of the layer which masato will be in. that shall be the trickiest of the work involved in this, since the original actor was shot in the set on location, and not in front of a blue or green screen. had he been shot in front of a solid color backdrop, it would certainly be quite the walking of cake for us to layer everything in the shot with little issue.

as it stands, since the actor was shot on the actual set, i have to go through major key frames of the video where our actor moves about, and “draw” a mask around him that isolates him from the rest of the frame. after this is done, he will be pasted back on top of everything else in the effects sequence, so that it will appear as if he actually is interacting with somebody who in reality performed the other half of the scene nearly two years and a thousand miles apart from when and where it was originally shot.

hollywood magic, baby. oh yeah.

so that’s a little of what happens to be going on at the moment with craig and i, as we move to push land of entrapment closer to completion.

hey little sister shotgun

2006-07-12T18:16:00.000-07:00

(due apologies – this post originally began on the second of july)

remind me constantly that should i ever feel the compulsion to attach myself permanently by the means of matrimony with a person of the opposite sex, it should be overseen by an ordained impersonator of the elvis presley variety.

personally, i hate weddings. a lot of women might take offense to that statement, since many members of the feminine persuasion share in this idyllic but impossible vision of some grandly fantastical event, but i don’t hate the *concept* of the ceremony itself – which is what i believe most people are so intrigued by – i dislike the actual execution. i think that in theory, the entire set of festivities are a very sentimentally wonderful idea. what usually ends up happening is that the families involved get overstressed for trivially stupid reasons, people are forced to sit in non-air conditioned sanctuaries (or outdoors, as i happen to be at the moment) around people they hardly know and in all likelihood would never care to, and undoubtedly at some point, the unholy song "chicken dance" (which even polka refuses to acknowledge as part of the genre) is called upon to portray a group of less than skilled dancers as even more so the fools than they already were making themselves out to be on the dance floor.

if it weren’t for all the ridiculously absurd "issues" that arise during most weddings, i would be more than happy to provide my endorsement of such affairs. our society is wonderfully skilled at taking even the greatest of ideas and totally throwing monkey wrenches all up in the mess. i mean, really. instead of just celebrating the combining of two lives together by the binds of love, people spend their time worrying that one fucking flower is two inches off its mark in the central floral arrangement. i don’t get why engaged couples become so enraged/emotionally dependant upon such ultimately minor details. it’s all a crock of bullshit.

there is such this big expectation/demand that weddings be the end-all/be-all of our lives. first it was graduation from high school, which would have been swell had the administration actually been able to have correctly pronounced the names of half of the graduating class. honestly, i doubt most people remember their high school graduation after five years pass by anyways. so the next "major" thing that we are to anticipate in life is either the college graduation, or a wedding.

i’m more into the big picture of things. what is important is that you commit and dedicate the lives of two individuals to be pledged to one another because of a shared love – not that the ribbons on the posts in the reception hall are one inch longer than they were supposed to be, or that the balloons aren’t quite the right shade of lavender. seriously, get over it. big fucking whoop.

in general i suppose that i am just annoyed that people get so caught up in minor inconveniences than they really ought. if you have such an all-encompassing problem with the way the ruffles on the curtains at your wedding look, you’re probably in for some incredible reality checks when truly important shit actually hits the fan at full force.

oh yeah. the reason for this entire rant is that currently i am sweating my ass off outdoors in the sun, waiting for the wedding of some friends of ours up in the mountains to start. dad and i are doing the sound for the ceremony, and then dj-ing the music at the reception dance later on in the evening. and even though i am far less involved in this wedding than i have been with previously weddings that i have attended, i still can’t help but silently giggle at all the "problems" that magically show up and somehow threaten to kill all the romance. i’m always the one hoping that a family member starts an argument/fight, or that a jilted ex-lover reveals embarrassingly incriminating details of a rather personal nature for all those in attendance to reflect upon.

hence why i strongly desire to have no part in some grandiose ceremony should the time ever come when i promise myself to another. the more scaled back, the better. even though i lucked out and my family will only have to spring for the rehearsal dinner (since the family of whatever bride i do eventually take will have to shoulder the financial burden of everything else), i want things to be as simplistic as possible.

fanciful dreaming, i realize. in truth, i’ll probably get roped into some out of control behemoth of an event that will turn my gushing fiancé into a terribly fierce menace should the slightest bit of anything be remotely out of place or not in a manner in which she had envisioned since she was ten.

i dunno. that’s just my take. back to you.

i know you know i want to know how i feel

2006-06-22T14:16:00.000-07:00

a lot has been going on.

the ultimate understatement you have yet to see. er. read.

for starters, my apologies that it’s been nearly a month since i last wrote. every time over the last four weeks that i have gone to start a new post, something either comes up or i pass out. it’s been an interesting month, no doubt, with lots of stuff going on that i could have written about. basically i am forcing myself to hold to publishing at least *this* post, so that there is *something* on my site for people to read. that is, if there is anybody still checking my site. i know monica and a couple other people at least have been asking what the fizzy is the dizzy, so here it is.

in short:

ashley is out. apparently. even though she never really did say anything to me to that effect, it became fairly evident that something was amiss when two months passed by and i got no response from her, despite the repeated e-mails and calls i had sent in her direction. a couple weeks ago, spring’s diligent sleuthing uncovered the profile of another guy on myspace in ashley’s home town to which she had been sending many lovey-dovey comments and messages.

so, whatever.

i didn’t take the news all that hard. as i had mused on when i finally realized things were pretty much over, the long distance factor in that whole relationship pretty much had cast a dark spell over things for the most part anyways. while i was definitely into her when she came out to visit, as time passed after she returned home, it just didn’t seem like things were entirely on the level. eventually it just became a given that the whole situation was done and over with.

which is terrific, because it allowed me to pursue the latest woman in my life – meagan (pronounced "meegin"). she is a phenomenally talented artist and a budding filmmaker taking film courses up in the city (you can check out her material at DoomGirlMeg). much more local, and definitely a wonderful companion to be with. hanging out with her is a total joy, and the relationship seems to be going quite well so far.

we met at fanimecon last month, when masato asked if i would assist him in figuring out the artist row stuff (he was in charge of the artist vendor room), as well as got me a media badge so that i could run around the convention for the entire weekend with loads of cameras strapped to me, taking pictures and video of practically everything at the event.

meagan and her good friend cassy were seated at the table across from us in the artist alley, and over time we all got to know each other and become good friends. the girls had a rather large printer/copier/scanner/hybrid behemoth peripheral (ironically, the same model my dad just recently bought), so masato and i offered the use of our cart to haul their gear up and back from their hotel room to the convention center. when meagan got home from the show, she went online to check out my availability on myspace, and was bummed to see that i was still listed as "in a relationship," even though it had been a couple weeks since i had finally decided that ashley probably was through with me.

a week later, after chatting online and text messaging on our phones, she and i began dating. it started off with an afternoon in a park down in santa cruz, and went onward from there. now we see each other every other day, either up in the city or her coming down and hanging out with me, masato, and stacy, a girl that masato is currently pursuing.

which brings us to now. meagan will be coming over later tonight after i get off work to hang out and watch movies, and i’ve spent several nights staying in her dorm room up in the city. which is also how my car ended up getting towed yesterday.

apparently i was parked in a "trucks only" meter spot, and so while she and i were snuggling, my car was busy getting its sorry ass hauled off to the san fran impound lot. anybody who has ever had their car towed may be familiar with the fact that it is a pretty steep charge to get your vehicle back, and i’m also stuck with a parking ticket that was issued a few hours before the city finally brought a truck around and made off with my ride.

which sucks royal, because i’m already in negative dollar land. my financial situation currently is most shitty, which is partly due to my never quite recovering my finances from when ashley was visiting. that whole ordeal left me pretty much high and dry money wise, and it took me forever to get back at least some amount of emergency cash in my savings account, all of which is gone after several unexpected expenses a few months ago.

entirely my own fault, no argument there. economic suavness is definitely not my thing, and it’s really starting to catch up to me. while i might not be the best at dealing with money, life certainly does have a way of discovering all the most annoying expenses and piling them up for you at the worse possible moment. in addition to having to pay the good citizens of san francisco for having my car towed away (and having to walk across town to get it back), my car registration is due (have to pay off the ticket first), but i also have to get a smog check on my vehicle before i can get it registered, and before i can do that i have to get a tune-up since my gas mileage has become less than awful and i’m sure that my near dead spark plugs are going to net me a fail on the smog exam.

whatever. a couple people suggested that i setup a paypal account to help me out, since i am currently broker than the rudder on the titanic, but i’m not so sure how i feel about that. i leave it up to you, the readers (what few there may be that are even left), to decide whether that would be kosher or not. as well, i’ve also been taking stock of what i own that has any remaining value (very little) and figuring out what to sell of mine on eBay for some extra cash.

the annoying thing is i am poor despite the fact that i am actually still working, and quite a lot to boot. my paychecks for the last several rounds have pretty much already been spent before i even got the money (and not on things that i would have liked to spend it on), so i keep getting this sense that i’m not really moving forward at all in life. it’s a bit frustrating.

anyways. my body also has been quite mad at me lately, as i have been less then diligent in securing the required amount of sleep it desires. i’d say a few months ago, my body finally decided that i no longer can stay up for extremely long periods of time and still make a full recovery on minimal sleep. perhaps it is a sign that i am getting old. or older.

at any rate, there have been a couple weeks where i ended up sleeping for less than four or five hours for the entire seven days, which became a big concern amongst my family, friends and co-workers that i devote just a tad more of my time towards getting some rest. it’s been slow goings so far, since i’m not the best at managing my time. but i’m getting there.

so, there at least is an update for y’all. again, i have no idea how many people even bother to check this site anymore. it wouldn’t really surprise me if people stopped coming by quite a long time ago, seeing as how i certainly presented the illusion that i was gone from the world of blogging.

but i’m back, baby.

there is beauty in this life we are living

2006-05-25T12:22:00.000-07:00

in between the time when i started this latest entry, a week or so passed. it was a fairly hectic week. details follow.

for some reason lately, around midnight or so, i’ll lay down on the floor without setting up my bedding materials, and pass out until four am, when the change in my body temperature awakens me and i roll out my covers and matt to fall back asleep on. sometimes i also fall asleep in my chair, but then soon after flop onto the floor and slumber for a few hours before getting up to close my laptop and shut off the lights.

almost every night this has happened for the last couple weeks. the two occasions where i did manage to actually go to bed properly in that time were one night when i was out in the living room after the season finales of my name is earl and the office, and one random night where i knew that sleep was fast approaching and i made myself ready in time.

it’s as if regardless of what i mentally decide, my body overrules and forces me to sleep.

not that i have been getting a world of sleep, anyways.

on the thursday before mother’s day, the grandfather of an extremely close friend of ours decided that the pain of arthritis and other ailments had become too taxing for him, and he put one of his competition pistols to his heart. after wrangling and hassling about, i was able to get last wednesday off so that we could drive to southern california for the funeral.

tuesday i already had off, which was the day we drove down on, but the memorial service itself was scheduled wednesday afternoon. however, before i could go, i had to meet up down in cupertino with david to finish recording the last of the sound effects we required for his segment of the film that he’s using as a class project. wednesday was the due date for his piece, so we had to scramble on gathering everything so that he could squeeze mixing and mastering the piece in between other classes and recording a chorale group, and we both ended up hanging out chatting and working until close to one thirty on tuesday morning. given my recent fits of random passing out, i’m thankful that i got home in one piece, as doing sixty five up fifteen miles of highway at two in the morning aren’t the most friendly conditions to lose conciousness.

seven thirty that same morning came way too soon. we didn’t leave until about eight thirty, and had to make a quick stop for coffee and breakfast pastries, making our actual departure time somewhere around nine am. dad’s a bit concerned with how rapidly we are putting mileage on the camry, so instead of taking one of our own cars down to la, a local rental company set us up with a ginormous ford 500 which i still swear to this day had a v6 engine in it (even if it was a shitty v6), though dad is dead set convinced that it was a four cylinder (is the argument even really that important? – not really).

the drive down was fairly uneventful, travel wise. i spent most of it scrunched up in the backseat, doing my best to ignore a righteous headache from the lack of sleep, listening to rush albums on the iPod, and photographing the endless landscape that soared past my window. it was actually a strangely bonding experience for mom, dad and i. with my brother off at the university of north dakota, and the rest of us working crazy schedules, we rarely get to see each other for any extended length of time anymore. i imagine it will become even more sparse should i ever actually move out of the house into my own place. traditionally, whenever we drive down to la, as soon as we get on the five, the family compartmentalizes into their own zones and pretty much stays self contained for the majority of the ride, but this time we did at one point devote quite a bit of the trip to actually communicating with each other and carrying on some noteworthy conversations.

and for the life of me, at ten pm tonight, i am totally blanking on every. single. one. of. them.

of course, that was over a week ago. everything is now a week ago. how in the fuck does that even happen?

as we dropped mom off at our old church in redondo beach to rendezvous with a friend of hers that she was staying with while we were in town, dad and i popped into the sanctuary to check out the new mixing console they recently got. nearly twelve years ago, before that church had any kind of formal sound system, dad and the other friend that he and i were staying with overnight got together and assembled a rather top-notch audio setup for the church, which lasted until last year when that church began a serious bid to replace and upgrade everything. it was about time, anyways. i’m trying to see if i can wrangle them into selling/giving me the old mackie 24x8 that is now collecting dust in storage. it may have shitty pre-amps on it, but i’d rather put the thing to good use instead of letting it take up space not doing anything.

seeing the drastic modifications to everything only highlighted this strange phenomenon of change. every time we go to visit our old neighborhoods, so much change has taken place that we hardly ever recognize deeply familiar locations anymore. i’m not talking about spans of years; these alterations to the landscape occur at an increasingly furious pace over just a few months. the last time i was in redondo beach, i completely missed a street because the landmark i was expecting to navigate by had been removed at some point in the four months that had passed since my last visit. those kinds of suburban modifications are truly terrifying; they serve to remind me just how much everything down there is transforming into something that is uniquely unfamiliar, almost alien.

of all the places i have lived, redondo beach was quite possibly the one locale that i ever really considered a home, and now that ninety percent of what is there is completely unrecognizable to me is a bit like finding out your home town had a terrible fire where everything you ever knew was completely destroyed and replaced with something else.

oh shakespeare, tremble at my melodramatically digital soliloquy.

marshalls was the next stop so i could get a tie to wear to the funeral. fuck knows i own twenty ties, and for not one moment while packing for this trip did i have the foggiest as to where the shit they are all kept. keep in mind that since moving into this house, i have had to re-pack my belongings even to simply move one room over, which is a smaller room than the one i previously occupied, so now even *more* of my crap is sandwiched into boxes up in the garage. one of these days, i swear i’m gonna go on impulse, stack all of that shit out in a parking lot, and set it ablaze. if i don’t even know what half of anything i have stashed in the garage is, how much would i really miss it if i just burned it all? obviously since i have managed to subsist for three years without needing any of it, i may as well just get it over with and destroy it all.

i suppose there is the off-chance that i might end up obliterating something that is discovered i in fact do need/want immediately after, and then i’d be totally hosed. my life is tailor made for ironies just such as those.

while we were in town, i was determined to snag a bite at chick-fil-a. there aren’t any around the bay area, and i desperately love their chicken with a passion. for reals. there are hardly any wendys down in la, and i am a huge wendys nut – i would gladly trade wendys to have chick-fil-a anytime i damn well pleased.

the rest of the afternoon was fairly chill. we hung out at our friend’s place until dinner, meeting up with mom and her friend again at chicago ribs. afterwards, i was hoping to either catch the scrubs season finale, or drive to the manhattan beach pier and take some pictures of it at night. sadly, neither of those plans came to action. instead i fired up my laptop for a short while to work on editing the trailer for land of entrapment, and then passed out somewhere near midnight, waking up at nine the next morning.

we didn’t have to be at the cemetery until two that afternoon, so the morning was spent lounging around, having a leisurely breakfast at kings hawaiian in torrance, and then checking out what used to be a really good christian book store. i dunno what holy smoke is in their pipes when charging forty five dollars for the widescreen special edition of chronicles of narnia (best buy sells it for twenty), but the real disappointment was that the sweet pro audio section they had has now been all but completely forgotten about and replaced with a few racks of compact discs.

there are only so many times in my life where i have actually dressed up all fancy like. to be quite honest, i truly despise nice formal clothes. men’s dress shirts always seem as if they are choking off your airways around the neck (especially when you throw in a tie; might as well go the full nine and make a noose out of it), and i have yet to find a pair of dress shoes that didn’t make me feel as if my feet had just been squeezed through a cider press and then steamrolled.

the service was ok. it was overcast out and there was a nice breeze, so even though it was about eighty degrees, it didn’t feel all that unbearable. there were several rows of chairs spread out graveside, and i didn’t take too much comfort in sitting on top of some random stranger’s final resting place. there are some things you just don’t do, and standing over or sitting on somebody’s grave is a big no-no.

(that may be some latent catholicism passed on by my mom since she was raised in the catholic church and only became lutheran later on in life when at the age of seven i asked her about God and she took us to a friend’s church while we were living in edmonds so i could check it all out for myself)

off in the distance over the hill sat the industrial cluster fuck that is long beach harbor. i wonder if the dead people buried there ever get pissed off that the primary view from the cemetery is an endless sea of filthy smokestacks and packing crates full of automobiles, computers and smuggled immigrants.

while we waited for the ceremony to begin, i took notice of the fact that all of the graves we were on top of were shared by couples; in most cases, the wives outlived their husbands by a good twenty years or more. makes you wonder about their lives, what they did. how they coped with the loss of their beloved. the headstone directly under my chair was for a couple where the husband was born in 1906, making him a child of six when the rms titanic launched. masato had just mentioned to me a few hours ago in a text message that there is a massive titanic exhibit opening up at the moscone center next month, and i wondered if this gentlemen had as a young boy been intrigued by what at the time was the largest ocean liner ever constructed.

after the family shared some of their fond memories of the departed, pastor john, who is the interim pastor at our old church gave a sermon that he largely phoned in. it was random and chaotic, and didn’t really seem to go anywhere. as my feet began throbbing from the pain of my toes being scrunched into two square inches of leathery torture, i made a game of trying to guess what path the minister was going to take next during his message, ultimately driving myself slightly mad as i couldn’t even begin to fathom where this guy was coming from. i only make such a big deal about this because from what we’ve been told, he is a good speaker, yet the example he provided that afternoon was certainly cause to bring his ordination into question. should the pastor at my funeral ever deliver as oddly bizarre a eulogy as this guy did, i probably won’t care all that much, seeing as how i’ll be stiffer than ron jeremy at the playboy mansion.

towards the end of the funeral, a flock of homing doves were released from a box next to the casket, who all promptly flew off towards central la, and inspired in me a possible ending to a comedic film should i ever motivate my sorry ass to actually finish a screenplay that has a definitive structure.

sitting outdoors amongst all of the graves struck up some thoughts in me, predominately what my choice would be as to the handling of my final earthly remains. so far, i know that my mom wants to be cremated, and my father hasn’t given any thought to the matter as of yet. i’m still undecided. while the ego-maniac in me has this fantasy of my corpse being preserved and held posed gallantly in a hermetically sealed viewing chamber for future generations to observe and admire, i’m more inclined to opt for having my cremated remains being fired from earth onboard a rocket bound for the sun. talk about going out in a blaze of glory.

well, not really. i imagine the rocket would likely explode long before it ever reached the sun’s corona. but that’s neither here nor there for now.

there was a reception held in the deceased’s honor after the ceremony at his surviving family’s house, which we attended for a brief period before needing to hit the road back to the bay area. all of us had to return home for commitments on thursday morning, so when the majority of the crowd began heading over to the torrance municipal airport to check out the deceased’s sister’s learjet (see: lots of texas oil money), we changed back into plain clothes and took to the 405 out of town. ideally, we were going to meet up with monica after she got off work at a fatburger in brentwood for dinner, but rush hour traffic was surprisingly lighter than i was anticipating (truly a rarity in the city of angels), and we got there a full hour before monica could make it. proceeding without her, we gobbled down some fat goodness, and then drove north on sepulveda through the pass and sherman oaks before picking up the freeway again on burbank.

originally i started off driving us out of town, and my plan was to trade places with dad as soon as we had descended out of the grapevine down into the central valley, but dad fell asleep before we reached frasier park, and mom was busy reading, so i kept on driving until we got to harris ranch sometime around eleven pm. dad took over driving at that point, which was a smart move, since i passed out dead asleep not even ten minutes after leaving the rest stop, and i pretty much stayed in a deep slumber until we got home just before two am, only drifting in and out of conciousness a few times when the road surface got vile enough that even the crappy shocks of the ford couldn’t handle.

reaching home, we all stumbled into the house weary as fuck, but i didn’t go back to sleep until about four after i woke up and dragged all the bags back in. which sucked, because i had work at eight.

four hours later. yeah. i got about two and a half hours of sleep.

and then had an eight hour shift. by four thirty, when i finally clocked out, i was beyond exhausted. somehow managing to make my way home from work without wrecking my car all over the road, the next three hours were spent taking a power nap, so that i could once again get back in my car, and head out on the road once more; this time to davis, outside of sacramento.

one of the attendees at the funeral was a guy who used to play guitar at our church before taking off for college in chico, and it turns out his band was playing the next night up around us at a bar just a few blocks from where renee lives. they’re a reggae group, which i hadn’t realized until i got there, and totally grooved the whole time they played since i’ve really gotten into reggae lately through the playlist we have at work. renee and her boyfriend david joined me and a pitcher of pabst blue ribbon to check out the show.

for the latter half of the show, there was this really attractive gal in a black skirt and top that kept looking over and eyeing me. she was fairly toasted, but so was i after downing several pints of beer, and for a moment, i realized i probably had a very good shot with her. the only thing that stopped me was the realization that i’m with ashley, and such behavior isn’t exactly the brightest thing to do in a relationship (although, i’m beginning to get the strong feeling that the future between ashley and myself may be in question – completely unrelated to my being in davis, getting drunk, and dancing to reggae), otherwise were i a single man, i totally would have been all over that.

as it stands, i kept to myself and hung out with renee and david, dancing along to the music and shouting like a wild asshole whenever it seemed appropriate, which was quite often as it turns out. it was great to hear my friend play again, as it’s been about ten years since i’ve last seen him really rip a guitar to shreds.

david, renee’s boyfriend, was kind enough to let me crash on his couch out in the living room, and after walking him to work with renee the next morning, she and i grabbed some coffee at peet’s and bagles at noah’s. there was no real pressing need for me to get back home until later that evening, so she and i walked down to the country club that her apartment gets her a discount on, and took one of the peddle boats out around the lake a few times. in spite of it being overcast (or really, because of it), i ended up getting sunburned yet again. you’d think that by now, after twenty six years, i would remember to bring sunscreen with me everywhere i go. oh well. i suppose i’ll eventually have to seek treatment should i ever develop melanoma.

renee and i grabbed some dinner at sudwerk’s, a local micro brewery (God, i fucking *love* college towns) and then i had to fight through a freak rain storm and horrendous rush hour traffic (worse than what i encountered in la) on highway eighty to get back home in time to change and get over to work for my closing shift. that night was totally bogus. even though it ended up being rather fun, out bathrooms were out of commission after a pipe exploded in our basement, and then one of the closing crew called in sick, leaving us short staffed on a busy friday night. we didn’t get out of there until two fifteen in the morning, and i had to be back once more later on at ten.

and again, it was a fucking eight hour shift. at this point in the week, i had gone three days on less than six hours of sleep, and it was definitely catching up to me rather fast. masato joined up with me for dinner at bj’s in foster city, where the lack of sleep and a rather generous pint of berry cider made me a bit loopy.

you would think that after dinner, i would have gone home and straight to bed right after.

nope.

like the fool i am, i stayed up until three in the morning. and then passed out.

the majority of sunday was spent curled up on my floor, napping away and developing a massive headache that plagued me for most of monday.

ok.

i seriously need to go to bed, since i gotta be up in six hours for work at seven. thankfully i’m only working until noon, and then masato and i have to meet up to discuss just what the hell we are going to do this weekend as far as our responsibilities go for certain projects at fanimecon.

hopefully the breadth of this post helps to explain as to why i haven’t written anything in the last several days. as always, there will be much, much more from me again.

which will be ready just as soon as i have another spare four hours to devote to craft these wastefully drawn out blog entries.

other peoples thoughts they ain’t your hand-me-downs

2006-05-12T23:10:00.000-07:00

you always know that you’re moving on up in the occupational world when you can put down on your resume that you have experience with scraping fly shit off a ceiling.

in the last post, i talked about my car a bit. since toyota has been running ads for the new hybrid camry, and i love the ’01 camry we have, i’ve been starting to think about how feasible it would be to convert my car into a hybrid. i’m sure that in the next couple years, there will be a surge of hybrid engines available third party that any old person could slap into a car and then go.

