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August 2001 I have not been very good at keeping my journal lately and it's because either I'm too tired or too distracted but it definitely has nothing to do with any lessening in my feelings towards you, gentle reader. I still love you with all my heart. Yesterday was spent playing Tomb Raider II and getting through the monastery level. I've stopped playing pokemon because I'm all pissed off that the pokemon I bred don't have the moves I wanted them to have in the first place and I don't have the patience to breed them again and get it right this time around because some of the eggs take at least 10k steps. Worked on the site for NYC and I'm doing corrections in another window as I type this. Nice thing is that I caught maribou on Lambda once I logged in for the first time and she asked if I wanted to do anything for dinner so we went over to Wooglin's where I had myself two hamburgers and she had a tuna melt (I think) then we went back and talked a bit how there's no large bodies of water around here then she mentioned we could walk down to the river which wasn't much of a river right now because it's the beginning of August and things have been warm so there's less water and runoff from the mountains. So we sat on the edge of the river and watched the lightning strike the hills and talked about MOO and how people act on MOO and how people get stereotyped into roles that really don't fit them because they're known for posting to *lists or talking in the Living Room and how folks get put on pedestals only to fall hard and become reviled for not living up to someone else's high standards. Very sordid. We walked back and talked in the backyard about stuff like Devo and Jaybird and shared experiences from being reviled when younger but how some people aren't able to move beyond that and hide themselves away from the rest of the world. Mind you, this is purely my take and has nothing to do with the reality of the conversation. Overall this was a good evening. Jaybird came home and had a smoke in quiet peace then went upstairs to play Diablo II and we all went our seperate ways. Well maribou's way wasn't that seperate but everyone went to bed and such. Only thing stressing me at the moment is money but I think that's just normal and soon enough things will be rolling along smoothly. The night before I dreamt that my parents had driven out to Colorado to visit me except I didn't want to show them my apartment because my mother had come along for the drive. We drove around Colorado Springs and I took them to The Garden of the Gods where we walked around looking at the striking red rock formations and walked back to the car once everyone was out of breath from the lack of oxygen. In the car were my father's sister and her family which made me flip out, "Get the fuck out of here. I choose who gets to visit me here. Don't you bring along folks I don't want to see. This is on MY terms because this is MY place!" Anyway I drove around in silence and the people didn't leave and the dream kinda flopped into non existence from there. Everything's fine. Just procrastinating on things when they come to my web page. Funny thing is that I'm not really that busy so I can't use that as an excuse. Hopefully by tomorrow I will have the nightmares colored and linked followed shortly by my Colorado extravaganza! Love, Don't have too much to say right now so I'm going to be more self absorbed than usual. Something that's always surprised me is the fact that women find me more attractive than my friend Brian which has always stumped me because Brian used to get tail like nobody's business until he reformed because of something called "love". Freak. Anyway. Kinja, Malyss and maribou have stated that Brian's got nothing on me in the looks department. I haven't asked Devo, Makonan or hhsb because I know I don't have to ask Devo, Makonan hasn't met Brian in person nor has she met me in person and hhsb is usually unavailable for comment because she's busy reading salon.com and memepool while not getting involved in the petty dramas of MOO. So I'm going to make this into another poll, the first in quite a while, where you can vote on who's better looking by looking at the following pictures.
Okay. That's not really Brian. Lemme do that again.
I'm annoyed at my refrigerator because it destroyed two pounds of ground beef that I had placed in there for safe keeping so I could make chili tonight and the fucking meat went bad and turned gray and it was only in there for two days. TWO FUCKING DAYS. Sigh. I did turn the fridge down to 3 from 5 because I figured 5 was a good, normal temperature because back at home our fridge was set to 5 but noOoOoo I lost food. Yeah, I lost the salami I bought for sammiches too. Bad enough that I put grapes in the snack drawer and they got FROZEN and when I put them in a pot to defrost (no fire, just a pot to catch any condensation) they turned brown almost immediately. Damn it. I'm so fucking pissed. Only thing in my fridge at the moment are two twelve packs of seltzer. Well it seems like I pissed off Kylie because she was trying to talk with me while I was enraged about the loss of food yesterday and I was nothing but Mr. Piss and Vinegar until I logged out to spare people from me being all angry. I still haven't said I'm sorry and I oughta because I feel like I treat Kylie like shit and she's really a sweet person who I hold dear because she's listened to me when I've whined and griped about the self centered things in my life and she has always been kind enough to call me to spare my phone bill for a change. This is the postcard that I'm sending back to New Jersey to let folks know that I'm in Colorado Springs and not Edison, New Jersey or Fords, New Jersey. Howdy, The picture on the front is a golden mantled ground squirrel who is waving like he's saying "Hi!" and it says "Hi! from Colorado" in big friendly letters but I think I mentioned that earlier. If and when I hear back I will keep you folks updated. Oh yeah, recently Makonan said that she would be coming to Colorado for a few days to meet Jaybird, maribou and myself but things in her life have gotten in the way of her plans so she won't be coming out here anytime soon. That's too bad because I was looking forward to hanging out with someone new and different even if it was for a day or so. I also mailed Devo earlier in the week, and this was Kylie's idea, and made it clear that if she ever gets the time or the gumption to come up and visit me in scenic Colorado Springs that she has an open invitation for whenever and however long she would like to stay. See, Kylie said that there was one time where she went to visit someone and they had mentioned off-handedly that Kylie could visit anytime but when she took up the offer she felt out of sorts and like she really wasn't welcome and Kylie suggested that I make myself clear to Devo. Only other stuff that's going on is the fact that I went to 7-11, smiled and talked a wee bit and nothing bad happened. I reckon I'll be socialized before I know it and at least have one or two more friends out here. That's about it. Don't forget to vote in the poll and don't just vote for me because it's my web page. FYI, I'm not voting at all. Good night and love, I blackholed myself because I wasn't feeling alright last night. Thought that I had irrevokably pissed Makonan off and I couldn't put up with Rebeka being a sandwich short of a picnic. Best way to deal with her is to ignore her because either you're steadfastly behind her or you're being mean, egotistical or paranoid and using her for a scapegoat. Still, I wish her well. Hopefully mockturtle will be better than prozac for her. Talked with Makonan on the telphone today and that seemed to be alright even though I was thinking "why bother, you hate me now" for the first fifteen minutes but I stopped stressing a little later. Now I'm headed upstairs to watch TV with the Birds which is the usual for Sunday nights. Tomorrow I'm going food shopping to make my father's chili for myself and put some aside for the Birds because I do like them a lot. Oh yeah, I also showed the pics from my trip across country to Makonan which was cool and she said that Devo was very beautiful. She did look quite good those two days I was in Tulsa and the second night I was there I reckon she did a little extra to look good to me but the slowly becoming vestigial part of me is saying that's just me thinking I'm not worthy of anything good or people doing good to me. Today I slept in until six in the afternoon or so after going to bed at two in the morning and I must've had the most elaborate dream. Each time I half-woke I thought "I really should repeat the dream to myself in my head or open the fucking laptop to chronicle it" but I was too tired to drag it into bed. Had something to do with this huge, gray cathedral and a complex adventure which involved most of my life except I was thirty the entire time through. That's all. I promise to be better about posting here and I'll do all that shit I promised that I would do sometime really soon like:
