Reasons to live in the city, #744 and #745: So, VH1 has been letting us down today, what with constant airing of country music related shows and the horrendous Blues Brothers 2000, so we dared to take on the suburban city streets at night to seek out a video store. The owners of the house we're sitting kindly left us their video rental cards, but we had to hope the employees didn't ask for ID or my signature. We get to the store, and there are kids *everywhere*. I swear, constant breeding must be taught in the high schools around here. Everyone had at least two kids, who were all running around holding cany in their hands, wondering if they had any more copies of Almost Famous or Remember the Titans in stock. So, I did a little spying and they were asking everyone for ID, so we left and decided to do something I rarely ever do.

That's right, we went to Hollywood Video. It was a frightening experience. First off, almost everything on DVD was gone, so we had to go through the VHS section to find our selections. So, we're standing in a 10-12 person line and this huge geeky dice-nerd looking guy, with dark black hair on his neck and a Nike cap on his head walks up to the employees and starts screaming at them. "Why don't you have all these other terminals open? Huh? I come in here on Saturday nights all the time and I'm in and out, and now you're telling me that I'm going to have to wait in a fucking line? Open up all these terminals so these people can rent their movies!" Dumbfounded, the guy replies "I'm sorry sir, they're broken." "You're a fucking idiot," he replies. "Thank you sir, thank you very much." Geez, what misguided testosterone this guy had. I bet he was renting a really bad movie too, either that or the new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit video. Fucking suburbs, makes me realize how much I like living in the city.

Reasons to live in the city, #744 and #745: So, VH1 has been letting us down today, what with constant airing of country music related shows and the horrendous Blues Brothers 2000, so we dared to take on the suburban city streets at night to seek out a video store. The owners of the house we're sitting kindly left us their video rental cards, but we had to hope the employees didn't ask for ID or my signature. We get to the store, and there are kids *everywhere*. I swear, constant breeding must be taught in the high schools around here. Everyone had at least two kids, who were all running around holding candy in their hands, wondering if they had any more copies of Almost Famous or Remember the Titans in stock. So, I did a little spying and they were asking everyone for ID, so we left and decided to do something I rarely ever do.

That's right, we went to Hollywood Video. It was a frightening experience. First off, almost everything on DVD was gone, so we had to go through the VHS section to find our selections. So, we're standing in a 10-12 person line and this huge geeky dice-nerd looking guy, with dark black hair on his neck and a Nike cap on his head walks up to the employees and starts screaming at them. "Why don't you have all these other terminals open? Huh? I come in here on Saturday nights all the time and I'm in and out, and now you're telling me that I'm going to have to wait in a fucking line? Open up all these terminals so these people can rent their movies!" Dumbfounded, the guy replies "I'm sorry sir, they're broken." "You're a fucking idiot," he replies. "Thank you sir, thank you very much." Geez, what misguided testosterone this guy had. I bet he was renting a really bad movie too, either that or the new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit video. Fucking suburbs, makes me realize how much I like living in the city.

So, now we sit down and watch The Avengers (our bad movie selection), and Tommy, which neither of us have ever seen. Wish me luck.

Ok, there's a Garth Brooks video on Pop Up Video now, time to convince the mocking ritual.

So, show #4 went quite well the other night. The Eagle is this leather bar that I used to be afraid of in high school when we'd drive to the city to see shows. I always ended up looking for parking somewhere in its vicinity, and the moustached burly guys on Harleys would stare at us as if we were from Venus. So I played some more X-Files pinball before the show (it's quickly becoming a tradition), and I looked up and there's some guy who looks mysteriously like Mark Eitzel nursing a drink at the bar, right behing Miss Rodeo America. Turns out, it *was* Mark Eitzel. Apparently some guy from Pavement was there too, and they were all there to check out my band. The show was fun, I only went up onstage for the 5 songs that I knew, so I had the curious experience of watching my own band from the bar for the first few songs. I think I've become comfortable with them onstage now, no more worrying about touching the keys, no more looking around the room in a semi-panicked state.

Yesterday at work I had the unfortunate experience of plunging my box cutter into my left arm while I was opening something. It hit right in the middle part, by my elbow, where the skin is all loose from bending. It less cut me than ripped open a 1/4 inch hole in my skin. So my boss drove me down to the occupational health center and I got a couple stitches put in while I laid on the table staring at the ceiling lights. The nurse practioner was a strange lady who kept repeating her name and title, and then everytime she prepared something for the little operation she would say, really loudly, "All righty then! Looks like we're all set!" She must have said this 5 times in the course of an hour. Now my arm is all stiff, I have a huge bandage on it that she told me I could take off in a couple of days, but I'm not supposed to get the sutures wet, so today I get to come up with an ingenious way to shower without getting a main part of my body wet. Plastic wrap? Plastic bags? I hope I figure something out.

