Fight noise with: noise.

Me sitting on the roof of my Dart the other day. Deya has given me a little bit of a haircut since.

T


here was a parking ticket on my Dart's windshield this morning. There was also one on the Vomit Comet. Damn that zone parking! I can't understand why it took the cops a month to finally bust us. I'd just assumed the rules weren't enforced in the summer time.

It's rent time at Kappa Mutha Fucka, so I drove to the landlord's office on Ivy Road and handed The Man $750 in cash.

Up 29 North, I bought a number of tools and supplies with which to do auto body work on the Dart. I want to fill some dents and rust holes so I can start painting the car to fit a theme. The idea is to cover it with silver stars and crescent moons so it will look like a wizard's cape. I bought a tub of Bondo body filler and a suction dent-puller, as well as some fuses and gasket compound. There is still an annoying leak around the windshield.

On the Downtown Mall, I paid my GODDAMN parking ticket and then went in search of more hardware. I ended up in a very quaint little anachronistic hardware store across the railroad tracks and adjacent to the dismal Garrett Square "projects." It's an amazing place, full of horse feed and gardening equipment. They had very little of what I needed, but they did have Liquid Nails. The clients are mostly little old white men. Instead of an obvious checkout line, there's an island in the middle of the store which customer and cashier approach from any random direction to ring up the purchases. There's no "employees only" section as far as I could tell. One of the cashiers is a distinguished looking old man who wears a pink bow tie. Back out on the streets, you're back on the edge of the projects, where most of the businesses have barricaded themselves behind concertina wire.

My Dart and I had a long interaction in front of Kappa Mutha Fucka. By trial and error I learned lots of little wordless things about Bondo, rust and sandpaper. I also applied lots of gasket compound around the windows.

This Batman/Robin dynamic duo suddenly arrived to save the day in an extremely noisy mufflerless car while I was playing guitar in my living room.

I


n the evening, Monster Boy went off to rescue Peggy and Zach. They've only been living on Carter's Mountain a few days and already they've blown a tire on the treacherous gravel road leading to the summit. The Toyota Race Car is an amazingly resiliant machine, but when you drive it with total disregard for its longevity, which is the way Zach uses anything, it's bound to suffer.

I was sympathetic to their plight, though, and most cordial as they hung out in the house, making lots of phone calls and seeking whatever assistance their limited social/familial network could provide. Unfortunately, it seems their only friends these days are Wonderboy Neek and his sidekick, Sherridan the sixteen year old alterna-boy drug-dealer-about-town. This Batman/Robin dynamic duo suddenly arrived to save the day in an extremely noisy mufflerless car while I was playing guitar in my living room. True, I WASN'T happy as Wonderboy marched through MY HOUSE, but what could I do? YET AGAIN Peggy and Zach were having a crisis spawned of their own foolishness, but as their friend, I had to endure EVERYTHING about them because to do less would have been at variance with my status as friend. So they had me over a barrel; I HAD to tolerate Wonderboy. I hated it.

As for Sherridan, well, he has a habit of burglarizing cars. I wouldn't mind so much if he did it somewhere else, but he's been known to use MY HOUSE as a base of operation for local car break-ins. I'm fed up with that sort of thing. But again, I had to tolerate his presence simply because of my friendship with Peggy and Zach. All the same, I don't have to keep his dirty little secrets for him. He never asked me to. He's never said a word to me. I owe him nothing.

Meanwhile, Matthew Hart, Leah and Deya had set off on a road trip to Philadelphia. Originally the mission had just been to take Leah's mother to Dulles airport near Washington. But then they considered how fun it would be to pick up Jessika and have her visit us. Unfortunately, Jessika somehow missed the contingent of my housemates; they were working under a time constraint and had to turn back. They did get to visit Johnny Boom Boom though.

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T


here has been an enormous increase in the amount of unsolicited email (spam) in my inbox. It's not from irate members of the Ladies of the Heart, either. It's from those trogladytic goof balls who think they can get rich quick. But I'm fighting their noise with some of my own. I track down their email addresses (that isn't always easy), and then I ship them multiple copies of netscape.exe. Take that! I have a T1, mutha fucka.

NEW! I've made a picture page featuring scenes from this past month.

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