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Archive for October, 2001


2001.10.31 children of the grave:

halloween. it seems kind of ridiculous to dress up and go to work, doesn't it? well…i decided to wear a shirt and tie today, which isn't really a normal occurrence (but i do look snazzy…take a peek). my costume? corporate asshole. thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen…i know i'm a genius.

other than that, i have what some might consider a follow-up date (which was actually planned prior to the first date) tonight. we're going out with some of her friends in a (gulp) limo, ostensibly to drive around, drink and act like total asses. i can't wait. keep in mind i'm accessorizing my "corporate asshole" costume with a gasmask, later tonight. once again…pure genius.

one of the good things about living in an apartment is that you usually don't get hit up by trick-or-treaters. not that i have anything against kids, mind you. it's just that i'm never home halloween night, so there'd be no one there to hand out candy. well…our front door is locked, no one on our side of the building will be home, and to top it off…our porch light is burned out. which reminds me…i need to replace that. tomorrow. along with cleaning off the back deck and generally preparing for scott to move in.

my biggest fear of scott moving in is that the two of us will become alcoholics who do nothing but sit around and play playstation2. this could do quite a bit of damage to our already weak social lives…oh well.

i somehow cleverly dodged getting sucked into the fantasy basketball craze that seems to be grabbing the majority of my co-workers by the balls. they're all sweatin' it out, talking about who they're gonna pick in their "draft." it's kind of annoying, really. i wish they'd just go back to talking about sex in the lewdest ways possible. that was at least moderately entertaining. it's always a plus to marvel at how completely, ridiculously stupid people can be, sometimes. seriously…you can't beat it.

- 01:46 pm - PL :: 2 Comments
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2001.10.30 pacemaker pace yourself:

plans are to try to get the rest of that at the drive-in set up on transmission3000 as soon as possible. you can still grab that advance track that was previously only available through slatch.com's blogmix. i think we'll try to get around to finishing up that braid set, too…

keep your eyes peeled for those sets, as well as sets from golden, man or astroman?, three second kiss, and of asaph.

while i'm talking about of asaph…they're playing thursday night at the aslans how gallery, here in louisville. check out the of asaph site for more details. i'll also be interviewing them, "seven questions" style, for carrie's zine, a pretty pickle.

i think that's enough for one day, don't you?

- 06:26 pm - PL ::
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2001.10.30 you're smilin' like new jersey on its side:

this is possibly the funniest thing i've ever seen: triumph at a bon jovi concert.

today's fortune:

your persistence and diligence are appreciated by all.

what does that mean? everyone likes the fact that i don't know when to quit? well shit…that's news to me.

- 04:27 pm - PL ::
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2001.10.30 what good could that possibly do?:

okay…fuck it. they're having an open casting call. i'm gonna go try to be on the real world. i'll see if adam wants to join me. this just makes me think of all the funny plans of getting on the real world and being the drunkest, most worthless one of the bunch. think puck revisited.

- 01:18 pm - PL ::
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2001.10.30 my eyes are blind but i can see:

i know, in these current times, that we're supposed to be loving all forms of authority, all the cops and firemen. i know this is our duty, as americans, to respect them and their jobs well done. well…shit…firemen rock. my friend courtney is a fireman. he rules. i've skated with courtney for years. now he's a fireman and an ems responder. that kicks ass. he's married, happy, and has a dog.

but cops…when they get on the highway…they suck. seriously. it's like they're the world's slowest pace car. it drives me nuts. and to tell the truth, maybe it's not exactly the cop's fault. it's just all the idiots who slow down to 45, no matter what lane they're in, just so the cop will pass them and they can pretend to resume normal speeds. the cop i was following this morning was doing a nice respectable 70-75. not too bad. but he and i had to keep dodging jokers that would slow down to under 50 in the fast lane. it's insane. i wish i had a police radio to call mr. policeman up and tell him to pull over those jokers "for being suspicious." now that would rule.

cop: i'm sorry, sir, but i thought it was mighty suspicious that you slowed down from 85mph to right around 40, in the fast lane, just because i rolled up behind you. are you high?
man in car: no sir…i just beat my wife to cover for my own penile inadequacies.
cop: fair enough.

or something like that.

the date last night? glad you asked. it went quite well. third time was apparently the charm. let's just say that i beat the handshake curse.

