Friday has turned into headache-day, and now I'm just waiting to get out of here while trying to get the taste of garlic out of my mouth. Neither lemon drops nor carbonated beverages have helped.

I've realized that even though I'm probably the happiest I've ever been, as I get older little things seem to get my angrier more than ever. In short: I've developed an attitude. I can get nasty, mostly about people I haven't seen in awhile, and then I feel guilty that I was being mean. I wish I could blame it on the heroin or something, perhaps I should just develop a habit.

Reading my posts from a year ago has helped me realize how long a year really is, but once it loops around again, it feels like no time has passed at all. Last year I was getting ready to go to the Oregon coast. This year, I'm getting ready to go to the Oregon coast. Last year I travelled to housesit a black and white cat. This year, I own a black and white cat. The only thing constant is that despite all my griping, I'm pretty happy.

Dinner tonight at God-knows-where, then off to see Charles Atlas at the mysterious Catacombs in SF. That is, if this sickness I'm feeling subsides and I feel like myself again.

Help. I've been borrowing the turntable I've been using for almost ten years, but now the older brother of a childhood friend is demanding it back. Granted, it's a crappy Kenwood that plays records at about 35rpm, and I've been meaning to get a pro turntable for some time now, but all of a sudden I feel caught in the trap of having my vinyl unlistenable in my room. I'm looking to spend between $100 - $150 for a new one, any suggestions? I've looked around on Ebay and seen some good ones, but I'm no DJ. Help me, please.

I just got a $4.00 an hour raise. This makes me very happy. Drinks are on me. I am so happy I want to celebrate by leaving work early, but I know I cannot do this. Boo-ya!

New Mirror Project entry. The guy who yelled at me was kinda scary, but I'm a tough kitten.

Yesterday was a beautifully foggy morning here by the bay, I snapped the daily photo driving along highway 37, just over the Sonoma/Marin county line. Even though it was sunny outside, it felt like I was driving into some uncertain void, even though I've driven that route hundreds of times.

I was walking through the hospital after doing my first delivery, and there, in the middle of the hallway on a stretcher was a corpse. It was zipped up tightly in a body bag, but I had to walk right by it to get out the door. It was eery, being alone in a hospital hallway with a body, but somehow it went with the atmosphere of cold and fog. Later when I was driving by a local high school I saw a couple who had run off from P.E. to makeout behind the swings and slides of the playground. It was that sort of day where everyone seemed to be hiding.

Last night while I was at the laundromat, this yuppie lady was jogging by talking on her cell phone when she dropped it and watched it bounce down the storm drain. She enlisted the help of just about every man she could flag down, but the still couldn't get the thing out. Last I heard, she was planning on calling the City of Oakland to come get it for her, 'cause, you know, I'm sure they'd be right out to do that for her. Yuppies get everything they want, or something.

New reviews:

Kent's Hagnesta Hill
Cracker's Forever

Congratulations to my good friends Mike & Allison, who got engaged on Sunday. Mike, who also plays guitar and sings for the Amscray beast broke the news to me last night before practice. I was so flabbergasted, the first thing I said was "why?" I should learn to think what I'm about to say through, don't you think? I have no tact.

After practice (at which we finished the mathrock song, watch out Chicago), we headed on over to Treat Street to have us some Pabst in celebration. Cheers, congratulations, etcetera, etcetera.

When I got home, Miss Rodeo America and Guyball were watching Sweet November, starring Keanu Reeves as an utterly confused beefy piece of dough, wandering around San Francisco like his mind was sucked out by a vacuum. Needless to say, we didn't make it through the movie.

It's official, watching Glitter last night hurt me. Bad. I was forced to watch Mariah Carey dance around in her underwear. Although not as bad as, say, Battlefield Earth, I feel funny in the head, like I was forced to eat a basket of cold medicine.

I made the worst coffee this morning. I also wasted two hours at work making a spreadsheet I didn't need, just because I needed to do something other than pace the room and let my head go into a fog.

I'm thinking about selling the daily photos , mounted and framed, to lucky citizens of the world. A nice largish framed original photo for, say, ten bucks? Sounds reasonable to me, and they make great gifts. More on this later.

Speaking of gifts, any potential Valentines can get me a subscription to No Depression Magazine. Which reminds me, sorta, that Charlie gave me two beautiful western shirts last night. Yee-haw, cowboy. Thanks so very much.

As an American, I was only able to go 14.5 hours without finding out who won the Super Bowl. I was hoping it would be longer, but my loud mouth co-worker won't shut up about how much money he could have won if he would have gone to Vegas to bet on the winning team. He also doesn't believe me when I tell him that I didn't watch it. Not a second of it, not even the halftime show. He will however go around asking everyone else in the warehouse if they watched it, and when they say "yes," he says "good, I'm proud of you." Somehow I didn't know that watching football was some sort of personal achievement. By not watching, he's disappointed in me. Aw, shucks.

MP3 of the week: In addition to being the best band I know of to come from San Jose, Duster are also the sloppiest group I've ever seen live. When Modest Mouse came around to play all the time, Duster would invariably open the show first with an apology about how they hadn't practiced in a long time, and then with a sloppy, noisy, choppy set that sort of resembled their records, but sounded more like a Duster cover band during their first rehersal. Stratosphere to me is the perfect example of late-nineties spacerock, complete with an assortment of recording styles, sounds, and song-titles such as "Constellations" and "Earth/Moon Transit." One of my favorite records for listening to in the dark, staring out the window.