On Hold Again: so it's an excuse to post. Seen tacked up on a door yesteday written on the little flap torn off an envelope: Timmy! Go home or swim to Rome!

You know it's gonna stick. Ah yeah.

So, my server crashed sometime last week and I just got the email configuration set up correctly again. So, if you sent me a message and it bounced back, uh, sorry. This is the precise reason I'm not involved in a tech related career.

Took an absolute boatload deliveries up to Sonoma county today. I really took too many, and spent half the day driving frantically around trying to make it back in time for band practice tonight. Of course, traffic and problems popped up to stop me from reaching my goal. No matter, the evening has been nice so far.

I had a new patient today who lived in the middle of the Redwoods next to a tributary of the Russian River called Sweetwater Creek. It was a beautiful drive into the middle of nowhere, that smell of mud and manure that I remember so well from hiking through the hills as a kid came back to me and hit hard. Everything was green and noisy with natural activity. This guy lived 6 miles up a winding one-lane road that went over countless cattle-guards and four hastily constructed concrete bridges. He has no electricity or running water, but lives off a generator to watch videos he buys at thrift shops. The house was a complete mess, the front deck had collapsed down into the basement, forcing me to use the back door as the only entrance. The kitchen smelled of rotting wood and rancid dog food, but the house was still strangely pretty. It's the little adventures like these that make deliveries so worthwhile. In a span of only a few miles I watched the landscape turn from expansive wineries to rolling green hills spotted with rocks, then to patchy forest until finally the sun darkened and the redwoods loomed thick around the banks of the creek.

It's officially Spring in California. That's 'cause I say so though, I think the first day of spring is really tomorrow. We've got two windows open here at 9:00 at night and it's still warm. I'm uncertain whether I should complain or welcome this new weather. It makes playing baseball a bit easier (which we did yesterday for three glorious hours under the shady trees of Glen Park in a seldom visited area of the city) but it also brings the return of "the hot car." My car, with it's deeply tinted windows, tends to heat up rather quickly and refuse to cool down. This situation makes trips outside of the bay almost unbearable.

So I was looking at new sites tonight and managed to frighten myself rather quickly at the amount of people in the world using the internet as a creative media, and doing it rather well. So many good photographers and designers, the only shame is that people haven't learned to write better. Not that anything was, say, horribly incorrect, but written content seems to venture either towards fumbling prose or erratic poetry. Shame, really.

Someone from Iowa just instant messaged me. Apparently it's freezing there, at the same time we're having warm weather here. Geography impresses me.

So we're about to finish watching the lengthy and mis-cast Dogma and then take a crack at Mifune. I haven't seen a movie worth noting in awhile. We watched O Brother Where Art Thou? again on Saturday, it seems that ch has a friend "in the academy" who hooks her up with video copies of movies nominated for academy awards. Ciao.

Ok, I confess. I wrote this album off *way* too soon. I listened to it pretty much nonstop when I first got it a tad over a year ago, but it didn't do anything for me. The reason why, I've gathered, is that it's not a car album. That's right, don't listen to Wheat while you're driving through towns (especially bayside towns, as I'm prone to do). Instead, it's a Spring afternoon record, a lounging around the living room 'cause it's too hot to be anywhere else record. If anything, "Don't I Hold You" has the incredible ability to change moods from "life sucks" to "why don't I get out more?" I'll never knock their abilities again, I promise.

So, I promised some sort of announcement. I was taking a shower the other day and realized that that my announcement wasn't *quite* as big as I previously thought. However, I think it's more of a decision based in reality right now.

When I started this site last year, I swore an oath to partial anonymity. Not some strict regimen of secret uploads and code word jabber, but not another site consisting of places I didn't care about and people I didn't know. It's worked OK so far, but I've realized that my stories, which have so far taken place in a fantasy land of nowhere really (but someplace everyone could relate to), were just that. Stories. Fables almost. Fantasy. I could be making this up. So I've decided to get geography involved. It's nothing that exciting, I'm not the neighbor you never talk to or a rockstar hiding in a life of namelessness (although I'll keep names out of this).

Just the facts please, 'cause the tales forthcoming are real and the past doesn't need repairing. I'm 24.5 (today is my half birthday, send presents). I live in sunny albeit gritty Oakland, Calif. I enjoy life here. It's nice to have a personality.

Oh yah, new MP3 of the week. Cutlass Supreme could possibly be the savior of Bay Area indie rock music. What with Creeper Lagoon on the road to boy band stardom and The Aisler's Set, well, sucking, we need someone. Very straightforward, more reminscent of The Replacements or something of that sort than to strict indie-ites, they belt out songs with passion and honesty without being whiney, complaintive, or noisy. Thank heaven for that.