oh wait. who am i kidding? just to even open the hood on a modern vehicle and know what the fuck you’re looking at requires at least several different diagnostic computers and a staff of semi-retarded monkeys. it sickens me to be nearly as nostalgic as i am, but there was a time when should something be wrong with your car, all you needed was a big wrench and a strong back-hand. smack the engine a few times, and if it didn’t work or respond, chances are it was fucked. ok, maybe not quite that simple or arthur fonzarelli-esque but the point is, you could take a few simple tools and within minutes have a working theory as to what is going on with your ride.

ironically, in order to make everything more efficient and functional, in the end we’ve made everything more and more complex. there is this gross oversimplification of so many things that life has become far more complicated than it really needs to be.

for some crazy ass reason, nobody seems to remember the time when cell phones simply didn’t exist. when your kids were out of school, you couldn’t text them to find out what block the bus was on, or conference call your entire family when you wanted to have a get together. people still laugh at concertos and movie theaters when they are reminded to shut off their phones or at least set them to silent mode, and yet some dumbass always forgets and a rather annoying blast from a shitty MIDI version of the 1812 overture rings out at usually the quietest moment in the film – followed by the aforementioned dumbass’s most private possible conversation that could take place in a large public forum.

bleh. i’m just a bit cranky tonight.

partly it’s due to the cost of gas. while i totally understand that oil companies (just like any other for-profit capitalistic organization) exist solely to make money, this shit is getting ridiculous. it has been guestimated that should the atomic situation with iran descend further into a large toilet, the average cost at the pump will rise to nearly eight dollars per gallon of that righteous crude.

that’s just not going to work. not at all. no, i’m afraid we’re gonna hafta come up with something else.

especially when the popular lament on behalf of our oil providers is “supply,” despite there being more than enough on hand for quite some time. when a company makes around forty billion dollars in profit in one year, i start to realize that while indeed i work for a company that deals with a vile black liquid, clearly i’m involved with the wrong commodity.

the other thing that pisses me off is what has recently happened to google. i’m not really talking about the censorship bullshit with china, although that does irk me quite fearsomely.

back when google was first introduced, the only thing that you got when you accessed their front page was a simple search engine. you typed in your search string, hit ok, and in seconds a wealth of information was returned to you from which you could satisfy your craving for knowledge.

not that google earth, google maps, and google video aren’t cool. i love each of those features, and i believe the company has done an exemplary job of demonstrating to its consumers how google can provide a lot of uniquely interesting solutions that we otherwise didn’t think we needed.

however. the downside is that google has sold out and become a corporate shill. the other day i was attempting to locate the corporate website for a product i wanted to get some in-depth information on. sadly, this happened to be a case where the website i needed was not something simple, like the company name. so, i figured i’d bring up google and easily find the site i was looking for.

wrong. dead wrong. the only results that i got were advertising hits. half of the links that turned up didn’t even correspond to what i was looking for, and the top twenty results were all amazon, best buy, and eBay links. now, i know how to search the internet. i’m not some newbie moron who doesn’t understand how things work. from the get-go several years ago, google has been my ever ready bitch. all you needed to give me was one moments time and the subject, and i could turn up exactly what you wanted.

on this one particular occasion, i had to create a search string so long, i eventually lost hope of ever discovering what i was looking for. i ended up having to exclude so many key words from the pattern, that by the time i gave up, there was close to twenty words that i had to forcefully specify google not to include in the results.

don’t even get me started on the bullshit advertising links on the side bar of the google site that integrate your search string into their titles, yet never ever have any useful content, even from a marketing standpoint. half of *those* links lead you off to a page that has yet even more links to other sites, which in turn have links to other sites, creating a giant maze of web pages that eventually bring you back around full circle to where you originally started. none of those links ever actually goes anywhere. simply to more and more collections of miscellaneous random links that deceive you into thinking you are getting anywhere.

this is not how the web should be. "link a" should direct you to "site b" which contains all the content you originally wanted; not a link to another site that links to another site and then back again. wasteful games that involve run-around linking are something i wish no part of.

i’m also a tad cranky because the last few days at work have been generally dismal. my co-workers are always a wonderful bunch to associate with, but due to the rising temperatures (finally, some decent fucking weather at last), a large number of the consumers that migrate into our store in search of cool refreshing beverages to quench them of their thirsts have all had really poor demeanors. it’s like whoever turned up the thermostat in the bay area also cranked the bitch factor control up to eleven.

a few people expressing misery that the gloomy gray seattle-style bullshit has finally gone is one thing, but it begins to really rag on a person when the majority of those who wander in are coping attitudes. especially all of the people who still blatantly fail to realize that they are not the sole inhabitants of the universe, and that there are actually a great deal many more number of people around them, all arrogantly convinced of their own illusionary superiority.

makes me want to go and watch clerks for the ten billionth time, and laugh extra hard when randal graves spits on the annoying customer who quotes headlines from horrible tabloids.

in fact, that sounds like a good idea. movie time!!

(oh, and if you haven’t already, skim down and read the post before this one, since I am making an effort to blog a lot more)

* addendum (in response to claudia's comment)

while i certainly don't believe that *all* mechanics are as dim as some primates, i have had more than my fair share of mechanics who were far too content to quickly mis-diagnose an issue with our car than actually spend the time to figure out what was really wrong with it. there is in fact a particular instance where the place we took our car to said the computer didn't find anything wrong, even though the car was very obviously in dire need of repair. all they did was push the buttons, wait for the machine to tell them the status of the car, and then refuse to do any further checking since the "computer" was "smart enough" to determine if the car was ok or not.

even worse was when the next shop we took it to said that one component had failed, and several shops kept having us replace it *four* different times before they all finally admitted that something else might have been the problem all along. in the end, we paid four times what it would have originally cost to solve the actual problem in the first place had they made a proper diagnosis, and since the work involved "required" their specialized diagnostic and calibration equipment, it wasn't even something we could have verified for ourselves as to what the real cause of the problem was. the repair places that we took our car to were more interested in having us pay a lot of money for something that was never even broken to begin with. while you can report those places to better business centers, there's only so much that can be done to ensure that customers are receiving honest, reliable service.

but it is still rather annoying that to even have basic work done on a modern automobile, you have to hand it over to somebody else and get charged a very large sum of money for something that used to be cheap as hell twenty years ago to do yourself. especially if you aren't even going to get reliable service consistantly, i'd rather have the option to work on my car myself and know everything about it, than have somebody "say" that it is one part when i know for a fact that something entirely unrelated is actually the issue. however, since modern cars require expensive devices to check, replace, or properly calibrate nearly everything, it isn't even feasible for enthusiasts to become directly involved in the upkeep of their vehicles anymore.

many times i've wondered how much there is to know

2006-05-10T00:32:00.000-07:00

five years.

five years i have owned my car, a mazda miata.

never once has anybody ever said anything derogatory towards me about my car, except for those comments that were knowingly in jest.

(an explanation for those who aren’t hip - for some reason the miata is "the" car for gay people to have)

last friday as i was cruising down 280 on my way to cupertino, some jackasses passed me in the fast line and yelled out "burn in hell you fucking faggot!"

uh... k?

my car has been called many things. jellybean, whitey the love rocket, and the all time favorite, tic tac. in fact, when i got my car, a former youth director of mine who i tormented endlessly about *his* miata sent to me a package of white tic tacs, which i think are still somewhere within the bounds of my car (lord only knows how many nooks and crannies there are that odd assorted items have disappeared into).

this was the first time somebody examined what i drive and used it as a sole basis for my sexual orientation.

jeebus. with that kind of intellect, i sure as all hell hope those shit heads aren’t registered voters.

wow.

i made a staggering *two* whole posts for the entire month of april. damnit all. that’s just depressing.

hell, i can remember way back when i used to post three times a day! used to be nothing could hold me back, keep me from mumbling brainlessly onto the intarweb.

but now… now. i don’t know. still am i in possession of the desire to blog, but life it seems just gets too much in the way. hell, two weeks will barely register and i’ll suddenly realize that i left my site to the wayside. then i get all in a twitter and start working up some grandiose post, only to become distracted by something else and wander off to once again allow my corner of the net gather cobwebs.

today i make my stand. no more, i say!

from now on, i do declare to post more! i swear upon thou an oath to commit insidious amounts of uselessly trivial details of my life to print! from hell’s heart, i stab at thee!!

oh fuck. it’s not like people are actually still checking this site, anyways.

i suppose that in itself could be freeing. disregarding the limitation that there are expectations upon what i do or say here. not that there ever really were any, but that i can just begin to blabber on and on as i used to, and not concern myself with whether somebody actually checks to see that i have updated or not.

the other day i had a rather striking epiphany. although, i hate to use that term, because lately i have noticed that tons of people have epiphanies everyday, nearly to the degree that they no longer hold any real special meaning. but this i did find to be a rather significant discovery.

as i was driving dad and i down to church on sunday morning (or was it saturday night, to do the audio mix for a concert? i don’t recall specifics no more), i suddenly realized why it is that i take upon so many projects that almost never see the light of day or are ever fully explored.

the conclusion was such a painfully obvious one, i should have caught this many years ago. ever since i was in high school, i have acknowledged that there are two vastly distinct personalities that occupy my mortal host.

the first is ever the free thinker, an abstract if you will. the dreamer; the child that grasps at imagination and hungers for inspiration.

then there is the analytical side to me. the bean counting, obsessively compulsive organizer.

generally whenever i undertake a new project, a precise script of events goes into play. the very first thing that i find myself having to do is try and organize all of my thoughts; collect and gather all of the ideas, hem them together and farm everything for what i can towards the ultimate goal.

the problem is, i get so stuck on the detail oriented nitpicking, that i rarely ever allow my abstract side take over again. more and more, the overall point of whatever i am doing becomes so tightly focused in a non-creative (but yet efficiently organized) fashion until i hardly have any wish to continue further. essentially, the dreamer in me becomes so flummoxed at the lack of input it has that i finally give up and move on to something else.

what i need to do is figure out how to relinquish control over ideas i have from the analytical, back to the abstract. if i afford the dreamer in me the chance to contribute to what i am doing, likely i reckon things would flow a lot smoother for me, and i’d express more follow through on whatever it is that i happen to engage myself and my energies towards.

although, now that i read all of this back, it seems as if i may have hit upon this discovery before, and simply filed that knowledge away into a neatly organized file somewhere in my memory.

how ironic.

over the last couple weeks, communications between ashley and i have dwindled. not so much a result of anything going on between us, but more having to do with the fact that her sister (whom ashley lives with) tends to become a right bit selfish every now and then, and refuses to allow ashley access to the computer or the telephone at home (which, sadly she has every right to do, since they both belong to her and not ashley).

i’ve managed to talk with ashley once or twice a week, usually by calling her at work, but generally those aren’t the most ideal conditions since i typically reach her when she isn’t on break per se, and thus she doesn’t have the opportunity to really engage in a longer conversation.

understandably, this is a touch frustrating to us both. matters aren’t made any better by the fact that ashley has been working several separate jobs per day to save up money to move out here to california, and currently spends more than three quarters of the day on the clock somewhere.

to anybody who still wanders this way and isn’t turned off by the disgustingly large amounts of text i leave here, if you could pray that she and i be granted the chance to talk with each other a bit more often, i would totally appreciate it.

it also doesn’t help that the "friend" she trusted to take care of her myspace page and e-mail has recently become insanely jealous that she has no romantic interest in him, and thus has been trying to start shit between her and i. on top of not getting to talk with her all that much, i gotta deal with this loser taunting me and carrying on like a real jackass.

that and other things have started to wear on me a bit. but, i had a job interview for a second part time job on tuesday that i think went fairly well, so that is good.

also, i got adobe audition 2.0 to work properly on dad’s computer. every now and then, my skill comes back to me and i’m able to beat software into submitting to my bidding.

this post was originally written on monday, but because my sorry ass fell asleep at midnight with all the lights and the tv on, i didn’t get to post it until today.

i promise that i will make a concerted effort to post more from now on.

back real soon.

bright light city gonna set my soul

2006-04-26T02:12:00.000-07:00

at the time of the start of this writing, it is about four thirty in the afternoon (pacific standard), and i have just passed through barstow california on highway 15 out of las vegas.

on sunday the 23rd, david, dad, a couple of other people and i drove from the san francisco bay area to attend the national association of broadcasters convention (aka, nab) in sin city.

correction. now we are on highway 58, headed towards tehachapi.

nab is the largest gathering of media professionals in the world; virtually every single company that has even the slightest to do with some form of media manipulation in the entertainment and broadcast fields is represented at the las vegas convention center just off the strip. while the original show was primarily about radio and television broadcast, over time the convention has expanded to include film editing and post production of both images and audio.

in other words, for a tech geek like myself, it is one giant orgy of cool toys and technologies.

for example, by far my favorite booth at the show this year was the adobe display. having been a photoshop user since version 2.5 on the macintosh (back when photoshop was *only* available on the mac), i have always been a firm supporter of their products and applications. recently, while engaged in the post production aspects of land of entrapment, i have rapidly grown to become a tremendous fan of after effects as well, and audition, which originally was known as ‘cool edit’ until adobe acquired syntrillium software several years ago.

the features in the latest version of adobe production suite are nothing short of incredible. suffice it to say, after sitting through the demonstrations of all the various new implementations, i have become hooked and will be saving towards moving my system to the latest versions of their software.

avid is the other major player that boasts one of the largest booths in the entire show. for the editing of land of entrapment, craig went with avid dv, and even i have begun dabbling with avid express pro hd to work on editing a trailer for loe. at their main booth, they have a gigantic fabric screen, onto which three separate projectors converge and display one seamlessly continuous moving image.

the trip has been fantastic. we left from the parking lot of the church in cupertino shortly after nine am on sunday morning, and we made it into vegas around five thirty, bringing out total travel time in at around eight and a half hours. not bad, considering we had to practically drive almost the entire way to los angeles from san francisco before we could switch off onto 58 at bakersfield and orient ourselves towards nevada.

david had a contact of a member of our church who owns a home just off of the las vegas strip in a gated community were we ended up housed at for the duration of our stay. the place was ridiculously large and magnificently well appointed, much to the degree of the homes that i would visit in the upscale neighborhoods in albuquerque when i was younger and would dream about someday living in.

anybody who has been to the las vegas convention center is aware of simply how massive the complex is, and for the most part, we never really ventured beyond the central and south halls. even though we arrived fairly early in the evening on sunday, the main exhibit displays would not be open to registered guests until the next morning. after getting settled in and hanging out with our hosts for a bit, we headed off to the strip to see what we could score for some grub, eventually moseying into the aladin hotel to catch some late night buffet action. unfortunately the buffet was one of the few things that had shut down for the night, so we ended up seating at a joint in the casino next to a rather famous coffee shop (the company of which i happen to be employed by, in fact).

one of the beautiful things about sin city (and one of the reasons i could easily live there) is that very few restaurants ever close at all. nearly everything in town is open 24/7, which is drastically appealing to a night owl such as myself. so it was surprising that the buffet wasn’t available past nine, but the place we ended up eating at had rather decent food for moderate prices. back to the house to crash and get some sleep for the coming day.

we started off the next morning poking about in the central hall which housed the majority of the broadcast type equipment; satellites, antennas, mobile uplink solutions, video over ip, that sort of stuff. however, on one side of the building were the tripod suppliers, as well as the camera dolly manufactures and a few steadi-cam type device companies.

after we were done with those exhibits, on the outdoor bridge connecting the central hall with the south hall were a line of broadcast trucks sitting in the parking lot. anytime you watch a show like the academy awards or the golden globes, or major sporting events like the super bowl or the world series, all of the video feeds for those programs are being mixed, directed, produced and broadcast from a collection of eighteen-wheel semi trucks that house mobile television production studios. all of these were available to tour, and we got to sit in the control rooms of the remote vehicles for several major corporate broadcast companies.

across the pavilion from these were the led display technologies that drive the jumbotrons that are commonly seen in sports arenas and stadiums. the “displays” are actually composed of modular blocks that contain sets of three led’s per “pixel;” one for each channel of video – red, blue, and green. if you move close to the screen on a conventional tube crt television, you will see that there are red, green, and blue phosphors aligned on the surface of the screen that respond to magnetic beams which determine how each pixel (called a pel on a television) should appear in order to make up an intelligible image. the same is true of these giant displays, however these areas are represented using simple led lights, and when you stand back far enough, the image of full motion video is recognizable across the screen. several of the demo units were set at ground level for convention attendees to approach and see close-up how the technology actually works. since the sections of lights are modular, you can build a screen of conceivably any dimensions you can physically afford, and then a computer drives the entire display to ensure that whatever video is shown on it is rendered properly.

sorry for the in-depth explanation there… had a bit of a geek moment. i’ll do my best to keep those at a minimum.

entering the south hall, we found ourselves in one of the coolest buildings on the planet. the amount of video and film technology present was really quite overwhelming. amongst the highlights that we wandered around drooling over are as follows (and forgive me, there was so much badassness that i will probably end up neglecting at least of a few); the booths of adobe, avid, artbeats, autodesk, - (also known as the four a’s) digidesign, sennheiser, neumann, sony, hp, barco, christies, and many, many others.

by far, the coolest elements of the show were three particular items. first, the adobe booth was simply awesome. by far, any convention that adobe attends, they typically dominate the floor with all the products they have to offer, and the demonstrations that they present throughout the day. some of the new technologies being implemented between all of their programs, such as metadata that can be manipulated in virtually any one of their applications seamlessly, and the new features and tricks in the latest version of after effects were mind boggling. it also didn’t hurt that they had a very well respected visual effects producer by the name of rob legato get up and do a presentation. even if you haven’t heard of his name, you have surely seen the output of his labor – aside from winning an oscar for visual effects supervisor on james cameron’s titanic, he also has produced visual effects for the aviator, star trek the next generation, and has directed several films as well as numerous television episodes.

the next attraction of really significant note was the virtual set creation. this company was demoing a complete computer system that can take any blue/green screen area, and in *real time* digitally replace the background with a digital 3 dimensional set that you can create in any major 3d software package. a number of television shows already employ this technology to create extremely realistically looking background sets that otherwise would be far too costly to create with physical materials for multiple talk shows. the fact that it is not only processed in real time, meaning you can broadcast directly to air without having to pre-render the set is complimented nicely by several open gl shaders available for the software that will allow you to cast real time shadows from live objects onto virtual objects. did i mention that you can move the camera about in any direction that you want, and the virtual background will match the camera moves with perfect accuracy? in *real time?!*

the third and final most exciting element of the expo for me was getting the chance to touch and mess around with a hybrid panavision/sony genesis digital film camera. essentially, this is the ultimate high end when it comes to shooting anything digitally, as it employs the legendary panavision lenses and optics to capture images onto an image sensor that is slightly larger than the exposure area for 35mm motion picture film. by contrast, most consumer digital still cameras have an image ccd that is 7mm. the video that the camera records is completely uncompressed raw footage, meaning that it produces the most beautiful digital film image imaginable (you have seen its results in the star wars prequels, as well as in other films like sin city, the lord of the rings trilogy, and the spiderman films), and also that the images being recorded take up tremendous amounts of storage space. essentially, you are talking about several terabytes of data involved in producing a feature length production.

if panavision would ever decide to actually sell their products to people, that be one of the very few things i would be desperate to own. as it stands, you can only rent panavision equipment, since renting prevents you from being able to disassemble and reverse-engineer their technology, effectively giving them the peace of mind that no other company will be able to match their products quite perfectly and push them out of the marketplace.

oh, and it costs about ten thousand dollars a week to rent one of these suckers.

tragically, even though monica is attending the nab show as well, she doesn’t arrive in vegas until wednesday morning, and the group that i traveled with to the show had to leave early in order to get back home to uphold educational commitments for wednesday, so ironically she and i attended the same convention, but we missed each other in town by less than twenty-four hours. even though i got to do pretty much everything i wanted to at the convention, the last time i was in las vegas was back in 2001, so walking down the strip really piqued my interest in wanting to return once again. for a person with add such as myself, vegas is a powerfully addictive drug.

since i started writing this post over two hours ago, we have passed through tehachapi, boron, and we’re approaching bakersfield. because we have several power inverters in the van that will produce delicious a/c current from any cigarette lighter, i fortunately have not had to rely on wearing down my laptop battery. i’m also surprised; the last time i used a laptop in a car, my equilibrium was none too happy and i ended up not being able to watch movies, use a computer, or even read a book in a moving vehicle for a long time.

back in the car again. we stopped off at harris ranch along the five, where i was hoping to sneak online using their supposedly “free” wi-fi network, but sadly i was denied an ip address, and therefore unable to establish a decent internet connection. i did however pay a ridiculous amount for a steak that ultimately wasn’t as good as that which i get from kincaids, although since i ordered a top sirloin at harris and usually get filet mignon when at kincaids, a fair comparison isn’t really possible. now, if harris actually had offered the choice of a filet mignon, i gladly would have taken them to the challenge of determining who reigns supreme as the ultimate steak master.

although, according to my parents, the best steak house is up in seattle. remind me to go visit washington state in the near future…

on monday night while in vegas, a few of us went over to the hilton hotel next to the convention center to go for a ride on both the klingon adventure and borg 4d in the star trek experience. the nice thing is that one ticket gains you entry to both rides for an unlimited number of times for the day you purchased it on, but i had also wanted to take the behind-the-scenes tour, which unfortunately had sold out by the time we got there, and wouldn’t be running again until the next day when we were to be leaving.

after getting out of the first ride, i had a bit of a scare when i realized all of a sudden that my iPod was no longer clipped to my waistband; it was nowhere to be found. period.

after panicking, hyperventilating, and nearly having a heart attack, we asked the ride operators to please check and see if they might find it somewhere along the course of the ride (you travel down several hallways and pass through a few sets before finishing the ride in a motion simulator), and then i ran to the parking lot to check our car to see if possibly it had fallen off of me on the drive over from the convention center (yes, i know – while the hilton is in fact next door to the convention center and we could have walked, we didn’t get out of the expo until closing time, which meant that the parking lot we were parked in would be closing as well, and we also had to drop off dad and david to the gordon biersch restaurant down the street to meet up with our friend jay from digidesign for dinner while the rest of us would be heading back to the hilton). the entire way to the car, my mind began shutting down as i couldn’t bear the thought of having lost such a dear companion, and you can not imagine the joy and rapture that soared through me when i discovered much to my pleasure that the iPod was sitting quietly on the back bench in the van. apparently what had happened was that when i put my lap belt on when we left the convention center parking lot, i had unclipped my iPod and set it next to me, fully intending to place it back on my person but failing to do so when we got out of the car and walked over to the hotel.

that major crisis averted, i was able to enjoy the second ride, and afterwards since the admission price had been significantly less than i had been fearing, i broke down and simply had to purchase a tribble.

at the moment, we are now about an hour and a half away from the bay area on highway five. this trip has been an immensely wonderful one, and in a day or so, i will upload a post about how i spent last friday.

by the way. on the way out of the convention center parking lot as we were getting ready to leave today, walking over to one of the hotels was an elvis impersonator wearing street clothes on his way to work.

long live the king, baby.

come on feel the noise

2006-04-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

(preamble: this post should have been set online on friday, the 7th. however, several factors came into play that prohibited it from being made available for you until now. i would go into detail, but the further i delay uploading this piece, the less likely the chances you will get to digest it in any timely fashion.)

on tuesday, april 4th, a friend of mine named david and i headed up to the foley stage at san francisco state university to begin recording sound effects for the 505 films production “land of entrapment.”

the following is a rather lengthy and long-winded breakdown of our day.

3:42am – after fighting some wicked insomnia, and listening to an hour of gershwin player piano rolls on my ipod (hey, at least some georges were badasses), i finally fell asleep. considering i needed to be up at too-fucking-early-o’clock, i would have appreciated getting a bit more rest, especially since i had only managed about four hours of sleep the previous couple days. hey, this just in. insomnia totally blows.

6:30am – the alarm clock rudely interrupts my naughty dreamland adventures. i wake up, turn it off… blink my eyes a couple times and pass out cold.

7:00am – dad knocks on my door to wake me up, which i do. then i promptly fall back asleep.

7:20am – my weary ass finally wakes up, and slowly drags out of bed. i down a bowl of cheerios (er, excuse me – joe’s o’s, from the infamous trader), and brush my teeth. i think the nerve in my wisdom tooth is just about dead. while there is no pain (and curiously never has been), i still do have a bit of a foul taste in my mouth. a couple ounces of scope solves that problem.

8:00am – dad and i head out from the house with all the props we will need, as well as my laptop, and the digital camera (pictures from the foley session are available in my gallery online). the rain that has been falling for the past three months nearly non-stop is in full force this morning. well, i shouldn’t say that it has been “raining” in any traditional sense. it’s more like somebody took a damp rag and has been wringing it out over the bay area since the beginning of the year. however, this morning, there is in fact some formidable precipitation.

8:30am – quick stop off at my store to fill up a cooler with ice that will be used in prop glasses on the foley stage. and for martinis on the rocks when the hookers show up. er, forget that second part. eek.

9:03am – david phones me to let me know that he’s stuck in traffic due to the relentless rain. which is quite kosher, because dad and i have also failed to show up when we were supposed to – entirely my own fault.

