Lester Flatts, Earl Scruggs, and Drugs

Once long ago I heard Lester Flatts and Earl Scruggs do a song on "The Beverly Hillbillies."  The song, "Can't Have Your Kate, and Edith Too" is about a guy who, clearly, wants to be with two ladies at once.  Maybe not at the exact same time; I don't know what kind of things Lester and Earl were into.  But in its way it's a timeless song, hitting on the nature of love and relationships.

I've been having panic attacks, bad ones.  I've also been depressed for quite a while.  So yesterday I went to the doctor and she put me on Paxil.  Now, I've never taken any kind of drug to treat depression.  I suppose I always thought that I didn't need them.  Maybe I should have taken them years ago; I don't know.  In any case, I'm on them right now, as I type this.  On top of the Paxil the doctor also gave me Adivan, which is much stronger than I anticipated.  I took half a Paxil and an Adivan yesterday afternoon, and more or less lost the day to a haze.  Today as an experiment I took only the half tablet of Paxil.  I still feel spacey.  Maybe it is "hangover" from yesterday, maybe it's the pill, maybe it's just me.  I don't know.  At least I slept last night.

Back to Kate and Edith and Lester and Earl; these pill make me wonder if I'm in a similar situation.  Specifically, can I have my brain (which we'll call "Kate") and my medications ("Edith," if you will)?  Can I still be the same person I was once I've altered my brain chemistry?  I don't know.

I think the depression really took hold when my cousin Ryan died.  He was like a brother; we were raised together, often in the same room.  We went through the same crazy family and home situations.  He was only eight months younger than I am, and he died from a massive heart attack back in November, right on his living room floor.

This event changed me.  It made me sad and angry and bitter.  I was angry because he died, having never heeded any advice about diet and exercise and stress.  I was so angry that he died that I didn't grieve for him, not until just a few nights ago.  It was long overdue, and it helped me.  Not only in getting over a death, but in learning to let go of misplaced anger.  To deal with things.  I'm very slowly learning to deal with things.

And now I'm on Paxil, and my fear is that it will just bury the things I haven't dealt with yet, but need to deal with to get out of my self-imposed mental cages.  In exchange, I'll be in a better mood and not suffer panic attacks.  But at what cost?  A lot of the things that this drug treats are also aspects of my personality.  I'm quiet, reserved, almost painfully shy.  Will that change?  Will it change my thoughts and attitudes towards social conventions and behavior, between right and wrong?  I just don't know.

I suppose that it is a risk I'll take, at least for the short term.  Maybe it is an important step in learning to let go of the idea of control, maybe it is a clean solution to not allowing myself to be happy, or maybe it's a huge mistake.  The only certain thing is that I can't remain the same person I always thought I was supposed to be.

Life is Hard

Sometimes, during the course of human events, something horrible happens to a person. Maybe a person does something horrible.  Most likely both, at some point or another.  I think there is a natural tendency to want to bury it, to hide it from the light of day in some dim recess of the mind, slated to be forgotten.  And there it will remain as the months and years and decades pile dust over it until it just sits, a vague semblance of its original form.  Maybe you can ignore it.  Maybe you can forget it altogether.  But it is waiting, just biding time.  Eventually you'll stumble across it, and all the distance you've gained from it will transform into inertia.

When it hits you, it hits you like a ton of bricks.

A lot of crazy things have been happening in my life.  For a while I allowed myself the luxury of believing external forces were at work.  That I was Good, and Evil was befalling me to test my mettle.  During these turbulent past few days, just last night, I realized that I am not Good.  I'm just a person, as weak and as thoughtlessly cruel as anyone else.  I don't feel like a bad person...just different.  A lot of things aren't as I thought, but I'm realizing that I have a much bigger role than I wanted to believe.  And I'm realizing that not dealing with events as they unfold is much worse than the alternative, because nothing can stay secret forever.

So there it is.  Maybe I've reached the gold standard of maturity, dealing with things no matter how much I don't want to and with more regard for the truth than for its possible consequences.  Sometimes it feels like self-sabotage.  I have to do the work all the same.  Whether it is with faith that things will work out in the end or with the idea that uncertainty is better than stagnation, it has to be done.

A big part of this, for me, is giving up the illusion of control.  The idea that I can guide the course of my own life, eliminating the things I want to forget, pretending or more likely working very hard to believe that things are going the way I wanted them to go, is false.  There are other people, and everyone in my life has some degree of influence.  Sometimes admitting it is hard, seeing how little control over your own life one actually has.  It is for me.