What I did Last Week On Sunday the laptop got killed because there was lightning strike outside while I was upstairs watching The Critic with Jaybird and maribou. I left it on because I had done it plenty of times before and never had a problem greater than the modem getting jolted and having it replaced in less than three days, for free no less. The next day maribou said that she was tempted that night to come downstairs and say "It's God's judgement. Look, when it hit our computer is just fine but yours is dead" or something to that effect. Cute. Ends up that the motherboard and the modem were killed by this "act of God" but thankfully the hard drive is right as rain. Now I'm nicely paranoid whenever I hear thunder approaching from the west and completely disconnect this machine lest anything like that happens again. What bugs me is the fact that my answering machine didn't get fried. I reckon its inner workings are just as fragile as the laptop. The week was filled with reading all five books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, procrastinated yet again on washing dishes and unpacking, wrote about ten letters (of which I only mailed six) and engaged in being short of breath. I also procrastinated in regards to work and aquiring insurance for my car because I had the ability to say I could procrastinate since I didn't have my own computer to do the necessary research or the ability to fax out resumes. My father sent me a care package from home which contained kitchen items, a wee beard trimmer which is more of a beard trimmer than a beard remover that my sister gave me for Christmas two years ago, a shower rack, Sunday's comics from NJ and knives. He told me that my postcard arrived after what seemed to be an eternity and then my letter home arrived which he said was fair and even handed rather than being something which crucified my mother which I was afraid it might be seen as being and raise a lot of shit for those who remain in that house, two and four legged alike. One useless thing that kept my hands busy was fleshing out the basic plot of my HERO system space campaign, figuring out the motivations behind the Empire, the Adversary, various personalities on Earth and the first galactic empire which decided it was much wiser to rule five known star systems rather than an entire galaxy regardless of their power. Still don't have a name for them and "First Ones" reeks of B5. Still have to work out the main events, create NPCs and their motivations. That kinda stuff I already have fleshed out for my Vampire game, just need to write up adventures using the setting and characters. Here's the basic premise of the space campaign: Ruling entity of this arm of the galaxy was ambushed and is engaged in a losing war with a race known only as the Adversary. Desperate, they go to unaligned and less advanced worlds (like Earth) and Earth accepts their generous offer to join the fight. The Vampire game is a power struggle between the Camarilla, who now run Asbury Park, and the Sabbat, who run Atlantic City. Pretty simple. From Friday to Monday I was having trouble breathing and I don't know why I was having trouble. I couldn't catch my breath and my breathing was shallow, when I would lie down to sleep at night either I'd sleep for about three hours then flail out of bed in an asphyxiation panic or I'd just stare at the ceiling only to get up and pace until dawn broke. On Sunday I got all worked up and drove around Colorado Springs looking for a dehumidifier thinking that my apartment was too humid due to lack of air circulation then I got a phone number for an allergy and asthma specialist and learned that the grass pollen count was exceptionally high. In the end, I reckon it was just a manifestation of stress. During my short of breath wakefulness I decided to keep myself busy by cleaning up my bedroom and kitchen and finished around three when I lay down again in hopes that exhaustion would outweigh the necessity to breathe. No dice. Around five Jaybird phoned my answeirng machine with "Hey, bingo tonight. Okay? Good" which had me sighing at the prospect of being cranky and overtired from being awake for thirty six hours straight. We were going to leave in an hour so I brought a chair out to the patio, sat down and actually slept. By the time I woke up I was breathing normally and I felt better about going out. I won two hundred and fifty dollars during double action (each square has two numbers, if one of the numbers is called then the whole box gets filled in) and it was happy. One thing about my win was that I won in forty calls which was the lowest that the caller had ever seen anyone win double action before and folks usually won in fifty or more. The Birds almost won twice except some old biddies beat them to it because they had slightly better cards. When Jaybird could've won the balls were fucking with him coming up I-26 and N-52 when he needed I-25. If they had won, this would've been the luckiest house in Colorado Springs. Afterwards we went home, watched Comedy Central and I brought up some chili that I made which turned out really good. The first time I tried to make it was at Malyss' place and I screwed it up something fierce even though I followed his directions closely. This weekend I'll probably make meatloaf even though it's not a month with an R in it. On Friday I went to the Utopia Cafe to hang out and they had an okay band there and I ended up watching the girls dance and writing down ideas for the space campaign, writing some ideas for a redesign of this site and a story about the face on Mars. I thought Saturday would be just as good except the band sucked and I left after ten minutes. At least the cover that night was only two bucks. Reckon that I'll go hang out somewhere else this weekend and have a better time. I spent a decent amount of bored time building up a team in Silver to trade over to Yellow so I could march through it and get a hitmonlee and a omanyte along with any other pokemon that I need to fill out the pokedex in Silver. Right now I have 232 pokemon in Silver. Yellow is cute because of the way Jesse and James show up like Gary shows up in Red and Blue except they always have the same three suck-ass pokemon. Now I just have to bring pokemon to Bill's grandfather in Gold to get evolution stones (and doing the duplication trick) so I can evolve other pokes into their final forms to fill out the pokedex. Oh yeah, something of interest. I had auditory hallucinations while I was offline early in the week and late at night. I would hear the damned pokemon music from my gameboys but I'd check both and they were turned off. Another night I swear I heard maribou calling "Haakon?" quite clearly but since it was three inna morning they were definitely asleep. Finally I heard people talking in the other room but it faded once I tried to listen to what exactly they were saying. The hallucinations went away come Wednesday evening and haven't been back since. For a day I toyed with the idea of becoming mayor of Colorado Springs. I reckon it was partly because I would like to emulate my father who is the unofficial mayor of Millburn. He can't go food shopping without having fifteen tiny conversations and one long involved conversation with folks he runs into which makes a simple run for bread and milk take almost a fucking hour. Of course he always blames it on the lines at the cashier, not the fact that he was talking with folks. On Monday night I realized if I lay flat on my back with no pillows I could breathe normally and this pretty much helped end my respiratory problems. I went out to spend my sinful money on books, got American Gods (which I'm halfway through right now), two Usagi Yojimbo compilations (though I don't know if one is the second half of the grasscutter story) because I couldn't find the Cerebus "Going Home" collected volume. While I was walking downtown there was a huge double rainbow to the east, the second one I've seen while I've been here and the first time that I saw one was when Jaybird, maribou and I were driving back from a day trip into Denver. I reckon there's more good in store. I would've had my computer back on Monday but I was asleep when the Airborne Express guy came around to drop it off and it required a signature. My car's screwed up for some reason, the starter seems to be going even though I haven't been cranking it or driving around much so I have to get an appointment to have it looked at and fixed. The bingo money will help with that. Now for Tuesday stuff. I went out to breakfast, read a lot, got online but LambdaMOO was down and I was thinking I really didn't want to go back online because it'll be more of the same, I won't have much to say because nothing much is going on here and if I do say anything I doubt it'll be entertaining or spark any real conversations that either side can keep up with any sincere interest. I logged in and it was pretty much as I thought it would be and my diary's even more boring than usual. According to maribou, who's been checking my website while I've been offline, someone padded the poll in the past day in Brian's favor even though according to her the score was at thirteen to three (my favor) until yesterday or Sunday. Now Brian has about thirty votes. I reckon it's Brack, whomever Brack is, or someone who has access to lots of subdomains. Got a letter from my sister. Hi Haakon! Thanks for writing back. Rocco's crying. Shh kitty. I haven't developed that role of film yet. I didn't forget about the pictures. Mom told me on