May 14, 1997, Wednesday

Consider this: the gods give you ten fingers and 32 teeth; they expect you to lose a few in 80 years.

M


onster Boy's friend and former Charlottesville personality Ray Roebuck showed up at Comet last night wanting to crash at the Dynashack. I know that feeling, so I loaned him my key. I took pity on him. He ended up having sex with some random girl in housemate John's bed. That wasn't exactly my idea.

I came back to the Dynashack this morning and found Cecelia the Brazilian Girl and Monster Boy sleeping on the couches in the living room. Andrew and I were both going to be gone today, so I had to leave them my key and I couldn't lock the door. All the tensions concerning the skinheads and the thug Chaz, in addition to the high possibility of burglary at this time of year, have me feeling paranoid about security at the Dynashack. I am embarrassed by the fact that it is becoming a hotel for homeless friends. If Morgan Anarchy and Toni Dirtbag should start crashing there or hanging out in my room, I swear I'll kill somebody.

I need to have friends with as much to offer me as I have to offer them.

I


'm in Staunton today and I fear I'll find a bunch of scruffy drunks at my house when I return. I'm too fucking tolerant. I need to have friends with as much to offer me as I have to offer them. I don't like pointless hanging out anymore, I don't like drinking to get drunk, I don't like having to do things for people just because I am a friend.

Today at the Shaque I redid the computer desk to accomodate two screens and two computers, one running DOS and the other my trusty Mac IIsi running at 24 MHz (I'm typing this web page on that now). I also wrote a new little story for the Big Fun site about pirating electricity in the Spring of 1996. My plans are to eat dinner with the folks and maybe spray the cherry trees in the front yard with fungicide so as to fight Black Knot disease.

On the local Shenandoah Valley rock and roll station there is a glaring demonstration of poor target marketing in one of the advertisements. It's an ad for Circuit City, and it starts out with the sound of a Rag Time band coming in over an AM radio. It's supposedly an example of how radio sounded when Circuit City was founded. Then the background sound changes to a hi fidelity broadcast of lite pop jazz, the sort used in an awful lot of advertisements geared at the 50 and older crowd. It's completely the wrong sort of music for the audience of rock and roll fans. It leaves me with a poor sense of connection to Circuit City. It's a failed advertisement.

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Your armpits could use deodorant.


H


oagie, my mother, cooked some chicken for dinner. Home cooking is something Charlottesville doesn't offer much of. By the way, my discovery of the literature on Mad Cow disease, combined with news reports that some American Alzheimer patients are in fact suffering from Prion disease, has put my parents permanently off of beef. They regard it much as an Orthodox Jew regards pork.

After spraying the heavily-pruned cherry trees for the black knot fungus, I headed back to Charlottesville.

All he wanted to do with it was buy a half gallon of liquor. I was disgusted and refused to buy any.

I found a group of scruffy compadrés hanging out on the Dynashack front porch, drinking Natural Ice. Those present included Monster Boy, Matthew Hart, Josh Mustin, Cecelia the Brazilian Girl, and that wormy hobo dog, BN. Soon enough the smelly gutter punks Morgan Anarchy and Toni Dirtbag arrived as well. Somehow Morgan had $20, perhaps from working at the C&O. All he wanted to do with it was buy a half gallon of liquor. I was disgusted and refused to buy any. I said I'd been dragging my ass all day and didn't want to. Predictably, Josh Mustin started whining and insulting me with his stupidity. This put a damper on the evening, because even though he is over 21, Monster Boy doesn't have the two IDs one needs to purchase liquor at an ABC store. Not only did I not want to buy liquor, I didn't want anyone drinking liquor on my front porch. It would just mean more mess, more broken glasses, more puke, more noise, a more thoroughly pillaged refrigerator, and drunks passed out underfoot. I can't have that happening every night at my house, especially now that my housemates are coming back from beach week.

My pre-work nap began at about 9pm.

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Camel Cigarettes will improve your love life.


M


atthew Hart said he used Monster Boy's ID to purchase beer today without a hitch. He said that using a fake ID is like riding a bicycle, "You never forget how!" He figures he'll go to the DMV with Monster Boy and get a copy made for his personal use. A lack of a fake ID has been a serious nuisance ever since "Habib" was taken from him by cops in New Orleans. Unlike Habib, however, Monster Boy actually looks somewhat like Matthew Hart, especially Monster Boy's present ID.

In other news, a yellow Ryder Truck was seen in front of Goth Central today. It seems Theresa and Persad are packing up and leaving town. Presumably they're going into hiding: from the law and from the skinheads. That's got to suck, but it must also be exciting.

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Go have a sandwich.


E


arlier this week, while still recovering emotionally from the theft of my CDs (but also working with an unexpected financial windfall), I bought two CDs: Mother of all Saints (1992) by Thinking Feller's Union Local 282 and Mekons' Retreat from Memphis (1994).

Mother of all Saints is so hopelessly zany and weird that it makes me glad I share the planet with such freaks. It's adorable like a toddler sailing rubber duckies in a toilet while screeching space ship noises. Every now and then the music collapses out of weirdness into credible music, often with a Medieval, Middle Eastern or utterly unfamiliar tonality. Lyrics are mumbled incoherently and most instruments are plucked note by note chordlessly. Then you'll become aware that a song has lingered perhaps a little too long upon a riff. Suddenly you realize the riff is underlain with the sound of a chainsaw (listen to track 19: "Raymond H."). Track 16 "Tuning Notes" gets my award for the single most annoying song not played on VH1; the CD is somehow designed to skip on a certain track for a predetermined and highly irritating amount of time.

Retreat from Memphis by contrast, is much more recognizably "music." It's sort of Brit Pop done with loud guitars and especially thick British accents. The first track features excellent trance-inducing guitar work.


You are getting sleepy.

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