I almost feel like a different person.  It's a horrible realization, but it's more than just that.  It's an awakening. It's a realization that all the uncertainty I've fought against cannot be overcome.  It's also a rallying cry, a stark declaration that life is different now, and that growth and change are natural and inevitable.  A sign that you have to embark upon a dangerous and difficult path of learning greater truths about yourself, things you may not really want to know.

When it happens you have the choice to continue trying to ignore and pretend, or to take the journey, with all the dirt and pain and confusion that being human entails.  It's daunting.  It's necessary.  It's scary and exciting and hard work, a long trek through the twisted halls you've created in your own mind, a labyrinth filled with the monsters and pitfalls you've encountered or created.  It is a long, dark tunnel that, once entered, once made real, is real.  There is no turning back once you take the first steps. And as a wise person I happen to love says, "the only way out is through."

Welcome back, I guess

It's been a long time since I've written anything here.  A big part of that was knowing that people I knew were reading this.  I've always suffered from insecurity, and it felt too intrusive.  Too much like people would get to know the me that I hide from myself, running the risk of someone making me look at myself too closely.

Turns out I may have to get to know myself.  There are major changes coming over the next few months.  I don't want them, but I can't stop them.  I have to learn to cope.  I have to learn to live my own life.  I'm sad, and angry, but mostly just panicked.  And I can't keep everything to myself any longer.  It's too much.  I can't handle it alone, I need help.  My friends are there, even though I know I'm being terrible company.  I don't want to tax them too much, but I am so thankful for everyone that has listened without judging.  It made me realize I have more than I may have thought.

There is no such thing as fair.  That may be the first lesson I'm learning from what will become my new life.  I can't ignore past mistakes or the reality of the future.  I can look at it as a nightmare horrorshow, my life disintegrating before my eyes as I'm powerless to stop it.  Or I can look at it as an opportunity.  A chance to grow and change, maybe to be happy.  It is hard to see things that way.  So hard that panic keeps overwhelming me, leaving me almost crippled, unable to breathe, my heart beating wildly, blood pulsing so hard that I can hear it, a desperate surge singing through my ears.  But even from the bottom of a pit if you look up you can see the sky.  Maybe it is a very slim, very distant sky, a sky that will take weeks or months or years of scrambling to reach.  But it is there.  It has to be there.  I have to find it.  I have to believe that one day my hand will reach the edge of the pit, and that I'll be strong enough to lift my head back into the light and air.  That I'll be able to come back to the world.

So I'm going to try to open up a bit.  To not be so guarded, to not be afraid to know myself or to let others know me.  For so long I feel like I've been hiding, like I was afraid to connect with other people.  It's hard to be alone amongst your friends, to hide your thoughts and feelings from everyone.  I'm having trouble still; being this honest is hard for me.  I don't want to get into the gory details just yet, but I may.  No one has to read this, but I'm afraid I may have to write it.

Completely Awesome Blog Post

At work Friday during the meeting I had a great idea for a blog post. Something new, exciting and directly related to These Times We Live In. Sadly it happened during the Friday meeting, and I did not write it down immediately. Then a coworker I'll call "Don" started screaming about something crazy and I forgot all about it. Sorry about that.

Instead you get this update on the gutters - they are still under the weather (ha ha ha). Some dude is coming out tomorrow to give an estimate, but I'm leaning towards this woman named Joyce because she was nicer to me on the phone. I haven't heard back from Joyce yet; she was going to come by either yesterday or today. So I may get to meet Joyce in person.

In other coworker news, two of my coworkers have been dating in secret for months and months. They told me a month or so ago, and I hadn't caught on to them, mostly because I don't care what people do in their personal lives. All of my brainpower is tied up in other projects. They claim my not realizing they were a secret date couple is an indication that I have poor detective skills. I maintain that I wasn't applying my detective skills to them.

But I digress. As it turns out they are moving just down the street from me, which means that now I have more friends nearby, but no more time in the day. I often find myself trying to tell people that I would, in theory, like being friends. Sadly I can't fit it into my schedule. Work, the rigors of Dungeons and Dragons, hitting the range, playing guitar, tending to my 71st level wizard's auction house interests...all these things take time. I barely get any recreational reading done as it is, and then people want me to spend time with them?! What the hells, man? As the driving paragons of industry said of yore, "this dungeon ain't going to run itself, yo."

Truer words were never spoken.