Friday that you were in Colorado. I said "Really? Where did you hear that?" She said that your boss told Daddy. It's O.K.. Daddy misses you a lot. (I do too). I'm so tired. They called me into work today (on my day off). That really sucked. How is everything going? I'm glad you like it there. I'd love to come out and see it. How does the job front look? I haven't had a chance to hook up my email yet. Mom has been acting funny since you left. I think she's upset but she has a funny way of showing her feelings. We had a litter of baby bunnies in the bushes. They were so cute! I think there mom moved them next door, where it is quieter. I think the dogs scared them. (three inch drawn with |<- actual bunny size ->| (I took a picture)) So does it get hot there? Today its 92o (when I'm on the subway its at least 10 o hotter). Too bad your air conditioner doesn't fit in your window save it for when you move again. I'm sure you'll be above ground next. If you can, send me pictures of Colorado. Do you ski? Your probably going to learn. That's the winter pass time. That's spooky that you weren't the one who called that night (when they hung up on dad and then called and hung up on me) I was almost positive that it was you. Mom + Dad thought so too. The night after you left, I let the dogs out before I went to bed and everything looked normal. The next morning when I got up + let them out, one of the chairs was sitting in the middle of the lawn (like when you used to sit in the yard at night, was that you? I bug out too much. I can't help it. It's part of being female. I still think you should call and say hello, if you can. Do you need a phone card? Were the phone cards helpful? I have vacation next week. I'm not doing anything though. Ben + Kate say woof. Kate was all buggin after you left. So are there a lot of people from Jersey out there? It seems a lot of people from Jersey moved there. Did you see the four corners? That's supposed to be cool. You can travel through 4 states in 5 minutes. Cool. I'm running out of room. I talk to you soon. |
I've been in Colorado for a whole month. Goodness. I found a cool site that lists places to check out in Colorado Springs. I reckon their tastes are the same as mine after I read this review of Wooglin's which nailed the place on the head. I think the site might be out of date since I think the guy's talking about the bookstore where maribou works except it's not called that. Wooglin's has fairly good food that is served up by surly Colorado College kids for exorbitant prices. They offer live music and open mikes occasionally, too, so if you're in the mood for angry female-fronted folk rock or free-form poetry -- not to mention really expensive beer -- this is place for you, you fucking hippie. I'd like the place better if it weren't for the people who worked there. Just glad that I haven't been there when they had open mike night. Angry college aged females reading poems about their angry college aged vaginas? SIGN ME UP! Anyway I still haven't found a place that I like enough to make into my diner like the diner back in New Jersey on Rt. 22. I'm sure there's someplace around here like that. Tonight or tomorrow I'll head over to the Nepalese restaurant to see what they have. Asian food is usually a winner for me because their cuisine lacks cheese unless you're thinking about one of those Chinese restaurants that caters to Jews during the other holidays. Why the fuck do Jews go out for Chinese food if the menu has an enormous section put aside purely for pork? They're not going to be getting anything kosher because I think the cook cares much about cleaning his utensils when frying up General Tso's chicken after cooking a batch of sweet and sour pork in the wok. Nor do I think most Chinese cooks care about the urine content of the Coca Cola. maribou says the Nepalese restaurant used to be a really good European restaurant with decent pierogies of various styles and when she kept bringing up the fact that it was Nepalese I kept thinking she meant Naples because I remember my first day in Colorado Springs Jaybird drove us around and pointed out there was a bad Italian restaurant, in the location of the Nepalese restaurant, where they just put ketchup on macaroni. Maybe I was only half-listening because I was busy being overwhelmed. I think it's cool there's a place like that in town because with all these fucking mountains I was wondering if there were a bunch of Tibetan and Nepalese expatriates living here. I wonder if they'd have the same reaction to seeing the Rockies as someone from Colorado would have seeing the Kittatiny Mountains in northwest New Jersey. "You call those mountains?!?!" Then again I'm sure that's what Brian would say to his next girlfriend, if things with his current girlfriend go down the shitter, when she takes off her top. Work is annoying at the moment because the manager's computer can't see the full text on one page and therefore he thinks it's a problem with the site even though the page shows up perfectly on the other computers like one of the annoying Powermacs that has spotty support for frames. Yes, frames aren't the best thing but that's what my employer wanted for their site. Shit, that frames business still comes up now and again whenever they deal with mac using clients which is failry often since they're in the entertainment industry. So I'm writing this entry in bed and it's pretty keen listening to my fingers thundering across the keyboard through the mattress and my pillow when I start typing at a decent clip. That's about it, the only productive thing I did today was do laundry but I started that late. Still it's being done. Look at me, I'm updating early inna morning and writing as if the day has already happened. Well the only thing I'm really going to mention is the fact that I'll be taking my car down to this one mechanic that Jaybird suggested because they're competent and honest. I just hope they're affordable. The most expensive thing that has to be done is having the starter looked at, the rest of the stuff is niggling shit like getting the horn, the dome light and the driver side window working once again. I still have 140 bucks in winnings from bingo, just haven't had the balls to see how much money I have in the Big Envelope tm. Right now I'm feeling homesick but I don't know if it's because I'm projecting my feelings of loneliness upon something which can't be helped at the moment (like I can pop back and forth between here and NJ with ease), the fact that I'm overtired and stayed awake for another entire evening or it's just so quiet and disconcerting trying to keep myself company by reading the web, reading books or playing god damned Pokemon. In the back of my head I'm thinking if I ever got truly unpacked either the place wouldn't feel lived in or I'd really bug out from having nothing to do or nothing to procrastinate. Maybe the homesickness came about when I saw the pictures for the Raisin Acres Halloween Parade web site. I've always had it in the back of my head that if I moved back to New Jersey that Raisin Acres would be a lovely place to settle down because it's so quiet, rural and beautiful. One thing that made me moody was when I heard back from Malyss that the Raisin Acres Halloween Parade is dying because there are so few volunteers taking part in the preparations of the parade. Sigh. Reckon that one thing which would make me feel a bit better and at home would be the ability to listen to Howard Stern, no matter how starstruck and unfunny he's become in the past couple of years. Most mornings when I would've gotten breakfast the timbre of his voice would make me have to go poop and I could feel the rumble in my belly. So I'm going to get started on the rest of my laundry along now that I've finished most of the dishes in the sink and just have to let the pot soak for the day so I can clean it out nice and squeaky in the evening when I have truly idle hands. Or I'll just reply to my sister's letter and that'll be it. After I get a decent amount of sleep and showering after I get up for the day I'm sure that I'll see things in a different light. This site really doesn't feel like it's one of the more important things in my life right now which is strange. I have no energy to think about putting my thoughts together into something coherent for this entry. One thing that I don't get is something I remember from talking with maribou a few weeks ago where she was going off on how she dug this guy back in high school and was holding his hand all the time this one night hoping he'd get the hint that she really dug him but he didn't catch on and said something to the effect of "Well, you do that with everyone." Don't understand that at all. There've been times where I've been out with chicks and later I bring up how I liked something they did and they're like "Oh, I'd do that for anyone." Great, I'm anyone. If only I was more perceptive. If only I could get over myself. If only I'd stop asking stupid questions like this. No, I'm not talking about anyone specific and if I was I would name names. Fucking disclaimers. Why don't you go log off and do something? There's plenty out there to do that's more exciting than being online looking at the same old pornography or reading the same old morbid news or talking to human medical waste which