Well it's all uphere from hill.

I just had one of the weirdest nights ever. I sat and... wait I am going to back up.

The college near my house was having a production of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Before the show started I ran to into a guy that I know and his friend, whom I know but who's name is so complicated (he is Bulgarian) that I can never for the life of me remember who to say it. Anyway, the play was pretty mediocre, imagine the play being set in a Northern California village, pre California Gold Rush. Really neat concept, but poorly delivered because there were just too many bits going on, whether it was one actor playing a character like Groucho Marx and another playing it like Konstantin Sergejevitch Stanislavski or the fact that they ran the curtain call like a Benny Hill bit, it was just a little disjointed. So my friends and I went out after the play and had a small (read large) bite to eat.

This is where it all went downhill. The place where we went specialized in Lebanese food, so naturally we all had hamburgers or steak & cheese wraps, but the two Bulgarians got this weird yogurt drink which is apparently the national drink of Bulgaria. One of the guys, Ivo, hates the drink, but insisted that he gets it because, "No matter what, I know my day will get better." Sound logic, and I identify because I don't like KitKat bars but about once a year I get one just to remind myself that I don't like them. The other Bulgarian, whose name I have trouble with, said at one point, "If you want to be miserable why don't you just consume feces?" (Do you see where this is going?) Anyway, we were walking home after the evening and Ivo went into a convenience store to "get some candy" and he came out with a Butterfinger and a GIGANTIC KITKAT BAR! We both ate the candy that we didn't like and suffered through it, meanwhile our compatriots where watching two 30 year olds grimace their way through candy we didn't like.

I was also struck by the way music triggers my brain tonight, at one point someone was playing Offspring's album Smash which came out in 1994 and it hit me with this flood of memories from my freshman year of college. It was really surreal.

As Promised: at six sentences

Sometimes it's better to stay in bed.

Many thanks to Rob.

Gotta get better at posting more often

So good news, my friend Amy Guth submitted a bit for this blogsite called Six Sentences, and her submission was accepted which is really cool. Basically the deal is you get six sentences, so... see what you can do. So I did, and they liked it and it should be up on Friday, I will include a link as soon I get one. I am pretty psyched about it because I have never really submitted anything before and it feels pretty good to have your submission accepted.

Lately I have been positively devouring books. I have been on this real Russian kick lately and today at a used bookstore I picked up an Anton Chekhov 2 volume set and some Dostoevsky (because I am a glutton for punishment). And I have come to the conclusion that these fuckers knew how to put a sentence together. I mean really knew how to make you feel like you were on the cart as it rambled across the steppes of Russia. The scenery, everything, it is all so vivid and I am trying to accomplish the same thing in some of my writing. I should have a new posting up on Marlowe's Sketch Pad, sorry it is taking me so long to get stuff up there, but I feel like I have been writing, reading, editing, correcting, changing but then stalling, so I think I might just start putting some stuff up and you all can give me feed back when you want to, anything is good, say you like it, say you hate... well if you hate it keep it to yourself, but if you would like to see more of something or you thought something worked well except for blah blah blah, put it up there. The only way you learn is by getting feedback I think. So check back on that soon and I should have something up in the next day or two.

I was walking to the bank to do a drop off for work today and I saw two really horrible sad things. I work next to a strip club, and it isn't a nice strip club, it is a sort of seedy club. As I walking to the bank I saw this girl walk into the club, she was youngish and pretty at least from fifty odd feet away and I didn't think much of it, nothing out of the ordinary, then a young boy, say five or six, came around the corner of the building and said, "I love you mommy, I will see you tomorrow." It kind of broke my heart. I am pretty good at justifying my feelings for strip clubs, I think I sort of pretend that they are all putting themselves through Ivy League colleges and they are working on a Tuesday because their Molecular Biology class was cancelled. But this hit home a little bit.

Then on my way out of the bank there was a woman in one of those motorized cart/scooter things you see advertised for old people mobility. Well the battery was dying and the woman driving it stopped the cart in mid traffic and stood up and walked the thing up the street. The first thought that went through my head was, "Oh, how sad, that woman has to..." but then the reality of the situation hit me. If you are strong enough to push a motorized cart up a hill, what the hell are you doing with a motorized cart? I had to chuckle to myself: pretty classy stuff.

Last thing of the day.

I have a friend, well an acquaintance really, who I know from an old job. She and a band mate used to come in to the coffee shop I worked in and we would all tell jokes to each other, some of them were really good, some of them... well not so much. Anyway her boyfriend has a new exhibit at a gallery and I have to tell someone, anyone, about it. His name is Sonny and here is his site CW Rolle. So all of these pieces were done with bent steel wire. So keep that in mind when you are looking at it, oh yeah and some of these are 4' x 5'. It is really impressive and really, really breath taking.