Social Media and Stuff

Hello readers! It's been a really long time since I discovered people were reading my blog, freaked out about it and quit writing. A lot has happened since then. I know I could easily see how long it's been since I've posted anything here, but rather than push a button and find out I'm just going to say it's been years and years. Not a whole hell of a lot has happened since then, but I'll lay it out anyway.

First off, I live in the same house, work the same job, and drive the same car. That pretty much covers everything most Americans are interested in so I thought I'd get it out of the way up front. Everything is fine, except that we have to have the gutters repaired, as it rained inside our house yesterday. Tracy rigged a temp fix. She is a badass, and that's why I married her. I'm not looking forward to paying a guy to do this, but I don't even know if I could make myself climb a ladder that high. My house is really, really tall. So there's that.

The main thing that happened in the intervening time is that I quit smoking. It's been over six months now, but I had to sequester myself away for those six months for the sake of society at large. As it turns out if you smoke for years and years and then just quit it can make you irritable. I'm irritable to begin with, so it made me damnably cranky. Still, no one was folded, spindled or mutilated so I'm calling this a success, with a downside. The downside is that, as a smoker, you likely wind up with a bunch of friends that are smokers. So after you quit you have to stay away from your smoking friends in order to avoid temptation. So that sucks, especially if you only have three nonsmoking friends and one of them is Steve.

Anyway, I'm back. Tell your friends, tell your enemies, go tell it on the mountain.

I'm a quitter!

So, as you may know I cancelled my Facebook account last week. I was at work and having a bad day, and got one too many friend request, whiney post, whatever; I blew my top. "Up yours, Facebook!" And with that bold cry, I deleted my account. It was easy. It was also easy to reactivate. Deleting and reactivating your Facebook account is exactly like logging out then logging in again, with one extra "are you sure?" step thrown in.

Anyway, Facebook missed the hell out of me and welcomed me back with open arms and promises not to be such a butthole in the future.

The real reason, I suspect, that I quit Facebook is that I quit smoking. I count the official quit date as New Year's Day, as I had my last one on the Eve. That last one was the first in about four days; I had gotten sick and went on the lozenge. So I had my ceremonial last smoke New Year's Eve, more out of a sense of transition than actually wanting one. Then I woke up January 1 and went cold turkey.

Cole turkey meant, for me, no smoking, no more lozenges, pills, patches or gums. I'd tried all these things with some degree of failure in the past. There is a secret weapon. I did not have the secret weapon in the past. The secret weapon is actually wanting to quit.

So, 19 days in and I feel great. I still get cranky from time to time, but the mood swings are lessening, or I'm getting accustomed to them. My brother in law said that the last time he saw Tracy and I he thought we were super hopped up on caffeine; turns out we just have more energy. I do feel great.

New Post for the New Year

I've been terribly neglectful of my blog. I'm afraid that a lot of the free time I used to spend here has been squandered on World of Warcraft and Facebook.

The day before yesterday I fell into a terrible mood. I was having a fine old time at work, came home and whammo; it hit me. Bad mood, dude; bad mood. It stuck around too, lingering overnight and hitching a ride to work with me the next morning.

That "next morning" was a Thursday, the day at work on which I often find myself with a goodly deal of down time, much of which is used to check Facebook. So there I am, checking my Facebook, noticing that I have a ton of friends whom I don't see on any regular basis and some of which I haven't actually seen in like fifteen years. This struck me as, well, gratuitous to say the least. I don't mean to be callous, but I don't care what these people are up to. Shane Tharp can espouse his love of Civil War Reenactment and call the President Barack Osama, but I don't have to listen to his stupidity or care about who got a little bunny rabbit over the holiday.

It's not that I just don't care; it's that hearing about all this actively makes me angry.

A while back I went through and arbitrarily deleted people I don't really know from my friend's list; this seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Then I started getting the letters. Complaining, cajoling, wondering what happened to all the good times we never, ever shared. I relented; I re-friended a few of them. But the letters never stopped. The last one I got had this tinge of self-pity to it, and it put me over the line.

I'm done with Facebook. Account deleted. If you're reading this, sorry; I didn't "defriend" you specifically (and yes, I've already gotten emails/instant messages with "wtf" in them). I just can't take it anymore. I can't pretend I give a shit what cute thing your kitties are doing. I can't pretend to care about the vacation you went on with a bunch of people I've never met in my life. And I damn sure don't feel like reporting what I've been up to for the benefit of seventy people I never, ever talk to in real life.

As for my other eight friends; you all have my email, cell number and will see me on weekends whether you want to or not. So you eight are the ones that really suffer.

I remember Halloween.