oh yeah…don't forget about those record reviews at 75 or less. i'm thinking over recent albums that i have purchased that might be worthy of reviewing today…

next year for halloween i am going to be iggy pop. you heard it here first.

hey…new guy at the coffee shop…when i say no whipped cream, guess what that means. yeah…it means no whipped cream, retard. better luck next time.

here's an invaluable resource for anyone who loves rock: the black sabbath lyrics archive. just remember, folks: when ozzy left, they replaced him with dio. black sabbath + dio = bad. as in not good. the companion equation, iommi + dio = weird looking band, does not justify it in the slightest bit. please don't try to use that to support your half-baked theory of "the dio stuff wasn't that bad." face it…the dio stuff sucked.

- 11:07 am - PL ::
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2001.10.29 with a palm full of napalm:

you can now consider me a full-fledged rock critic. i know this is just what you've been waiting for, huh? i'm now reviewing records over at 75 or less, which is an offshoot of the venerable (ha) slatch.com. today's reviews: the new hey mercedes, the newest neurosis, and the remixed and remastered version of raw power. enjoy.

- 07:45 pm - PL ::
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2001.10.29 ain't got time to make no apology:

apparently those forces that i discussed the other day are still conspiring against me. case in point: it was hot as hell in july up in here earlier. once a few of us complained about the sweltering heat, they turned the heat down. all the way down. as in off. as in i swear i think they have the air conditioner on. this, i would say, is a serious problem. especially considering it's already kind of chilly outside. so we complain…they take away the heat altogether. very clever. well played, clerks.

i went to go grab some sesame chicken for lunch and….double dragon was closed. i had to scramble through my head for an idea of what to eat (never an easy thing, mind you), and ended up at the pirate's choice: arby's. bland. regular. definitely not sesame chicken. i grow to hate fast food more and more every day.

drinking my coke, freezing my ass off. work is really just pissing me off, these days. i didn't get the position i went for (it went to an unqualified asskisser, how typical), plus now it seems that no matter how much i go beyond my job description, i get no recognition. none. oh wait…welcome to corporate america. get back to your box, drone!

- 03:52 pm - PL ::
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2001.10.29 quit if you're through with it:

last night was trash night. i took out right around five bags of trash. i took them straight out the back door and down the back steps to the big plastic bin provided by the city. i'm telling you this why? because i think it's amusing to type about the most incredibly boring and tedious things. that, in itself, is boring.

it's amazingly hot in the workplace right now. we're not talking "hot girls, cover of maxim" hot here. we're talking "flaming caverns of hell" hot. i would sincerely appreciate it if someone respected my desire to not die an early death due to heat exhaustion. thank you.

scott came over and we shot the shit about his possible move into casa bipolar. it looks like he's leaning toward it rather heavily, which is a good thing. there are few people who i think i could share an apartment with, at this point in my life. scott would be one of those people. hopefully things work out.

orange juice + cinnamon sweet roll = delicious breakfast. that's some math to remember.

why am i busy posting to this business? i have a date tonight…

- 12:03 pm - PL :: 3 Comments
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2001.10.28 day in day out:

sunday morning. the mocha is gone. where do i go from here, i wonder…

forces are apparently conspiring against me, i'd say. i wrapped up my great weekend with a grand total of five hours of sleep, last night. it was a late one, especially after my second halloween party in a row. the kicker of this is…i forgot to set my clock back, which would have given me an extra hour of sleep (maybe then i wouldn't feel like such a zombie). when did i discover this fact? oh…right around the time i settled into my desk here at work and realized i was an hour early. i'm not the greatest with time changes, it seems. curses.

on to the weekend proper…

the telavet show wednesday night was awesome. guy and i cut out after fin fang foom, and then met up with scott for some late night grub at denny's. i'm tellin' ya…denny's hashbrowns with a1 sauce…you'll never find anything so delicious. we hung out for a while, and then i met scott back at my house for the usual gran turismo 3 pseudo ritual.