thankfully have an off button. Scram. You'll feel better that you did. I'll just be here telling people to log off for their own good. I went to this Nepalese restaurant but it wasn't the one I thought it was but it was still good. I had lamb vindaloo with garlic naan but it came out to be seventeen bucks. At least I left feeling full so I didn't feel ripped off or anything. I should make a point to head down to this other place which is on the same street but a few blocks further east to try their lunch buffet which is all you can eat. Bad thing is that my car's still hit and miss when it starts plus I'm afraid that it isn't the flywheel (Jaybird says it sounds like the flywheel and I know the starter is good. I know what a dying starter sounds like, damnit) and if it's the starter then it'll be an ouch on my funds. I'll be dropping it off at the garage on Sunday night. For some reason my left foot has started hurting. I think it's from kneeling on the side of the bed and typing away with my toes bent because the pain's right on the ball of my foot. I walked down ten blocks tonight and it just hurt without incapacitating me but I reckon that I should take it easy. Also gotta whip up my resume and make it sound technical rather than creative along with sending out an invoice to work for what I've done in the past weeks. Oh yeah, one last thing! This morning when I walked over to 7-11 for a breakfast thingy I saw there was frost on Pikes Peak!!! It was so cool plus the morning was nippy and made me hope for autumn days where it's nippy like that in mid afternoon rather than early morning or evening. That's the best weather, especially when the leaves are off the trees and scrape on the sidewalk or get mushed like wet cornflakes in the street. Only thing that I really want to do is lie here in bed typing on my laptop and have my back touched or have someone lie perpendicular to my body and rest their head against my back. Or to wrap my arms around someone's middle from behind and press my lips to their left shoulder while I start to fall asleep. To fall asleep and wake up to someone smiling at me because they're happy at my presence beside them. Nothing naughty, just intimate. I want to go food shopping with someone. Of course the only person I'd really want to do this with is Devo. I was a Big Boy on Saturday and trimmed my beard for the very first time. I used to have my father do it because it would be time where we'd sit together and talk for a few minutes. Reckon I got the impression that beard trimming might be tricky because he's a professional and has lots of experience but I don't have any experience or knowledge in this area. So proud of myself. Next time I'll have to make sure when I trim the front chinacological area that I don't make it as short as I made it this time. Thank goodness for idiot guards on my trimmer. There's something I have in mind right now and it involves me taking piano lessons to learn how to play one song on the ivories. It came to me while I was on the can last night and seems like the perfect way to do my little scheme. Only thing is that I don't know how to read music nor would I have the faintest inkling of how or where to start learning that form of notation. Aintcha excited? |
Went to PPV with the Birds, read, went online and got the paper but not in that order. Makonan's not talking to me because she thinks I treat her like a second class friend despite the fact I emailed her and told her it's not like that and I thought my actions showed otherwise but I haven't heard back so I don't care since she doesn't care. I have about 1800 bucks left, I need to go food shopping and my foot doesn't hurt as much as it did the past two days. It all started when two hours after falling asleep I had one of those dreams that just stopped everything. I was going back to New Jersey and standing in a terminal at some airport getting my ticket when the lady behind the counter said she needed to see some photo ID. I don't have any photo ID and everything stopped dead right there to the point that I woke up a little thinking "Jesus, I don't have any photo ID" in mhy sleep fuzzed head. I shut my eyes tight and slipped back into my dream as best as I could. The effort paid off. Back home, I went to the library and borrowed a Michael Crichton novel from the library and there was this little old lady, who had a great big book with pages full of manilla pockets and in each pocket was a slip of tissue paper and aluminum foil bearing a name, that tells me I can't take the book out unless I give her ten bucks. After all, it's a Crichton novel. I give her the cash and go about my merry way, not reading the book. Walking down the street past the Kwik-E-Mart and the undemolished Schaible Oil building until I was home. Back home, I realized that my folks were coming home after a long vacation and things needed to be ready. All I did was flip through the book and hold the page with the library's take-out slip in the back cover when my parents did come home then went outside into the darkness on the porch. When they came in the door, they were doing the same exact stuff that I did when I came in the door and I watched them through the kitchen window next to the porch. Up above, the moon and stars did strange things like dancing and pulsing in the night sky which was too black for its own good. After a time I got up and left for the library. There was gunfire in the streets, mostly automatic gunfire. The Schaible Oil company was wrecked and the site was surrounded by a chain link fence covered with bedsheet banners proclaiming that the Earth is alive as Gaia and one shouldn't use any technology whatsoever. The gun wielding fanatics were shouting and shooting sheepishly because they were being hypocrites shooting Uzis and Tek 9s at innocent bystanders but in their eyes it was alright because Gaia understands people will stop using technology in good time, it's inevitable and using these guns is a necessary evil rather than going around with clubs and fists. Back at the library I looked for something new then realized I had the Crichton novel in my backpack and it was startlingly overdue which meant if I went through the book detectors again they would go off since the book would now give a signal saying it wasn't being borrowed anymore to the detectors. At the checkout counter I gave the book back then went to the old lady telling her my name and how she owed me ten bucks. "I have a Haakon Studebaker here but it says he's only nine years old and he can't take out any books. You can tell that there's no ten dollars here either." She grinned up at me helpfully as I looked at her slip-filled book. I spoke with her a while, very slowly, telling her that I did borrow a book and give her ten bucks at her insistance which was owed to me. In the back of my head I thought, "Aw shit, now I can't get lunch on my way back home" since the ten bucks seemed further and further away. After my explanation she allowed me to check my pocket and my pocket only and within the tissue paper was no ten dollar bill but I dislodged the pocket below me which had my neat, folded, crisp ten dollar bill which she misplaced. She was frustrating and senile until I gave up letting her keep the money and I got in line to leave the building. Something was going on down in the library's basement and to enter it one had to answer questions about science like recite the table of the elements which I did, "Dark, Steel, Psychic, Poison, Bug, Grass..." and all the other pokemon types which only served to irritate those behind me and the folks who couldn't answer the question to my right. I limboed under the police line do not cross tape and thumped downstairs. It was a huge exhibit of three paintings which were like stained glass reproductions of Jackson Pollack style paintings. The paintings weren't so much chaotic smears and splats but rough pointillism made with a stabbed brush against the walls that made images instead of the fine dots of Seurat's work. Most of the pictures were abstract, one was supposed to represent main street in my town, another looked like a photograph of Don Knotts dressed up like Barney Fife and the other said how the artist was going for a stained glass feel and how his work was temporary. The gallery displaying these works was quite big, shaped like a letter E with the paintings covering the walls which are the three prongs sticking out of the E and went all the way up to the ceiling. Down the main stem of the E was a walkway along a fake canal. I looked at the paintings and noticed the use of scarlet and gold in lieu of other colors but how the artist was able to create an illusion of a broader spectrum with just two colors but I decided to look for the exit (which was always behind me in a dream kinda way). In front of me was a black transgendered person with a medieval monk's haircut, they crossed the canal to somewhere to avoid me which didn't bother me one bit. A few minutes behind that person were these two black twins wearing what American blacks would consider to be "traditional" African garb even though it was bought at the black Gap or something and they were about as African as General Tso's chicken. When they were closer I saw that they were twins but one was a light skinned black woman and the other was a pale woman who was