9:20am – dad and i arrive at the san francisco state university (sfsu for short and from here on out) campus nearly a half hour late and meet up with david in the parking garage to unpack all of our gear. david is a film student at sfsu, and is assisting 505 films on the post-production of “land of entrapment.” as well as dialogue editing (which is the process of scouring through all the spoken dialogue in the film, cleaning it up in quality and adjusting the volume on everything so it all matches from shot to shot, and seeking out alternate takes of lines in the event that the production audio is unsalvageable due to issues like distortion or uncontrollable ambient environment sounds – think private aircraft or hordes of cicadas), david is also in charge of recording and mixing all of the foley effects for the film. the final mastering of all of the audio for the film will be handled by a friend of mine and dad’s named jay who works for digidesign, the company responsible for the popular audio recording, mixing, and mastering software suite protools.

9:35am – the three of us reach the art building that houses all of the audio production stages on campus. on the way there, we pass the student union building, which currently is evacuated because the fire alarms are going off. since it’s spring break right now, that means only the janitorial staff and facilities people are standing out in the rain, freezing their asses off. as we pass by the giant bay windows, the strobe lights from the fire alarm system inside oddly compliment the rain as a sort of “faux lightning.”

9:40am – after hauling our gear through the building, and waiting ten minutes for the volunteer student running the edit office to give us the keys for the studio, we enter and begin setting up our stuff. david has brought his neumann u87 microphone, as well as a sennheiser shotgun (which is a mic, not a firearm), a bunch of xlr cable, and a longer bnc video cable so we can wheel the studio monitor about in order for me to see what all is happening on screen. for the majority of the film, i will be acting as the foley artist, which is the person who actually sits in the studio and makes all of the necessary sound effects that will be used in the final audio mix. in addition to the mics, david has also brought his road case which has his millennium microphone pre-amplifiers. essentially, this is a rather expensive piece of equipment ($10k) that is used to amplify the sounds being picked up with the ultra-sensitive microphones we are using in order to cleanly boost the gain (incoming audio signal) to better facilitate recording the very minute sound effects we will be capturing.

the foley stage is a fairly large room, about twenty feet square with a twenty-foot high ceiling. in the center is a large concrete “pit” that has several smaller sections dug into it. each of these areas contains different “textures;” sand, gravel, small lava rocks, dirt, leaves, metal gratings, hardwood panels, linoleum and ceramic tiles. these all simulate different surfaces that actors will conceivably walk across on screen that will need to be emulated in the studio since footsteps usually are too faint a sound to pick up with on set microphones when the original footage is shot. there is also a large sunken tub that can be filled with water to simulate – you guessed it. sound effects that require fire. er, water. yeah.

10:00am – after setting up everything we will need, and importing the protools session that david and i spent the last several nights creating for this day’s worth of work, we discover that the video that syncs up to the audio in protools for some reason is not being displayed properly on the external video monitors. it plays perfectly fine for exactly two seconds, and then displays a second and half of black, then continues on with another two seconds of normal playback. this pattern more or less remains constant for the entirety of the clip we need to work with, and thus is a major issue that will need to be solved before we can even begin recording any audio at all. we attempt a myriad of different tricks to try to get it to work, all to no avail. finally, i suggested that possibly the g4 mac in the studio isn’t capable of having so many firewire devices connected to it (the video is exported through a firewire cable to a conversion box), and we copy all of our stuff over to the g4’s hard drive and disconnect david’s firewire hard drive. the video now works flawlessly. we can begin making noise.

11:40am - since we only have a limited time to use the ice in the cooler (even though the studio was meat locker cold, the ice still did melt quite a bit throughout the course of the day), we start off by capturing all of the drink sounds that we need. the clip that we are working on today is a three minute segment of the film that david is concurrently using as a project for his sound production for film 101 class, in which he has to use audio in a creative fashion to help drive a part of a story in a short video clip. the segment he has chosen is the last third of the scene in the film that takes place at o’neill’s bar where we are told about and watch the unfortunate end of an unlucky pizza delivery guy (depicted in a flashback cut-a-way sequence), and ends in the next scene, right after the character amy intrudes in on our “hero” (clint)’s contemplative moment. we have mapped out in an excel spreadsheet all of the sound effects we need to gather for this scene, and since we have to record not just one, but three distinct beverage and glass sounds, we get to work as quick as we can.

(as a side not, i don’t recommend that anybody ever drink of the tap water produced by the sink in the corner of the foley stage – not only did it have a rather disturbing amount of floaties, the water tasted downright rotten, so when you watch the final film, and you see any character drinking a beverage, try to picture me sitting in a studio, gagging on ass water. wait, somehow that ended up sounding even dirtier than it was supposed to.)

12:45pm – once we have all of the beverage sound effects done, dad volunteers to make a run to the in n out burger down the road for some lunch. coincidentally, the avid headquarters are across the freeway from the in n out burger in daly city, avid being the parent company of the aforementioned digidesign, makers of protools. david and i move onto recording sounds to correspond with the movements that the character alex is making on screen. various subtle details such as clothing rubbing together as a person moves about, or when their arms brush up against a table very seldom actually get recorded when the scene is shot, and although they may seem trivial, are fairly instrumental in helping to establish the setting and add an extra percentage of nuance to the overall scene. otherwise, you see the character place his arms firmly on the table, but no noise is produced. this can cause a bit of a disconnect, and it is the job of foley artists to help introduce that element back into the film in order to round out the world that the filmmakers are depicting. another job of foley artists is to make vain attempts to hack into the school’s wireless network to download righteous amounts of questionably filthy porn.

1:30pm – just as we finish up recording the footsteps of our ill-fated pizza delivery guy, dad arrives with lunch, so we break for a meal. while scarfing down burgers and fries, david plays back the session so far, for us to watch and gauge how our efforts are turning out so far. everything looks just swell, so while dad heads home to go do some *real* work, david and i begin recording various different footsteps of both clint and amy, since we see them moving about in a couple of shots, and then start to gather different incidental audio elements, such as when amy drags her backpack across the door, and then sets it down with a thud on the floor. she also sits down on the bed, so we simulate the sound of a mattress with heavy ass moving blankets that were in the studio, and then rub some sheets of canvas together to get the sounds of amy moving about on top of the covers as she sits on the edge of the bed. after that is all done, since we see clint displace several fingernail polish and makeup bottles off of a shelf in one of the shots, we setup a makeshift “shelf” and record a bunch of wild tracks of nail polish bottles clinking together and being moved about on a wooden surface. lastly, my trusty sega dreamcast adequately fills in for the sound of an answering machine being dragged and picked up from the shelf.

4:00pm – after several hours, we finally have all of the bits and pieces that we need to make these scenes complete. at this point, we try to improvise some sound effects that we might need for other shots in the film, since although we don’t have a protools session set up at the moment for any other scenes, we do have the studio booked until 5pm and desire to make the most out of our time there. the last thing that we got on track is the sound of fine particles of sand falling past the microphone, which will come in quite handy in the opening shots of the movie as the sound of dust and dirt blowing about in the outdoor desert scenes that land of entrapment starts off with. normally, in any other environment, you’d never be able to record such a delicate and barely audible sound, but in the dead still silence of a recording studio, it is ridiculous how many miniscule sounds you are able to hear with your naked ear. for instance, the sound of a naked elbow.

while we are reviewing the audio that we have gathered that day in the control booth, the “live” mics in the studio start producing an annoyingly loud scratching/crackling sound every couple of moments. david and i are both baffled as to what the possible causes could be, until we step out of the studio (which has no windows to the outside world) and see that although it is not raining, and the sun is in fact shining over some parts of the campus, there are tremendous bolts of lightning emanating from a rather ominous gathering of clouds on the horizon. this is both a bit odd, and ironic; odd, since we hardly ever get lightning and thunder around here (the last time was the early morning after christmas), and ironic because several of the land of entrapment film shoots had to be postponed for a few hours while we waited for thunderstorms passing through albuquerque to go on their merry.

since the electrical interference from the lightning is playing mary hobb with all the unshielded cable in the studio (don’t ask me why sfsu made the inexplicable decision to not properly shield their wires), we pack it all up as the student volunteer begins making his rounds to see that everybody is getting ready to close down for the day.

6:00pm – david drops me off at home, and without bothering to put my stuff away, i pass out dead tired and wake up sometime around midnight.

in the coming weeks, david and i will need to attack the remainder of the foley items on our list with a vengeance so that we can pass the audio off to jay for the final mix down and mastering, which will finally bring us to the close of post-production on this project, and start the count down to the release of land of entrapment.

as it stands, there are several hundred sound effects yet to be recorded, so i’m gonna shut my yap here and go back to getting my foley on.

it's been so long since i held ya'

2006-03-30T17:16:00.000-08:00

you ever have those times, every now and then, where your mind just really does have too much to focus upon and think about that you find your brain is a giant scattered mess?

where you have so much going on that you don’t even know where to begin or how to sort out the details and make sense of all the constant mental chatter?

that’s about the situation that i find myself in a lot lately.

which absolutely sucks, because as you can plainly see, my blog is totally suffering directly as a result of this issue. i do in fact have tons and tons of stuff to say... i just have no fucking clue as to what point i should pick as a starting zone.

do you guys honestly want to hear about the rather unpleasant situation with one of my wisdom teeth? probably not.

or how about an elaboration as to why i have used the term "spooky gravy" lately? nah. you wouldn’t want to hear about that.

what then of the now hundreds of ideas and projects that are roaming through my brain and attempting to steal my attention? no... you’ll hafta wait to check out some of those delightful bouts of inspired creativity at some point in the near future.

i’m sure that some of you are still eager to learn more about ashley’s recent visit to the bay area and what she and i were up to while she was here. obviously i need to fill you in a bit more on all of that, but i keep realizing that such a narrative is likely to span ten or more pages, which would more than make up for my two week plus absence from the world of blog, but at the same time, end up being far too lengthy for most people to hold interest in. perhaps i shall break it all up into smaller installments that are more pleasing for the drastically short attention spans that the television generation has been graced with.

from the top, then.

oddly enough, i was not nervous at all about meeting ashley. from the moment i left the house to the time i saw her walking around the corner through the terminal (and i recognized her immediately – thanks in part to a camera phone picture she sent me earlier that morning before she got on her first flight), it all just felt like i was meeting up with somebody i have known a long time. during the wait in the airport, i did get a might impatient, however. every ten seconds or so, i looked down at my watch, and since that particular wing of the terminal didn’t happen to have any flight information screens, i could only use the online flight tracker information i had checked just before leaving as a guide as to whether or not her plane had touched down yet.

in order to keep myself from staring down at my watch so much, and also to distance myself from a rather creepy older gentlemen who happened to move closer to where i was standing every moment, i popped out the ipod and started listened to some soundgarden.

didn’t really need it, since before the first track was over, a throng of passengers emerged from the jetway, and just as i got my earbuds wrapped up and stored in my pocket, ashley was getting close enough for me to call out her name. she walked over to me, her whole face lit up brilliantly with a perfect smile, and after staring at each other for a moment, we embraced and kissed.

after that, everything became a wonderful blur over the next seven days. though i am still able to recall nearly all of the specific details, i figure this is a good stopping point in the recollections of her visit... in order to, as the saying goes... "keep you coming back for more."

but at least you know now that i am in fact still alive, and do intend most fully to continue with this blog.

just gotta sort through the neural flotsam cruising around in my mind.

placeholder

2006-03-29T15:48:00.000-08:00

there is a new blog post on its way.

promise.

thursday.

honest.

sleep will not come to this tired body now

2006-03-14T00:26:00.000-08:00

before we begin, i must apologize. i’m not nearly the great poet writer that some others are, but i figured that i might as well try my hand at knocking out at least one poem for ashley. while this is meant primarily for her, i feel the need to share it out in the open with others as a show of how much i care for her. here goes (hopefully this doesn’t totally suck ass):

who would have thought...

...that cheese tacos could be a royal feast?

...that the ocean could be any more incredible?

...that simple things like driving to the store could be so wonderful?

...that the music i listen to is twice as good as i thought it was?

...that the touch of a kindred spirit is everything?

and much more, simply because you were here beside me, to share and enjoy our world. you enhance everything in life and amplify it to the point of overwhelmingness.

i think, and reflect; upon these

...how one week can feel like hardly an hour...

...how your smile warms my heart and lights up the room...

...how you have such a remarkably loving soul...

...how amazing it will be when you and i are living together in a few months.

i pray that you make it home safe, and that the rest of the week brings you and i good news.

i love you, ashley.

thank you for loving me.

we only stop for the best

2006-03-06T21:09:00.000-08:00

as i write this, ashley is currently at thirty-eight thousand feet above the state of colorado, roughly two hours away from the airport that i am gonna pick her up in.

and the thing i am most nervous about is paying off the motel room.

go figure that, eh?

unfortunately, her connecting flight in atlanta took off close to an hour after it was supposed to, so where i would have been leaving on my way to the airport right about now, i’m gonna hold off for another half hour since her flight is due in a good forty-five minutes beyond the original schedule.

hehehe.

as i was typing that last paragraph, the schedule function on my cell phone went off to let me know to head out and pick her up. i figure in another few seconds, my outlook scheduler will follow suit and alert me to my impending fate.

aye, but that is what this is, right? fate? destiny?

i’m not so sure about any of those, since over the last year i have had more than enough questions and experiences to throw the concept of fate and destiny straight out the window.

and yet, at the same time... i maintain that pretty much everything happens for a reason. we may not always know the meanings and the why, but there you have it. things happen. just as everybody said they would.

ok. hold the phone. i am getting way too philosophical again.

all i do know for now is that in a few hours, i will come face to face with a young woman who has declared many times that she loves me.

and when she and i do finally meet, we all will find out just how real that love truly is.

cheers, mates.

i’ll letcha know how everything goes.

...or not. :-p

you in the moonlight, with your sleepy eyes

2006-02-27T22:15:00.000-08:00

the other day, it hit me. i’ve written a grand total of about four posts for the entire month of february. huzzah for me!

understandably, i have been rather distracted lately. however, it hasn’t been just thoughts of ashley that have stolen my acute concentration (insert laughter at my attempt to state that i have a decent attention span), but just overall i have found myself unable to focus on much. the miniscule amount of time that my mind isn’t spent dwelling on how incredible ashley is has been occupied by just mental white noise. every now and then, i’ll look up and realize that the song i was listening to ended quite some time ago, and in order to satisfy my desire to listen to it and actually *remember* the act of listening to it, i’ll need to repeat it several times until i am able to dedicate my full attention to it for a long enough period of time.

part of it due to my sleeping schedule being all kinds of fubar lately. i had a rough couple days last friday and saturday as far as shifts at work went, and i think i am still catching up on the damage i did by throwing my pattern all out of whack.

you might also have noticed that the surprise i mentioned last monday has failed to materialize. were this any other blogger, at this point, i’d use my inability to focus as an excuse to explain why it isn’t ready yet, seeing as how i directed you towards that conclusion with the setup in the above paragraphs.

however, i’m not gonna use a cheap excuse to cover my ass, primarily because there is no real form or structure to my blog posts due to my shitty attention span. it’s all just a bunch of words haphazardly vomited into a file and stored for your eventual dissection. and you thought performing an autopsy on frogs in high school was gross.

rest assured, i am still working on it. my initial estimate of when it would be done was a bit off. if i really crack the whip on myself, i can get it done by this sunday, but we’ll see. i have another set of shitty ass work shifts this coming friday and saturday, so i’ll likely be just about back to a decent sleeping pattern by then and instantly be forced to start all over afterwards.

however, there is one thing that i have been intently focused on. exactly one week from the time i posted this entry, i will be hugging ashley in the terminal of the san jose airport. miraculously, she and i both managed to get the time off that we requested, and a good deal on airfare happened to come our way just in time. for seven days, she and i will be spending nearly every moment together.

it probably doesn’t even need to be stated just how excited i am about this. i can hardly wait. the next six days could either fly by, or take forever. since i am going to do my best to deeply immerse myself in the project i am working on for whatever loyal readers i still have left, it is my hope that keeping myself occupied will make the time pass a fair bit quicker.

but as i said, i have had a lot of trouble concentrating, lately. perhaps a side effect of the zyrtec i have been taking? nah. i’d like to think of it as i am saving all my ability to focus for when ashley is sitting directly in front of me, bathed in the soft glow of candle light as we listen to music and stare into each other’s eyes. or for when we snuggle up next to each other on the sofa, watching family guy episodes and movies.

there are tons of things i have in mind for her and i to do when she gets here, all variously suited to whatever weather we end up being graced with. today the sky was storming up a shit fit, dumping an endless torrent of precipitation all over. down the block from the coffee shop i work at, the sidewalk was flooded a good two inches from all the water backed up at the storm drains. supposedly next weekend is going to be even worse weather, a prospect which although intriguing to entertain, would definitely not play in favor to any outdoor activities with the lady.

being that this is her first trip to california, it is only right to take her up to san fran and tour her around the city. if the rain goes away, we’ll take caltrain on up and just walk from place to place and take in the sights. were she here for a longer stay, i would undoubtedly drive her and i down to los angeles to show her all around where i more or less grew up; although, since she and i have been seriously discussing her residency being transferred to a location considerably closer to me (i.e., within the same dwelling), i am sure that later on this spring/early summer, we’ll head down to redondo and spend a weekend down in so cal after she moves in with me. to say that we will co-habitate at this point time may seem a bit premature to you all with common sense, but love makes people blind, and all is fair in love and war, and... wait. what was i talking about, again?

likely if the weather is less than desirable, we’ll end up driving around to see the sights instead of walking about, and probably go see a couple movies. i doubt we’ll remember any of them, since it is pretty much a guarantee that halfway through any flick we start to watch, we’ll end up locking lips and making out like drunken teenagers. she and i both have many months of catching up to do, with the kissing and all. oh yes. there will be kissing...

and so much more...

...and i just forgot what i was talking about again. :-/

when the rain washes you clean... you'll know

2006-02-20T13:36:00.000-08:00

i would imagine that twelve days may be the longest period of time that i have gone without making a blog post ever since i first started my site.

rest assured, my blog is not dead. i have little intention to let it slip and fall by the wayside.

the last week or so has been kinda busy, and not busy at the same time. every time that i find myself going to make an entry, i either end up getting distracted, or at a total lack of words. it has been bugging me plenty.

also, it seems like it takes forever for people to swing on by and comment on what i write. while i shouldn’t base my desire for writing on a superficial validation such as that gleamed from comments that people leave me, oftentimes i feel driven by what people do or do not say as a guide for what to write about.

in the end, i know that i should only write what i want to, and the opinions of others be damned, but sometimes that is just a bit difficult to do. comments on my blog inform me that people are actually reading it, and absorbing the heavy amounts of useless information that i scribble together and voice electronically. when nobody comments, or few people comment, i feel crushed – as if nobody bothered to read my writings, or they did and just did not feel they were entirely worthy of feedback.

what can i say? i’m an attention whore. :-p

so, it is almost totally confirmed. in thirteen days, i will have the pleasure of picking ashley up from the airport, and staring deep into her two beautiful blue eyes. she just has to double-check if she got all the time-off that she requested and if she has a ride to the airport, and then we will purchase the tickets.

perhaps it would be a bit courteous of me to fill you in on how she and i met. while i have only been talking about ashley on my blog for the past month and a half, we both met close to eight months ago.

i don’t even remember how – i think ashley’s page came up on the featured profiles thingy or i saw her picture on a random profile, but back in june, somehow i found her myspace page, and added her as a friend. ironically, with all of the major people in my life apart from family – craig, todd, and ashley, none of us can remember exactly how we met. for each of us, it really does feel like at some point in time, the other just materialized out of thin air and started being a part of each other’s lives. i suppose that is why i feel so strongly that ashley and i are meant to be – in each of the cases where i can’t fathom how events came about that lead to my meeting somebody, that person in turn ended up being a very significant part of my life ever since.

at any rate, she had written some erotic poetry on her myspace blog (much like that which can be found on one of her two blogger blogs), and i had left a comment on one of them that i really liked. coincidentally, she and i were both feeling very much alone and low at the same point in time – myself over monica, and her over somebody else.

for a couple of months, our e-mails were fairly simple – the standard "hey, how ya doing?" affair. then in november, when she made a blog post about a medical condition she had, i started e-mailing her, asking her how she was doing. pretty soon, we were both e-mailing back and forth with more substantial e-offerings, and from there things just took a natural course. i told her that i thought she was beautiful, and for some crazy reason, she seems to think that i am handsome, and eventually we clicked on a very emotional level.

this has all been quite insane to a degree. we both still have yet to meet each other physically in person, but despite that fact, we know so much about each other already. it honestly feels like she and i have known each other for a long time. the kinda thing that most people dream about, but takes forever to actually happen.

to tell the truth, it’s a lot like those eharmony commercials with couples being interviewed – saying they have grandiose phone conversations and spectacular dates. young couples telling how they have found the "love of their life." when i was a member of eharmony for six months, i never once got any connections like the ones they advertise. that site generally promises results within a month or two, but the lack of any matches after a half year rendered my decision firm to cancel my subscription. now i believe that i intentionally had no luck with that site because i was destined to meet ashley instead. i’d be curious to attempt an experiment – have her and i both take the psychological profile exams on the site, create profiles, and see if that system randomly paired us up together. just for fun, to see what that service would have to say about us being together. although, fear not. i’m not gonna base my feelings towards ashley by what a dating-service says. i already know what my feelings are for ashley.

which brings me to a major point. we were originally gonna wait until we met in person before even saying that we love each other, since we wanted to hang out with each other for a bit to make sure. however, during one very memorable phone call when she and i were faced with the direness of her inventory schedule, and how every last avenue to get her out of it had been exhausted, we both agreed that we could not wait any longer to declare our feelings towards each other. is that a good sign? that she and i had to fight the urge to say that we loved each other for a while? i know it seems hasty and curious to declare love for somebody you haven’t met in person yet, but for both of us, the need to say it to each other was just so overwhelming.

since then, she and i keep getting into little mini arguments about who loves the other more. they are not serious arguments, just playfully mushy spats and cutesy lovey dovey stuff that would make anybody apart from us express an interest in hurling most violently. :-p

the days when we don’t get to talk to each other over the phone are painful for us both. additionally, we can’t seem to be able to take our minds off of each other. at work, ashley had to come up with a system of finding objects to think about in order to focus on something other than me, and when i am at work, more and more i am finding that every woman that comes into the store makes me think of ashley. this makes it fairly difficult to concentrate on anything that isn’t her.

i suppose there will always be uncertainties in life. lord knows that i have blogged numerous times about my frustrations regarding them. but when ashley and i talk with each other… it just feels *right.* like, she and i are supposed to be together.

truly do i hope this to be the case.

again, my sincere apologies for the dreadful lack of postings. i feel that i should make up for my absence in some special way, so be looking forward to a treat for you guys later on this week. probably wednesday, or maybe thursday. or even tomorrow, assuming i get it done soon enough...

keep checking back, and have a swell week regardless!

friends who never left your mind when you were far away

2006-02-08T22:12:00.000-08:00

patience definitely is not one of the virtues of character that i have been blessed with. my lack of patience typically rears its ugly head whenever i am driving to or from work, as i tend to wind up stuck behind the slowest mother fuckers on the road. i especially hate it when these losers coordinate with each other and manage to take up all the available lanes, ensuring that any sliver of hope at passing them vanishes, and with it, the idle dream of traveling at a speed closer to the actual posted limit rather than just inching along at an infuriatingly dreadful slow pace.

or like when i am at work, and some idiot in line decides that the five minutes they just spent waiting behind the other customers in front of them wasn’t quite enough time to figure out what the fuck they want to order. lord help them if they happen to be yaking away on a cell phone as well... several times i have been tempted to throttle the shit out of the annoying yuppie scum that somehow believe that the conversation about last night’s 'american idol' or 'oc' episode with the friend that is less than five minutes walking distance away is more important than actually ordering their drink so that they can move the fuck out of the way of the rest of the impatient people waiting in line.

i bring up patience because it has been heavily tested quite a bit lately.

even though tuesday was ashley’s birthday, she unfortunately was not hired at either of the jobs she interviewed for last week, and thus she was unable to travel out here to california to spend this week with me. after her rather colorful interview at dunkin donut’s, she also ended up getting an interview for being a waitress at a friday’s near by. she was to find out if she got that job by last saturday evening. had she been hired for the waitress job, we literally would have been buying her plane tickets at the absolute last possible moment, since her flight would have taken off and arrived on sunday. we both had driven ourselves mad with anticipation by building up our hopes for things to work out.

sadly, it was not to be. instead, she and i now have to wait an additional several weeks before she will have the available time off to come out and visit. while i am not mad at her (how could i be?), i am fairly incensed about the whole situation.

primarily because i wanted her birthday this year to be special, since the last several birthdays she has had were less than decent. i would have made a post yesterday about her birthday, but i told her before she left to go spend a couple days doing inventory at a store far from her home, that when she is able to come out to visit, we will "officially" celebrate her birthday then. we’re going to pretend that her birthday actually falls on one of the days during her stay. when that happens, i will make a post to signify this celebration, and i ask all of you to kindly leave her much love.

obviously, this is not the end of the world. it is of course a bit of a setback. a rather annoying one, at that. she and i will still meet in person. i think that is pretty much a given at this point. all this means is that we have to wait a bit longer before that can happen.

however, i seem to recall somebody, somewhere, at some point in time musing on the following:

"good things are worth waiting for."

and i was dreaming of the night; would it turn out right?