So for the second year in a row I've missed the annual Halloween bash, the biggest and best party of the year. Dang it. Last year we didn't have a babysitter, so I sent Tracy and stayed home with the D. This year neither of us went. What a drag. Apologies to everyone we missed. Hopefully someone will at least post pictures. Super apologies to Katie and Chris. It wasn't personal; we just couldn't get our shit together. And by "we" I mean "I". We did manage to pull it together for Delia's birthday, but just barely. We didn't think to call anyone, so it was just us and a few other childrens. Sorry if you missed it; I am a slacker asshole. You know it, I know it, the American People know it.

I've been having a lot of "can't get my shit together" days. My last few posts featured grandiose plans to post every day without fail. I think I made it a whole two days in a row. Fall came in with this "I'm just going to be winter, so screw you guys" kind of chip on its shoulder, so the Funk took the opportunity to use Fall's uppityness as a distraction to move in early. The house got messy and we got grumpy. It's actually what NIN's "Downward Spiral" album was about; it was a record about how Fall kicks our collective ass here at Strother House.

The blog posts I've so magnificently fallen behind on I blame on the good people who make Peavey guitar amplifiers. I broke down and bought a guitar amp to replace the one I sold at a yard sale a few years ago. The one I sold was more or less a piece of crap, but it had been my piece of crap for fifteen years and after I sold it I had to just admire other peoples pieces of crap, which is about as alluring as it sounds. So anyway I finally replaced it, this time with a decent two channel, multi-voicing TransTube amp. And so my normally scheduled blogging time gave way to Heavy Metal Guitar time, which is a shame on the blog front but otherwise completely and totally kick ass.

On a more positive note, we are planning on having Thanksgiving at our house this year. Tracy's mom made an announcement last week that Thanksgiving can go fornicate itself with an iron stick (I'm paraphrasing.) We're going to take up the gauntlet and have it here. Come one, come all, but you might want to bring a chair because we only have five. (See how I'm being positive and acting like there are more than like two people who will want to come?)

Crap

I missed yesterday's entry. I meant to do it but instead succumbed to a nap, then Pizza Hut. I think it was Pizza Hut that really did me in. That's what I get for eating at a place described as a Hut.

Last night I went to Black Bear to help Malissa hang paintings for the Morgantown Arts Walk, which I believe is going down tonight. It's usually a pretty good time, and I encourage people to get out and look. I think we may go as a family unit tonight; I like for the D to see these events our town bothers to put on. It's nice to live in a town that appreciates culture almost as much as it seems to appreciate beer pong and those annoying mufflers that serve to make your car louder. It's also nice to get to drill holes into a wall that doesn't belong to me. If you ever find yourself drilling holes in the wall at Black Bear it's important to remember that the chairs by that bar in the front are much, much taller than the chairs you are probably used to standing on in your kitchen. Take it from me, you can't just step down off them.

Today I came to work with the intention of putting up another installment of Friday Meeting Notes, but they were thrown out yesterday. So instead of putting up the notes from the week before I'm putting up today's masterwork, which I sincerely hope serves to both entertain and enlighten. Bon appetit.

This still counts as Wednesday. Damn it.

I set myself a goal; update ye olde blogge every day. It's technically Thursday right now, but since I just got home from work and haven't gone to bed yet it counts. Yes way, Ted; it totally counts.

Sometime between taking the D to school and her getting off the bus we lost a neighborhood tree today. I don't know what happened; it wasn't particularly windy or stormy, at least not enough for me to take notice. Maybe the high winds (50 or so mph gusts) damaged the tree earlier this week, but for whatever reason the stately maple tree at the corner of Overdale and Alma is gone. I personally choose to make up (and believe!) that it was downed by a drunken college student in an F150. Probably with a set of artificial truck testes dangling from the back bumper. Nice driving, dick.

I was a guest speaker!

Yesterday at about 12:30 or so I was hit by a bolt of memory lightning; I had to speak to Delia's class at 2. Her teacher had sent home a form asking for volunteers, and D told me that they were having trouble getting people to show up, so I signed up for it. What the hells, it was only a fifteen minute commitment and I love public speaking

When I got to the class the teacher subtly emphasized that I would be saying how my job helped the community. So I start winging it, telling the kids that I'm a graphic artist who works in desktop publishing, advertising used cars...blah blah blah. They don't care. I know how an audience works, so I started telling them about Photoshop, which they also don't care about. Then I tell them that Photoshop was invented by Industrial Light and Magic, to work on special effects for Star Wars. It was like shooting lighting out of my eyes. They went, in about one second from "dude, we don't know what you're talking about" to "Holy crap; he MADE STAR WARS!" It was pretty awesome.