covered with freckles that weren't so much freckles but broken pieces of red pottery stuck to her skin that she had yet to shed. Their features were very similar though. The girls seemed to know me from when I was little and they were still twin black girls and would see me at the municipal pool. We talked for a bit and stood in the topmost prong of the letter E gallery when I discussed how the artist was trying to convey a sense of mortality and how temporary life can be for people. That seemed to be the wrong thing to say because the paintings started shaking against the wall and paint chips, like broken glass, started hailing down on us. I grabbed them both and ran down the walkway towards the bottom of the E shaped building and out into the street once again. From inside, I could hear the artist cursing my name because I didn't die in the planned collapse of the paintings and I saved those two twins who were nowhere to be found now. The firefight from earlier was reaching a fever pitch, the Gaians were frat boys firing away with unlimited ammunition at people who were simply trying to get home going underneath this railroad bridge that doesn't exist back in my hometown. Three times I tried to time my running under the bridge to avoid being shot and three times I got stitched in the side by hot gunfire which didn't break my skin or kill me but sent me back to the beginning like a video game. I was eventually able to get through and hide underneath a Japanese style tree, all around me I could hear media types talking about it, how people were dying and how they would switch over to the weather except their weather woman was wounded and stuck in a helicopter about ten yards away from where I crouching. In the back of my head I heard how there was one of those Gaians crouched in the helicopter and despite whatever illusions of safety these newspeople had for the safety of their wounded weather woman, she was in mortal danger anyway. I scampered around the tree and looked back at the helicopter, rising behind the window was a guy wearing a camoflage hat, dark aviator sunglasses and one of those faggot Village People mustaches which are always more acceptable to employers than beards. I reached down and got a sniper rifle with a laser scope, shouldered it, levelling it at the guy who was laughing about how he would kill this woman in cold blood and once the red laser dot had stabilized I squeezed the trigger blowing his brains out. I breathed hard, the dream faded from my consciousness. I woke up and wrote all this down. 8/20/01 7:58 a.m.. So there. Been talking with Kylie lately because I was feeling down with my brief spate of homesickness, losing a friend and complete boredom. Sometimes I feel bad because it seems like that's all I ever do when I speak with her even though that doesn't seem to be the case in the light of a new day without last night's moodiness coloring my thoughts. Plus she claims that she dishes out the bitching and moaning just as much as I do to her so I should quit that. Last night she insisted on phoning me and we talked, I stopped feeling upset once I started reciting the recipes for my father's meatloaf and chili to her which is a Good Thing (tm). I'm working on redesigning the navigation of this site to reduce the clutter of closely spaced links in the right hand column but the only solutions I found were perl scripts that involve this page being a .shtml or using javascript. The redesign I was going to implement were just drop-down menus for the regular diary entries, probably keep the big numbered grid for dreams and nightmares and clean up the rest culling links which really aren't that interesting or relevant to me. Most people surf with javascript turned off and they wouldn't be able to get to my diary archives with it turned off and they're not about to turn it back on just for my wee site. This page is a PHP file which precludes it being a .shtml file. I uploaded a sample of what the new site will feel like once I get it done. I may keep the huge single page archives as well but offline just in case I decide that the new site is too unwieldy for its own good and return to the green, unreadable clutter. Please let me know what you think of the new design especially in the area of navigation. I want to make the site look good and easy to navigate. Spoke with my father for a minute or two earlier today and found out some spic came around the house while my sister was home. Apparently he's wanted for breaking and entering, the police are out looking for him and I hope they throw his greasy ass in jail. Too bad I wasn't there because I would've gotten the cleaver and menaced the fucker or used it if he tried anything on me. Mmm, sociopathy. My car is back, the starter was replaced for 318 dollars and the driver's side window had the clips replaced so now I have a functioning window again! Plus my father phoned me and said that old starter was under warranty according to his friend who fixed the car in the first place so I'm thinking I might be able to get some money back which would really kick ass. Glad that I found out about this within the same day that I got the car back so by tomorrow I'll probably be able to get the starter from the garage and cash in on the warranty. This is great! The up side of all this is the fact that I didn't have my horn and dome light fixed since there's a short in the car that would've taken one to three hours to hunt down which translates into $180 bucks at most. Whee, I'll be getting money back! Crossing fingers. That's about it. See you tomorrow. I have to thank Jaybird for reminding me of Arcanum. The first time I heard of it I thought it was a cool concept and it's being done by the same folks who worked on the Fallout series but the demo was ungodly in size (200 megabytes, I think) for my measly 56k connection and I assumed that the computer I'd run it on was lacking in horsepower to run it anyway so Arcanum slipped from my head. This fucker's coming out on the 24th, allegedly the real release date is a whole month later, and amazon has it listed at 44 bucks for pre-order. It'll probably retail for sixty in the stores considering that The Sims and other games which have been out for a year are still hovering around the fifty dollar mark in price. This is strange, lately I've started using anti perspirant and I think it's actually made me much more stinky than I would normally be if I didn't use such a product. How annoying, especially since I'm trying to get myself to being job interview clean on a regular basis for the job search (it's picking up) since most employers are sensitive to that kind of stuff. The boss at my first real job was anal like that, there was no air conditioning in my office nor was there any air circulation so I would get awful hot and it seemed that no amount of showering was enough. He always reeked of really bad cologne like he bathed in it. Anyway that job was mostly nigger work rather than actual desktop publishing and design. Quick note. I bought a Brain Boy earlier today, it's a cheat device with a graphical interface, and I made a mew and celebi. I haven't figured out how to figure a pokemon's stats so I can make a pokemon into a shiny pokemon which is something I'd really like to have. Math is hard. There was a dream which began in my apartment. Odd thing was that my apartment was adjacent to the Birds' apartment and I had TV reception. There was a show on TV about the history of plumbing and how hot water heaters and showers were really made out of the bleached skeletons of criminals. I went to the bathroom, which was shared between us, and saw an arm bone and a tibia attached with a splayed hand for a base and a skull on top for the showerhead. I thought it was fairly cool especially since it was held together with rubber bands. Jaybird and maribou were occupied watching TV and I really didn't want to disturb them even though when I turned on the same program on the Discovery Channel that they were viewing I realized that Jaybird was Dick Cavett in disguise. The doorbell rang and clustered around the window beside the door were three kids, one big fat dorky one in a red jacket and two others who were darker and nondescript in blue jackets. "Yeah?" "Got any cigarettes?" "No. Fuck off." and the kids left but I decided to be an ass and phone the police. When I did I noticed that the phone I was using was the cordless from New Jersey and when I stepped outside to see what direction the kids were going in I saw that I was on my front lawn back in New Jersey watching the kids walk back towards the middle school while I told the cops their whereabouts. After I hung up, the kids started running fearfully past me to the other direction which made me chuckle. A small black easy chair kinda spacecraft came down from the sky and inside was this east Indian woman with blonde hair at the controls. The ship could've been an easy chair if one pushed the front hood down and folded back the plexiglas roof. There was enough room for two and I squeezed in as the ship took off, zooming through the air down towards Route 22, dipping and rising and swerving wildly through all sorts of obstacles. All the aerial acrobatics didn't frighten me one bit even though there were plenty of dead drops but I knew that I wouldn't hit the ground, the scariest part