2006-02-01T22:59:00.000-08:00

not that many people particularly care, as is evidenced by the lack of commenting affections bestowed on that last post, but i finally did manage to score some mega m&ms. i had to go to the filthy k-mart to get them, but now they are mine!

just as a side note, i would much rather we had a wal*mart in the community than the abomination that the k-mart is. at least the wal*marts in albuquerque were clean, inviting, and friendly. this k-mart near us looks like it was established a thousand years ago, and whoever was responsible for properly maintaining the store stopped caring nine hundred years ago. the floors and ceiling tiles are all browned and worn, and the lighting is so poor that any time i head down an aisle for something, i can’t shake the feeling that some large guy named brutus with a tattoo of the jolly roger on his arm is waiting in the shadows to make mince meat out of my naughties.

yikes! omg. i guess i have been neglecting my blog lately, huh? :-/

a couple of different reasons are at play here.

last week, after having overlooked my health for *seven* years, i finally went to the doctor’s office, seeing as how i have this magical thing called "health insurance" that promises to laugh at me whenever i ask for it to cover medical expenses. a couple of pokes, some prods, a turn and a cough – i have been put on zyrtec to take care of my allergies. i’m a bit distrusting of allergy medication, since all it basically does is block the histamine receptors in your body from having reactions to the stuff that is relentlessly attacking you, regardless if you are on pills or not. but for now, it has definitely aided in preventing some of the nasty "non-smoker’s smoker’s" cough that i have been plagued with for the last several years.

the downside of this drug is that when i take it at eleven pm, shortly there-after i become wearily exhausted and pass out like somebody has unplugged me. which has been very odd for the past couple days since i first started; i tend to normally get my second wind usually around midnight. i start to feel a surge of energy well up inside of me, but then the anti-histamine asserts itself by making my body recognize it’s authority, resulting in a very awkward feeling when i drift off into the happy land of funny elves and cake throwing midgets.

for example, the other night when i was laying in bed and staring up at the ceiling, my mind came up with a brilliant plan for how i can get next monday off from work – i’ll just simply find a native american indian and offer him some land in order that he grant me the favor of not having to work on monday. right about then i figured that my brain was already under the control of the medication, as i began thinking up the weirdest shit i could imagine. it reminded me of the katamari franchise of video games – either the creators were smoking a grip of weed, or were heavily doped up on nyquil to have come up with so complicatedly whacked a series as that.

i probably don’t even need to really say what else has been pre-occupying my time lately… i’ll give you three guesses, and the first two do not count.

i’ll even give you a hint. ‘rhymes with "sashley."

practically every night for the last three weeks has been spent on the phone with her. these aren’t short conversations, either. most of our calls last a minimum of three hours. our longest "chat" went on for nearly six hours – and took two phones since the batteries died on the first one i was using.

she drives me positively crazy in all the right ways. with literally every phone call, we talk until we are exhausted, and then almost fall asleep with each other still on the line. it takes us a good ten minutes just to say goodbye, and by the time we finally do manage to disconnect the call (usually myself doing it, because as she says, she can’t bear to hang up on me), we both drift off to sleep within a few moments after.

i gots me a favor to ask of all you. lemme give you a bit of the setup first, though:

ashley works for a store that is forcing her to do mandatory inventory for the next several weeks. this entails her having to travel to each of the different stores in her state, working insanely long shifts. her birthday is next week. the last four birthdays she has had were none too pleasant. it would give her and i no greater pleasure than if she can spend her birthday on a trip to visit me. however, that mandatory inventory means that she can’t get any time off what-so-ever until it is all done.

this thursday morning, she has an interview for a new job. if she gets this new job, she will be able to quit her current job, freeing her up to be able to come and visit me. as far as the inventory goes, if they have to assign somebody else to the task, they will, but she was picked arbitrarily at random and can’t back out of it unless she leaves that job for something else.

both of us would greatly appreciate it if you would pray/send good thoughts/chant good voodoo spells to grace her with the best of luck regarding this interview. if she doesn’t get this job, she and i will end up having to wait another several weeks before we can meet each other in person. while this is not the worst thing in the world that can happen, she and i would much rather she have a good birthday spent with me, instead of tediously counting merchandise in the freezing warehouse of a store.

i’ll letcha guys know what develops as it does. thank you much!

capture my thoughts, carry them away

2006-01-24T17:30:00.000-08:00

yikes.

i guess it has been a while since i have posted, huh?

what can i say? ashley has been occupying my time and thoughts a lot lately.

a lot. :-p

at times, i wonder if this is all but a dream. or that maybe my imagination is acting up. to some degree, i can not believe how wonderful this is. overwhelming.

rather than go on and on by detailing you on how much i look forward to the first time that she and i kiss, i have a question to pose to you all.

what the fuck happened to mega m&ms???? they ran ads for them for a while, where a guy in an office cubicle throws a giant m&m up in the air and tries to catch it in his mouth, only to have it smack him in the head instead. at one point, john o’hurley (j. peterman for you seinfeld fans) of 'dancing with the stars fame' was the official spokesperson for the candy, much as his voice is now the identity of many "jack" and "max" fm radio stations.

so where are the damn things?

i have never once found them in any store, and anytime that i ask about them, all i get are blank stares from people thinking i am a complete looney toon.

am i the only person who remembers these?

or has my imagination totally gone off the deep end this time?

(just checked m&m's website, they do indeed have a section for them… funky)

i will hopefully have an audio blog post available soon, as well as other "surprises" in the near future...

we come into the world and take our chances

2006-01-18T03:58:00.000-08:00

at first i wasn’t gonna say anything, but i made my decision – what the hell. this is what friends are for, right? punishing each other! bwahahaha!

by that i mean, that i want you all to go and wish monica a wonderfully happy birthday today. i won’t betray her by stating her age, but a few hints for you: there are two digits to her age, and both are the same number. three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceedith to three.

five is right out.

hopefully, i’ll have some good news concerning ashley and i in the semi-near future...

keep praying for us. we need some magic worked here.

and stay tuned...

i kept rolling on and never thought you'd wind up chasing me

2006-01-13T18:57:00.000-08:00

my life it seems would be a few degrees from being complete were it not riddled with obstacles.

i suppose that is what helps to make existence interesting; things hardly ever go as we envision. or in a way that makes any degree of sense to us.

ashley.

that is her name.

by no means is she herself an obstacle. perhaps i worded that all incorrectly, and upon closer inspection will need to rephrase things a bit.

she is a wonderfully beautiful, fragile creature of incredible spirit and beauty.

and she lives on the opposite end of the country from me.

it would seem that if things are to work between her and i, there is a lot that has to be overcome. sacrifice. compromise. patience. all of these will undoubtedly come into play. that much is naturally a given. i’m willing to invest every last effort that is necessary.

for the past week now, she and i have talked with each other on the phone every evening – conversations that average a minimum of three hours. sometimes we have a thousand things to say, and other times… we simply listen to the sound of each other breathing. her voice is heavenly, and for reasons i may never fully understand, she is enthralled with mine. and despite her having seen several pictures of me, she still is infatuated. it boggles my mind, really.

the chemistry that she and i are fostering over the phone is overwhelming to say the least. it is this magic that makes me yearn to meet her in person – to see if this same connection exists when she and i are face to face. very little of me feels that it would fail to manifest itself. and should it prove to be even stronger when she and i stand together in each other’s company, i believe that i would question how there could possibly be anybody else meant for me.

my mind is literally drowning in thought. over the last six months, that was more of a curse, as i struggled to make sense of all that i was going through. even now, i still feel infinitely embarassed to have carried on as i did with regards to monica. it makes me ashamed that i could have been such a dramatic fool.

but now the thoughts that course and swirl through my head are delightful ones. hints of possibilities and musings on what the future holds for us.

but, like i said… there are obstacles. the distance of course is one of the most major factors hindering our romantic advancement. annoyingly persistent obligations to our respective employers is another. and still… there are other issues, some that will be shared with you in their own time, that are going to make the next several months very emotionally tough on both of us.

audience participation time: as some wise people have previously intoned, anything good is worth fighting for. as well as waiting for. the fact still remains though, that sometimes more assistance is required. the prayers and well wishes of those we know will definitely serve to help make things a lot easier. so, if it is not too much to ask of you, we will need all the support we can get.

it is going to be so awesome when she and i finally get to be together.

you’ll definitely get to hear all about it.

well... *almost* all about it. ;-)

lighting up my unconscious, and the secret places of the heart

2006-01-10T03:52:00.000-08:00

as some of you noticed, i dangled a bit of a hook out in front of you with that last blog post by mentioning that i had had an awesome phone call recently. that awesome phone call has blossomed into *several* awesome phone calls.

i don’t want to divulge too much at the moment, because frankly i don’t want to jinx this. my head is also swimming so insanely, that i’m not even sure that what i have to say would make sense to anybody else. what i can tell you is that in the past couple of weeks, i have been in communication with a very enchanting, sweet, and adorable young woman. every conversation has become better than the last, and the connection that we are fostering is incredibly intoxicating. that’s about all i wish to share of recent developments at this time.

for now, all else i have to say is this: if you would be so kind, i beseech you that your prayers be with this good fortune that i have been somehow lucky enough to stumble across as it continues to manifest itself, and that what i hope will come true in fact eventually does.

it has been quite some time since i have felt this happy and full of joy. i strongly pray that this is not a false alarm.

you can be sure that you will all hear about the details of this in due time. for now, let me gather my thoughts, and do my damndest not to fuck things up.

we got into a serious thing, and then i forgot how that song ended

2006-01-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

i’m glad to see that my first audio blog was well received. you guys have convinced me – i will make another. maybe it will become a weekly thing. not sure just yet. you’ll definitely get to hear my voice some more.

sorry to disappoint you, spring; it will be a while before you get a *video* blog entry. and even when that does happen, we all know that i am long winded, so the file will probably be obscenely huge.

we’ll see.

anyways. i toldja guys that i had another gift for ya. check it out:

the first piece of art from me for 2006

well, technically it was started in 2005, but i finished it on new year’s day. so, yeah. enjoy! hopefully this year brings lots more artwork for you guys, some more music stuff for me, and way more awesome phone calls like the one i had last night...

and the voice rings in his ears, like the music of the spheres

2006-01-02T04:06:00.000-08:00

while talking with spring online the other night, i started toying with the idea of putting together an audio post for my blog to start off the new year. normally i wouldn’t ever dream of doing something so foolish, as i positively can not stand to hear the sound of my own voice when recorded and then played back, but she seemed persistent in her demands that i at least say *something* into a microphone for my readers to hear what i sound like.

so, here it is:

01-02-2006.mp3 (4.46mb)

sorry about the large file size – i attempted to compress it down as much as i could until just before the point where my voice began to sound *truly* atrocious, but even still i ended up with a file almost five megabytes in size. hopefully most of you have broadband access, and downloading this shouldn’t take too long. the file is in mp3 format, encoded in mono at a sampling rate of 96kbs, so it should play back without any trouble in pretty much every standard audio program available (i.e., winamp, iTunes, or windows media player). why should anybody care about those specific details? don’t ask me, i just felt compelled to share that information with you.

since you get this little treat now, i’ll hold off for a couple days on giving you guys the *other* gift that i have in store for you. hey, i gotta have *some* gimmick to lure people into checking back here later on in the week. :-p

hope you enjoy!

we sometimes catch a window - a glimpse of what's beyond

2005-12-31T19:50:00.000-08:00

i’m gonna break with "tradition" and forgo the whole "new year’s resolutions thing" for 2006. let’s all be perfectly honest – how many of us actually follow through on any of the promises we make to ourselves each january? not many.

how can i say that with such confidence? probably because people usually start complaining around march or so at how they failed to uphold their resolutions, and that it’s all just an exercise in self delusion anyhow.

instead, i’m gonna make a few predictions for what 2006 will bring. here goes nuthin':

at the fortieth super bowl, the half time show will be interrupted when trent reznor of nine inch nails suddenly starts having sexual intercourse with pop star shakira on stage, which will immediately be cut from the air replaced with a hyper-suggestive viagra commercial starring bob dole and britney spears. the controversial half time show will end up becoming the only topic anybody talks about for the next two years.

as part of the backlash from this scandal, the fcc will begin censoring everything, including people’s minds. thoughts that are not pure will be strictly forbidden, and punishment for having a dirty mind will be in the form of painful electrical shocks delivered via mandatory brain implant chips.

despite such stringent control over everything by "big brother," er, i mean the fcc, fashion trends will somehow continue to become more and more risqué. victoria’s secret will release a line of underwear that is made with invisible materials, and teenagers will wear clothing that have pictures of their genitals printed directly on the fabric.

a deadly plague will infect millions of people, and george w bush* will be blamed for it.

fox will introduce a hit new reality show, "smash!," which will feature traffic light mounted camera footage of idiotic drivers crashing into each other at intersections. the program will be sponsored by geicco, annheuser-bush, and paulsen’s funeral homes.

hollywood will begin the year of the remakes of remakes. audiences will be treated to interpretations of last year’s interpretations of classic original films that were infinitely better than any of the shitty remakes tinsel town "produced" in 2005. towards the end of the year, look forward to the re-makes of films that haven’t even come out yet.
(ritual seppeku knives will provided at theaters for those patrons who wish to end their misery with honor.)

we will learn that the real reason nick lachey and jessica simpson broke up is that just like her younger sister ashley, jessica can not "perform."

jennifer anniston will viciously murder several orphan children to get back at angelina jolie for stealing brad pitt from her. the two women will later have an emotional healing special on oprah where they forgive each other and run off to cancun as lesbian lovers.

kirstie alley will lose forty pounds. then gain another seventy. then lose ten more pounds. the title of her show will be changed to "occasionally overweight actress."

as oil prices begin to rise back up again towards the summer of 2006, a federal investigation will reveal an enron-like scandal among the top petroleum companies. the economic devastation will financially ruin thousands of companies and cause another stock market downturn. george w bush will be blamed.

global warming, deforestation, pollution, and anything else harmful to the environment will combine to form "super stormquake '06," which will destroy 95% of the landmass on the planet and kill billions of people. george w bush will be blamed.
(al gore will take refuge on the moon, laughing maniacally at the throngs of suffering people who failed to heed his warnings.)

will ferrell will make a new film in which he stars as a loud, annoying jackass who is completely different from all the other loud, annoying jackasses he has played so far.

in an effort to introduce young kids to the works of shakespear, miramax will adapt the story "hamlet" into "omg wtf lol!," which will star a bunch of nasally hip 'tweens' who are plucked from various third-rate kids programming on the disney channel.

oscar the grouch will no longer live in a trashcan, as this will be challenged as "insensitive" to people who are homeless.

doctors will determine that fat is bad for you. after some research, they will announce that fat is good for you. several months later, they will declare that fat is once again bad. people who are genetically obese will still be shit out of luck.

the public education system will discourage giving lower grades to students who don’t answer test questions correctly, since this can have a negative impact on a child’s self esteem.

once again, we will be denied the awesomeness that is the flying car.

and if i’m really really lucky, i’ll meet another women who i will eventually have sex with, prompting the second trumpet of the apocalypse to sound.

happy new years ya’all. drive safe. hope to see everybody next year. :-)

* (dante would like to publicly state that in no way, shape or form does he endorse george w bush, however he is rather disgusted by how many people blame seemingly irrelevant and outrageous shit on the president. get a life, people. he’s either a super intelligent evil genius mastermind behind every conspiracy known to man, or he’s a retard incapable of performing even basic tasks like snacking on pretzels. he can’t be both.)

** (dante would also like you to know that he has nothing against retards who are not able to eat pretzels.)

countless ways you pass the days

2005-12-27T02:36:00.000-08:00

every couple of days or so, i begin composing a new entry for my blog, and at some point, either what i was writing becomes invalidated, or i just don’t feel like what is shown on my screen is reflective of what i want to say to the world at that point in time. i confess that a large majority of what little writing i have penned lately has largely been solely for myself and as such is locked away in a file, or just merely deleted with the ease that my laptop provides.

in a way, i think that is part of why i so ardently love computers. you can take volumes of data, and just completely strike them from existence. you have control over the fate of information.

wish the same was true for memories. not that i would want to delete any of the memories that i have, since all of them serve to build the person that i now am, and the person i am becoming, but there are certainly little nuggets of thought that i would be more than happy to shove into a locked file and not concern myself with for many, many years.

that having been said, there is not a whole lot of noteworthiness going on in my life at the moment. for the most part, i go to work, and i come home. i try to hang out with friends, and more often than not, they are too preoccupied with other commitments to devote any time to socializing. i don’t care to go to clubs or bars, because frankly i just don’t ever feel comfortable at either of those refuges, and there aren’t really any community activities that i could go get involved in. i would love to sit down and practice all of the drumming knowledge that i am slowly absorbing, but in order to make way for our christmas decorations this year, my kit is currently sitting disassembled in cases, stowed away in a corner, which means they are basically non-accessible for the time being. i’d go out and take some photographs, but after using a wonderful manual slr digital camera, i just can’t bring myself to go back to hauling around my bulky point and shoot digital, now that i have experienced the true joys of everything i loved about photography having been brought together in a piece of technology i’ll not soon be able to afford.

basically, i am just merely existing, and frankly not really even sure why. it’s the biggest question on my mind, and there won’t ever be an answer to it. you all are well aware of how often i speak of the tons of unanswered questions that float about in my mental sea. by now, i have come to basically acknowledge reluctantly that they will continue to go unanswered long after my soul has quietly departed from this world.

i lack the motivation to go out and actually do anything. most of the ideas i have, whether they be film or musical in their nature, all require the assistance of other people. since i lack the appropriate avenues of help, most of my concepts are slowly vanishing as with most other ambitions i once possessed.

it certainly would make perfectly logical sense that as soon as i attempt to commit myself to laughing off whatever happens to me, a ton of overwhelmingly annoying events (to me, anyway) would occur that would instantly destroy my resolve to not give a shit about anything.

like when the downstairs bathroom flooded once again, a year to the day that it did last year. once more, i found myself dutifully having to spend several hours scrubbing human waste from nearly every surface of my bathroom a day before christmas, and drying out the first several feet of carpet at the entrance to my bedroom that got soaked by the horrid deluge of sewage. it goes without saying that this whole situation displaced me into a rage of furious anger.

however, once i got over the whole germophobic anxiety laden panic attack and went about cleaning up the mess, i conjured up the will to discover a sort of ease of spirit, and accept things for what they are. i wasn’t happy about it at all by a long shot, but at least i was able to take up the passive resignation that sooner or later, this (pardon the pun) shit was bound to happen once again.

three hundred bucks later, after the toilet had been ripped from the floor and several feet of snake sent down our septic line to remove the buildup of roots and other flotsam, the toilet *still* clogged up no less than twenty four hours later and has once again been rendered unusable until we can afford to contract yet another service person to resolve our plumbing troubles. truly these are tests of my patience as i once again find that most of the things i used to take for granted are no longer available.

(in addition to the bathroom fiasco - our garage door opener has taken to intermittently refusing to actually open the garage door, sometimes opening it a foot and then ceasing, or simply not opening at all; as well, we have ruled that further use of the garbage disposal in the kitchen is impractical, as even when my bathroom is functioning normally, the majority of what we grind up in the sink ends up being vomited back up through the drain in my bathtub)

and that’s about as exciting as my life gets. unless you count the sizeable chunk of flesh that was painfully scooped out of my index finger when my hand got jammed inside of a sugar dispenser at work last night. or how my bank account is now overdrawn after i miscalculated my finances slightly during this year’s christmas shopping.

christmas was good, though. a nice, relaxing stress free day. i didn’t have a care in the world, and i found that as we opened presents, i willingly conceded that even if i didn’t get anything that i wanted, i was still happy. or exhausted. it’s hard to tell, sometimes.

point is, very little was able to phase me that day. as i sat on the couch two hours after christmas had ended, giving way to boxing day, with "momo’s dance party" playing softly on my laptop, a copy of neil peart’s novel "ghost rider" in my hands, and a wickedly powerful rain storm, complete with brilliant flashes of lightning and awe-striking rumbles of thunder surging along in the background, i experienced the first truly transcendentally peaceful moment in all of 2005.

and then tomorrow was here.

are the liberators here; do i hope or do i fear?

2005-12-16T14:28:00.000-08:00

as part of my "not taking myself so seriously" endeavor, i offer you up this image for your consideration.

the sad truth.jpg

i figure that if i can’t laugh at the fact that i’m not getting any, or how i don’t seem to have any opportunities to do so anytime soon, then i’m still too wound up in myself.

it’s all part of the zen. i gotta be able to laugh at myself and ridicule my trappings with ease. to do not is to be too stiff and rigid.

besides, it’s about the only other alternative i have at the moment. obviously since regardless of what i do, i end up either sabotaging my chances with women or ignoring/overlooking whatever slim possibilities may exist, there are two ways i can react.

i can get horribly angry and go about living as a bitter, cold, pissed off shell of a person, or i can laugh it all off and tell fate to go fuck itself. might as well take the more light hearted option. being consumed by rage didn’t really make any difference on things. it’s entirely probable that laughing things off might not work out either, but at least i might move a bit closer to happiness.

ironically, it would be pretty warped if i ended up being happy in life only by chuckling at how everything in the world is designed to work against me. but, considering how crazy and random life generally seems to be, i’m not sure if that would really take me by surprise.

at any rate, i’m sure that allowing rage to foster inside of me is probably not a healthy thing. besides, i’ve been contemplating over the last few months how emotionally immature i really am. if i can’t deal with a minor situation such as a faux relationship that has troubled me greatly for most of this year, how on earth would i even handle something more significant? something that mattered?

i’ve been tempted to complete erase the last several months worth of blog posts; at least, the ones having to do with my complaining about the way things went down between monica and i. the more that i read what i have written, the more disgusted and irate i become that i could have allowed myself to develop into such an overly dramatic fool. every word feels like an anchor dragging me into a bottomless ocean, gasping for air as my body gives up to the depths.

however, i will not delete them. i can not destroy my writings. i’m not one to selectively pick and choose elements of who i am. certainly, all of the events that happen in my life contribute to who i am to become, and to disregard each of those pieces (regardless of whether they are desirable or not) would be to not acknowledge the complete image of the person that i am.

which is to say, unknown. i have yet to figure out just who the fuck i am, and i’m starting to realize that i never will. for the most part, i just seem to be a faceless observer who studies and seeks answers to impossible questions.

there is a lot that i have to come to terms with. it’s not going to be easy, by a long shot. there are going to be parts of me that will refuse to ever accept things the way they are, and insistently challenge for a better explanation. the problem that i have discovered, is that there are no absolutions. the more i contemplate things, the more i understand just how futile everything actually is. i suppose the best solution is to discontinue searching for meaning in the futility and to just enjoy the chaos.

for the moment, i am done with trying to find somebody to be with in life. while i will always still want to share my life with a companion, it’s becoming fairly obvious to me that i am not meant to succeed with things of a romantic nature – at least not anytime in the foreseeable future. either something about my personality, or the way i think, or even possibly divine intervention: it’s not meant to happen. a large part of me is taking this news fairly well, though there is still a tad bit of final resistance and bitterness regarding this conclusion. but i can not keep touching a hot pan on a stove and expecting to not get maliciously burned. at some point, i have to move on and eliminate my attempts if all they ever do is produce the same general outcome. consider this the scientific method of deciding that i’m destined to be by myself.

in truth, this option always existed, yet i staunchly refused to accept it for a long time. a significant proportion of my nature is automatic defiance and rejection of any mandate, so it’s understandable as to why i would express such aversion towards this eventuality. i’m still having a tough time wrapping my head around everything, but i suppose that with time, i’ll just move on and develop other uselessly trivial things to worry myself ill over.

one final question in this whole envelope: is the slight inner sadness and resignation at being alone better or worse than the sadness and depression i used to get whenever i attempted to make romantic connections and failed?

i don’t suppose there is an answer to that.

go figure.

wise enough to win the world, but fool enough to lose it

2005-12-10T13:13:00.000-08:00

damn.

i’ve been taking myself way too seriously lately. that shit’s just gotta stop.

the other day i was reading over my posts, and was fairly discouraged by how negative all my writings have been lately. obviously, i am more than aware of what i write, but seeing it in print on the web kinda… i dunno. made me stop and think.

there are two sides to me. two *very* distinct and opposing sides. one is the analytical thinker – the obsessive compulsive nitpicker that is so tightly wound that if i were a coiled up spring, the slightest disturbance would launch me to the moon. that’s the part of me that absolutely has to have balance in everything – visually, physically, verbally, anything. most of my disappointment in life comes from this personality. for some crazy ass reason, it actually *expects* certain things and conditions in life, even though logically it recognizes that nobody is guaranteed anything in life. this is the part of me that drives me absolutely insane, mostly because it keeps getting stuck in mental circles and can’t ever reach any decent conclusions. i suppose i should have paid more attention in math.

then there is the fool. the class clown. the part of me that doesn’t take anything serious, not even myself. the part that believes in respect, but that it should be earned and not freely given away. the part that thrives on anarchy and secretly delights when things go to shit just so that he can revel and dance about in the chaos.

i need to spend more time with the latter of the two. a lot more.

perhaps that would help to keep me a bit more sane in the membrane. the only times i tend to get depressed are when i actually give a shit about anything. whenever i make a vested interested in something, my hopes tend to get dashed. i’m starting to better understand some of the principles of zen. the whole “order in chaos” theory. i need to become more zen.

i mean, really. obviously, as far as physical maturation goes, i think my body is just about done. this is it. this is how i will look. unless i pursue plastic surgery or get horribly maimed in a violent accident, i’m pretty much stuck with this appearance.

don’t get me wrong. i’m actually comfortable with the way i look. but i’m also not stupid. i fully understand that as far as society is concerned, i am not sexually attractive at all. that became quite obvious in high school when all the girls were flocking around other guys and not me. it’s obvious whenever some "hunk" comes wandering into the store, and every woman present nearly pisses themselves as they try not to stare at him – yet hardly anybody ever notices if i am there or not. i just kinda blend into the scenery, regardless of how flamboyantly i carry on, and tend to get lost in the background. so, as much as it infuriates the analytical part of me to do so, i’ve come to the conclusion that the only way i’ll ever snag the sexual attentions of horny women is if i were to become a famous musician or filmmaker. even then, i’m not entirely sure.