Blog o'the day is back...

Today's winner is: untitled blog by Anna.
Why: Starting a blog is terrifying business (at least it was for me) and I remember getting my first comment from a none-related person and feeling both terrified and relieved at the same time. Anna, if you read this, good luck.

As I was writing I was listening to music by Kasabian. I am a fan of what they do, it gets me typing. Check them out.

At the request of my Mother-in-law

I got a nasty comment on my previous post. Essentially my mother-in-law thinks I am being a slacker because I haven't posted anything on my blog in quite some time, and unfortunately she is right. I am a slacker.

EGG ROLLS ARE WHACK
My saving grace at work has been this chinese restaurant that is right down the street. They have pretty good shitty-american-chinese-food. It is also wicked cheap and wicked fast. You have to ask them to make the chicken dishes well done, otherwise it comes out kind of gooey. They are also, and here comes the funny, right next to a porn shop. Even better it is an express porn shop. There is something really funny about express porn to me. But almost without fail, when I go into to order some pork lo-mein or something there is a guy standing there with a black plastic bag that has been folded into either a DVD size or a magazine size and I have to wonder what it is like to sit and eat eggrolls while looking at naked people fornicating.

The other day there was this woman who came in while I was ordering my food and she was talking about how she was "addicted to their egg rolls". She asked me for a dollar so she could order two egg rolls, and I obliged because it was a dollar. Then she proceeded to tell me her life's story about her boyfriend and their baby (which is on the way) and how after she drinks wine at night she craves eggrolls. I think I said that being addicted to eggroll is not that bad, because the police never threw anybody in jail for eating too many eggrolls. She looked at me, squarely in the face, with no expression and said, "Yeah, I guess not."

Brief explanation for my hiatus
I have been doing a lot of other writing, more focused, less, gee-this-is-funny-what-happened. I have also been doing a lot of reading. I will give you guys a quick list here and tell you what I liked or didn't like about them.

Go Away, Go Away - Nikolai Koladya: I didn't like anything about this. Not one thing. It was billed to me as "Cherry Orchard if Cherry Orchard happened in the 20th century." Cherry Orchard, by Anton Chekov, is wonderfully witty and sad and happy and hopeful. Go Away, Go Away sucks. End of review.

Angels in America, Parts I & II - Tony Kushner: I loved this one, for a couple of reasons. One, if you aren't gay, which I am not it really captures what it must have been like to be gay, particularly in the mid 80's and early 90's. It makes the characters approachable and the dialog is wonderful. This is one of those plays that I think everyone should read.

Becket - Jean Anhouil: This might be favorite play of the year. Becket is based, loosely, on the life of Thomas Becket a courtisan in England under Henry II, he was elevated to the role of Archbishop of Canterbury and it destroyed his relationship with the King and ultimately lead to his murder. I don't think I can say enough positive things about this and might, BIG MIGHT, make a whole post about it in the future.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco: I am actually still in the middle of this one and it is probably the best book I have ever read. It is about a man who is a book seller (not at Borders, but one who collects and resells rare books), he wakes up and can not remember anything about his life, he can remember everything he has ever read, but nothing about his personal life. Really really fascinating.

The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow - Rolin Jones: This is a funny play about a girl with OCD and agoraphobia who builds a robot. The purpose of the robot is to help her explore the world and find her mother because she was adopted, she is also a genius. Her adopted mother doesn't understand her and it is just really crazy and funny and human.

I think that is about it. Busy busy busy. I guess I am using a lot of this reading to help build a foundation for a better writing experience. Anyway. That is all I have been up to, the little old man that rocks out to the Beach Boys every morning, still rocks out every morning. He actually makes my day.

It is sort of funny how one routine thing everyday can make your day. The other day I was going into work, really early for me (8:00 a.m.) and I was just having this weird experience that today was going to be one of those days. Basically my underwear wasn't fitting right, and all day long no matter how many times I went to the bathroom things weren't straightening out. So I sort of muddled through the day with this ominous discomfort that today, something bad was going to happen. And at about 4:30 the snowball started happening. The dry cleaner lost all my shirts, I forgot to do a pretty critical part of my job that lead to an admission to pretty much everybody that I forgot to do this part, and then a bird shit on my head. All in the span of about 15 minutes. By 5:00 I was shirtless, humiliated and shat on. It was really surreal. I know that some people will say that being shit on by a bird is good luck ("For somepeople they sing") but I still felt shit on, and it was hard to feel lucky at that point.

