People I Know

I've been digging through my own posts adding tags to them. I found the old avatar jobs that I did and decided to do so again:

Shari & Michael
Here's Shari and Michael. Michael is a nobleman and Shari is out shopping by the Pantheon. The lamb can be taken as a friend or a sacrifice. Shari will probably take it as a friend.



Aasa
Here's Aasa at a Ren Fair. I gave here a mini dragon that'll eat you if you're mean to her. I wanted to find a easel, but it wasn't available.



Shaun & Lucia
Here's my roommate and his girlfriend. He's a the gym ready to kill Brian if he shoves the rules in our face again. Lucia is in Venice. There, happy Lucia?

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Joe
Shaun & I recently caught up with our old friend Joe. Since he's working on getting a job with the Madison Public Library, I put in this background. He also gets the zen hawk trainer look.



Kyle
Here's Kyle with his artist look and box of kittens; one more than he has. He also is working towards being a surgical tech.



Jess & Dave
Here's the Chicago Roommate Duo of Jess & Dave. The first posts, the second is going to get nailed with haiku if he doesn't get back to it. Jess is at a Red Sox game and Dave is Mr. Social, so he's the Fonz at a concert.



Jeremy & Tracy
Jeremy & Tracy will have the first child on June 6 (hint, hint). I couldn't get Jeremy right, so I put him in a motorcyle helmet. He'll be doing lots of riding soon. Tracy is a pharmacist, hence the equations. Jeremy gets Winston and Tracy gets Lucy.



Bleet & Melissa
Bleet and Melissa are kind of the anti-couple. They've never met, but I can tell. They had this argument, yet neither helped me out. Melissa had a good excuse. I'm not sure what Bleet's excuse was. Anyway, be careful of Melissa. She's in (or just back) from Hong Kong. Piss her off and it's off with your head by dragon. I couldn't get Bleet right, but I though an octopus would be a good companion for him.



Steve
And finally, we have Steve. He always, I mean ALWAYS has a Hawaiian shirt on. He's in Red Square because that's where I got to know him. Well, the Russian trip, part of which was in Red Square.



They're all smilling, even those in masks, because I love them all to pieces. If any of you gives me crap about that, I'll shove a hot poker up your ass.

Haiku Challenge

Back in May of 2004, I caught up with Dave at the Scottish Country Fair. I learned that he had a blog, which was kind of new to most people then. I decided to follow in the master's footsteps. Despite pledging to post one a day this year, he's managed just 11.

We'll be his personal trainers, so let's all give some inspirational haikus to Dave in his comments. Girlfriend time be damned!

Grace

Strange to find that Minnesota has a state photograph. I quite like it. A picture is worth a thousand words, so:

Exhaustion..... Gee, That Again

The last week or so has been quite a challenge. I've felt the anxiety, apathy, and the whirring of my mind. Funny thing is it has made old memories clearer.

My old (and Shaun's) friend stopped by on Sunday night. We haven't seen him for a couple of years and haven't talked to him in longer. It was great to catch up and then relive the old stories for high school. Actually, those are some of the few good ones. All the old things we talked about; the heavy-metal vomit parties, driving around aimlessly, breaking into the church; seemed quite vivid.

On the flip side, I get frequent headaches, small panic attacks, and loss of concentration. This morning, I woke up with complete apathy, tremors on my left side, and a feeling like someone was sitting on my chest. All this, I could do without.

One day at a time for now....

Top 10

I'll post something else later:

Puppet Love - Carter Burwell (from Being John Malkovich
Desert Search For Techno Allah - Mr. Bungle
Ryerson Vols - The Goose Island Ramblers
Easy Living - Billie Holiday
Blerwytirhwng - Super Furry Animals
New York City - The Jesus & Mary Chain
Black Star - Radiohead
Radiohead- The Talking Heads
Jesus Came From Outta Space - Supergrass

Six Of 'Em

I gots the tickets.

-------------------------------------------------------

Due to popular demand, I picked up two more. Yes, Bleet, one of the eight is for you.

A Place To Hide

Sometimes I like to think of places to go to be out of the way so I can just exist. I'm not sure how happy I'd actually be doing this, but it's a good daydream release. I've always thought of being near the Arctic Circle in winter as all the tourists would be gone and I may have the grudging respect and rancorous ridicule of being there when the sun is on the horizon during high noon.

So I found these out-of-the-way spots. Maybe Åsa would know something about a couple of these:

Tórshavn: 19,000 people on a series of islands of 48,000 between Norway and Iceland.

Åland: Kind of the same thing as above, but closer to larger places.

Falkland Islands: Free from invasion since 1982! Lots of sheep.

Vladivostok: Ok, this place has a lot of people, but is at the end of the line for the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The route itself is seclusion, with periodic tea and vodka breaks.

So there it is. I'm sure there's more when I find them.