(regardless of how i write this, i can’t seem to *not* make it sound like i’m some whiny teenage girl fishing for compliments – my apologies)

but, if tom petty can get women, i think there’s still a chance for me.

i am attractive in my own right. i know that. my friends know that. but, let’s not kid ourselves. if i were as handsome in the eyes of society as people try to imply, i think there’d be way more women wanting to hang around me. as it stands, no. there are not. why should i care?

i’m not even sure if i do anymore. i dunno if it is zen to become *totally* apathetic, but i’ve begun taking on the realist approach to things. i know that i will die. someday, probably long from now (since there have been many, many times where i could have but did not), and then that’s it. life moves on, just not for me. to deny or ignore this aspect of existence would be immature. my life will not continue forever. someday, it will come to an abrupt end. i’m pretty much cool with that. it doesn’t really bother me anymore.

every now and then, the anal-retentive side of me becomes embroiled with rage at this concept. if there is no point to anything, why the fuck bother to do anything? why bother making films and forming romantic relationships when regardless of what i do, i’m still gonna end up as a corpse in the ground?

the fool in me gets a big laugh out of this self-imposed anguish. perhaps because the futility of it all is in its own way a form of anarchy. you can’t control life and death. they are forces of their own. you just gotta go with the flow, and accept that to each end there is a beginning. and vice versa.

this past year, i have only been focusing on the negative side of things – pretty much because i keep taking myself too seriously. it’s ridiculous to expect that i should be in a happy relationship right now. or to think that i deserve riches wild and fantastic. nothing has been promised to me. nor will anything ever. nothing may ever go right in my life (and that seems to be the path that i am destined to travel), or everything may go splendidly. it’s all left up to chance, and fate. the best i can do is keep an open-mind, and try to stay positive about it all. even if nothing that i want ever comes to bear, unless i interrupt the process, i’ll pretty much just keep existing until my time is up.

the problem i face now is getting my ying and yang to coexist peacefully. i’m not sure it can be done, but if so, i think that would help me a lot.

or drive me nuts. i guess i gotta wait and see.

sometimes though, it is just really, really hard.

come tomorrow may i be bolder than today

2005-12-06T14:53:00.000-08:00

(originally started on monday evening)

let’s see if this can happen before i gotta leave for work in twelve minutes.

usually my posts require a bit of time to compose; editing takes an hour or so (even still i end up with tons of errors) and if i get distracted, the process takes even longer.

i’ve decided to refrain from signing onto instant messenger for now.

so far, that gal has not been back into our store. she and her friend frequented us for over a month, and now two weeks have gone by without so much as a hint of her or her friend anywhere around. i even asked some of our regulars since she occasionally would hang out front on the sidewalk with them, and none of them seem to have any idea as to her whereabouts. point taken. yet another missed opportunity.

i suppose i have a couple more thousand of those to go before i begin to experience any degree of success with women again.

becca wanted me to participate in a blogging meme where the subject states ten random factoids about themselves, and then request ten others to follow suit. maybe i can nail this list out before i gotta roll off to work. maybe not. i can’t really stop or lose focus if this is to happen.

1. when i was in preschool and kindergarten, my best friend was a girl named courtney. we used to hang out all the time, and would present each other with gifts. one time, she gave me this toy school bus that i absolutely loved, until our teacher mistakenly thought during show and tell that i had taken it from courtney, and demanded that i relinquish it. i threw a tremendous fit over this, and both our moms actually had to physically come to the school to inform the teacher that the toy was in fact mine and that courtney had given it to me. i haven’t seen or heard from her since my family moved away from pennsylvania, and i have no clue what became of her. sometimes i wonder if she even remembers me, and what might have happened had i not moved away. i suppose it is entirely possible to suggest that she and i could have ended up dating and becoming high school sweethearts. alas, that did not occur.

2. there are several hundred ideas for projects coursing through my head lately. i’m attempting to establish the means to pursue as many of them as possible, but i doubt even half of them will ever see the light of day. it’s a shame, because any number of these could be the “one” achievement that nets me some attention, and develops some exciting career opportunities. most of these are fairly ambitious beyond their means, and the majority of them require assistance from other people in order to be executed correctly.

(the free time i had before having to leave for work has elapsed. i didn’t figure there was any way i could make a post like this happen in less than a half hour, which is part of why i am a bit angry that going out to dinner and returning home took as long as it did. i’ll hafta finish this up when i get home at about twelve thirty am)

3. for the next couple weeks, i have the pleasure of borrowing and using a friend’s brand new nikon digital slr camera. i am quite excited about this, since taking pictures with point and shoot cameras is rather annoying. obviously the disadvantages of automatic cameras force you to develop your creativity in order to deliver the results one seeks, but sometimes i like to exert more control over elements of my photography that i just can not get from my current digital camera. i’ll be posting some of the images that i have managed to capture so far in a few days. i’m afraid that i will probably seek to purchase my own nikon digital slr in the near future – a wise decision since i intend to resume my still photography hobby, although this investment will of course set me back about a thousand dollars or more once i throw in the memory card, a lens, and all the other accessories that go along with a sleek tool such as this.

4. my germophobia is so pronounced, i wash my hands about every two or three minutes while at work. i just can not help it. there is a surprising amount of unsanitary conditions in this line of work – emptying the trash cans, cleaning up other people’s messes, stocking and spot checking the restrooms, and any other housekeeping that is required in order to maintain a presentable atmosphere for our customers. not too mention, our heavy use of sugary syrups means that just about anytime you make a drink, you are guaranteed to end up with sticky hands. thus you either have to wash the stuff off, or suffer with having anything you touch adhere to you. additionally, my hands have become so dry from the combination of excessive washing and the cold weather that my skin has been cracking and splitting. there are a number of cuts and sores on my hand that have refused to heal since there is no elasticity left in my epidermis. to rectify this situation, i invested in some hand creams and lotions from williams sonoma this weekend.

5. for now, my absolute favorite band is rush. i am obsessed with studying neil peart’s drumming methods and technique. ever since i started listening to rush a few years ago, various aspects of peart’s playing style have begun to influence my own drumming. u2 was the band that i was listening to when i started learning the drums almost ten years ago, and a lot of my education came from mimicking larry mullen jr’s sound. once i got a fairly good handle on how he plays and what motivates him with drum parts, my attention started drifting in search of other drummers to study and emulate. carter beauford of dave matthew’s band has so foreign (and creative, of course) an approach to rhythm that i doubt i will ever begin to grasp how he comes up with the shit that he does, but with rush, i have found that despite the complexity of their material and the odd-ass time signatures they employ throughout their catalogue, peart’s percussive muse and my own speak a common language. mind you, it will be a long, long time before i ever come even remotely close to playing a fraction as awesome as he does, but i at least am able to understand and progressively figure out the concepts that he has mastered. the album vapor trails is currently the cd that sees the most action in my rotation; this is significant in that before recording this record, neil peart spent six years in hiatus from music altogether after a couple personal tragedies left him searching for a reason to live – similar to the sort of malaise i am now experiencing in the wake of monica.

6. just about every night now, i have at least one dream that involves an airport in some way. either i am wandering about departure terminals, eating at a concourse restaurant, or driving through a parking structure. spring says that her dream book interprets this as a sign that i want to travel or move forward with my life, but that i am currently stuck in limbo while waiting for the correct flight. i’d say that that is fairly accurate. she felt that the definition seemed to be written specifically for me. also, i keep having dreams of this one particular city. as i have said before on this blog, my belief is that dreams are something like another state of waking that we encounter, possibly as alternate reality. the amount of people that i witness going about their daily lives in this uber metropolis is far too high a number for my imagination to just be coming up with at random. i don’t know the name of this city; i simply have designated it as “’the’ city.” every time that i dream of this place, i end up seeing different parts of it. i know that it is near a large body of water, because there is a port and some dry-docks. the rail system is fairly complex, and there is a commuter train which i have ridden on that provides service from the downtown area all the way out to several well developed suburban communities. there are tons of skyscrapers, and many of the buildings have giant glass crosswalks that connect one another high above the busy streets.

7. vans are the only shoes that i wear now. anytime that i was “lucky” enough to get nikes or reeboks as a kid, they tended to last barely six months. even though i’m not a shoe fanatic, i do have about eight pairs of vans that i have bought over the past six years in various stages of wear. this number does not take into account the pairs of vans that i have put through such stress that they were in fact ruined. generally in my experience, vans will take a lot of brutal punishment and keep on going, but there have been some circumstances where i overestimated the awesomeness of these kicks and ended up destroying them unintentionally.

8. my mind exists as different constructs at different times. sometimes i feel like my brain is a giant room that is lined with a wraparound couch against the wall, populated by tons of people hanging out and carrying on various conversations. other times, it seems like my mind is a giant tunnel that information takes forever to pass through. there is always music playing in my head. this usually prompts me to whistle or snap my fingers, or tap my hands against any available surface in time with what i hear mentally. if i knew how to read and write musical notation, i’d be able to express more clearly some of the concepts that i have. however, since i lack this ability, i find it rather frustrating that i have so many clearly defined ideas that i just can’t make other people understand. in my attempts to alleviate this disconnect, i have tried to learn the guitar and piano, but my extremely short attention span and lack of effective time management have hindered my progress. perhaps in time i will be able to either overcome these obstacles or learn to use them to my advantage and articulate some of my thoughts.

9. one of my philosophies is that everything, and i mean *every*thing can be broken down into simple concepts and elements. for all the complexities that humans have, it really is not too difficult to draw a comprehensive understanding of human behavior. some people would point to this mentality and ask how i could possibly believe in something so complex as an all powerful God that created all of existence, but i look at that particular subject like i would gravity. God exists whether you acknowledge God or not, just like gravity does. most people don’t spend their time sitting and dwelling about how they are firmly rooted to the ground; they just take it for granted and don’t give it much thought. it is just there. that’s what i think God is like. God is just there. no amount of believing that God does exist will change God’s existence, just like no amount of believing that one can fly if they simply concentrate hard enough will result in a person levitating off into the sky. returning to the theme of simplicity, sometimes it bothers me that humans are so reluctant to express their true intents and desires and instead seek out roundabout ways of articulating themselves. i think there is this intense fear that whatever we say will be misconstrued and so people hide themselves behind falsehoods and censored thoughts. the freedom of speech has never nor will it ever truly exist, since anything we say ends up being tempered and interpreted in whichever way that those who hear or read our words choose.

10. there are two shelves in my room that are reserved for die-cast model cars. since i lack the means to purchase and store a collection of full sized automobiles, i have to make do with miniature representations. the star of my collection is the fiery red 1959 cadillac eldorado biarritz convertible, which sits on the middle of one of the shelves. it is the ultimate car that i wish to possess someday as an actual vehicle. however, i wonder if my longing for the car is more satisfying than actually having it would be. everybody seems to continually advocate that the journey is its own reward, and that sometimes the means are better than the ends. this frightens me, because if this is true, i’ll never ever really be happy. i just want the damn car.

even though the original concept was to post only ten facts, i am making an executive decision that this meme goes to eleven.

11. recently, i have encountered great confusion as to what love actually is. i’m coming to accept the fact that i’ll probably never understand it, and to be on the safe side, would be better off just not trying to deal with it or encourage it at all. as much as i was trying to deny it, i *thought* that i felt love for monica. a lot of people that i talked to opposed this conclusion, and told me that what i was feeling was in fact, *not* love. so, if what i *thought* was love actually was *not* love, than what the fuck *is* love? assuming i ever end up with another woman again, and possibly start to feel the exact same way, should i continue to believe that that is not love and dismiss it as something else? i don’t get it. this whole situation has left me so befuddled that i doubt i will ever have any concrete answers to the many thousands of questions i have. perhaps it is best for me to just not bother with love or romance at all, since clearly my perceptions are hopelessly misguided. people say that when love is there, “you’ll know,” but that is a huge boiling crock of shit. i thought i “knew” that it was love then, and everybody seemed adamant to convince me otherwise. what the fuck? somebody needs to explain this shit to me, and in a way that my pitifully immature self can understand. otherwise, there is no way i’m ever gonna succeed in finding out what love is. or enjoy it, for that matter.

well, there you have it. eleven random facts about me. as always, i took my sweet time writing it, and ended up posting this a day after i originally started it. now comes the turnabout.

i am to ask ten other people (no, wait.. eleven) to play along and get crackin’ with some factoids. the victims are as follows: spring, lois, wyntir, kelly, mandy, cher, monica, masato, cogent, allison, and fox.

can’t wait to see what everybody’s posts are like. go forth and blog.

if all your hopes survive, your destiny will arrive

2005-11-30T04:20:00.000-08:00

last week, as i was scouring the intarwebs to increase my playlist of eighties music substantially in order to fulfill my desire of securing over forty-eight hours of reagan-era tunes, i became enamored with a particular track called “magic,” by the infamously physical olivia newton-john.

so much is my addiction to this song that for a few days, i began figuring that the only reasonable way to redeem myself from the shame of such a dishonorable position would be to commit ritual seppuku, until i discovered to my delight that that piece was actually co-written and produced by elo. now i feel much better. guess i’ll hafta put the ceremonial dagger away until the next time my musical tastes stray so dangerously close to the edge.

(how bad is this? rhapsody is currently offline, and in my desperation to hear this song for the thousandth time, i actually went and *paid* for it on itunes. that is fubared, my friends.)

lois lane of homefires mentioned something in the comments for my last post that i wanted to touch upon. in her words (and i am quoting here for complete accuracy): “treat girls like you treat boys, friends first.”

(i know you didn’t intend it lois, but just wanted to clear up something: generally when i make friends with other guys, i don’t particularly foster the intent to weasel my way into their pants at some point.)

you would think that “friends first” is a proper approach when it comes to the opposite sex, but there have been a number of girls who ended up becoming missed opportunities simply because out of respect i didn’t try and push any kind of sexual agenda until they and i had gotten to know each other a bit. after all, even a desperate loser such as myself is fully cognizant that coming on too strongly too soon to a woman is generally a surefire way to spend saturday night alone with the internet and a box of tissues. since i didn’t take any prompt action regarding these possible situations, almost always they ended up with my finding out (with a touch of perfect irony in that these revelations *always* surfaced *after* these girls had hooked up with some other guy) that they had in fact been romantically interested in me, yet they assumed that i did not share their sentiment when i failed to pursue a deeper, more meaningful relationship with them.

most lame. in fact, just simply recalling all of those incidents is most frustratingly painful. this is all part of what i said in the last post about how my timing sucks royal eggs (naturally with timing so bad, it’s only fitting that i am a drummer). i’m not merely bullshitting people or searching for a laugh when i allege to them just how unlucky i have been with women. it’s nothing but pathetic fact.

sometimes, it makes me really fucking angry that i could suck so bad at scoring tail when jocks and other dumbass males whose brain cells dwindle in the negative numbers could be such skillful players. why the fuck can’t i do that? it is most bothersome that i have yet to have a relationship that lasted anytime longer than two months. shit. i know guys who are still with the gals they hooked up with in high school for christsakes, and that was nearly ten years ago. how come that kind of sweet deal wasn’t in the cards for me?

one of the realizations that is not lost on me is the fact that had i been born several thousands of years ago, natural selection would have all but kicked my ass at this point. since i’m about as far from an alpha male as you can possibly get, it’s pretty much a given that my particular genes would have ended right there on the spot when some saber toothed cat dragged me off to his dinner table before i ever got a chance to pop some cavewoman’s cherry.

i really hate to keep harping on this one topic all the time, but as i’ve stated abundantly before on multiple occasions, i really do have a one track mind. for example, the other afternoon while topping off my gas tank at the filling station, this one exceptionally pretty young woman in a green top inspired me to utter under my breath "sup, girl.. i’ll stick my nozzle in your tank." see? one track. i’m also an asshole, in case i failed to mention that lately as well.

while discussing manic depression with a friend who recently imparted that he is afflicted with a similar condition as myself, i learned quite a bit about some of the medications employed to treat such symptoms and promote a generally healthier lifestyle. one of the main downsides that he pointed out to products like zoloft is that they completely rob you of any sexual desire whatsoever. well, great. mentally, i’d be tip-top to go out and find tons of hot fuckable women, sway them with my adorably undying charm, bring them back to my place and then ask if they wanted to watch tv instead of knocking our junk around due to my lacking any form of a libido whatsoever. hoo-boy! can’t wait for *that* kind of fun action. it’s kind of like that episode of the next generation when a slightly-androgynous alien fell in love with riker, only to be whisked away and psychologically re-programmed to become a sexless drone once her asexual society ascertained that she was looking to funnel number one’s hog.

if i even somehow managed to get a girlfriend under those circumstances, she and i might as well just skip the whole wedding thing and jump right into being the couple who never touches each other, and hates every iota of their lives with a firey bitter passion that’s expressed by endless marital bickering until she gets fed up with my stubbornly bullshit ways and goes off to find a better purveyor of man-shaft.

it might help to better understand where i’m coming from. i know tons of adults who are single and absolutely hate it, but they are at the point in their lives where getting into a relationship is so alien that you might as well be tasking them with converting a delorean into a vessel suitable enough for time travel. witnessing first-hand how miserable these poor souls are, i am utterly paralyzed with fear that i too will easily end up as such. really, i’d rather prefer to avoid that situation if at all possible. and i don’t know why. if i were to learn that it’s in god’s will that i never marry or have a significant other, i’m very much eager to put a stop altogether to the cruel experiment that is my life and let the almighty guinea-pig that shit on somebody else.

onwards to other topics. i refuse to continue with this particular thread since currently i am desiring to put my hand angrily through the wall with enough force to shatter every last segment of bone up to my wrist.

even though there was an ample amount of free wifi access in the jury assembly room in our local court house on monday (which i did usurp to full advantage), i failed to put down any of my mental drool while stuck there for nearly four hours until being summoned with fifty other people up towards a courtroom to wait through the arduously painful and drawn out process of jury selection. which sucks because i ended up processing a lot of random thoughts in my mind, and was actually able to come up with significantly better material than my typically nasal whining about the dry spell that is me.

when i first found out that they provided an internet connection to those whose names wound up getting picked to wake up at too fucking early o’clock to go and sit around for damn near forever and a day, i thought it would be really kick-ass to make a blog post or at least scribble some of my useless thoughts into word while the boredom slowly eroded what is left of my mind. however, as usually is the case, i ended up occupying my time with idly chatting up some friends on instant messenger, mindlessly dragging cards around my screen in pursuit of the zen known as solitaire, and looking up obscure topics on wikipedia. at the very least, i should have taken the opportunity to begin re-penning my screenplay “phonies,” but nope. instead, the dumbass in me prevailed and dutifully mis-managed the free time i was graciously blessed with.

the only colorful incident to occur during the waiting was when a guy a few seats over convinced me that he must eat garbage every day since I can’t imagine what the fuck he could have consumed that would have produced such vulgar flatulence. it didn’t help matters any that the room lacked sufficient means of circulation, and thus the noxious cloud he gave birth to just sort of hovered over the room for what seemed like a way longer period of time than it actually might have been. when we finally did get into the courtroom, you’d think out of respect for the sanctity of the judicial system, farty mcstinky ass would have made some attempt at keeping his anal commentary to himself; however for most of the session, it sounded like there was a damn trumpet over in the corner of the room. one after the other, this bastard just kept firing them away, as if he was utterly oblivious to his role as an unwitting biological weapon.

the important thing to walk away with is that i didn’t make it onto the main jury panel, and even though my name was the first one picked for being a back-up juror, somehow i managed to avoid being stuck on a trial for two weeks. hurrah for small miracles, i suppose. walking away from the courthouse, i felt a tinge of regret that i didn’t get selected for the case, but then i smacked myself in the face a few times until i came to my proper senses.

then i went home, listened to olivia newton-john another twenty times, and fell asleep to dream of the xanadu that is nailing sandy olsson (either when she was a sweet nubile blonde, or a hard core grease-monkey bitch).

i've heard the accusation before, and i ain't gonna take anymore

2005-11-26T03:56:00.000-08:00

ever wonder what became of the kids in school who never learned to color inside of the lines on assignments and coloring books? there were so damn many of them in my class; it really annoyed me that nobody bothered to have standards anymore when it came to applying crayons to paper.

i’m willing to bet they all ended up as the assholes who don’t possess any clue as to how to properly park their oversized vehicles.

for a moment, consider america’s favorite past time. or "supposed" favorite past time, since lately it doesn’t seem like anybody gives nearly as much of a shit about it as they did before. in baseball, there is a thing known as a "perfect game." this is when a pitcher manages to strike out every single opponent without ever letting the enemy team get to base. it happens quite rarely, but when the beginnings of a perfect game coalesce, superstition (which is abundant in the sport) dictates that you do your best not to make any mention whatsoever of it. you don’t look at the pitcher, you don’t talk about the game, you don’t even mention the words "perfect" or "game" at all.

to do so invites bad luck and threatens to ruin the opportunity.

the same i believe to be true about dating and relationships with women.

if a woman shows interest in a man, any verbal mention he makes of it challenges the possibility of anything significant happening. this may sound ridiculously stupid, but hear me out.

it’s like in something about mary. while the film was beyond par for most comedies, aside from the magic of harland williams’ tomfoolery involving ab muscle work-out pyramid schemes, it did happen to point out something very pertinent when it comes to handling social situations with women – if you go out hoping to score, you’re gonna fail.

well, at least some of us. confusingly, there are tons of guys who talk up a heaping pile of game about how they’re gonna romance some nubile young lady out of her pants and into the backseat of his ride, and they almost invariably always do. such is not true for losers like me. or jason mewes, at least before he came out of his shell. or so we are told.

i’d love to place the blame on something like the cards being stacked against me (which they often are anyways, but that’s beside the point), but it has more to do with the fact that i can’t help but wear my intentions on my skin. again, this seems to work amazingly well for some "players," but for an inexperienced newbie such as myself, i haven’t quite figured out the proper formula to make it all happen. or rather, i’m still far too skeptical of my abilities to read people (especially in light of how far away from the ballpark i was when it came to figuring out monica recently) to rely on my proper judgment of distinguishing between the girls that are all about getting down and dirty right away, and the women who would rather carry on for umpteen hundred hours about their massive shoe collections and how the last twenty guys they dated never "got" them.

this whole "learning" "process" royally sucks. especially if you’re an impatient fuck like me. a pathetically whiny fuck, to boot. rather, it feels more like this is all some sort of twisted joke. a part of me keeps expecting to look up into the sky one day to find some ginormous research laboratory scientist peering down intently at me, and scratching his head in bewilderment at how i keep deliberately running into all of the walls of the maze instead of sniffing out the succulent block of cheese barely five feet away from me.

since i already spoiled things and jinxed myself by simply talking about the most recent development in my life with nick, craig and spring, i’ll go ahead and hook you up with some four one one. i don’t see what further harm can be done that hasn’t already. over the past couple weeks, there has been this gal who regularly comes in an hour or two before we close, orders a drink with her friend, and then sits until closing at the counter across from our register stands. every night that she has been in, she peers over at me, and invariably i catch both her and her friend checking me out. having realized that this probably means she is interested in me, i made it a point to remember her name and drink order, to which she was astounded one day when i greeted her by name and asked if she was having her usual. i’m guessing she didn’t think she was worthy of me remembering her. or that it was a not so subtle statement of her opinion of my memory (which admittedly has been irritatingly spotty, lately).

when i finally came to my senses that i should probably ask her out soon, it turned out that i wouldn’t be on the night crew schedule for quite a few days. nevertheless still determined, i managed to drop by the store each of the nights that i wasn’t working, not only to order my now customary green tea latte, but to also investigate and see if this gal was hanging out (it would seem that they only stick around if i happen to be on shift – lending credence to my assumptions).

long story short, i have only seen her once more since i set my mind to proposing a dinner date with her. that one time that she did finally come into our store, i was stuck behind the bar making an assload of drinks and as such was predisposed from going over and talking her up. since she uncharacteristically ended up getting something other than her usual espresso drink, she had no real need to walk over towards my station and thus the best i was able to manage in the ways of communicating with her was to say hi to her as she was walking away from the register to go wait outside our store for her friend to show up. this all took place not even ten minutes before my shift was over. anxiously i finished up my tasks as fast as i could, and bolted outside after clocking out only to find that she had disappeared from our curb into the night.

the whole agonizing drive home, i frustratedly cursed myself quite loudly for demonstrating far less than a satisfactory mojo. she hasn’t been back in the store since then (almost a week ago), and i’m wondering if she finally decided that she was tired of waiting for me to come around to her, and has moved on to someone else. such as my other dating experiences have been, i wouldn’t at all be taken by surprise at this outcome.

i’ve never had the proper timing for anything when it comes to women. the first gal i dated, i was a bit nervous about becoming intimate with her – not so much because i didn’t have confidence in myself, but because i wasn’t sure if she was interested in taking things so quickly. after all, one person’s definition of "making a move" can easily be interpreted by another person as "sexual assault." generally, i like to stay on the greener side of the law (my having been born with a foot composed of lead aside).

thus, i held back and did what i thought was proper – waited until i thought the time was right. or rather, i *would* have followed through with that had she not realized that i wasn’t going to get with her right away, and went in search of something a bit quicker. this was confirmed later on when she admitted to me that she was more than willing to go pretty far with me from the get-go. all the way, in fact.

guess what mistake i made with the next lady? if you selected "moved way too fast for her tastes," you win the prize.