was going under things and being afraid I might hurt my head. We zipped through a warehouse, it was clean with blue steel doors and unmarked cardboard boxes, and she gave me the impression that she had to catch up with a convoy but since she always hated being hindmost she was going to take a shortcut to take the lead. The convoy had lost us, taking an exit in the middle of the warehouse to somewhere and we exploded out the front doors down the highway towards Bowcraft. Bowcraft is a little amusement park about fifteen minutes away from my house on Rt. 22, it has rides and miniature golf and it used to be cool when it was more campy but nowadays it's all cleaned up and lost the giant fiberglass animals which would be on every lawn. We landed in a shaded area and she did something strange that made the ship split in two like a cancer but when it split it was no longer spaceworthy, being just an easy chair. "We're going to give these kids rides." she told me as she got into what was left of her ship and pulled a kid into her lap. I got into my ship and waved a kid over and flew the ship straight up as far as I could handle much to the kid's glee. A few jostles and dead falls then the ride was over, coming to a stop next to an abandoned ticket booth where the kid got out and the Indian woman came over saying something to a Haakon. I kept looking around trying to get her attention since she didn't seem to notice me when she was talking at me but it ended up there was a little Indian girl behind my chair who was named Haakon as well. She knelt beside her and spoke softly, that's when I noticed why the Indian woman who drove the spaceship was an alien. Where she would've had a wedding ring she had two delicate eyelids with spidery eyelashes which opened to reveal a small brown eye that looked about wildly before the finger was slid into the little girl's mouth. Don't remember much else except waking up about 2:30 a.m. and being irritated that I was so close to having normal sleep (meaning waking up in the morning rather than mid afternoon). The lovely picture at the top of the page is courtesy of Malyss. She has these little plastic monkeys which she made and lined up along her computer desk and she sent me this picture of the wee sparkly beasties. Woke up early. I've been trying to reset my body so I interact with the rest of the world on a normal schedule. You know, waking up before ten thirty, going to sleep by midnight. All that happy sorta shit. I set up triggers on SimpleMu so if Devo ever logs back in again, she says she's busy but I have no idea what she's busy with and it's her business and absolutely none of my affair, it'll play "Hallelujah" from Handel's Messiah. Bored. Nothing going on. Found out that one can't make a pokemon shiny by tweaking their stats or remove a pokemon's shininess by tweaking the stats so I've taken to duplicating my shiny gyarados, changing its species, level, stats and such to make my own shiny pokemon. Um, no dreams. No new comics. I still haven't touched fucking pictures nor have I added any new text to stuff that you've already read regarding my trip to Colorado. Tonight I went to a local linux users group and it was alright, two hours didn't seem like enough but there wasn't that much discussed after there was a brief overview of MySQL and PHP which really wasn't as informative as I would've liked in the first place. The rest of the meeting folks talked about the code red virus and wireless networking. My father emailed me the night before and said how he was contacted by my boss in NYC. Boss was pissed off about the computer repairs but think everything got straightened out. This makes me feel that I fucked up a decent job that had shitty hours (not in the schedule sense but not enough hours to live on). Now I sit and wait for emails that will bear bad news or no news. He says that everything is fine and the business manager is being rational and she'll put some sense into the boss' head. Still I have FUD. In my book, having absolutely no news about something is always a harbinger of bad news. Douglas Adams said in Mostly Harmless that nothing travels faster than bad news, and how aliens tried to create a star drive that worked off that principle, but in my experience bad news is more sudden or takes forever to arrive. Kind of like that saying, "It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end." When the bad news does arrive, it arrives with such force and ferocity that it feels like one got blindsided by a hungry tiger. Like when I was fired from my previous jobs, they held off on firing me for about a month without saying a thing and pawning me off to do menial work rather then the stuff I was hired to do in the first place. Now I wonder if this will be the case with my web job. Of course there's also the fact that I haven't heard from Devo in quite some time and part of me is gnawing at whatever fresh growth of thick skin I've grown on my psyche trying to get me back into a New Jersey state of mind. Plus a few days ago I was talking with Wellsie and seeing if she had heard from Devo then followed it up with me fishing to see if Devo had said anything about me. Wellsie paged back with, "You really like her, don't you? I mean, she is amazing and all." My kneejerk reaction to this was "fuck, here comes bad news" and I told Wellsie this. She replied with "No no no" and went on to tell what she knew, like how things seemed to be getting better between Devo and someone else. I countered that and then I realized that it was getting close to the time that my father said he was going to call. I was glad of that because the timing couldn't have been better since I didn't want to continue and have seeds of doubt apparently fertilized by "truth" or reality. Just been telling myself lately that Wellsie probably hasn't spoken to Devo in many, many months so what she knows is probably expired like milk. I should remember that if I want to know, I should just ask Devo rather than looking for signs and portents in someone else's opinions or knowledge because I don't want to show weakness or insecurity because I reckon showing those two feelings just diminishes what other people think of me. Shit dealing with work seems a fuckload of a lot more manageable than dealing with personal life kind of stuff because I can always find another job, I can always get my hands on money, I can always slant my resume to make me seem like someone I'm really not. I can't do that with personal stuff. I really wish I knew how other people are able to do that with their personal affairs. Must be their confidence. Bought some Tootsie Pops from Groucho Marx in my dream last night. The person before me was also buying Tootsie Pops and their purchase went smoothly. Somehow when I gave him my pops the wrappers had fallen off, I got lemon and orange flavor, and he had added blueberry to the ones I was going to buy. First he looked down, rubbed his finger along his eyebrow and sighed because he couldnm't get the price off the wrapperless lollipops. I fumbled over to the coffeecan where I got the lollipops and pulled out the wrappers and handed them to him then mentioned that I only chose orange and lemon flavor. Groucho looked at me like I was being a wiseacre and put the blue one into his right pocket and the other two into his left pocket. I thought, "Ah, lollipops aren't any good unless the have pocket lint on them." He rang me up, each one was $2.35 but the total price with tax was $4.13. Feeling silly that somehow I gave him an extra Tootsie Pop that I wasn't going to buy I offered to buy it for him since he looked hungry but he declined. As I left he asked, "So, what are you thinking now that you're leaving for Colorado?" There was a big movie being filmed before this and almost as soon as it started filming, it was finished, released and received rave reviews. I just knew this in the way one knows something happens in a dream. Ended up that Devo had a small role which eludes me and I had this urge to get online and list her on imdb.com right away so she could get even more famous than she would just being in this movie. Turns out she had already starred in another movie but when I asked her what was up with that she denied that she had appeared in any other movies. Of course I only ran across Devo after I had left home for Colorado in my dream. My father had two cats, one was silver and the other was black and I'm certain she was Pudding. I knew the dogs were around but they didn't appear in the dream. Griped to my father about how my mother always mentioned the bad and never any of the good when it came to me but he kept getting distracted because the animals wanted to go outside to take care of business. Oh yeah, I think reading Maus altered the very first part of my dreams last night since I dreamt entirely in black and white panels about mice who always looked much happier than a drawn human would look with the same drawing and inking style of Art Spiegelman. Maybe I wasn't asleep during this part and was just reading it while my eyes worked and my brain was desperately trying to engage the dreaming part. Zzzz. Nothing interesting. Move along. Wait, not just yet. It seems that /The_Cat/ has travelled out west in order to keep tabs on me. No, I haven't had any visitors with a wee black head and silly voice