In other news, I'm still pissed at my cable company for taking away PBS, Cartoon Network and the History Channel. I know I only pay nine dollars or so a month for cable, but PBS? Really, Comcast, seriously? I live in the same town as the station. It wouldn't be so bad if you hadn't run commercials for months saying that Comcast customers didn't have to worry about the new conversion to digital cable. Yo, Comcast, you guys are liars. I do have to get a conversion box to watch my local PBS station. I don't want to spend $40 for one channel, but I'm going to. Gods know there isn't anything on SyFy.

As for you, SyFy...dudes, you aren't even trying. There is some show on right now with a few fifteen year old kids going to someplace called the Vortex. I think it's in New Jersey. They keep saying something about a munitions factory exploding there, and one lady who is very insistent that there are spirits there, "locked in time and space". I'm not sure what this show is, but it's terrible. It's like Ghost Hunters, if Ghost Hunters came from Fanjul's Factory Outlet. Holy crap, I'm sure if they let these turds on this show they'd let me and my jackass friends on. These kids on now should have worn brown trousers, if you catch my drift.

Hot Bliggity Blog

I'm trying to post something daily now. My boss told me last week that the only way to get people to read your blog is to keep it freshly updated, presumably because a lot of people have an attention span utterly decimated by television. I don't have any problems believing this at all.

It's only 9AM on this dreary Monday, and I've accomplished things. Payed a few bills...freakin' bills. Bills are the bane of my existence. I made a resolution for 2009 to be more fiscally responsible, but it's tough going. Budgeting has never been a particularly strong point with me. I'm better at it than I am at, say, not drinking coffee until my hair stands on end, but that's not saying much. Most people don't have that problem either. Or do they?

The problem with daily updates is thinking of something to say. To newsworthy items happened over the weekend.

1. Flavored cigarettes are now banned in the US. I don't smoke flavored cigarettes. I've never been a goth kid, so I didn't need them to mask the scent of an abandoned bus station while listening to the Cure hoping my hairspray is helping me look depressed. I doubt if I've ever smoked more than one or two of these things all the way through. Once in high school we had a Renaissance Festival, and someone made an apple pie using a period recipe. It had a buttload of clove in it, to mask the taste of the rotten apples that would have been the main ingredient during the Renaissance. So that's what clove cigarettes always reminded me off; rotten apples. Grodacious. Totally grodacious.

2. My brother-in-law John's friend Dave was stabbed over the weekend. He's in the hospital but slated to recover, from what I've gleaned from Facebook. This is some grade A crazy shit. Friday night John was here, and was (I think) shocked to hear my friend Chris and I assure him that Morgantown has a large number of weekend fights on the streets. Then he goes home to this crap. They caught the guy who knifed him, which is good. It's hard to tell what they'll charge him with, but I can easily see how stabbing someone with a knife would land you with attempted murder. I think it should, but then again I'm sure once lawyers get involved there will be this and that extenuating circumstance, flim flammery, and outright lying. I hope the dude goes to prison, because if he doesn't John likely will.

Good luck, Dave. John, don't shoot anyone.

Psychic Tom is apparently no Psychic Tina

Last night we went to a Dead People Party at my friend Angie's (codename: Angie Frangie) house. It was first presented to me as a Supernatural Party, which was kind of confusing costume-wise. The reason it was a Supernatural Party is because the ladies decided that if we all coughed up like fifteen bucks we could hire Psychic Tina to come and predict our futures for us. How it became a Dead People Party I'm not quite sure, but everyone with the inclination to dress up in a costume came as walking corpses (note; we were not zombies). I would post pictures, but I left our camera at Angie's.

So there we were, with our fake bullet holes and cut throats and slit wrists, hanging out on Angie's front porch when this older dude drives by looking for an address that was actually Angie's but which he must have written down incorrectly. He kept driving by slowly, looking at us as if we'd lied to him about house numbers before he finally figured out that we were by far the most likely group to have hired him. So he gets out of the car and we're all like, "whoa; where in hells is Psychic Tina?" And he's all like, "Yo babies, be cool; Psychic Tom is in the house taken care of business."

Actually he didn't talk that way at all. I exaggerate for color, a free service to you. What he really said was that he was just as good as Psychic Tina.

Now, a lot of the people there didn't seem to think Psychic Tom was all that psychic, but I liked him. I've read books on Gypsy fortunetelling tricks to pull on rubes, and maybe I am a rube, but I want to believe Psychic Tom, because I liked what he had to say. For the most part.