Places of the Damned

There are places where we all go and turn into a sort of mindless zombie. Not a zombie looking for brains, but rather the zombie that is milling around with no purpose as no purpose is to be had. I call these such places Places Of The Damned! These are not places necessarily tied to consumerism since those places have purposes, however crass they may be. No, these are genuinely places that make us all look like 90-year old men with confused contenances and diapers full of yesterday's apple sauce. Here are the ones that I can think. Add more.

1. Airports!
2. Banks
3. Women's clothing stores (for men only)
4. Dry cleaners
5. Traffic jams (hopefully while in your car.)
6. High school

I know, I know, there are reasons to some of these (#3 to make girlfriend/wife happy, #4 to have clean clothes), but the milling part really applies. I added high school since it was a tremendous waste of time for me.

Add, damn it, add!

Autocrats

This is exactly why I loathe Hugo Chavez. When someone takes all of the power, this shit happens:

Less than 10 miles from Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's mansion in Harare — the largest private residence on the African continent — Cleophus Masxigora digs for mice. On a good day, he told me, he can find 100 to 200. To capture the vermin, he burns brush to immobilize them, then kills them with several thumps of a shovel. This practice has become so widespread in Zimbabwe that, as a Zimbabwean journalist informed me, state-run television has broadcast warnings against citizens setting brush fires. Masxigora began hunting mice to support (and feed) his wife and three children soon after Mugabe began confiscating thousands of productive, white-owned farms in 2000, a policy that has since led to mass starvation. Not long ago, Zimbabwe, the "breadbasket of Africa," exported meat and produced what was widely considered to be Africa's finest livestock. Today, Masxigora tells me that each mouse nets $30 Zimbabwe dollars, about 12 cents, which makes him a wealthy man in Zimbabwe. "This is beef to us," he told me in August.

Fish Fry

While I remember a fair bit of my dream, I'm not going to write but one part. It was too complicated and not translatable in words. At least not for my rudementary creative writing skills.

Anyway, I was standing in some line just off of State Street. A woman about my age turned around and asked where she could get fish, it being Fat Tuesday and all. I guess my dream mind confused Good Friday and Fat Tuesday, though they are related. I said some smart ass answer that I cannot remember. She wasn't impressed, so I then tried to think of a good place to get fish in downtown Madison. Outside of the expensive restaurants, is there?

Favorite Internet Video

Is he drunk? Nervous? Slow in the Head? Ask yourself...

Bullshit!

This is fucking ridiculous!

"This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

I'm Feeling Non-Sensical Today....

.... so here's some lyrics:

Every day, I get up and pray to Jah
And he decreases the number of clocks by exactly one
Everybody's comin' home for lunch these days
Last night there were skinheads on my lawn
Take the skinheads bowling
Take them bowling
Take the skinheads bowling
Take them bowling
Some people say that bowling alleys got big lanes
Some people say that bowling alleys all look the same
There's not a line that goes here that rhymes with anything
I has a dream last night, but I forget what it was
I had a dream last night about you, my friend
I had a dream--I wanted to sleep next to plastic
I had a dream--I wanted to lick your knees
I had a dream--it was about nothing

"Take the Skinheads Bowling" by Camper Van Beethoven

A Good Test

I sat for three minutes trying to remember Wyoming. Who the fuck cares about Wyoming? Here's the test.

Ah, Precious Stereotypes!

So I was leaving the post office after picking up the mail and I saw a 50-ish obese white man:

* wearing a tan trench coat
* with a bluetooth device in his here
* get into a Cadillac Escalade
* and drive away blaring Rush Limbaugh.

Sometimes it's sad seeing stereotypes confirmed because most of them aren't true.

Ah fat men and Rush Limbaugh....

Bad Recommendation

I just added "Hustle and Flow" to my Netflix queue. As every time I add a movie, Netflix recommends some more. They recommended "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" (uh, pass), "Animal", "G", "ATL", and .... "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London"????

This Could Get Ugly

I'm sincerely hoping everything works out ok, but I have a very bad feeling about this.

On a side note, Seymour Hersh has it down.

How Times Have Changed

So these days I cannot drink. The slow decline of my boozing began a handful of years ago as going out was not as fun and drinking more than a couple of beers made me feel groggy. I found that I had a better time if I just didn't drink. I staid awake the whole night out and didn't devolve into the Reverend Jim Ignatowski, and a surly one at that.

The begin of the end began last year as I ticked and jerked. My doctor changed medications on me and the new one didn't go well with alkyhawl. The final nail in the coffin was yet another change in medication and my doctor said "Nyet!" to any more drinking. That was no big deal to me, as I only desired a beer every so often.

The funny thing happened today, but I must back up a little. I had the whole (I mean every one plus my uncle) over for dinner for Frank's birthday and to meet my new roommate, Stanley. My father brought over a six pack of beer. I still have a lot left over from when Shari and Michael visited and the last time the family came over for dinner.

Today when I opened the fridge, I realized that I need to rearrange the contents to fit everything so the eggs and orange juice wouldn't fall out upon the opening of the door. I saw the remenants of the six pack and said *scough* "More beer!?!"

The me of five years ago would have bitch slapped the me of today.