(admittedly, the prize isn’t all that glamorous; basically you just get to keep reading the rest of this already long-winded post)

this imbalance of "working it" carried on until i encountered monica. she was the first woman where i just had a feeling that i knew what was going on, and that proved to be correct – at least in the beginning. maybe it was the fact that she didn’t buy into playing any bullshit games. or perhaps the smooth pimp in me finally took charge and laid it all down like a fly mother fucker. either way, my instincts ended up steering me proper, and it paid off. again, at least initially they did. somewhere along the line my instincts got all haywire and fuckered, probably because i went deeply into shock that i was actually finally getting some.

(although, a part of me still foolishly maintains that my instincts probably are still correct regarding her despite all that has happened – evidence of the stubborn german in me, i suppose)

as foolish as it may sound, i’ve always held at least partially to the belief that since patience seems to be the biggest lesson that life is trying to force me to learn, attempting to make things happen on my own terms usually leads directly to failure. this includes self gratification. while it is entirely permissible to write off as mere coincidence, the proportion of negative situations and circumstances surrounding my daily life eerily increase anytime i clobber jimmy the one-eyed walrus. consider it the latent catholic in me (my mom was raised catholic).

since the majority of popular religions and philosophies speak of things turning against you when you follow pursuits of a selfish nature, it may not be so farfetched to suggested that my "habits" invariably stack the karmic balance outside of my favor. again, i know that it sounds horribly idiotic, but i’ve eventually arrived at the belief that when a potential opportunity crops up for me, if i indulge in a little heavy handed personal time before the fruits of fortune come to bear, chances are i’ll probably end up screwing whatever possibility had shown me some sliver of promise.

i dunno. maybe i’m just talking out of my ass again. as you all are well aware (at least my regular readers – assuming any of you are still out there, seeing as how i have been negligent in posting lately), i have an annoying tendency to do that quite frequently.

at any rate, i’m tired as all fuck out. i got off work at one am last night (friday/saturday/however it works out – i can’t think or reason anymore) and my next shift starts in t-minus nine hours and counting. then i work for another eight hours, and assuming i’m not completely dead from exhaustion (i got four hours of sleep the previous night), will be swinging by the birthday party of a co-worker.

as always, i’ll have more for you all to digest, and a helluva lot sooner than the enormous wasteland of neglect between the last post and this one.

still standing in the wind, but i never wave bye-bye

2005-11-14T13:00:00.000-08:00

when customers at work ask me how i am doing, usually i just respond with some bullshit like "great!" or "doing well." i say that this is bullshit because as you all know, i am not "great" or "doing well."

i am in fact miserable.

i can’t process anymore. i can’t reason.

in the ongoing saga of my mind battling with all the insecurities/pain/confusion/anger at my first real meaningful relationship folding faster than a chinese laundromat attendant, i feel the need to make something abundantly clear. as much as i bitch about monica and i no longer being together and how this all has affected me so, i don’t really want her back. i don’t think i could handle it.

while i certainly am pissed that i *finally* had what i really wanted and then it instantly vanished like some floozy in a cheap penn and teller stage trick, the truth of the matter is that if so much of what has happened has sent my state of being into a boiling rage, do i even want to invite that kind of catalyst *back* into my life? i’m doing the best i can (and failing miserably) at removing the instigations for my pain out of my life, so why would i willingly conceded to a reconvening of such factors?

don’t get me wrong. i still feel deeply for that woman, and probably always will. but i realized over the last several months that the point of no return was long ago passed by. so then what? if not monica, who *do* i want? and more importantly, who the fuck wants me?

as you may have inferred from my other posts just in general, i am the kind of person who is big on looking for signs or interpreting messages that aren’t really there. like for instance how i’m coming to believe that the reason i am only meeting women who are otherwise unavailable to me is a hidden message by god or whatever governs existence that there in fact are no women out there meant for me, and i really should invest my desires in something else least i face massive disappointment when a suitable romantic partner fails to materialize over the course of my life.

i’m sure that everybody who experiences the end of their first major relationship probably feels the exact same way. if there’s ever been one thing i’ve been keen on, it was being just like everybody else and making the same stupid mistakes.

sarcasm just doesn’t show up as well in print as it does in spoken word. :-/

i’m deeply conflicted and it bothers me plenty. there’s a part of me that wants for monica to have nothing but happiness, joy, and success in her life. hell, if i am consigned to feeling miserable, why should she? after all, she already detached herself emotionally from the situation long ago. from the very beginning, i had always wished that her life would be good even if i weren’t a part of it in the way i would like to be, and most of the cheesy-ass 80’s romance flicks dictate that that in fact is love. i still ain’t buying.

the other part of me wants her to suffer gravely until the day she dies. i’m generally not a ruthlessly evil person brimming with malice, but having elicited a rather primitive "eye for an eye" mentality, i want to as much pain inflicted upon her as was brought unto me (the irony being that that likely has already happened). that any other relationship she enters into afterward fails miserably. it disturbs me to some degree that i would feel this way, but nonetheless an aspect of who i am desperately wishes for her life to suck beyond words.

and it’s not even so that after anybody else she gets with rejects her that she’d come back my way. fuck that. while i certainly have nothing to be proud about, i feel at least enough ego to discard the option of being somebody’s "last resort." maybe monica in some way felt that i viewed *her* as a last resort? perhaps. it’s not often that a woman actually takes any kind of serious interest in me, so maybe i was in fact wanting to be with her to avoid missing my last chance. not only am i socially defunct when it comes to actually persuading women to go out with me, on the rare occasion that it actually does happen, i feel this intense pressure that this may be my one and only shot.

that probably doesn’t turn on nearly as many people as i pretend it might.

(and no; for the record, i never once actually thought that she was a last resort – regardless of how contradictory some of what is said here may seem.)

it really bugs me just how blasé monica was about all of this. there are several particular instances where if she was really serious about not wanting to get so close, than why did she allow things to happen the way they did? if she knew it was a bad idea from the start to make certain choices on her behalf, than why did she bother making them in the first place? and then, after having done all the damage that she could, why did she just take a happy nonchalant attitude and pretend like nothing had even happened? her approach to all of this is so infuriatingly confusing, it makes me want to rip every follicle of hair out of my skull and set them on fire.

ultimately however, it keeps coming back to me. i am the only one responsible for this suffering. way back on that first night when she and i kissed and sealed this fate, i should have realized just what the fuck i was doing. no. i was a dumbass. and now it is costing me plenty. i think it is safe to say that a fair degree of buyer’s remorse has surfaced.

again, all this musing does is leave me back at square one. nothing has changed, or will change – no matter how desperately hard i have worked the last couple months to make it change. i’ve tried forcing change to happen on my own, and that failed. i tried allowing change to just happen without pressuring it, and see what might develop. that failed too. so, um... huh? what do i do now? cuz i’m completely tapped of ideas, and meanwhile something’s gotta give soon or i’m just going to lose it and self destruct.

lately when customers ask me at work how i am doing, i no longer give them a bullshit response. i have one of two answers.

"i don’t know."

"numb."

you just smile politely and i grow weaker

2005-11-10T01:52:00.000-08:00

at this point, i’m gonna go ahead and say that it’s safe to assume that my body hates espresso. it’s true that i absolutely do love the occasional caramel mocha, but anytime i ingest even a half shot of espresso, shortly thereafter i become a urine fountain and experience mild intestinal unrest.

while it may *seem* that i have been busy due to the severe lackage of postilingus, i assure you that i have not. life has been it’s sweet old merry self, only it seems to be going by at an even faster rate of speed than it was the last time i bitched about time going by too fast.

i suppose in some twisted way, this is one of my wishes being granted, albeit in not quite the fashion i would like it. for the past several months now, i have wanted my life to end and be over with, and since time is accelerating, it would seem that in a way, that end is drawing closer. am i scared at the prospect of losing precious valuable time with which to live my life?

not really. i’ve had enough of being toyed with, being strung along and played like a fiddle, of being the butt of nearly every joke and of the non-stop chatter that my mind engages in. even when i am knee deep in the busy of work, i can’t escape my own thoughts. i really am dead serious when i say that i am beginning to believe that the only way to shut my brain up is with a .22 shell.

or medication, but this solution still petrifies my drawers. the lists of negative side effects for any of the drugs that would be prescribed to ease me in my torment read like judicial state punishments. sexual side effects? urinary tract infections? blurred vision?

yeah. quite the miracle fixes, all right.

besides, ultimately those pills wouldn’t resolve any of the major issues that loom in front of me and constantly make me feel like a worthless shit.

why can’t i get over monica already? why must everything possible under the sun remind me of her, and why can’t i just pretend that our relationship (again, if you can even call it that) was nothing more than a bitter-sweet dream?

i think that by having seldom dated in high school, i ended up putting myself at a severe disadvantage towards romantic relationships and how to deal with them later in life. most people have already gone through all this shit years before i have. of course, most people had already been laid a decade earlier in their lives than i had.

it’s just that i seem to lack the capacity to deal with this. i just can not do it. i don’t know even where to begin. i’ve tried redirecting my energies into my hobbies, and those had no effect. working harder and harder at my job only flushes the anger to the surface, and i am then left with a fragile shell of calm sitting atop a battery of rage, at which the slightest disruption will shatter my resolve.

reading poetry and self discovery bullshit doesn’t seem to help either. these activities serve only to add more conflicting thoughts and images into my being, making me madder still. hell, even trying to hang out with the few friends that i have left in town, or making new friends has fallen through as an effective means. there just doesn’t seem to be any way for me to reasonably figure my way through this mess. for God’s sake, stop thinking to yourself that i have given up. i do my damndest every single fucking day, and no measure of my efforts works in the slightest!

in the end, my turmoil is extremely unfair to all of you that read my blog (or the few that are still left). it takes forever for me to develop the motivation to even write anything, and when i finally do slap something online for the interweb to digest, it comes off as being a retread of the same old shit i cobbled together for any previous post. the overall desire to blog is still there. there just doesn’t happen to be any stimulus for fresh material. i feel trapped beneath all the shit i let get to me. do you really want to read post after post about how regardless of what i attempt, i fail? for the moment, that’s basically all my life is at this point.

add on top of all of this nonsense that i have been experiencing a crisis of faith. i still believe that there is a God and that he listens to people, but i get the feeling that he’s tuned me out. there are far more people in incredibly more dire situations than i find myself in, so why should he bother wasting valuable time listening to my stupid bitching? after all, i have a roof over my head and food to eat. millions of disenfranchised souls have even less than that.

hopefully the next time i post, i won’t come off sounding like a melodramatic attention whore.

bows its head and prays to the mother of all machines

2005-11-01T16:56:00.000-08:00

i could indulge in sharing with you guys how i nearly lost all sense of control last night after work in a fit of frustrated rage, but that’s boring and i’ve done far too much bitching about my problems lately.

instead i’m gonna tell you that i have a jury summons.

the last time i was called upon to serve my community, i ended up getting picked as a juror. the trial lasted two weeks, and we returned with a guilty verdict on all but one of the counts that the defendant was charged with. in fact, during the selection process for that trial, a number of the prospective jurors broke down emotionally and wept uncontrollably when the fifteen charges against this elderly man were being read.

he was a child molester.

the solitary count that we weren’t able to find him guilty on was the charge of kidnapping. only one member of our jury wasn’t satisfactorily convinced that the legal definitions of kidnapping had been appropriately met by this individual.

it didn’t matter. the guilty verdict for the other fourteen charges against him were enough to ensure that his sorry ass was sent to folsom state prison to serve his time. one hundred and twenty years worth of time, that is.

while the experience of observing how our legal system worked and being a part of upholding justice was interesting, the circumstances of such a situation were less than desirable. several times during the proceedings, recesses had to be called since a few of my fellow jurors were overwhelmed with emotion, especially during the statements taken from the victims of these crimes – none of them older than ten at the time of the hearings, and none of them older than six when they had been violated by this perverted adult.

in a way, i wasn’t as affected by the testimonies as i thought i would be. it sounds callous and fucked up to say, but after having seen very similar courtroom scenes on countless television programs, a sort of desensitization had taken place. it seemed more like a dream, or like an episode of special victims unit. it just did not seem real.

perhaps that was an example of self defense. it may have been that the things we were hearing were so profoundly offensive that i took to distancing myself emotionally from everything. it also made me think about how complex human society is.

one of the thought processes that continue to pass through my mind throughout my life are the differences between homo sapiens and other animals. since i am more than willing to entertain the possibility that both evolution and creationism can peacefully support and co-exist with each other, i have to wonder just what the advantages of evolution might be.

so far, the only examples that people can give me involve mostly technological developments. we have automobiles, computers, and television, and ways to share and discover information. telecommunications and satellite uplinks to provide forums with distant acquaintances. medical techniques to help aid in promoting longer and healthier life spans.

but as a species, have we really advanced all that much? it seems to me that with every major advance in technology, it has served little for our own mental well being. it doesn’t take a genius to observe that the stress levels of human beings are continually on a rise.

it also does not take a lot of effort to notice the results of these stresses. parents who exhibit careless disregard as they ferry their children around in large suv’s at dangerously wreckless velocities – and then express great confusion and anger when the consequences catch up to their actions. people who charge tens of thousands of dollars until their lives are buried under mountains of debt. nations that have such deep hatred for each other that the risk of violent confrontations balance on fragile eggshells.

with all the advancement and development, are we happier as a species? have these "improvements" really made our lives better?

have we really evolved?

or is that something we just tell ourselves to make more sense out of all the things we don’t know or understand? to make us feel… better?

somehow, i doubt that the average dog or cat ever asks any of these questions.

perhaps they are better off that way.

no hero in your tragedy, no daring in your escape

2005-10-30T21:12:00.000-08:00

if you are familiar with the show futurama, you may happen to remember an episode where flying brains came to visit earth in an attempt to steal all knowledge and leave humanity stupider.

the other night, i was looking hard at the skies for signs of airborne noggins. in the ten minutes that it took me to drive from our house to the local wendys and back, no less than five other drivers nearly collided with my car. several of them shot out of blind driveways without bothering to actually check for oncoming traffic, and a couple of them were just merely impatient assholes who didn’t seem none too pleased that my vehicle happened to be occupying the same physical spaces that they wished to occupy.

my tolerances for the stupidity and lack of common sense in other people are rapidly drawing to a head. granted, i have been one to royally fuck up on multiple occasions with many hilariously awful results, but this is just getting way beyond acceptable.

nowhere else is this more noticeable than at the coffee shop. the self-centeredness of people really shines through there like no other. it would seem that common sense dictates that if a trash can is more than full, the other satisfactory options you are presented with are to either pile your garbage on top of the grotesque amount of refuse already present, or to simply dump it on the floor/ground. heaven forbid should one actually go in search of another receptacle with which they can dispose of their waste.

what really kills me are the lengths that some of this shit heads go not only to *not* throw their trash away, but to *hide it.* as if this were some game. when people spend a portion of their valuable time re-arranging the items on a store shelf in order to position garbage out of sight behind those items, these individuals are in desperate need of some serious medical help.

what the fuck is wrong with people?

at the moment, i’m rather annoyed that i have to work nine hours on halloween until closing. that means from three in the afternoon until midnight, i’ll be stuck at work.

please tell me that’s a good thing. i’m trying really hard to see the positives in this situation, and so far, my mind is drawing a complete blank. lately i’ve been working hard to find the silver lining in *anything,* just to give myself some peace of mind from all the shit that bothers me endlessly, only i still am not able to discernibly locate such solace despite fiercely dedicated massive amounts of effort.

rather, it seems that the harder i look for the good in things, the more forcefully all the bad pushes its way to the foreground. i take two steps forward, and the world kicks me in the nads until i stumble backwards about ten feet. i’m really, really, *really* getting sick and fucking tired of this bullshit. and i have a horribly sinking feeling that things are only going to get progressively worse – regardless of what outlook i choose or how vainly i attempt to make things go right.

i just don’t know. can somebody please explain to me why i even give a shit? life would be so much easier if i just didn’t care about anything. but somehow, i seem to have this dreadfully insatiable curiosity/willfulness that refuses to be squashed. for some inexplicable reason, it decides to soldier on even though it constantly only meets with frustration and/or disappointment.

not that spending all hallows eve at work is really that much of a disruption. it’s not like i was invited to any parties, or care to pack myself into an overcrowded club with a bunch of intoxicated assholes. i don’t even have a costume, and i doubt that at this point i will carve any jack-o-lanterns.

somebody out there better have a happy fucking halloween. i sure as shit will not.

i've got celestial mechanics to sychronize my stars

2005-10-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

fresh baked garlic cheese ciabatta bread. tomato basil soup. filet mignon. garlic mashed potatos. steam cooked asparagus. key lime pie.

a birthday dinner like that just about makes up for an entire year’s worth of shitty.

almost, anyways.

a new snare drum helps as well.

my birthday present was actually a gift certificate towards the instrument shop i frequent. it’s been three years since i bought an actual drum for my set, so i figured it was about time. the decision was between either this badass pearl piccolo snare that i found, or a second crash cymbal. and while i really do need to start expanding the amount of cymbals that i have, i just could not get over how sweet this snare drum sounded.

take a listen for yourself, in fact. maybe you’ll agree.

(i kinda half-assed what i was playing for this test recording – whatever. you get the point and get to hear how it sounds – single mic’d with a shure 57 for anybody who cares to know that tidbit of trivia.)

i’m thinking i need to get another cymbal soon, anyways. i’ve been itching to play lately, and some of the practice sessions that i have indulged in didn’t suck too badly. maybe with time, i can get over my limitations and start becoming a killer percussionist.

out the door, i wound up with the drum, a stand, and a soft cover bag for two hundred fifty. this is pretty sweet, since the snare itself originally goes for close to four hundred bucks. at least i still got it when it comes to bargaining.

now, if only i could steal some of neil peart’s talent, perhaps by slicing off a swath of his hair, then i’ll really be getting somewhere.

i can learn to resist anything but temptation

2005-10-22T02:40:00.000-07:00

remember a couple weeks ago when i mentioned rather blatantly how much i have grown to despise working the closing shift on friday nights?

yeah.

in addition to the usual scene of newbie couples and puppy-dog-eyed dopey lovers, there was a football game at the local high school a couple blocks from our store (they ended up winning). this means that once the game was over, pretty much the *entire* damn stadium filed into our store in search of beverages.

a group of extremely statutory looking young cheerleaders from the school happened to be standing over in one of the corners of our lobby, and the hottest of them at one point turned to her friend, tugged incessantly on her arm, and urgently expressed the following:

"oh my God, i am so frigging horny right now. you don’t even *know.*"

um. so, do please explain to me again exactly *how* the cosmos aren’t just *totally* fucking with me here?

if you will it dude, it is no dream

2005-10-20T00:05:00.000-07:00

on this day in history:

1803: the united states senate ratified the louisiana purchase.

1910: the hull of the rms olympic, sister ship to the rms titanic is launched in belfast, ireland.

1929: us 101 (the bayshore freeway) opens in the san francisco bay area.

1944: the soviet army captures the yugoslavian capitol city of belgrade.

1955: j.r.r. tolkien’s final installment of the lord of the rings trilogy, the return of the king is published.

1967: 4,000 civilians gather in berkeley for the largest vietnam protest rally.

1973: the sydney opera house opens, abc premieres the six million dollar man, and william shatner weds his second wife, marcy lafferty.

1977: ronnie van zant and steve gaines of lynryd skynyrd perish in an airplane crash in rural mississippi.

1979: the john f. kennedy library is dedicated in boston. your pal dante (aka, adam) is born at st luke’s hospital in denver colorado.

angels and demons dancing in my head

2005-10-18T02:04:00.000-07:00

thank you for all the supportive comments you have provided. i do actually appreciate every single one of them, and your valuable personal time.

however, i should have been a bit more specific in my last post. all of that thinking that i do? yeah, the majority of that doesn’t actually occur *just* when i am sitting at home.

in fact, a huge amount of it happens while i am at work. even though i rang up close to eight hundred people last saturday (yes, that is right – eight *hundred* people in a nine hour period – my cash drop was one quarter of the entire store’s income that day), i couldn’t stop my mind from constantly going over these thoughts. in fact, if anything, being around that many happy people (99% of whom were couples) served only to amplify how dreadfully awful i feel. so. now you have an important detail that wasn’t present in my other post.

if i can’t *not* focus on this bullshit even when faced with a nonstop flood of thirsty consumers on a busy weekend, than what is it gonna take? the current options that i am considering are – medication, or a bullet. one is guaranteed to resolve the issue but pretty much cease my existence, and the other *might* resolve some of my troubles but can bring about possible worse side-effects.

i have no idea what to do. some of the people that i have talked to who have gone on the medications that i am investigating have informed me that not only did they end up feeling worse when under the influence of the drugs, they actually began to hear louder voices in their heads. as it is, i already have tons of thoughts swirling about in my head constantly. what happens when those countless nodes are brought into even sharper focus? would i be more open to impulses that i normally have to concentrate on not acting upon?

these thoughts also happen when i am driving to work. or driving home from work. or hanging out with friends (although, the high i get from socializing with people helps to mask a portion of this buzz of mental activity), or eating dinner with my family, or when i do actually have a few moments to practice playing drums.

or, perhaps the most annoying intrusion of these thoughts… the hour or so it takes for me to fall asleep whenever i hunker down for some slumber action. it doesn’t matter what time of night i go to bed. ten pm, four am, whatsoever does it make no difference. one hour is about the amount of time it takes for me to pass the fuck out when i hit the sheets. roughly sixty minutes of craptastic quality time with my motherfucking mind. at least if i had somebody to sleep with, i would be able to *do* something like cuddle so that i wouldn’t be forced to concentrate on how completely alone i am.

let’s be clear about something. i haven’t sat at home every night and let this crap stew about in my noggin. over the six years that i have lived up in northern california, there have been countless amounts of times i have gone out to socialize with other people. parties, the few times i did try going to clubs, raves, all kinds of shit. in the end, the results are pretty much always the same.

in fact, i make almost desperate attempts on a daily basis to ensure that i’m not stuck at home by myself (most of them lately have proven less than successful). on the lucky occasions when i have been able to snag people to hang out with recently, the women i meet who are my age are happily married. MARRIED. when i meet older women, they are of course also married. and then, i meet girls who are under the age of legal consent. in fact, they tend to be the females that ironically show the most active interest in me. it would figure, right? there are at least five girls i know of offhand currently that have expressed serious interest in me; all of them are seniors in high school and completely untouchable according to state law. *tell me* that isn’t the cosmos totally fucking with me. explain to me exactly how it is not. because, really, i can’t come up with any other reasonable explanation for it at all.

i’ve tried tons of other options. i’ve gone to the few college age programs at the churches around here. you’d think in an area that has several major universities (stanford, uc santa cruz, uc berkeley, etc) that tons of churches would attempt to capitalize on the potential for ministering to these large numbers of youth. nope. in fact, just the opposite. there is so little interest in this area to witness to college age kids that i beat my head in frustration anytime people express confusion as to why the peninsula has one of the largest un-churched population centers in the nation. it doesn’t really matter, though. regardless of which program i go to check out, all of the girls i meet are already in satisfying relationships anyways.

in the last couple years, i have posted my profile on twenty different personal sites, including true match, match dot com, and eHarmony. all of the sites that “guarantee” results + me = nada. the only thing that has happened is that they take significant amounts of my money and deliver jack SHIT for results. twenty. not a couple. not “a few.” twenty. do take notice of how that’s quite a bit more than “not a lot.”