I liked that he said I was going to live a long-ass time. This was from the palm and one of the first things he said to me. Then he told me that I was under-employed and likely would be for about two years or so before moving on. He told me that 2010 and 2011 would be better years financially than we're accustomed to. So all in all it was a pretty sweet future being laid out.

I can't help but wonder why Psychic Tom, being psychic and all, didn't seem to know that I was a powerful sorcerer in my own right. He didn't even mention it, or turn pale, or tremble or anything. No reaction whatsoever. So while I want to believe Psychic Tom is going to be right about my future I'm just not sure I'm buying it.

No offense, Psychic Tom.

Blogger V. Wordpress

In what I'm sure will turn into something akin to the epic battle of XTC V. Adam Ant (power-based pop V. new romantics) I've decided to do a side by side of Blogger and Wordpress. Blogger is easy and familiar; Wordpress is complicated but apparently lets you do a lot of neato things. So far results are pending.

I signed up for Wordpress yesterday at work while we were waiting for the final go-ahead to come through. All I did was register and make it look like I wanted, then it was time to go. I spend a good deal of time in the car on Fridays. Yesterday I spent it thinking of how to maintain two blogs simultaneously.

I came up with this plan to use the new one for an extended piece of fiction, a fake blog that I would gradually introduce a weird happening into, extrapolating on it until it got weirder and weirder without ever bothering to explain that it isn't true. But what to say? At first I thought about including a weird dwarf that would follow me around after a while, doing things like mugging people with orthopedic shoes in order to be incrementally taller. I had to scrap that as being insensitive (not just because I don't know any little people.) Then I thought it would be fun to recruit a cohort, someone to play the part of "The Creeper" in the story. All The Creeper would really need to do is let me take a few pictures every now and again, preferably while dressed all creepy and hiding in bushes. Maybe a short video of The Creeper being fled from in a car. No big deal. A Creeper email address (with only the picture of my volunteer Creeper attached to a fake name) also struck me as being a good way to gradually make his/her presence more immediate.

This was a very exciting idea yesterday while I was driving down to Clarksburg, but I don't know if it's really very feasible. You can't just go up to your friends and say, "hey, you're one creepy looking sonuvabitch, wanna be kinda almost semi famous?" So now that little project is on hold while I think it through a little more. Which means you're stuck with just this, my regular run-of-the-mill blog. If I go through with it I'll post a notice here. Addios.

Back into the proverbial swing of things

So it's been a really long time since I last posted anything. I took some time off in the months leading up to super beach vacation (which was a hoot), but it took me until now to start posting again. Sorry about that. Hope your deprivation didn't cause scurvy or rickets.

I'm at work right now, so this is going to be short. I've been thinking for a long time about scanning my notes from our Friday meetings. Here's the first installment. Bon appetit.

Seriously; if you didn't take that "adult content" button seriously - move along. Nothing to see here.

You were warned.

So way the hell earlier today (I'm talking around 5pm; it's now 2:02am, just for frame of reference) Tracy and I went out to dinner.  I had a jumbo margarita, and this at a restaurant where Mexicans make 'em strong.  Then there was this long sequence of being in a bookstore drinking coffee, then a craft store that rapidly degraded to sitting on a bench while Tracy talked her mom through a minor babysitting crises. 

So far, so good.

We came home to R (a semi-permanent denizen), R (a fleeting denizen) and J (a one-nighter) already at our house.  No problem.  Had a beer, changed clothes, then hit the road.

(Side note; I stopped the narrative here, at 2:10am, to eat a boiled egg.  It was delightful.)

Anyway, I went to my friend Willy's house.  Willy is my fellow degenerate, the dude I turn to when I feel like it might be a good idea to go out drinking, possibly smuggle a beer out of the bar to drink in an alley, and definitely pee someplace that Roscoe P. Coletrain would disapprove of.  We drank a beer, then walked down town to see what was going on.  Our usual place of interest (one 123 Pleasant Street) appeared to be hosting some sort of hootnanny.  A hootnanny with a cover charge, no less.  Well, believe it Discerning Readers when I tell you that neither one of us were willing to part with five American dollars to see this hoedown in Motown.  So up the street we went.

Willy and I have made a practice of stopping in at a place called the Boston Beanery, which was our next stop.  This is a very regimented visit; we walk in, step up to the bar, do a shot, then get the hell out.  I secretly hope we'll become semi-famous, the Two-Guys-Who-Hate-This-Stinking-Craphole-But-Want-a-Shot-of-Bourbon., though Willy tells me he's in there on a semi-regular basis, thus shattering this petty dream.  