on top of funny looking legs with brown and black fur with a bushy german shepherd tail. The past week or so I've seen something large, black and feline dashing away from the backyard or just turning around a corner only to vanish into thin air. How merry. Too bad there aren't any rotties for /The_Cat/ to fudge around here. Maybe she fudges frat boys instead. Jaybird's so generous. He purchased Arcanum recently and since he's still levelling up his barbarian to level 99 or 100 he decided to let me play around with Arcanum while he completes Diablo II. Of course I'll have to return it to him so I'm taking extra special care. I've installed the program, made a quickie character from scratch and played about five minutes before realizing I should delve into the instruction manual to learn more about character creation and how to make the character I want to play in the game. I'm thinking about playing a technologist but I'm not sure if I will play a half-orc or a dwarf. I have no real desire to play a mage, Jaybird and I talked about this briefly when he was having a smoke on the patio that the game is (probably) unbalanced giving magic an unfair edge over technology. Still, I'll give it a try. The final level of mechanics is keen, a big steam powered spider. Oh yeah the background of Mad Scientist sounds very cool despite the fact one begins the game at -3 constitution which seems to limit it to dwarves. While reading through the manual my mind started wandering away from playing the game and into thinking up other ideas like elves are descended from grasshoppers and dwarves from ants. Not in the evolutionary way but in a mythic way of "Ah little bug, you have proven yourself to be hardworking and noble so I shall turn you into something greater" and poof the first dwarf was made. Mind you this is taking a cue from the fable about the grasshopper and the ants where the grasshopper lazed about all day rather than busily storing up for wintertime like the industrious ants. Humans would be descended from spiders. No real reason though, just because. Another idea that hit me was when I was thinking about how these fantasy worlds have so many disparate species of humanoids coexisting in such a small region without one wiping the other out. Yes ancient humans coexisted with neanderthals for a million years or more but in the end we fucked them out of existence or perpetrated the slowest but grandest (in scale) act of genocide. I remember a Discovery Channel special that said the neanderthals might be around today if their birth rate was higher. So I figured that it'd be interesting for a world that was once akin to a galactic United Nations until some great catastrophe came about and ended space travel or greatly hindered technology. The beings who needed strange stuff to live (silicon based folk, methane breathers, hydrogen breathers, hyperintelligent shades of blue, heptapods) simply died out and became legend while the races which were fairly common to the planet's environment simply set up shop and went native forgetting old squabbles or friendships from their pasts and starting new ones. If this was a story or game, there would probably be some adventure that would reveal their true heritage and perhaps sail among the stars once again. I've always liked that kinda shit. One thing that bugs me is that organic technology seems to have become common in recent popular science fiction and it makes me hesitant to write these stories for fear of hearing "Oh, that's just Farscape except you redid Moya" or "Vorlon ripoff. Lame." I want to be somewhat original or rehash something old into something new, like Edison did except giving credit where credit was due unlike Edison. Heh, that reminds me of something I thought during my second week out here in Colorado Springs. I went from being fifteen minutes away from Edison's laboratory (more like an invention factory) to living in the very city which became home for Nikola Tesla. If or when I move again, I should brush up on my famous inventors and choose a city based on which inventor lived where during their lifetime. I figure that I'll fire up Arcanum, create a character and go from there so I can regale Jaybird with tales, hints (not spoilers, I owe him that much) and strategies whenever I see him next. Oh yeah, oh yeah. One last thing. I was hanging around on Yahoo Messenger earlier today and got to talking with someone from Colorado Springs trying to figure out where would be a good place to hang out or socialize and make aquaintances or friends and I mentioned that I've been through Acacia Park. "Oh, they call that Runaway Park." Yeah, it's pretty much true that there are a lot of runaways who hang around there since they have nowhere else to go but I remembered for a second what my sister said to me after I told her that I was leaving home while my parents are away. She said that I was running away, I replied with "Yeah, tell them you saw me walking down the street with all of my worldly belongings wrapped up in a sheet tied to a stick." Plus I'm thirty fucking years old, I doubt that my actions could hardly be defined as "running away". This is something that I should've done a long time ago but I wasn't ready for it (read as not having the balls for it). I'll just have to find someplace that's fairly quiet or someplace that has games. Games are Very Important to me as an element of social interaction. It feels good to play with other people and to begin to have some commonality with them just through the game then go from there. TV and movies just don't do it because you just sit there and the screen does all the playing for you and most entertainment is mindless so there's nothing thought provoking to talk about without seeming self absorbed. Reading and writing certainly aren't social pursuits and usually end up being things that two people in love do in the same room where they know it's just okay to do nothing and just read quietly for hours on end without exchanging a word or glance. Most likely there are a few pool halls over on Academy and I think there's a decent bar over on Tejon (walking distance, a definite plus so I don't have to worry about DWI) which I'll check out in the middle of the week or on the weekend. I can't stand noisy places because I like to talk with people and I hate having to shout at the top of my lungs in order to be heard as a mere whisper over the racket in the background. Then there's always the fun thing of shouting a conversation to someone over the din when suddenly the music stops and one's still shouting what they're saying so the whole establishment can hear much to one's embarassment. Of course it's fun embarassment but embarassment nonetheless. One last thing on the subject of games and for the tonight's entry, since I got the Monster Brain for Pokemon I'm happy that I'll be able to do Crystal movesets even though it'd be through using a cheat device rather than using breeding chains or raising a pokemon in Crystal. Ah, no more wasted time and carpal tunnel syndrome from hatching egg after egg or jumping through hoops to raise a pokemon's happiness enough so it evolves into its next stage. Whee, or something. The days drag by so slowly sometimes. I wish that my time perception was consistent so an hour felt like an hour and a day like a day and so on and so on and so forth. Not much else comes to mind at the moment so that's all the entry you're going to get, I tell you what. Yeah. I'll have something updated by this afternoon. Ugh, I'm terrible with time lately. I'm a creature of habit. Yeah, I've already covered this territory back in June when I was talking with Brian and sharing my conversation with you, gentle reader. It bugs me that I'm a creature of habit though, especially because it affects how I deal with people. Monday night I was talking with Kylie and Makonan (a.k.a. Blue_Guest) when my body starting shutting down for the night so I decided to roll over and lie for a while. Unfortunately I fell asleep, when I woke up I found this in my buffer: Magenta_Guest says, "so i've been moody and pissy since all this has been happening, and i've been incommunicado and very crappy to people." I think I know why I take it personally. I get used to people being around and thinking that they'll always be around in some capacity or another, which is completely unfair because people have their own REAL lives (opposed to MOO, etc) which don't involve me. I wonder, "Gee, they changed so abruptly. Reckon they hate me now." whether or not its based on reality or someone's attitude towards me. With Makonan it seemed clear to me that she disliked me after she had a confrontation regarding obtuse comments Rebeka made about her and I just felt bad like I had finally started getting a good new friend and like everything else that's good it's pulled out from under me. Makonan sent me an email that also felt like a big blowoff letter which was why I removed her from the site for a day or two. I had gotten used to her company online, I knew about the other big things going on in her life but I couldn't see past myself. Anyway, I was wrong. I just hope that I'm also wrong about other people too. I'm way distracted right now so I'm going to cut the entry here. For your convenience, I'm going to post my new pokemon team here so you don't have to skip over it.
