March 16 1998, Monday

The day was another cold one, and the cloudiness aggravated the bit of the air. I was on my bicycle for a short excursion to the UVA grounds, but mostly I stayed home, took a bath, and tried to bring some conclusion to some ongoing computer projects that are taking up all my precious space.

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t around 5pm, Jessika came home from her day at the antique store. She even had a complementary doll. It was all bandaged up, and she called it her "burn victim." Later she announced a plan to put together a whole set of dolls who had died in various bizarre ways. It's occurred to both of us suddenly that Jessika does have some fairly lucrative skills in the aftermath of her exuberant youth. She's been frequenting antique stores, yard sales, dumpsters and her parents' basement for years. By now she knows what's valuable and what's junk. Her experience around old stuff could well prove helpful should she try to get a more permanent job in the antique industry.

Morgan Anarchy (another one of those occasionally-obsessed Jessika admirers) had invited Jessika to a dinner funded by Morgan's mother, so she returned to the Corner (by bus) soon after coming back from work.

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ater, when Jessika and Morgan returned together from dinner, Morgan had a hundred dollar bill that his mother had given him. The crisp green Ben Franklin (one of those new bills with the big off c e n t e r head) was sort of a sad thing to behold, since anyone who knows Morgan (in a way that his mother obviously does not) would be aware that his goal would be to spend that hundred as quickly as possible on alcohol. Morgan has no hobbies, no interests, no hopes, no dreams, or, indeed, anything that extends into the future any further than his next bottle of liquor. In this way his mind is almost incomprehensible to me, but in a familiar sort of way. My lunatic brother, you see, is exactly the same way except his interest is in food, not liquor.

Morgan asked if I wanted to go to the liquor store to help him buy a half gallon of tequila, but I had no interest in participating in what I regard as his pathetic decline into oblivion, so I said no. Jessika agreed to go make the purchase, but unlike me, she had no transportation. So Morgan called Ray's girlfriend Melissa. I told Jessika that I didn't want that tequila drunk here (a half gallon of tequila plus Morgan Anarchy spells trouble). So when they vanished, they vanished for the rest of the evening. I guess they all went to Ray's place. I could have come along, but it wasn't my scene (or, at least, to the extent that it was my scene, I wanted to move on with my life).

Premium television was especially rich with 80s movies about adolescent hierarchies, with one (I believe it was called Can't Buy Me Love) about a dork who pays a popular girl $1000 to go out with him for a month. I was watching this crap all by myself, feeling kind of like a dork myself: sober, "abandoned," "rejected," miserable. Almost always when I feel this way, I also feel just a dash of sadism, like I'm in control of the situation and making myself suffer so that others may suffer too. It's all part of the game of life that we pawns play on one another in the race to be queens.

When I'm bored and sober, life sometimes seems especially uninteresting. Tonight I found myself asking (of life), "Is this all there is?"

Meanwhile, I got my four track tape recorder working again, this time with some sounds (the drum track) coming from my computer's sound card. Damnable demoware, the MIDI software suddenly and unexpectedly terminated with a window telling me to pay up!

I was hungry and ate a whole tin of anchovies. I know that's kind of weird, and I'm not pregnant or anything, but I get strange culinary urges at times. Afterwards, I saw Nicholas the Cat looking especially cute on the couch and sat down beside him so I could stroke his long soft fur. He went nuts, climbing all over me and sniffing audibly with an earnestness unusual for a cat. Unable to find any fish, he chomped down on the nearest thing, my wrist! The little fucker left marks that itched the rest of the evening.

With just a little glass of vodkatea, I found myself reading little parts of William S. Burrough's Junky. I was asleep by midnight.