I digress.

We walk in, do our shot, then we're out of there.  We walked up High Street, ending up at a place called Gibbie's.  There is, in fact, an actual dude named Gibby.  The last time I saw him he was by the pool table in his bar, biting a girl who was dancing on said table RIGHT ON THE ASS.  Clearly this is a quality establishment.  All the same, my friend Brian's band (The Love Me Knots; dig 'em) were playing, so that's where we sat, listening to Brian and watching some seriously one-sided boxing on what I took to be ESPN.  

Even this grows stale after a while.  Willy and I, however, are not to be discouraged.  In another time and place we may have been pirates, or perhaps Viking raiders.  We craved more; adventure, spectacle...something.  So we did the only thing we could, took the only avenue left open to two such as ourselves on a night such as this.

We went to Buck's.

Now, Buck's is a very special place.  It's the last bar on the Other Side of Town.  It had been a long time since I'd been there; perhaps five years or so (the previous visit to that being some ten to fifteen years past).  Buck's has not changed very much.  We walked in, sat at the bar and listened to the jukebox, secretly wishing they'd turn it off and crank up the Def Leopard concert that was on the TV.  Then Willy revealed a Revelation: Buck's has an upstairs.

Perhaps, like me, you are a bit curious as to what could be better than sitting in a bar constructed mainly of plywood, listening to U2 on the jukebox, wishing that in addition to pickles and pickled sausage that they had pickled eggs.  It turns out that there are many things.  

Most noticable are (1) upstairs there is karaoke and (2) upstairs are where the girls are.  Don't get the wrong idea; these are not girls that I would want to meet.  In fact, the most likely chance of me actually talking to one of these girls is if she walked drunkenly into the men's room while I was in there quite contentedly throwing up a bit of the bourbon I so injudiciously drank.  These girls do have a few things going for 'em.  They dance, AND they sing.  Perhaps more amazing (in the interest of being fair, balanced, and not sexiest) there is also the spectacle of the Dancing Redneck Dude.  In retrospect they are a package deal.  You really need to see them both doing a bizarre line dance to MC Hammer to really get a feel for the place.  Imagining neon, disco lights and a drunken blond girl with no shoes dancing with a backward-hat redneck dude....well, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.

I'm going to have to cut this short; it's late and I'm tired.  Suffice it to say that a good time was had by all.  AND (as an addendum) Willy and I made further plans for our kick-ass band, including finally deciding on a name.  

Ladies and Gentlemen; I give you Keziah Mason,

That is all.  Return to your daily lives.

Mad! Mad I say!

So I've kind of been haunted these last few weeks. Not in a badass blood-seeping-out-of-the-walls sort of way, or even the lame-o rattling chains sort of way.

There are people in my house.

I should preface this; this was partially my idea.

My cousin is going through a divorce and staying with us until he gets a job and an apartment. We grew up in the same house together, so it's nothing all that new to me, with a hitch-I'm an adult now. And it turns out that I'm more than a little set in my ways.

Take tonight, for instance. Usually when I get home a tad bit early I sit at my computer and write. There are two stories that I'm working on, one of which is pretty well outlined and well into the rough draft stage. Almost a finished rough draft.

It's not getting finished anytime soon.

When I came home tonight, my cousin was up and watching some Sci Fi Channel TV show. Not a big deal, but I'm on the back porch blogging on Tracy's laptop instead of finishing some work up. This is not good. Then there's the massive amount of alone time that I absolutely require if I'm to stay sane. This alone time has become like the rarest diamonds, something so precious that I can see why some people would be tempted to kill for it.

Now, again, this move in was partially my idea. I'm not mad, I'm just venting.

In other news, it's been a long ass time since I've posted anything here (what with the almost finished stories and the house guest and all). I'd like to say all kinds of awesome things have happened since last post, but aside from a long drive to Virginia and back and a few good hikes, not a whole hell of a lot has gone down. Fact is, I'm bored.

I've heard before that there is no reason for an intelligent person to be bored, but I'm bored all the same. Malaise, I think they call it. Not much has struck me as interesting lately. Maybe I'm getting depressed.