But the last couple of days have shaped up pretty well. Today is beautiful, which, of course it is, I have to go to work. And tomorrow I am off. More reading some more writing. I am hoping to finish the two books I am working on right now, Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen and the aforementioned Umberto Eco novel. Big plans. Oh and I got my application for URI in, so there's that.

Holy crap...

So my friend Liz chastised me today for not having put up a post in quite some time and honestly it didn't feel like it was that long ago, but it surely and truly was. So if you are regular checker of this blog, please forgive me. I will try and make this full and you will have the full scope of what I have been up to so that it will make some sense to you why I have been so sparse.

Gym Antics...

Things at my gy... err Fitness spa are going well. I don't think I will ever get used to the Fitness Spa name. They are really serious about things there. (Too serious? That is still up in the air.) One of the things that I am still struggling with is going from the gym (screw them) to work. I have to wear a tie and sport coat to work and I haven't found a good way to get stuff from my house to the gym, then work out then get from the gym to work without really wrinkling the hell out of my clothes. I have tried whole garment bags, but they are too cumbersome, I have tried small zip up hanging bags, but they are obnoxious. I have been trying to find a way to get my stuff to work and leave it there directly after the cleaners and then just take a quick change of clothes, but that means I am wearing clothes, gym clothes and work clothes all in the same day and if that doesn't make an environmentalist cringe -- they probably aren't cringable.

The scummy salesman on the other hand, has been absent. I am sure it is just a conflicting schedule thing, but it is weird to not have him around giving me "shooter finger" or "thumbs-ups" or something else that makes me feel marginalized.

I had a strange reaction to the TV's at the gym today. They have a platoon of TV's in front of the cardio equipment and one of them that was near me today had on Fox News. They had a story blurb about Mark Foley (R-FL). For those of you who are not currently evented, he is the douchebag that was internet sexing, inappropriately conducting text messaging with pages at the United States House of Representatives. Whatever the guy is a scumbag, sick scumbag, but a scumbag none-the-less. So anyway, the Fox report was that Mark Foley's lawyer released a statement saying he was "molested by a member of the clergy as a teenager". To which my natural un-filtered response was, "AWW You have got to be fucking kidding me." More on this later. But the three old women behind me on the stair steppers and tread mill apparently heard me and started to tune in. I was a little embarrassed. I wish that swearing wasn't such a natural reaction to me, but I have a filthy mouth and sometimes I just drop F-Bombs and don't even mean to.

I also had a run in with a nekkid talker. I was going to go the jacuzzi, but it was broken, so I decided to sit in the sauna, but the sauna at my gym is a one seater, and some one had just jumped in. So when I politely said I wasn't going to join in, he said, "I can make room," and he scooted over leaving a sweaty naked ass print on the wood of the sauna. note to self: don't ever go in the sauna at the gym EWWW!

Doomed!...
Folks we are doomed. As a nation. The whole lot of us, are doomed. D-O-O-M-E-D!

There are two reasons why.

1.) Editing and proofreading on the internet are dead. They don't exist. The desire to have news released two seconds before it happens has lead to either shitty writers being hired, or shitty editors doing the editing, or some combination of the two. Here is a quote from a CNN.com article.

While honing his skills on stage, he held several odd jobs as a landscaper, teacher, carpenter and illustrator while honing his skills on stage.

Maybe I am being harsh, but honestly. This isn't some random 14 year old's blog here. This is a major legitimate news source. Somebody should have caught that.

2.) Capitalism has gotten out of hand. Somethings need to be sacred. I was up in Boston and I was overwhelmed by all the tschotke bullshit. In the garden square between the Old North Church and St. Steven's church -- two sites that were 1.) Instrumental in the start of the Revolutionary War and 2.) That last standing Charles Bulfinch church in Boston, respectively -- there was a guy selling T-shirts, the souvenir kind that have all of the funny misspellings that make it a "Bahston Shiht". But I was really struck by the Old City Hall (It might have been the old state house) that is now a Ruth's Cris Steakhouse. Yikes.

But outside of the capitalism I had really lovely time in Boston and it deserves a post unto itself.

Todays blog of the day:
Marmaduke Explained
Why?
Marmaduke is my grandfather's favorite comic. Actually it might be a tie between Marmaduke and, as my grandfather calls it,
"Ole Beatle Bailey". I have very found memories of Marmaduke, I even have a Marmaduke book of comics that I ordered from a book club once. Point is, I love it, but it is one of the stupidest comics ever. I mean have you ever met a person that owns a Great Dane? Me either. But this is a funny page, that somehow makes the strip even funnier to me.