April 9 1998, Thursday

Jessika has been trying to encourage me to look for a place to live once the lease on this house expires at the end of May. She acts like my mother sometimes, really she does. I know I should look, but the end of May still seems a long way away, and I have more immediate concerns just now.

I

n the evening we got a call from Cecelia the Brazilian Girl. She was in town and trying to track down Monster Boy at work. I suppose Cecelia was assuming (for whatever reason) that we're no longer good enough friends for it to be appropriate for her to visit us. That's poppycock, and besides, we didn't have Monster Boy's work number anyway. So either Jessika or Deya suggested she come over to our place instead. When Cecelia and her sister Leticia finally arrived, they had Jesse and Morgan Anarchy with them. They were, for the most part, stoned on marijuana, but they wanted to contine with modified mental states by drinking beer.

After making appreciative noises about my recent paintings, the visitors pooled their nickels and dimes and left with Jessika to get beer, catching a UVA bus on JPA for their transportation. I'd been so busy talking on the phone (first to my Dad - excited about a newly-awarded $5000 grant from Patagonia, then with Nathan VanHooser, sympathetic about my recent job interview) that I'd been unable to participate in the planning of this beer run.

Jessika told me later that a sympathetic UVA bus driver had actually driven faster than usual so the merry beer seekers could make it to Farmer Jack before the midnight alcohol purchase cutoff. After they had their beer, the rag-tag contingent had walked down the railroad tracks. As they'd passed the Buddhist Biker Bar on Elliewood (near the tracks) they'd heard Jamie Dyer and the other Hogwaller Ramblers performing live, so they snuck in through a window and helped themselves to unattended partial good beers. Later, when it was just Morgan and Jessika walking back to Kappa Mutha Fucka, they'd stopped in Olssen Hall's 24 hour computer lab. A security guard took one look at them (Jessika in her blue wig, Morgan in his spikey leather jacket) and figured they weren't students, so he kicked them out.

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n other things today, I completed (or nearly completed) a strange little painting of an alien fungus living within an engraved piece of marble, beyond which a human face can be seen in a tiny little bit of revealed background. I'm going to call the painting Consumptive Appreciation. It was the first time I ever tried to paint engraved rock surfaces, and I liked the results so much that you may well see more of that sort of thing in the future.