what a weekend. i would like to think it's not sleep deprivation that's causing my thumb to twitch a full half inch every 60 bpm's, and it's not the sunday night beers that's making my right eye ache.

on saturday the protest in boston was amazing! 25,000 of us to 50 of the prowar people - i hope to have pictures someday, as soon as the roll is finished, developed, and scanned. the march was surreal, yet it was *so good* to be surrounded with so many passionate, like-minded people. i found the prowar slogans / posters to be pretty childish and violent: "smoke saddam - not crack" was one of my favourites. my favourite anti-war poster was "W, is this war part of your faith-based initiative?" - at least the anti-war slogans were somewhat witty and thought out. the most moving part were the veterans from past wars who marched with us - if that doesn't send a statement, then what does? there were no arrests, and the weather was perfect. all in all, a spectacular success. i said to friend, we may be losing the invasion in iraq, but at least we seemed to be winning the war at home.

oh, and apparrently, if you don't support the war, you're a "commie" who should get a job. this i verified with at least 2 pro-war sources. a third declined to comment. i think he may have been homeless, though.

i ran into a crack / coke head on friday night after last call in mission hill. i'm sure there's a good blog in here somewhere, but all i can remember is telling him that c3p0 was probably into heroin, since he was all gold. i was really drunk.

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Pet names should be a punishable crime.

I recently started seeing an awesome girl. she's fun, she's arsty-fartsy and really laid back (no drama, ok?), and has the coolest hair i've seen in a while. but last night she developed a really bad habit. she called me "sweet pea". it was cute at first, but then i realised; i had just been a victim of a pet name. my oily shredded rag that i call my dignity fell out of my ass and into my sock. hoping it was a one time deal, it unfortunately wasn't. on our way out this morning, i was victimised yet again. same name too. when will it end? rather than bring it up with her, which i should, and well...we'll see, it's much easier to be passive aggressive these days - what with street-beatings, gay republicans, and the polish - and bitch about it here.

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Drama......cripes.

there's a lot of things that annoy us in life. for instance, when i go to drop the kids off in the pool at work, i often have to halt the brown baby boy mid travel because someone comes in to the bathroom. sounds weird, but the bathroom is one urinal, two stalls, and complete silence. the place is like a sound-proofing chamber. i swear you can hear the bacteria growing in that bathroom. so, if you're sharing the space, the other person can hear everything, and i mean EVERYTHING! highly annoying. oh, web sites about alarm clocks and pet rocks are annoying. so are hangnails, street-beatings, evil sarah at last call, bad art, and war. but most of all, the most annoying and tiresome thing has to be drama. i am sick to fucking death of drama. i used to surround myself with it. it was so exciting. he said, she said - oh it was so great being mopey, and quoting smiths songs that applied to the situation - feel sorry for me, pay attention to me, i can't believe he did that, why is she like that, blah blah blah fucking blah. heaven knows we're miserable now. but then i went to amsterdam. i took a week off from the boston scenesters - and it was great! no little black haircuts, not a little pocket-mod (thanks grish) in sight, not one (well, a couple) man purse to be seen. i realised that i, in my head, am a picture of perfect mental stability. i found serenity in half-pints of fresh heineken, and peace in stumbling all sauced up past the anne frank house, talking about her diarrhea in the attic. i noticed that no-drama is super cool. i don't have problems, i'm not crazy....but the rest of the world is fucked! Word up!! when i got back, the drama attempted to start again.....but i was now prepared. instead of the chocolate flavoured dignity-free guilt shake i'd have for breakfast, i now replaced it with a healthy bran-brick of fuck-it-all. 'oh crap, what do i do, i feel so guilty, i think i'm gonna cry, where's my velvet journal?' was quickly replaced with, 'dude, you're nuts. seek professional prozac.' yes, living the drama-free life is the life for me. i couldn't be bothered. it's all about avoidance, and pretending to be at least a 19 year old at age 26. let's see how long i can keep it up.

who's up for some PBR?