(embarrassingly enough to admit, i have even tried fuck buddy websites. any luck? would i really be sitting here bitching about my problems if those actually did work? besides, i’m not looking for just a cheap lay. while sex tends to dominate my immature juvenile mind, even i realize that i require something far more substantial than just carnal deliverance.)

so, that’s pretty much it. if there is some mystery location where there exists single women, fuck if i know about it. but, that’s not even an issue anymore. because, fuck it. i just don’t care anymore. you tell me. what would you do? do you honestly believe that six *years* of trying to meet people is really not all that much when it comes to percentages of one’s lifetime? just how long *is* enough? sixteen years? twenty six? should i keep trying and hoping it happens in thirty six?

for somebody as impatient as myself, this scene is unacceptable. i am fucking tired of striking out time and time and time and time and time again. so what? try some more? one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same task over and over again, yet expecting different results. why should i be lead to believe that i can expect any kind of results different from that which i already have experienced? what in six years of trying dictates that there is the remote possibility of hope to prevail?

oh, right. i got laid. with one woman. twenty-six years old, and i have had one sexual partner. that’s fucktastic. maybe when i’m thirty, i can proudly proclaim two. who knows? maybe by then, it will even be three.

wait, scratch that. i’m not *that* lucky. and yet, assholes who beat their girlfriends and insult them daily, steal shit and have been to prison, have had tons of women. lesson learned. good guys are losers. we don’t get to finish. really, it’s not so bad, and i don’t understand why the world constantly tries to persuade me otherwise. it’s ok to tell me that my life is going to continue to suck royally and that shit will get far worse. trust me, i won’t be offended. i came to that conclusion quite some time ago. if you honestly feel in your heart “well, he’s fucked,” than tell me that. i’m not so unintelligent to know that some people just have a shitty go at life. them’s the facts. sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes; why, sometimes he eats you.

besides, everybody keeps trying to tell me that i won’t find happiness simply by getting myself a relationship anyways. even though i constantly try to patiently explain to them that when i was living with monica, i truly was happy as a clam. i’ll repeat that, just in case once again, the nay-sayers of my words insist upon convincing me otherwise that which i know to be true. when i was in a relationship, i *was* happy.

and no, i was not really all that happy when i met monica. in fact, i was feeling just as shitty as i do currently. perhaps even worse, because at that time, i not only felt alone, i felt hopelessly betrayed. during the production, craig and i had a bit of a falling out. there was an argument, some serious discussion, and confrontation. it drove me to question why i would ever have quit my job to come out to the hot ass unforgiving desert just to end up essentially getting what seemed like a slap in the face. how hurt was i at the time? i had placed a reservation for a rental car to drive home in. yes, i was that fucking pissed off at the time. there was a lot of personal shit going down, and i simply wanted out of the movie entirely.

the *only* reason i stayed was because in the end, i decided that i was determined to finish something that i had started, no matter how unpleasant or uncomfortable the situation was making me. i wanted to see things through to the end, no matter if i killed myself out of frustration in the process. my confidence was totally lacking, and about the only conviction that possessed me was the desire to prove myself against the odds. two days later, monica and i got together, and so began the most meaningful relationship to date i have had. and then, i was happy. all the shit that was getting me down about the movie, and the troubles, they all seemed to vanish almost instantly.

maybe they didn’t vanish, but since i was happy with monica, i didn’t let those annoyances bother me so much. had that relationship not developed, my experience of making land of entrapment would have been far more dour. dismally rotten, even. there are many reasons as to why i felt monica was “the” one for me, and to some degree still do. far too many for me to ever hope to list without missing a few. certainly a major one though, was that she helped me get through the production of that film without killing myself or craig. and she probably didn’t even know that until now.

so when i say that i *know* that a relationship with somebody would help me gain my footing in life, i’m not just bullshitting you. i’m not talking out of my ass. i am dead as all fuck serious. and perhaps that insight can help explain to you why it is just so goddamn frustrating that i have had absolutely no luck in meeting anybody at all. maybe you will see this as a declaration of co-dependence, or maybe you will understand what i mean when i prattle on endlessly about how much being single sucks for me. i can’t explain it, and it does not make any lick of sense – but i simply can not believe in myself until somebody else really demonstrates to me that they believe in me first. it wasn’t until i was with monica that i felt truly capable of beating my own demons regarding the work on the film. why? fuck all if i know. my sorry ass is horribly backwards to the rest of the world. just the way i was made, i suppose.

i’m running out of ways to articulate my predicament. no matter how i try to phrase it, people just don’t seem to quite get it. there’s always a crucial piece of the puzzle that people miss, and because of the lack of understanding, the discord creates a rift. some of that is due to how much i hold back. i’m sure the majority of you didn’t even know how utterly low i was feeling during the filming of loe. i don’t even think monica was aware of how awful a time i was having. i dunno. maybe she was. perhaps that is part of why she ended up getting with me. the point is, she did, and ever afterward on that film, i knew i could deal with whatever happened because there was somebody that cared about me regardless. it was incredible moral support, and i treasured it a great deal more than i can ever possibly hope to express.

but now i lack that kind of support. it’s wonderful that people thousands of miles away tell me that they pray for me, and that they hope i feel better. but, and i don’t mean to sound callous or ungrateful for the generous latitudes of support, it just isn’t the same. people can tell me how they are “sorry” about how i feel until they are blue in the face; ultimately, it doesn’t remotely compare to the warmth and comfort i derived even from just a simple hug from a woman that actually gave enough of a shit to invite me into her home at a time when i felt i was without one. over the course of my life i have occupied tons of houses; never have i felt so at home as i did then.

some of you will read this and continue to shake your head at me, thinking i haven’t “gotten it.” i dunno, maybe you are right. maybe i never will get it. maybe i am just a hopeless cause that refuses to accept the truth. or maybe i am just backwards to the way the world works, and i gotta figure out how to re-write the rules to accommodate oddities such as myself.

but, lately i’ve been asking myself why bother? regardless of who we are, or what we do, there is but one common tie.

we all die alone.

i'll give you a man who wants to rule the world

2005-10-13T00:46:00.000-07:00

another week goes by. father time continues to wage his epic battle against the advancing armies of acceleration, only to fall prey to the attack and suffer an agonizingly humiliating defeat.

well, at least i’m still alive. or... something. i guess. there’s been a lot going on in my mind, and not nearly enough going on in my life. so, why haven’t i posted anything recently? i figured you all deserved to be spared from another bloated entry that served no other purpose than as a vehicle for my endless moaning about how much i think the cosmos hate me and are dolling out royally cruel punishments without care in my direction.

unfortunately, that’s essentially how i continue to feel. my emotions have been so all over the place that i’m beginning to think i’m experiencing some form of male pms, one that lasts for months on end. one wonders how long a person can hold onto such debilitating anger and frustration, and then looks at me and pities the pathetic mess that i have become. i’m still hopelessly bitter and pissed off, and feel that i am facing some sort of judgment for crimes i did not knowingly commit. this year has continued the downward slide into easily becoming the shittiest that i have had in a while time.

here’s how much i totally suck. no matter how much i try to convince myself, i’m still not entirely over monica. i’m not even sure anymore. i think that by and large, i am mostly angry that everything happened exactly as i had pictured the ideal relationship would happen, and then when things did actually fall into place jut the way i envisioned, it all fucking ended. rather pointlessly too. the whole situation baffles me to no end. i have spent countless hours trying to make sense out of the entire extended ordeal, only to have it further push me towards the brink of madness. there is no fucking reason. second guessing, re-examination, all of it is fruitless. in the end, no matter how much i try to analyze it, it makes no fucking difference. nothing is resolved, and there are no answers. just more questions, and increasingly cyclical patterns that lead towards deeper confusion.

it’s enough to make me consider forcing a screwdriver up my nose and stabbing my brain until i lose the ability to think as much as i do. maybe if i can remove all the annoying chatter that relentlessly torments my already weary mind, i can come to peace with all the bullshit that i have no control over. maybe even then i could stop worrying about useless matters such as relationships, and focus more on just the basic instincts of eating, sleeping and shitting. as of late, it seems to me that anything outside of those three major events is just extraneous waste and not worthy of anybody’s time. regardless of how much i think, and probe, and dissect and evaluate, nothing ever really changes. all that happens is i get angrier and angrier.

and i’m fucking tired of it. why can’t i just push aside all the non-essential noise and be happy with the fact that i’m twenty six years old, working at a minimum wage retail job, own a working automobile and am blessed with plenty of shelter, food, and enough entertainment to last a lifetime? instead, all of these other distractions forcefully filter in and run my sorry ass through annoyingly endless circles.

so, yeah. i’m a loser. i spent ten years obsessing over erin, and i’ll likely spend double that amount of time thinking about monica, considering that my interactions with her were extensively more developed than with my previous object of fixation. speaking of erin, last saturday at work, i rung up a girl whose name was erin crum. entirely different girl, because she didn’t look a thing like the one i knew in school, but the situation begs me to wonder what the odds of that happening are. out of all the coffee shops that exist in my area, and out of all three registers that were open, i happen to be the one who rings up a girl with the same name as my first major crush for drinks. exactly a week after i went to manhattan beach in the hopes of possibly seeing the original erin. what are the odds of that happening? why should i care anymore?

last week, one of three good friends that are still living in this area dropped a surprising bombshell by announcing that he’s moving off to washington state this saturday to take up a cushy civilian job with the military. sadly, it’s not like he and i have been able to hang out together lately anyways, but it is rather depressing that more of the people i know are now moving away. a couple years ago, he was just about the only person that i had to hang out with for a long time, and now he’s basically gone. the other friend i have that is within less than an hour’s drive (everybody else i know lives at least several hundred miles away) has been so busy lately with work and studying that he’s making himself physically ill off of the stress. so basically, i have nobody to hang out with now. i’d go out and make more friends if i didn’t think that at some point, their lives wouldn’t become so complicated as to not be able to hang out with me. or if I even knew where to meet people, anymore. to some degree, i wonder if despite my initially personable demeanor, i just have a habit of repelling people over time. sure would help to explain a whole fuck of a lot right there. otherwise, what the fuck is the point in investing time developing relationships with other individuals if ultimately those relationships will end up becoming little more than minor elements in your life despite how much you try to avoid them not ending up as such?

to make matters worse, the plumbing in the downstairs is acting up *YET AGAIN.* this is now the *tenth* time since we moved into this house two years ago that we have had problems with the fixtures. tonight, the toilet in my bathroom started bubbling in very much the same manner as it did just before it began overflowing all over the downstairs floor last winter. this is all despite the fact that we already had a plumber come over earlier this week to take care of the garbage disposal backing up into my bathtub once more. i’m holding out hope that we don’t end up mopping up buckets of water between now and when the plumber will be out here in the morning to look the situation over more thoroughly this time.

at the rate this year has been going, i’ve pretty much given up on praying for things to get better. in fact, right now i’m feeling a might gutsy.

i *want* shit to get worse. lots worse. come on, fate. do your fucking worst. go ahead and burn my house down, then kill all the people i care about. see if i care. like lewis black theorizes, all the happy well adjusted people die young, and all the miserable narcissistic pricks like me have to live forever. might as well invite God willingly to fuck everything up beyond recognition. He’s gonna do that anyways; i should just learn to get used to it and accept it.

(mind you, i realize the hypocrisy of my saying that i have had it bad this year. never once have i been in the path of a devastating tsunami, or been caught in a tremendous hurricane, or submerged by flood waters, or shook to shit in a violent earthquake. but damnit, it’s all still a matter of relativity anyways. i’ve had my own problems and troubles to deal with as it is.)

if you want to pray for me, that’s swell. i’m not asking you to, or even expecting it. but if in the off chance that you find yourself graced with some free time to kill, do me the favor of asking God to lay off on all the negative bullshit and toss me a fucking bone once in a while. i’d greatly appreciate it. that is, if there is anybody left still pouring over my selfishly whiny mumblings.

i hate the phrase “when life closes a door, it opens a window.” six months now. i have been desperately looking for the window, and finding none. i can’t even find the door i came in through, since i now seem to be sealed up in a featureless room, madly clawing at all four blank walls in the futile attempt to escape.

somehow, i have a feeling that i will wake up tomorrow. i’m dreading that thought already.

now let your mind do the walking

2005-10-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

there is no possible way in all of hell that i can come close to writing about every last thing that happened on my trip.

don’t get me wrong – that’s a good thing. usually there is so little that transpires in my daily life that sometimes i am hard pressed to figure out what to write about on my blog, and usually end up defaulting to bitching about how low or awful i am feeling. so when there are circumstances that produce a flood of information and details, i am more than pleased.

notice how i skillfully employ a large amount of words to convey that essentially my trip rocked. that trend will continue, so you might want to dedicate ample time if you plan on getting through this post in one sitting.

i managed to outdo myself on this vacation. some of you who have read about my other excursions know that when it comes to packing, i am the ultimate procrastinator. usually i don’t bother packing what i need until just before going to sleep the night before my journey. this time, i did one better. my bags didn’t up getting packed until just before i actually hit the road.

about the only thing i did manage to do the night before was clean my windshield (which is in need of washing again since returning home) and clear out my trunk. there was a huge amount of crap hanging out, and i spent close to an hour sorting through everything that was present. bear in mind, this is a miata we are talking about, which doesn’t boast the greatest amount of cargo space to begin with, so to have amassed enough junk that required an hour’s worth of time to parse through is fairly negatory on my part.

it’s a good thing that i made that extended effort this time (i haven’t before) because i ended up having to forcefully cram everything that i was taking along into every last square inch of my trunk. i even ended up having to remove the cd changer unit (i never use it) and setting it aside in the garage to make room for all the things i was taking.

which weren’t a whole lot, in all truthfulness. the laptop and its accessories, of course. my small bag for clothes, my pillow, the digital camera and accessories, and the audio mixer i had originally bought for use on land of entrapment (the reason i brought the mixer will be explained later in this post). not a tremendous amount of stuff, but items awkward enough that it required a fair degree of engineering prowess to package it all into the limited luggage space.

it’s no surprise that i ended up getting a later start on thursday morning than originally i had intended. i did manage to wake up fairly early, despite my body’s severe dislike for the morning hours, and even had a substantial breakfast for once (very rarely do i ever eat any breakfast other than fresh mixed berries). with only four or five hours of rest from the night before, i finished loading up my car and headed out towards la. a quick stop down in morgan hill for some of that righteous hot chocolate that i always get at the only ya’bon that i am aware of in this region, and my journey began.

there was little traffic on the five both driving down, and coming back. for the most part, i was free to cruise at whatever speed i wished, so i maintained about ninety or so for most of the way. stopping off at harris ranch and lost hills quickly identified why so few people were out on the road – the cost of gas is significantly worse along that route. fuel prices on the five have always been less than ideal, considering all of the station owners are more than aware of the fact that there are so few depots along the route that the demand crookedly justifies the increased cost of the supply, but even these increased rates were grossly unpleasant.

getting to craig’s in west covina took a little over six hours on the way down. had i left a bit sooner from my house, i would have avoided the mid-afternoon traffic along the ten freeway out to the valley, but as it ended up, i didn’t get delayed all too badly. ended up pulling into his place just in time for us to come up with a dinner plan that involved a trip to chic-fil-a down in chino hills. driving back up grand ave, we stopped off at a fry’s electronics to pick me up a spindle of dvd-r’s on sale for some disc burnin’ a bit later on in the weekend.

cogent and i met up at fatburger in west covina on friday afternoon. it was a good lunch gathering. she is quite pretty in person (and in pictures, for those privileged enough to have found them online), and provided a nice conversation. sadly she didn’t have a whole lot of time to hang out, but the time we did spend together was definitely enjoyable.

later on that afternoon, craig and i met up with an old friend of his from high school, mike and his girlfriend ashley. from craig’s place we ventured out to bj’s for some dinner and drinks, and then over to the edwards theater to catch a showing of serenity, which sadly had a lackluster attendance. i would be kind in saying that the theater was even one quarter full, which was most disappointing considering how kick ass a film it was. up until that point in time, i was not really consciously aware of firefly – after watching the film, craig and i began watching all of the episodes of the show on dvd to introduce me to the series, staying up way beyond the time i originally had wanted to go to bed in preparation for attending the hometown fair the next day. at about two in the morning on saturday, i came to the conclusion that i likely was not going to make it to the early morning 10k run, and instead opted to watch more episodes until about four or five in the morning when i finally did go to sleep.

waking up sometime around noon on saturday, i journeyed out from west covina to the coast where surprisingly it was quite overcast and chilly in the beach towns, compared to the glaring heat and sun that was hovering over the inland valley. also amazingly, i managed to snake a very convenient parking spot fairly close by to the fair (originally i was worried that i would end up having to drive all over town looking for parking).

before heading off to the faire, i took a few moments to wander down to the pier and check out some of the surfers who were out enjoying a couple waves. the pacific didn’t seem to be too active, but there were a few dedicated souls out for whatever ride they could get. there was this one particular blonde in just a two piece suit who exhibited a tremendous amount of grace with her longboard.

heading back up the hill towards the faire, i stopped to check out the collection of classic ford woody station wagons. no matter how upscale and yuppie manhattan beach may become, at its heart the town is a classic surf community, and this is reflected throughout by means of various different outlets. the beach towns are perhaps one of the few places left in the world where you can still see wood paneled cars with surfboards strapped to the luggage racks on top, and the atmosphere is just very laid back and slackeriffic.

the faire was very much how i have remembered it over the past almost-decade. predominately arts and crafts type stuff, largely focused on the immediate community and lifestyles. there was a significantly larger number of photographers exhibiting depictions of the bay area than there was the last time i was there seven years or so ago.

perhaps the biggest question on some people’s minds (ok, maybe only monica’s) is if i happened to run into erin at all during the faire or not. i *could* sit here and tell you that not only did i meet her, but that she and i totally went at it like hyperactive bunny rabbits for hours until my wang fell completely off. i *could* say that.

doesn’t mean i wouldn’t be telling a whopper of a lie. at best, i saw somebody who from a distance looked like it could have been her, but when i got closer, discovered quite clearly that it was not her at all. the results for the 10k run do confirm that she was in attendance and took part, but i didn’t get a chance to see her at all. oh well. i consider it just yet another confirmation towards an answer i had already assumed several years ago.

instead, i got a call back from todd who was made aware that i was in town, and told me to swing on by. originally i was supposed to meet up with richard and spend some time with him that afternoon, so my idea was to hang out with todd for a half hour or so and then jet on to margolis’s, but as always seems to happen to me, time flew by way too fast and before i knew it, i had ended up spending eight more hours in manhattan beach than i had planned. i was gonna try and make it back to craig’s house that day by early evening at the latest, since we had a commitment to attend to the next morning, but between video games, downloaded episodes of the venture brothers, ice cream from the soda shop in downtown and dinner at the kettle, i didn’t end up heading back in-land until after midnight. turns out that both of the other friends that were hanging out at todd’s place have worked for the same video game conglomerate that i have, and one of them is even moving up this way at the end of the year to work at the local corporate campus full time.

by the time i got back to craig’s place it was just about one am. he and i both needed to be up at six to make a seven am call time for the shooting of an independent picture that involved a friend of craig’s. after carefully reviewing the fact that we had less than six hours for a decent night’s sleep, craig and i indulged in checking out more episodes of firefly until it was time for us to leave his house. at this point, we were both getting a bit groggy and a stop at mickey dee’s for some breakfast was in order. as the sun crested the horizon and the night hastily gave way to a rather hazy morning, we made our way to the cbs studios in burbank.

supposedly we were shooting on a backlot, but after craig and i had a chance to check out the street mockup, it was more like an alleyway between two soundstages that had inexpensive facades thrown over the walls. sandwiched between the studios that house csi: ny, and according to jim, we met up with the crew for the project. the film is an indie short, so pretty much everybody present was on a volunteer basis. craig was to be the boom pole op, and i was the sound engineer. initially, it sounds more impressive than it actually is. my task primarily was to stand between craig and the dp (director of photography) and make sure that we got consistent audio recordings of all the dialogue. earlier in this post i had mentioned that i had brought my audio mixer, which was intended for this film shoot. since the camera they were using already had appropriate audio inputs, we opted to just run the microphone direct into the camera, and i “mixed” the sound by directing craig when and where to move the boom mic to. apparently i did good enough of a job to warrant our cinematographer asking for a copy of my resume, which i will be sending him later this week.

the shoot itself was quite fun. met a lot of cool people, got to hang out and chat with some industry pros, and help out on an action film. i’m guessing the final run time of the end product will only be about ten minutes total, even though we were on the lot for close to eleven hours and shooting a couple tapes worth of footage.

after the shoot, things become hazy. since both craig and i were running on empty at that point and were exhausted, i don’t remember a whole lot of what happened. somehow, we managed to end up at a wendy’s in west covina instead of in a flaming mangled wreckage, and mindlessly ordered some fast food in the hopes of actually deriving any energy at all. i’m pretty sure that craig threw his tray away instead of putting it on top of the trash can, a spectacle we couldn’t stop laughing at despite not being able to figure out what exactly was humorous about the situation. needless to say, severe exhaustion seems to produce the same kind of goofy behavior that repeated drug use does, without any of the nasty chemical residue in your blood stream.

i think when we got back to his place (again, a miracle), we kept ourselves awake by watching more firefly. or at least tried to keep ourselves awake. the goal was to stay up just long enough to watch the new family guy episode on that night, but when we found out that it was a repeat, we both told consciousness to go fuck itself and passed out in our respective rooms for some much needed rest.

there is this running theme throughout my trip. most of what i “planned” didn’t actually come to bear, as the itinerary was altered over time. for example, my original plan for monday was to leave sometime in the early morning to arrive home by mid afternoon. didn’t happen. hell, i didn’t end up leaving so cal until almost four pm. there were still a number of dvd’s that i had left to copy, and craig was busy encoding the latest edit version of loe that we had spent some of the weekend working on for me to take back home. at some point around noon i gave monica a call to see if she was up for a lunchtime meeting, a proposal that was swiftly shot down. craig and i decided instead to head on over to fatburger one more time for me to get my fill, and i discovered much to my delight that there is going to be a fatburger opening up within a couple miles of my house by the end of the year. if there is only one good thing to come out of the year of SUCK, it is that finally for fuck’s sake, there will be a fatburger nearby. this may seem trivial, but i assure you, it is not.

after lunch, and with the last of the dvd’s burned, i made my way onto the ten towards the five and home. i managed to make it back in just under six hours, holding true to my competitive nature for beating my own records for travel to and from the city of angels.

sorry that this post took so damned long to get online. it doesn’t help me any that my mind has been scatterbrained as all fuck lately, and that i haven’t had any patience to sit down and write anything. oh yeah, on monday morning i also woke up to find that in my sleep i had pulled my sciatic nerve, and have spent most of this week suffering agonizing lower back, leg, and foot pain. the other day at work i felt as if somebody was kicking me right above my ass for most of the shift (thankfully only four hours) and by the time i punched out, i could barely stand. today the pain has for the most part subsided, but anytime i shift my weight around, the arch and heels of my feet keep trying to convince me that there are nails or spikes being wedged deep into my flesh. it’s pretty much the same horrible pain that i experienced a little over a year ago towards the end of my trip to boston.

for the most part, the final running length of land of entrapment is now locked down. that means that sound and dialogue work can commence, we can begin color correcting it, and music will be written so that we can finish this endeavor and move onto other projects.

at the moment though, i’m gonna go watch the neil pert dvd that i purchased tonight at the gelb music super sale so that i can be reminded once again just how much i totally suck at playing the drums.

fly by night! owww!

never again is what you swore the time before

2005-09-27T02:17:00.000-07:00

this should be interesting.

for the first time ever since i moved away from so cal, i shall be returning to manhattan beach this weekend specifically to attend the manhattan beach old hometown fair, a fall event the likes of which i haven’t attended in over seven years.

i’m not even sure why the fuck i am going back to it anymore. originally, after my residency was teleported to cooler climates, the goal for making an exodus down to this street carnival was the optimistically slim hope that perhaps yours truly would happen a merry gander at the young miss erin again. even though i had transferred out of mira costa to south high in torrance after freshmen year and lost the opportunity to check her out on a daily basis during my educational enslavement, one of the few guaranteed chances i had to see her was at this particular annual gathering.

every year, without fail. dolled up in her greens and yellows, the official school colors of my first high school alma mater. marching down the avenue with the rest of the drill squad and cheerleaders in their oh-so delightfully magnificent skirts, preceded by a couple dozen semi-lethargic students cresting various musical instruments of a high school band nature. later on in the afternoon after all the pomp and what-not, she could usually be found hanging out at any number of mira costa sponsored booths, either in an assistance capacity, or just cheerfully fraternizing with various hottie acquaintances.

sad to admit that i had this all documented out in my head. what can i say? i keep tellin’ y’all i’m a bona fide loser.

however, after my family relocated and the years moved steadily on as they are unstoppably persistent to do, my initial drive and purpose for seeking this venue lessened to the point where it seemed fairly questionable as to why i would even harbor such a desire in the first place. especially after the involvement or whatever with monica, my feelings have been somewhat hampered towards that maiden idyllic crush.

so why bother going? fuck it. i’m going anyways. every year, i have felt at least some amount of an urge to return, and each time, some mitigating circumstance or other manages to creep along into the works, gumming up the machine and fouling my agenda. last year, understandably it was due to my having been reduced to non-existent financial standing, thanks in no part to having spent the last of my savings in the pursuit of film making (a decision which i still do not regret in the least). the year before that? i don’t even recall. i believe monetary reasons prevailed as well. before then? prior obligations, the likes of which could not have been adequately met at any other period of time.

recede back far enough and the reasons break down in simplicity until you get to the point where the only thing that hampered my voyage was the lack of suitable automobilage to facilitate such travel.

but not this year. i think perhaps that is one of the only reasons for which i am actually making this journey – basically because i finally can. nothing at this point currently stands in my way. i possess the fundage, the transportation, and the availability to make it all happen. think of it as a personal triumph. finally, the odds will have been beaten.