I heard on the horror radio show that I listen to every week (Rue Morgue Radio; www.rue-morgue.com. The dash is important; without it you get some kind of crazy porn) about this contest to win a book about Ray Harryhausen. The contest involves writing a letter detailing how his work has affected your life. I briefly considered making up this big lie about Cassiopeia from Clash of the Titans being my first (pretend) girlfriend from the time I was 13 until I was 28. I had a pretty good lie all cooked up, but then was too apathetic to bother to send an email. I probably would have won too; those radio hosts are some pervs. But I think the thing to take away from this is that I was too lazy to go through with the easiest of all hoaxes to perpetrate; the email scam. I'm never too lazy to mess with someone via email. I've spent days exchanging emails with those crazy Bank of Zimbabwe email scams. I make up little characters to be; like a homeless guy in the library or a crazy immigrant saving up money for a sex change. I keep them in a special folder labeled "Fun with Email Scams". Yet I was too lazy to try to talk a good enough game to score a free book. That can't be a good sign.

On both the up and down side, vacation looms. It's the upside because I get to get away from this town for a few days. I like Morgantown, but even pineapple upside down cake gets boring if you have it every day. It's the downside because the vacation fund isn't quite where we'd hoped it would be. At least the house is already rented for the week. Even if we don't get to stash away any more loot for vacation, I'm really looking forward to it. Seven days with only the handful of people I hang out with outside of work or D&D is going to be pretty rad. Delia won't be the only kid, so she shouldn't be bored. I personally don't care if I don't get any further from the house we all rented than the two blocks to the beach. And it's encouraging that every single one of us who boldly proclaimed that by now we'd be in the best shape of our lives while we were planning this trip last winter was completely full of shit; failing isn't all that bad if there's a whole group of you. In fact, get enough people to fail at any one thing and it becomes something different; not so much a failure as a flaw in the system, whatever that system may be.

Maybe since we all failed we could score some of that sweet bailout money they keep throwing at the auto industry.

I'm going to bed.

Jonestown

Last night we had a cookout.  It may be the biggest party we've ever had here at Edgehill house.  I think at least a dozen people were here at one point.  The nice thing about cookouts is that it keeps people more or less clustered outside.  The bad thing is that people never eat as much as you think they will, so there's always a butt ton of food left over.  I could feed a smallish army this morning if one happened by.  

Another downside of the cookout is beer bottles.  My friends all like to drink.  None of them are alcoholics (that I know of), but when you get fifteen or so people together the old glass bottles start to pile up.  Usually after a big party (say, the annual Halloween bash) it's like the Jonestown Massacre the next day.  Dozens of glass bottles strewn about the compound, staying where ever they happened to fall after the Kool Aid did them in, waiting for health workers to pile them into ambulances.  This is what I was thinking about this morning when I woke up.  I was lying in bed kind of dreading coming down and having the easter egg hunt for Sam Adams and Miller Lite bottles.  

To my delight, it wasn't that bad at all.  This was not what you'd call a wild, out of control party.  There are a lot of bottles, but they are for the most part conveniently where the recycling belongs.  I didn't have to collect them from random bookshelves, bathrooms, or hidden inside random boxes, shoes or backpacks (not that that generally happens, but you get the idea).

Sometime today though it's going to be time to play "The Town Alcoholic Goes Recycling."  This is always a hoot, having a VW full of empties that I pile into the recycling bin six at a time.  It always makes me feel conspicuous, like people will be looking at me thinking, "Good Lord, that guy drank sixty beers last night!"  I'm sure they aren't, but still.

Last night was also the second Sneakies show.  The Sneakies are a newish band; this was only their second show.  I saw them at McClafferty's a few weeks ago, but the sound there is terrible.  Last night was a 123 night, so you could actually hear the band, which was both rocking and rolling.  Now if only they would play on a Saturday so Tracy could go.

Epic

When Delia was in kindergarten we started reading Harry Potter at bedtime.  I don't always get to do bedtime.  Work, grandma's house, late night movie nights; all of these have helped stretch a series of bedtime books out.

Seven books over three years.

Thursday night we finished book seven.  It's kind of amazing to me to think that we've been reading this series for so long.  The first five books were re-reads for me, so it was really exciting to get to book six, then the grand finale.  I thought I would feel hollow or let down when we finished, as if we'd reached the end of a really long journey taken for the sake of the trip itself; that perhaps the destination would be a bit of a letdown after the fantabulous trip.  Not so.  Instead it felt more like a milestone.  Tracy and Delia have been through a lot of  books.  Narnia, Percy Jackson...they seem to crank out the stories.  But this is the first that Delia and I have finished.  It's a pretty good feeling.  

I think she wants to go through Narnia again with me, which will be nice.  I've never read any of them.  

Eh.

Bah.  I'm bored and restless.