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time to take inventory of my time in boston. a 3.5 year relationship with what i thought was my future wife that bit the dust after i moved here, the coke-heads i've encountered, dancing in the rain to plastic bertrand in a s&s parking lot with grish because we didn't want to stay at the party, my cubicle job, a recital that doesn't seem to be happenning anymore, because i wouldn't record the girl who's putting it on having an orgasm, holly, nina, nice sarah, julia, kimberly, driving from florida to boston with rimmer, start!, mod night, 80's love night, the smiths, the cure, *joy division*, wire, le tigre, my one man band, experimental electronic sound collages, being rude crass vulgar and now drunk, being entwined and lost within each other to an entire new order cd, refusing what's-her-face of "coke, life sex and babies", my awesome and gigantically pregnant sister, brian's good ear, beardo saving me from making not too much of an ass of myself, binge drinking all too often with the most critical, emotionally fucked up, and best friends i've had in a long time, norad's pretend brain drugs, 60-80% bullshit, robin's silent monologues, waking up at 6am to go to planned parenthood before i have to give a presentation at work 2 hours later, athena, (my perfect little goddess), dancing all night, twice a week for the past 5 months with busy little athena....being dangerously and excitingly close to suicide for 10 months, nina's beautiful, laughing eyes in november, dancing to peter shilling, and observing silverback gorillas one sunday for three hours, all the time, thinking about humanity, evolution, and how much i would love to touch her heart, overcoming the past, overcoming, overcoming, overcoming, and living like i have never before.....

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give me pabst. now.

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last night at start! was awesome. athena and i jumped around drunk, and the music was the best it's been in a while, despite the couple of hip hop songs, and the extreme lack of electro. but the thing that bothers me, and is something that i need to get over is putting too much into something that's not giving back in the same way. to cut your losses and move on is tough, and to do it in a highly mature way is even harder. having been on both the recieving and giving end of such a mess i know that it sucks at first, but gets better as time goes on. christ, i have to thank norah again for the virtual prozac she gives me. these chicks help too. they made everything make sense. well....i'm off to enjoy the nice weather and pretend everything's OK....you're OK....OK.

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there's something wrong about this. i'm sitting in my corporate cage, cubicle, sweet cubicle, eating some extra frosted baby shower cake, and watching a live feed of the population decrease in baghdad. it's creepy, there are bombs, explosions, and gunfire. oh, the feed has sound too. the guy next to me that i work with, is getting all excited cheering, and turning up the volume, so it seems as if the tax-funded munitions are going off down the hall. this is totally creepy. morrissey's attempting to drown it out, but to no avail. 'louder than bombs' he is not. bush can officially be tried as a war criminal......yeah......

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so my mother got me a a desktop calendar for work this past christmas. the theme is 'don't sweat the small stuff', by richard carson. he's a cool guy, he wrote a book called 'taming your gremlin' which is really good. but this calender is something that does not gel with my super-hip, and comically bitter mindset. for example entries like:

"smile at children more often! you'd be surprised how much they understand, and can in turn make you feel like a child again."

w.t.f.? yeah, i'll smile at children....the next thing i know i'm in a paddy-wagon getting the snot beaten out of me by the boston PD.
So I had almost lost faith in the calendar, until yesterday, who's entry seemed somewhat interesting:

"Sometimes, when you're feeling a bit overwhelmed or burdened by your responsibilities, imagine what it will be like when you no longer have those supposed burdens to complain about."

hmmm.....did carson go of the deep end on March 20th, and is quietly suggesting murder-suicide?

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weird,

looks like under the U.N. charter Bush is now a war criminal for invading Iraq. something tells me there won't be a trial, though. jesus.....

but it's the little 'Unknown Pleasures' that keep my head up - I got to send out my joy division solution to another MATLAB using engineer yesterday, a tech doc describing the combination of two different license types:

...If, for example, the INCREMENT line for the USER_BASED (Group) product MATLAB that is assigned to users icurtis, shook, smorris and bsumner reads as follows;

INCREMENT MATLAB MLM 13 01-jan-0000 4 CCDD5325P14938BEL316 USER_BASED \

-Then you would make the options file (MLM.opt) read as follows:

GROUP Division icurtis shook bsumner smorris

INCLUDE "MATLAB Key=CCDD5325P14938BEL316" GROUP Division....

i guess that makes me a post-geek.

Next time it's a rainy morning, try listening to the smith's 'william, it was really nothing'....made my day.