it was wednesday night when i heard a funny story…a couple of weeks ago i was supposed to take the ramsi's girl out to that huber's farm place. this was her idea. i was down with it, but i really want to stress that it was her idea. so i don't really talk to her too much for the couple of days prior to the scheduled date, but i did talk to her the night before and she sounded like she was still into it. needless to say she never called saturday, and wasn't home when i tried calling her. i wrote it off, she still hasn't called. oh well. she's out. here's where the interesting part comes in…when we were over at guy's house unloading some of the telavet gear, john (from telavet) and i were talking about girls and i related the fact that i was briefly seeing the previously mentioned ramsi's girl. well he went on about how attractive she was and then said "yeah…i just saw her at huber's this weekend. she was with some dude." at this point, guy busts out laughing, and i was forced to relate that that was supposed to be my date. okay…that story isn't as funny as i thought it was.

lesson: girls are evil

thursday night we headed out to barretones to check out billy's (the drummer for telavet) other band with some friends that used to be in national acrobat. they were nothing short of amazing, as is usual. guy ended up being incredibly hungry (when is he not hungry, i wonder), so we ended up cruising over to ramsi's for a late dinner. nope…the ramsi's girl wasn't working, which is really a good thing, considering the above story.

friday night was milemarker (great show) and then the yearly halloween party at the 953 gallery. nothing like a couple hundred (at least) drunk indie rockers dressed in outlandish costumes, crammed into a civil war era warehouse. nothing like it, i tell ya…that was a good time. starkiller played. i'm doing a horrible job of relating my weekend in any kind of entertaining fashion. why are you still reading this? shoot me now. please.

saturday night the slow suicide played out at the rud. they played an entire set of nirvana covers, which pretty much rocked the house as hard as possible. we then stepped out to another halloween party (like i mentioned, the second of the weekend) and i ended up at my house with amelia, hanging on the couch, talking until about 4am. and there we have the answer to my lack of sleep.

oh woe is me and all that shit. why the hell are you still here?

it looks like i missed my mark and was unable to get out "seven questions" every day, last week. i missed thursday, but i'd like to point out that it's not my fault at all. no way. regardless, look for the feature to go bi-weekly. i'll be putting up an archive page soon. and yes…that bagel buzzsaw is the coolest thing i've ever seen.

please….go outside.

- 10:49 am - PL :: 2 Comments
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2001.10.26 seven questions with jack miller:

did one of your ancestors invent miller high life? you know i love that stuff…
it's pretty unlikely; the name "miller" only showed up on my dad's side of the family when my great-grandfather emigrated here and changed his name to avoid anti-polish discrimination. i'm guessing miller high life goes back further than that. so unless it was invented in poland or china or japan and randomly named "miller," the odds are slim that any of my ancestors had much to do with it.
then again, i don't know chinese– maybe "miller" translates into "beer that will appeal to an american named brian" in mandarin or something.

how awesome would it be if apple actually started making their macs out of…well…real apples?
i dunno– sounds sticky. and there's a real concern about structural integrity, there. to get any strength, apple would probably have to use a powersauce bar-type compound made of apple cores and chinese newspapers, like on the simpsons. otherwise we'd start seeing imacs that look like those shrunken apple heads we used to make when we were kids. although, the concept of edible computer components has some merit; sometimes i'm hungry but too busy to get up and hit the vending machine, so it'd be nice to munch on, say, the f13 and del keys to tide me over until lunch. maybe the "\" key, too– i almost never use that thing anyway.

how many times, on average, do you go to the bathroom a day?
on average? i really don't know– six? seven? i don't keep track. it varies wildly from day to day, ranging from maybe two to over fifteen.
see, i have this really screwed-up thirst reflex; basically i never get thirsty. when i go out to eat with people, they often look at me funny when i order dinner and nothing to drink. i have to keep reminding myself to drink stuff, because otherwise i can go for days without any serious fluid intake and then i get really dehydrated. it's pretty gross. so in busy or high-stress situations, i tend to forget to drink anything, so my bathroom frequency drops way off… like, when katie and i got back from london last weekend, once we got home i realized i hadn't gone to the bathroom in over nine hours. that's pretty normal if you're asleep, but i had been awake the whole time. so that day was probably a three or a four.
on the other hand, since i never feel thirsty, when i am forcing myself to drink, i don't always know when my body's had enough. that, coupled with other factors like sleeplessness and boredom, can send the bathroom frequency through the roof. metaphorically speaking, of course.
really, the only times i feel thirsty are when i've been eating a massive quantity of salt (it has to be a lot), or when i've been skating for a couple of hours and sweating like a mofo. after i go skating i can usually down half a gallon of gatorade in about three minutes without trying.
that concludes this segment of too much information theater.