Today was a lazy day. I fixed the lawn chair out back so I can lay on it and ended up taking a nap for most of the afternoon much to my personal pleasure. It reminded me of one of the finest naps I've had in my life which was back in college after my morning photography class when I had come home smelling of developing fluid and laid out in the hammock under the tree which was already November barren which was under a November gray sky with a gray sun burning coldly behind the clouds. Mmm, arty farty faggy. It was delightfully cold, just enough that I could keep warm with my jacket then throw it off and get cold then pull the jacket back over me. Lemme see, went for a quick drive then maribou came by to say hello as she returned from school and we talked for a bit then went upstairs to talk some more. Came back down around nine-ish, I think I spied one of my neighbors lying nude in bed (I wasn't trying to spy or peep or voyeur, I was just taking out the garbage) and dicked around online talking with Mordred and played three rounds of yahtzee with Kylie before writing these few paragraphs and hitting the hay. Earlier today I had a solid bowel movement which has been unusual for me for quite some time. Many summers ago there was a time where I was pooping blood. Bright scarlet poopwater would greet me when I got up from my throne. Of course I was worried but I figured that it would clear up eventually. It did. Since then it's been rare that I've had a solid one, mostly loose and all that good stuff. Diarrhea without the urgency. Where was I? Oh yeah, I pooped earlier today and it hurt like a motherfucker. After the discomfort was over I got up to see what I made and it was actually normal, something Dr. Kellogg would've been proud to see in his water closet. Still that poop felt more like a boyfriend than a poop. That's all behind me now. This is a new day. I hope you enjoy it more than I do. Poll results!!! It's been ages and I should've taken the poll down a few days ago but it's down now. the final results are six people voted that they've never found something swimming in their poop after they used the facilities and ONE person voted that they have seen something swimming in their poo after they pooed. Whoever voted that seriously please write me about your experience! Lemme see. I haven't gotten any checks in the mail, I'm sure to receive the check for the starter next week but I haven't a clue when I'll be receiving the check for services rendered at my NYC web job. The boss had a problem with me charging them with the repairs to the laptop. I'm afraid some shenanigans are going on and they're not even going to pay me for the work I did along with not paying me for replacing the motherboard. Went out to dinner tonight at the Utopia Cafe and it was pretty keen because they were friendlier than usual, last time I was there it wasn't busy but the folks were more distracted by other stuff. maribou told me that today (or was it saturday) that one of the women at her store heard so meone getting bitch slapped next door and when they went to find out if everything was alright the people there said "yeah" and passed it off. Just odd. I went onto Ghostwheel and did some hunting and I discovered something really neat that was added recently except I can't get to it much to my dismay. I tried and I tried to find a way into this new complex but was stumped. I did make a map of what I did find there which is awful happy but I want to see what else is around there and to get inside the complex. While I was at Ghostwheel I looked at my old MOOmails and discovered a dream that I had MOOmailed to myself but it was intended for someone (probably devo) and it seems that I didn't post it here. How strange. I'll reprint it here in it's entirety. Date: Fri Aug 25 17:02:06 2000 EDT i had the strangest dream after going to bed last night that involved us being at some beach (for some reason i remember this beach being part of my dream landscape. i was there once before running up and down the thorofare trying to get home but i'd never get home.) and staying in a motel that was also a library. the strange thing is that we never ever went out onto the beach itself when it was bright and sunny but when it was gray and misty we would head out but then we wouldn't go near the beach because it was foreboding. we'd split up and i'd walk on over to the burger king nearby and phone my father back home. i didn't know where you went but you were always back at our room when i got back. the dream continued like this for a bit, the room was really strange in that it had fewer walls than one would think. we had a public bathroom installed in our room that people were using for more intimate relations because they were allegedly private and you'd always seem to talk with me whenever i was in the bathtub. that's strange because i haven't had a bath in years. only showers and even then showers seem to take just as long as it takes when i take a bath. a whole half hour to clean me off. then i'd talk to you in our room, you're lying on the bed and we'd talk about if we should go out or not. soon it became night time and we decided that we should get home because this was getting boring. on the way out we noticed the burger king across the street erupted into flames. we went further down the road and saw that there was another burger king but this one was open for fourteen hours instead of 9-5 kinda hours. even further down the road was a twenty four hour burger king and across the street was a twenty four hour mc donald's.eventually we got to some woods and the dream faded from there. it was a very odd dream and one frought with sexual tension. I updated one of the people in dramatis personae and I reckon by the end of the week I'll be updating the other folks in dramatis personae. Finally at Lambda I had an idea to do GSBot for LambdaMOO since I don't use IRC. I realized there are over two hundred moves in Pokemon along with 251 individual pokemon with 12 types and many more combinations of those types. Fuck, too much work and I should be getting more responsible sometime soon dontchaknow. I dragged out my notebook and started taking notes and decided on designing a simplified version called Cockfight. Of course I know next to nothing about MOOcode but I'm sure I could get help on how to do this, by help I don't mean passing it off to someone else to do for me. Right now it's basically one type of fighter and the basic moves are:
The effects mentioned are:
The basic stats are
I'm sure once I get the core of this working in MOOcode, I'll be able to add different types like electric, fire, and other stuff. Innat fun? First off, I found someplace really cool on Ghostwheel that I can call home and it's not a tent. It's a vault set in the side of the big black wall that surrounds the Real/Time headquarters. The door was unlocked but I locked it after I explored the place then tried to hack the number so I could get in legitimately and use the door myself. Inside I found two sets of pseudo chitin armor (just like in Wasteland) and there was this big machine that makes boomshells for something called a boomstick. Spent a lot of time using a trigger to pick the lock on a foot locker so I could figure out how to use the base. Pure luck on my part. I was able to use the remote control so this robot called Pusher would push a boulder away to access a northern tunnel that simply led to a hole leading up and out into the wastes. I was hoping it would be an exit to the big complex in the northwest corner of the big black wall. Still, my day was spent mostly at Ghostwheel. Went out to dinner by myself where I was writing down notes regarding the combat system for the cockfighting game I have knocking around in my head for LambdaMOO. Figured out how the attributes work and I have set properties on the feature object which, so far, will represent the entire game. I'm hoping that this'll be a game like tilemasters where people remain brains in a jar, idling in rooms and jerking off to lists, but still interact long distance by playing a game. So far the cockfighting game seems a bit more violent than Pokemon would be with moves like slash (which causes bleeding, my answer to poison), eye poke (reduces accuracy) and fart (makes the opponent dizzy, like confusion in Pokemon). Once I have this worked out and the combat works the way I know it should, I'll add types of combatants just like in Pokemon like rock, fire and electrical elementals. Maybe if a combatant is paralyzed a certain number of times, it becomes crippled which is uncurable paralyzation and if the combatant becomes crippled twice it dies. Lots of alligators in my dream last night. I kept talking to them and about them like I was talking about the dogs back home. Thing is that I could run past them while they basked on the lawn and not get snapped at, very cool. One of them even tried standing on his hind legs as a trick for some unknown presence that dwelled in the sky. When I woke up I had Margaritaville stuck in my fucking head, repeating the line about "Searching for my lost shaker of salt." Thankfully it stopped around midday. Can't say that there's lots of excitement here. I'm going to try and keep online to a minimum so I can get telephone calls, if anyone calls, and play Arcanum or Half Life. |