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war.....hua....good god....what is it good for?

absolutely nothing

yeah, except maybe more of a choice of what to goggle at the box at prime-time. hmm....will and grace, or the war on channel 4? i think i'll write some music, or wait for the simpsons to come on again. last night at mod night DJ vinny even had some awkward moments, a request came in to play 'killing an arab' by the cure, followed immediately by the clash's 'rock the casbah.' har har har. that's as political as the scenesters get, i guess. either way, it was surreal dancing to joy division and blur, drinking a beer, smokin' a butt in the bar, while in the background there's a TV showing saddam "defying little bush". good god, what is it good for? lower gas prices? yet another puppet government? enough oil for one more truck commercial? yes, that's right people, if TV and the US gov. has taught me anything, it's that tearing up the woods in your massive cock-mobile is worth a few thousand "collateral lives". my big truck - built iraqi tough. i wonder if in 10 years we'll be invading Syria, to steal their solar power, because the US is dangerously low on wind machines and ethanol for our cars.....prolly not, but hey, you never know.

"i'll take peace with a shred of dignity to go....super size it, please."
"ok, would you like freedom fries with that?"

give me a f*cking break...

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well, due to the nice weather boston experienced yesterday, i was able to drive my crap-ass 95 neon around with the windows open, obnoxiously blasting some tunes, making the 17 mile commute with MA.drivers a little less craptacular. i caught some strange looks from other drivers....or at least i thought i did. i was stopped at a light, and as human league's 'don't you want me baby' segued into 'regret' by new order, this lady in the birdshit green taurus next to me lowers her sun glasses to give me a quick, confusing glance above the gold frames. haven't you ever seen anyone mouthing lyrics on the drive home before? then it hit me....the human league, the smiths, the cure.....my musical tastes have sincerely come out of the closet this winter, and weren't prepared for the public scorn that commuters are so easily capable of dealing out (commuters (myself included) are swift with their arbitrary actions, both with middle fingers of justice and expert racecar driver judgement of fellow motorists.), now that open window driving season is upon us. so i guess it happened so slowly that i never even saw it coming. first there was the occasional smiths song or two in august, breaking through the thick curtain of joy division that i wrapped around my 'tortured, black velvet soul'. in september the cure managed to take over the now 7 or 8 smiths songs in the mix. well, by february not only was new order having it's way with me, but human league, nena, blondie, soft cell, and (dear god) even depeche mode had managed to creep in to the playlist; wearing a striped shirt, daisy dukes, and a bushy moustache. it was around the 3 mile mark that "just can't get enough" by depeche mode had come on, and well....i just did "have enough." i turned of the radio for a minute, cleared my head, thinking about ladytron, miss kitten, and even DJ assault, trying to talk some sense into my rather flamboyant musical taste. it sat, it listened, it thought. then it got up in defiance, and said, "this is the way I live my life!". with that, general public's 'tenderness' came on, and there was nothing i could do, but remember the days of metallica, or throwing the old pig-skin around to black sabbath. yes, things would be different from now on. i'm here. i'm not queer. but goddam...is that morrissey blasting out of my car windows?

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okay, i'm not as anti-social as i hope to be one day, but if there's one thing that turns my stomach, it's small-talk concerning the damn weather. every time i'm out having a smoke at work one of my co-workers has to mention the weather. sorry, but i choose silence over the daily comments about how friggin' cold it is, or how we're all ready for spring. i hear the phrase, "boy, am i ready for spring" more times than my own name at work. at least keep it down to once a week. let's have allotted time to discuss the weather as a company. we'll schedule a conference room, enough to fit all the smokers, and start with a pie chart or something. "okay, so...let me get a hands-up, who's 'ready for spring'?".

Actually, what i'd really like to discuss with these people is their crippling lonliness, and social ineptitude - the underlying reasons about why they talk about the weather. i hear subtext - maybe it's my love of dramatic theatre, or maybe i'm just really friggin bored, but when craig from sales takes a drag from his camel light and says in a robotic voice, "boy....spring would be nice right now. i'm sick of the snow" i hear: "boy.....a hug from a man-father would be nice right now. i'm sick of my wife." c'mon, people? no one cares about the goddam weather! it's there! you can't change it! let's talk about why you wet the bed last week! sheesh!

oh, and it's finally warming up in boston! thank god, cause boy am i ready for spring!

- update! there was a break in the monotony. i was outside, not talking about the weather when an atmospheric comment made by a co-worker definitely revived the idea that small-talk can be unexpectantly avant-garde! he farted! out loud!

we, of course, ignored the 'comment', not talking about how methane being realeased into the open air is still a 'change in the weather'.

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