if you had a million dollars…how much of that would be spent on (vegan) doughnuts?
what, all at once? these days i pretty much eat at most one vegan doughnut a week– sunday morning, with a hot cup of joe and the funnies. (no, I don't eat the funnies. smartass.) since i probably couldn't eat more than maybe two or three a day and they have a limited shelf life, it'd be a waste to get more than a couple hundred of them.
so if i had a million dollars, i'd probably set up some sort of doughnut trust fund that would pay for my weekly doughnut in accrued interest and release the necessary funds maybe once a month so i could go pick up the goods four at a time. that seems like the most financially prudent strategy.
being a millionaire wouldn't change me– most likely i'd remain a one-vegan-doughnut-a-week man. except i'd probably quit my job, and offer people money to bark like a dog in public. man, that slays me.

tell me about that bagel buzzsaw again, man.
the best chain of bagel shops around these parts is finagle-a-bagel, and they've got
the bagel construction process down to a science. this morning i stopped in to order a classic hummus on a sesame bagel, toasted, with lettuce, tomato, and cucumber to go. tThe counter guy rings it all up, takes my money, and gives me a numbered receipt. he then grabs a sesame bagel with a pair of tongs and tosses it onto a moving conveyer belt.
here's where things get crazy. the belt carries the bagel toward a spinning buzzsaw, which slices the thing in half and sends it flying out the other side into a bin where the sandwich makers are waiting. [footagequicktime required] they then toast the pre-sliced bagel, assemble the sandwich, bag it up, and call my number. the whole shebang is a modern marvel of efficiency, but that buzzsaw– that's the coolest thing on the planet.
of course, i used to work in a bagel shop myself, and back in my day, we didn't have new-fangled mass-production devices to facilitate the bagel assembly process. i, in fact, am trained in the delicate art of slicing a bagel perfectly in half using nothing but my hands and a big knife– without drawing any blood or losing a finger. with the advent of those wooden bagel-holding-slicer things (and now the buzzsaw), it's almost a lost art… sort of like long division. someday i hope to pass this ancient bagel-slicing lore onto my children.

if you could switch places with any popular actress for a day, who would it be and what would you do?
"popular actress"? i hope you don't mean "actress on 'popular,'" 'cause i don't watch that show. and am i just trading places with her, like when fred stayed home with pebbles and wilma went off to work for mr. slate, or are we actually swapping minds like in freaky friday? the details are important, here.
your mind would be inhabiting her body. you would literally be her for the day.
i'm going to pretend i'm not married for a second here and say i'd become alyson hannigan (you know, Willow from "buffy," michelle the band camp girl from american pie, etc.). i'd spend the day dumping that guy who plays wesley on "angel" and then feverishly planting subliminal messages in all her (my?) stuff to call that jack guy in boston because he seems like a pretty cool fella. then i'd switch back to me and wait for the phone to ring. foolproof, i tell you.

if it's just a "let's trade places for a day" gig, well, maybe i'd trade with Sarah Michelle Gellar so at least I could spend a day on the "buffy" set making goo-goo eyes at alyson between takes. no, wait– better yet, i'd trade with the actress who plays tara, willow's lesbian lover, because then maybe i'd get to smooch her, too. while we're dreaming, i'd also like a pony.

what are three things about married life that we should all know before we enter into that unholy pact?
well, i've only got two and a half weeks' worth of experience upon which to draw, here, but here goes:

1) it's surprisingly difficult to get used to using the phrase "my wife" instead of "my girlfriend" or "my fiance." It just feels wrong.
try it. weird, isn't it?

2) it's no panacea for the constant hassle of being asked "when are you two getting married?" because it just turns into "when are you two having kids?"

3) it's not an institution to be entered into lightly, so regardless of any possible moral objections to "living in sin," i recommend that people live together for a while first just to make absolutely sure that they're compatible and that they can live with each other's idiosyncrasies. eleven years worked for us. your mileage may vary.

[jack does a (week)daily apple news soap opera called as the apple turns, which actually has a warning about spewing chocolate milk onto your monitor. he's rarely seen by the public, so he provided this mugshot for visual aid. jack spends just about as much time in front of a computer on a daily basis as i do. this is neither an criticism or a compliment.]

- 01:19 pm - PL :: 18 Comments
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