(ya know, one would think with the overall shitty luck i have been experiencing this year, that i would exercise a fair degree more caution when tempting fate. nope. not only am i a loser, but i probably failed to mention that i’m not all that bright, either.)

of course, the entire trip isn’t just about spending an afternoon browsing arts and crafts displays that dot the thoroughfare of a bustling surf community while secretly hoping to possibly steal a glance at a former object of attraction. additionally, i will be devoting some quality time with my good pal craig for a couple days. while the present itinerary is focused on working towards the completion of some of the afore-mentioned tasks to our cinematic efforts, a screening of serenity seems to have introduced itself into the works.

i also will be granted the pleasure of meeting up with miss cogent from cogent diversion, for a saturday mid-afternoon meal taken at the greatest of eateries to pay homage to when one finds themselves in the metropolitan los angeles area - fatburger. i have a feeling that the company should prove to be most acceptable, and there will hopefully be much positive socialization.

of course, i’ll be lugging my new laptop down for the stay. while i’m debating on whether or not to bring the digital camera as well (i don’t want to haul too much stuff), i certainly will at least have my precious computer, should the need arise that i find myself in situations demanding of sufficient processing power. perhaps even a couple lan games with the wunderhund, if he feels so up to the challenge (he’ll more than easily school my sorry ass). i might even post an entry if a convenient (and free) wifi network presents itself.

now… if i can just figure out where the fuck i am staying while i’m down there… then i’d be set.

the road unwinds towards me, what was there is gone; the road unwinds before me, and i go riding on

2005-09-22T02:35:00.000-07:00

holy shit.

it is extremely hard for me to believe. wait. no, actually it is more than plausible. one year ago today, craig, monica, aaron, tony, drew and i all gathered at the administration office of an apartment complex to shoot the final major segment of principle photography for our freshman introduction to film making, land of entrapment (aka loe). that night hinted at the amount of fun and joy we *should* have encountered while filming *all* of the material we managed to get in the can (er, cassette cartridge) over the previous two months spent sweltering under the unforgiving desert sun in the great state of new mexico.

however, those eight weeks were a bit more of a struggle than either craig or i would have cared for, as we dealt with such annoyances as a couple of finicky cast members (sadly, the lead actor and actress both), scheduling conflicts, irate location managers, equipment/technical issues, and other assorted trouble spots that popped up throughout our valiant endeavor. regardless of all the strife and punishment, there was quite a lot of fun and enjoyment to be had as well.

and now, a year has gone by.

it’s definitely been an… interesting year, to say the least. a significant number of you who read this blog are more than familiar with my exploits, or lack thereof. sigh.

i’m trying hard not to get all nostalgic. but if you know me… and some of you do… it is very difficult for me not to. what can i say? i’m a masochist and am deathly in love with torture.

a bunch of you have been asking when you will finally be able to see land of entrapment for yourselves. the short answer? hopefully soon.

there is still a bunch more post-production work that craig and i have to iron out before the film is presentable. we almost have the final running time for the film nailed down (currently hovering way short of our original 90-minute goal, at only 74 minutes), and pretty much all of the scenes have been cut and edited to craig’s ultimate satisfaction.

additionally, we still have color correction, digital matte work (i can now proudly stake my claim as a digital matte artist), music and audio to finish up. once all of the final elements come together in the next couple months, we will be able to finally put this canine to rest and begin to focus on what is next for 505 films.

our current target release period for the film is sometime around the holidays at the end of this year. maybe. that’s not even close to a promise. craig’s *original* plan from the very beginning was to ideally premiere the film on the one year anniversary of when production wrapped (today). yeah, obviously that won’t be happening. the fault doesn’t really lie with anybody. we’re just working our damndest to make sure that what we present to the public is actually worthy of your attention and respect.

we’re just about there. it just requires some patience.

of which, i lack. horrendously.

since this film is quite possibly one of the more monumental undertakings of my life thus far, understandably it (and the experiences surrounding it) have become a benchmark by which i measure myself and where i am now. what i come up with is… kinda depressing.

as i have more than bellyached in writing before on this site, round about since january, this has been a terrible year (post-production for loe aside). after we wrapped shooting on the film, that intense let down feeling of not having anything more to do has enveloped myself (and to some degree, craig as well – in my humble opinion, anyways) and has remained ever since.

there are two places that i see. the first is of a happy person, very much enamored with the woman he is living with, and having a total blast for the most part while he seeks out his dream of making a movie. i see an independent. a pathfinder.

and then i see a loner. almost a failure. all that he had that made him happy is now gone. a shell of his former self. the high, like all, was short lived. i finally had found my utopia, and nearly an instant later, it was ripped from me. i knew all along that the joy ride had to end. i had no real choice in the matter. the stars had already been aligned.

i just wasn’t nearly enough prepared for the traumatic blow the path back down would be. damnit all, listen to how shitty this is. i can’t ever seem to hoist myself out of the shallow lake of pity i perpetually find myself drowning in. what the fuck is wrong with me? craig and i set out and accomplished something that a lot of people will never get the chance to do. we took a common dream, and built upon it; forging ahead and allowing for one moment in time the exposure to the awesomeness that comes when you dare to step out of line from the system, and blaze a frightening new trail of your own. there’s a lot that i should be happy about, and even more to express pride in.

so how come all i can focus on is how broken i feel?

all i know for certain is that in one year from now, i sincerely hope i am able to accept all the things that i presently do not, and that i have figured out what to do to find my own inner happiness.

as much i hate to admit it, it is a personal journey that i will probably need to face alone.

but in the meantime, here’s a drink to all the people who supported our psychotic adventure, whether they were parents, good friends, or strangers we met along the way.

it couldn’t have been done without you.

now… let’s all do it again. ;-)

i clutch the wire fence until my fingers bleed

2005-09-17T00:52:00.000-07:00

once again, a large portion of the dreams that i have been able to remember lately involve airports in some way. there are two possible reasons that i feel this may be the case.

one – the obvious dissection. i am supposed to travel somewhere. where exactly this phantom location may be i know not, but in time i suppose some kind of sign as to where i am to end up will make itself known.

two – the deeper analysis. my subconscious is totally pissed that i am passively approaching life and wants me to make some major changes. if this is the case, too the fuck bad. my subconscious can go kiss my pasty white ass since i don’t really feel inspired to do much of anything with my life lately except for veg out in front of my new laptop since that is the only thing i have demonstrated moderate success at doing.

i have recently (as of last evening) come to the eventual conclusion that i positively hate working on friday nights. thankfully, i didn’t have to work all the way until closing last night – i was scheduled to head out a bit earlier than that.

the main reason for this attitude is that the majority of our clientele on friday nights happen to be couples out on dates. happy couples. couples that seem to be in love.

people, try to realize something here. it’s not like i sit in my room and intentionally conjure up images of romantic partners kissing and having a good time together in order to make myself feel like total shit. really, i don’t.

i don’t *need* to.

i see it firsthand for eight fucking hours every friday night at work. one after the other. it never ends. at some point, you really want to leap up onto the counter and scream at everybody to just go the fuck get a motel room already and to leave us the shit alone.

if i were given a dollar for every customer that made out with somebody in my line, i’d be a richer motherfucker than bill gates. i’d probably be richer than sam Walton if he were still alive, and his fortune wasn’t spread out amongst his offspring.

hell, the one couple alone that couldn’t seem to do one damned thing without sucking each other’s faces off (and i mean, anything – reaching into their wallet, ordering their drinks, handing me money, receiving their change, taking their drinks, walking out of the store – fucking revolting) would have given me enough money to drive away in a ‘59 cadillac while giving them the finger in stereo.

where the shit am i supposed to meet people? clubs just aren’t my scene. i can’t fucking stand clubs. all of the clubs within a reasonable distance of me all charge extremely high fuck cover fees, and that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll even meet anybody one you’re in there. that’s just to get in the fucking door.

so where else is there? the book store? anytime i’m in there, pretty much everybody is deeply buried into some novel or other tome. people don’t go to bookstores to get approached by complete strangers. they go there precisely the fuck to get away from all the loser nobodies that encroach upon their personal space everywhere else to begin with.

community college? what the fuck would i study? i don’t even want to study anything right now. why enroll in a class simply to meet people if i know that ultimately i don’t give two fucks about the academic aspect of the course? once again, i’d be paying a fee just to simply be around people in the first place.

so what the fuck does that leave me? online? 99% of the people i know via the internet live at least one hundred miles away, minimum. the rest of them are pretty much spread out across the entire fucking country or way the fuck on the entire other coast. no matter where i go, it always seems to be the wrong place regardless.

all i do then is stand at work like a zombie, hopelessly disgusted by the endless amount of affection being demonstrated before me countless numbers of times. it is enough to drive a sane person completely bonkers to the point of shitting on their own belongings and eating out of a sack of garbage. there’s no way to block the torment; i have a front row seat, dead center. and there is always an encore.

tonight, i will go to bed without having somebody to kiss, or even hug. damnit, nobody is even willing to hold my hand. there is so little contact in my life right now, i don’t even feel like i fucking exist. the only time i actually do feel anything is when i punch my desk or the wall out of frustration or anger. that at least provides some kind of tactile stimulation.

damn it all to fuck. i hate friday nights.

horizon to horizon, memory written on the wind

2005-09-13T00:40:00.000-07:00

understandably, i have been rather preoccupied with my latest acquisition.

oh. my. God.

it is incredible how good it feels to have a working computer that does precisely what i ask it to. now, if i can just convince the new anti-spam feature of my inbox to not classify *all* incoming mail as spam, i’ll be set.

so, yeah. i went for the system that i mentioned in my previous post. securing the loan was easier than i thought, and not only was i able to tack the cost of my new laptop onto the end of my auto loan, i was able to refinance and get a lower interest rate for my car payments! awesome.

it’s kinda funny that now that i have a working computer that i am able to rely on, it has been a full week since my last post. she has enjoyed pretty much all of my free time over the past few days. this whole last week, i have been annoyed at having to go into work since it robs precious time away from me that would rather be spent playing around on the new lappy. of course, since my job happens to provide me income to *pay* for said notebook computer, i suppose that it is a necessary evil.

i’ve worked a few morning shifts in the past couple days, and i re-assert my absolute hatred for waking up early in the day. the few times that i was scheduled recently for eight am shifts, my body actually felt physically ill at being awake at so early a time. and despite having sufficiently large bowls of kix for breakfast each day, i somehow manage to end up feeling like a starving peasant that has had little to feast upon over the course of his life. yet, and here is the kicker – both times i ended up supremely hyper for the entire eight hour period of which i was at work. since kix doesn’t have a whole lot of sugar in it, I am at a loss to explain why I was so active. somebody care to explain to me the logistics of such a situation? either i am bi-polar, or some funky shit be going down.

as usual, my dreams lately have been incredibly vexing and leave me in a confused state as i continue to blindly figure out what reality actually might be. considering how the actual flow of time decided to accelerate a bit more over the past couple weeks, i am starting to worry about what might be up. yesterday morning, as i lay in bed contemplating how i had to actually drag my sorry ass up and about, the hour of bullshit time that i had padded into my schedule seemed to disappear in a little less than ten minutes. other people that i have spoken to seem to agree that time is going by at an alarmingly faster rate, and yesterday at work i nearly gave one of my bosses a heart attack when i mentioned to her that two hours had elapsed since one particular conversation we had been having earlier. she had even warned me about not jinxing the fact that the day was going by like it practically didn’t exist, and yet it still managed to pass with hardly anybody catching up to it.

lately… there have been these extremely odd… occurrences. i’m not even really sure what an appropriate term for them might be, but i’ve been racking my brain to come up with something adequately cool. I’ll probably settle on “temporal convergences.” if quantum science and advanced physics are someday able to establish unquestionable evidence regarding these experiences, i ask that you inform them that i already came up with a badass name for them.

the best way that i can describe it is sort of like an out of body experience coupled with massive déjà vu. essentially when it strikes (at random, of course), for a moment, i feel as if i am connected with myself in other periods of time when i have felt the same way or will feel the same way. it’s not just a normal sense of “i’ve felt like this before;” more so it is rather like if i closed my eyes, i would not be able to tell you what year i was currently existing in. is there such a thing as telekinetic time travel? i’m not sure.

specific examples might help. the other day, i was enjoying a shower, and i closed my eyes for a moment. the window was open to help deal with the accumulating steam, and a gentle but assertive breeze made its way into the room and sent a chill through my body. i froze for a moment, feeling as if i were unable to move, and i was strongly reminded of this one time way back in high school when we were living in redondo beach, and a cold breeze blew into the bathroom that i was at the time showering in. now, i know fully well that pretty much anywhere that different pressurized pockets of air exists will experience wind and breezes and the like, but this particular breeze (as it felt in both times) had a certain quality to it. is it crazy to tell you that it seemed like these two breezes felt as if they had a personality?

basically it felt like i was back in the first instance of this memory, as if it were happening for the first time. way more than simple déjà vu. this was some kind of wierdass wormhole through time shit, something like what was demonstrated in donnie darko. i guess my mind has finally cracked to the point where i am incorporating elements of fictional motion pictures into my reality. who knows? i’ve always thought to a degree that i am probably just some psychotic whacko… maybe this is evidence that i truly am fucked up in the head.

i dunno. the strange thing is, my friend nick up in the city has been having some odd experiences as well. he has commented to me that on more than one occasion, it seemed as if his surroundings dissolved from summer to fall, literally before his eyes. what with the tsunami and katrina, time speeding out of control, and now these odd situations… maybe the rapture has commenced.

after all. craig did predict that the beginnings of the end of the universe would be after i finally got laid. i’m starting to think he may have been correct about that.

i mean, hell. i finally have a sweet-ass computer again.

*knocks on wood, and then locks the door to go hide*

take a page from the red book, keep them in your sights

2005-09-06T02:28:00.000-07:00

i’m in love.

and she costs fourteen hundred dollars.

twelve hundred after the mail in rebates.

today (the 6th), i’m gonna head on over to the credit union and try for an addition to my auto loan so that i can then cruise to the local fry’s and pick up a new electronic paperweight… a 2.0ghz - 1gb ram - 100gb hd - 128mb ati radeon - 15.4” widescreen ultrabright hp zv6000 seven and half pound paperweight, to be exact.

excitement wells.

knowing my luck with computers this year, this could end up proving to be a phenomenally ridiculous mistake. but, we’ll see…

on sunday morning, before i woke up at around noon, i had some vividly detailed dreams. however, since i didn’t make any real effort to concentrate on committing these images to memory, they were quickly lost, and at this point, i can remember only that i initially remembered them extremely well. there was an immense amount of specificity that still lingered in my mind even after my brain rudely snapped back into consciousness, but all of that information hastily vanished. i totally hate that. i remember that i remembered the dreams, but i can’t remember any particulars about those dreams. talk about a mind fuck.

unlike monday morning’s dreams, during which i dreamt that i was a drummer posing as a guitar player in my friend’s band that long ago went defunct, and then later found myself playing the roll of a gigolo who provided much needed love to sad and lonely women.

since craig was in town this weekend (as well as last weekend), masato, craig and i took the opportunity to go over a couple of sequences in land of entrapment (loe) and see what all might need further improvement. we also held an official 505 films pre-production meeting for phonies, the screenplay that i scribbled out some time ago, and began brainstorming again to see if we could possibly salvage a phoenix from the ashes. it wasn’t actually until masato had left and craig was in the bathroom after he and i had tossed some potential storylines back and forth when my mind was blindsided by a remarkable epiphany. hopefully by alluding to it, i am not forever jinxing myself with a curse over this particular project, but i really do feel as though the immense amount of struggle that i suffered with this particular film concept may finally have reached an end. for months, there has been this tremendously ominous cloud that hovered over me and prevented anything productive to become of what i had initially started, and for once it appears as if my muse was able to manage her way through the mire in order to provide me with some insight long overdue.

which pleases me greatly, because frankly it had been the bane of my existence. now i just need to get my act together and pen a new draft of my opus and see if we actually have a workable film to shoot on our hands.

but then of course comes the question of money. to be continued…

over the last several months, i have almost desperately been trying to hang out with people more and more. thankfully, it has finally begun working. in the past week or so, i have gotten to hang out with a bunch of friends and associates a bit more often than usual – and the difference in my attitude has of course been incredible. as i keep saying, i feed off the energy of people, so any chance i have to hang out with others is a welcome change from the doldrums of just sitting in my room and moping about the futility of it all (which admittedly actually does have some degree of merit in the end). i think what i really need after all is a fully active social life in order to be happy. enjoying the company of friends really does affect me in strongly positive ways.

mind you, i do enjoy my own personal space and time as well. even if i do eventually end up with a significant other of the female persuasion, one thing that is essential is that i still retain the freedom to set aside a portion of the day/week that grants me the opportunity to simply exist on my own for a while. that may not seem to be clearly conveyed through my posts, since normally about all i am capable of doing is whining about how i am so depressingly alone, but i do actually cherish the down time every now and then.

just not several *years* of it. sadly, the quest still continues. i’m not even sure if it will ever come to an end. perhaps i am one of those people who is meant to journey forever by himself, only i am not quite aware of it just yet. i definitely am hoping that this is in fact not the case, because i honestly do not feel like i could handle that kind of situation. but i suppose that truthfully, if certain destinies are unalterable and forever must be as such, then i wouldn’t really have any sort of choice in the matter. regardless, it sure would be nice to get some kind of concrete resolution handed down to me firsthand regarding this issue.

it would seem though still, that is a bit too much to ask for at the moment.

well i'm taking my time, just moving along

2005-09-01T17:22:00.000-07:00

sometimes it seems as if the universe goes out of its way to make you notice something. as i have mentioned/complained about before, i usually am not all that skilled at picking up on subtle clues being tossed at me from the swirling force that is life, but every now and then, there are certain things that tend to stand out.

usually, it has something to do with music. in the last couple weeks, there have been certain songs that have gone to the trouble of making themselves be noticed for some reason or other. for a while, anytime i hopped in my car, either before or after work, at some point during my commute the song “joker” by the steve miller band would find its way into the rotation on the radio. since i would be in transit at varying different times throughout the day, this coincidence sometimes felt like there was something a bit more to it. do you ever get that feeling? like perhaps the “random” events happening in your life aren’t really as random as they may first seem if you weren’t paying all that much attention?

the same went with the song “foreplay/long time” by boston. lately it has been “t.n.t.” by ac/dc, and “china grove” by the doobie brothers.

i’m not quite too sure what exactly i’m supposed to be getting from these songs. you have to understand that i take my music very seriously. it’s one of the ways that i feel that God actually does speak to me. some people are skilled at being able to blindly open a bible up to a random page, place their finger on top of a verse, and it turns out to be exactly the verse that speaks to their current issues. i have never been able to do this. usually whenever i attempt this, i tend to end up at some random passage discussing how such and such was begatting so and so. it just doesn’t work for me.

but normally, i can pose a question to God, turn on a radio or a random mp3 playlist, and get floored by how most of the selections seem to have personal messages directed straight at me. so when one or two particular songs tend to show up more and more in my life without my conscious doing, i have to stop and wonder what exactly that might mean.

there are usually other things as well. just yesterday, on my way to work, i began to contemplate how most of the cars with a certain color were standing out to me. what was it about that color that seemed to be drawing my attention more so than others? is there some significance to it, or just something that happened to be calling more notice to itself than usually might be?

nowhere more evident is this type of analytical scrutiny present than in my dreams. the number of references and items of note that stand out in my dreams usually seem to do so for specific reasons, even if i may not ever actually figure out what they are. certain locations and settings keep cropping up, and some actions or events tend to repeat themselves throughout the years. oftentimes i wonder if these are just memories of some original dream, or if there is a deeper reason as to why my subconscious dug the material out again for re-examination.

overall, the problem is that i tend to overanalyze stuff and try to find meaning in anything. while i do believe that everything happens for a reason (even the small, seemingly insignificant stuff), sometimes searching for an answer tends to only yield more questions, if anything else. at some point, it just becomes a huge game of second guessing everything, and ultimately, i spend way too much time hunting for clues in things that may in fact be meant to remain as complete mysteries. the final frustration comes when i struggle to identify that which is intentionally shrouded in eternal mystery, and that which i am supposed to pick at to gleam hidden insight upon.

i’d comment more about it, but frankly it’s starting to make my head hurt again.

sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, i guess.

smoke if ya got’em.

the year turns and the world yearns

2005-08-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

frankly, i am amazed that i have been able to stick with this blog for as long as i have. two years ago, when i first registered on blogger and started blabbering all over the web, i didn’t really know or think that i would have kept up with it for any extended length of time. at the moment it had just seemed like something cool to do, since a bunch of my pals already had blogs in some form online, and i had experimented with online journaling a few years prior.

so, yeah. today marks the two year anniversary of the very first time i posted on here.

one year ago, i was typing out a post in monica’s apartment, looking after her cat macy while she was off at work. craig and i didn’t have any film production going on that day, and after monica had left for coronado that morning, i fell back asleep and rested as much as one can when a psychotic cat is roaming about, knocking shit over in a feeble attempt to draw attention to herself. around noon, i slithered out of bed, made my way over to the computer, and relished in the fact that i had recently gotten sex as i began contemplating that my stay in albuquerque would be coming to an end relatively soon (a bit later than originally planned, but nonetheless very close on the horizon).

two years ago, i scribbled a post on blogger just before heading to work. i was scheduled for the night shift in the a/v office at the hotel, and at this point in time i was deep into hating my job. the cool boss had been fired (in a very *uncool* way) and replaced with this lanky creep who looked kinda like a dopey bird from an old warner brothers cartoon. it was a slow night at work, just myself in the office, so i spent the better part of the evening making another blog post and farting around the property listening to various tunes on my iPod.

a lot of shit has managed to happen in the last twenty four months. hell, in the last twelve, even. since getting back from albuquerque, i managed to completely ruin my credit rating and sit in debt for five months, watched as the church i used to belong to self-destructed and began wasting away, taken up a new job serving coffee to yuppies and hot looking jailbait, realized i was in love with a woman, declared this love to said woman, been rejected over such love for said woman, gotten over said woman, had two computers die on me at round about the same time, write a screenplay that is in bad need of major editing, and through it all, continue to post online with more or less the same amount of zany insight i typically have when it comes to the bizarre cloud that is reality.

there has actually been some amount of good over the span of the last year, albeit sparse and infrequent. i guess the world is just having an off year for now. murphy would be most proud of how things are going.

mostly, this site has brought me a lot of good since i started it seven hundred thirty days ago. i have met tons of good people through this blog; friends like becca, spring, k-bear, hajra/naranca, CheR, cogent, jen, wyntir, alispain, phil, katriana, kelly, sean, mandy, lois, and many many others. some of them are no longer posting or even online, a lot of them continue to post regularly. all of them have made a significant difference, and their friendships have been greatly valued.

usually, i am quite known for starting grandiose projects, dedicating extreme devotional concentration to them for a short period of time, and then walk away as my interest in the completion greatly wanes to the point where i have no further ambition to see my work through. for some reason, this blog has been different. importantly, it is quite possibly the first major piece of work that i have started and remained more or less faithfully committed to. just about every day, i check in to see who has commented and what they had to say, as i absolutely live for comments as a means of validating what i do. while that may be the wrong reason, nonetheless it continues to draw me back and force my brain to come up with something to proclaim to the world via this digital medium.

hell, even in my darkest moments where i feel there is absolutely no hope left in the universe (see the post entitled ragged lines of ragged gray), the one thing that does keep me going, corny though it may seem, has been this blog. it has been my refuge and sounding board for when i needed to get something off my chest, or felt that the world would somehow benefit from digesting my mental diarrhea.

my condolences if the above sounded cheesy in any way.

for now, my plan is to pretty much sally forth and carry on with this thing. perhaps someday in the future, i may decide that this blog no longer benefits me or anybody else in any way, and will abandon it like so many of the other projects i started that now waste away in unrealized potential.

but let’s all hope that is a long time from now. ;-)

fubar

2005-08-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

fucking bloody hell.

i'm telling you, this is the year of SUCK.

my good pal becca, who desperately wanted another child finally got her wish with a daughter that she delivered yesterday, but it seems there are some complications and the baby is now in the ICU with blood clots on her brain or something.... becca hasn't posted a whole lot about it, but says the situation is not good.

i ask you strongly to go to her site, www.dasbecca.com and leave her some comment love.

at the very least, please say some prayers for her.