The line between early and late.

I walked outside of my second story apartment tonight to find that the normally pitch black, cutout silhouette of the San Rafael hills that looms over the town was almost imperceptible. Northern California occasionally sucumbs to the wildfire season as well, and the winds have brought a thick layer of smoke across the north bay for the past couple days. It's disgusting and ugly during the day, but the smoky smell mixed with the night air really appeals to me- possibly because the burning smell at night reminds me of a fireplace.

I've recently found myself skirting the line between agnosticism and atheism. I think I'm both too smart to comitt fully to a god belief, as well as too whimsical to dismiss it, but as political climates fluctuate, the balance tilts. I'd probably be more inclined to a spiritual lifestyle in Barack Obama's america than John McCain's, even though I think it might be of more benefit in the latter case.

I recently recalled an interview that Fox News' chief antagonist Bill O'Reilly did with Richard Dawkins. To call it an interview is being a little coy, though, unless watching Bill O'Reilly talk smugly to himself and fail to register any irony or mental awareness qualifies as an interview. In any case, at one point O'Reilly tells Dawkins that he can't prove to him that god doesn't exist, and Dawkins' reply is that O'Reilly similarly couldn't prove that Zeus doesn't exist or Apollo doesn't exist, the implication being that O'Reilly had no argument in favor of Judeo-Christianity that you couldn't cut and paste in another religion for.

This got me to thinking... when someone talks about Zeus or Apollo nowadays, it is typically in conjunction with the label "greek mythology." I was taught about such mythology as young as twelve in my middle school literature class. But the leaps of faith that those tales ask me to make from a religious standpoint are no greater than Christianity; essentially acts of magic and nature that are explained by the presence of divinity. So why is it that I'm taught about a previous civilization's religious structure with the fact that it's mere myth and legend stated up front? Is it simply because those religious beliefs aren't reflected in today's society? If not, why would I not then be free to lecture a class about the bible as a work of historical fiction? The answer is pretty obvious; people would be outraged (although I'd probably started scoring some counter-culture women that way, and they know how to have fun). Organized religions tend to have spiritual blind spots that rub uncomfortably against societal blind spots, until you have oozing, raw sores that start to whip up fervor. And I'm becoming more and more humorless by the moment.

Figured I'd go out with a poem... I wrote this last year.

----

in crooked houses by crooked creeks
where silent mothers kiss their babies cheeks
its got to be warm in there
candlelight drenching the ground outside
a comfort by silhouette
finding yourself at night
too restless to grab a bite
or fight or spit or spin and dash
no people to see
no parties to crash
a subdued singsong soul lacking in support
both moral and emotional
can be drawn to scale
analyzed
taken apart up and down
and reassembled in traditional mosaic style
but be no more logical than it was before
lying on the ground staring straight
up up up
not a star in the sky
too embarrassed to knock on the door
worried that they wouldn't care
that you're stuck in the cold
and its got to be warm in there

What's the point?

That is to say, why even bother getting excited about Chris Paul, Steve Nash, or Baron Davis when I know that come Finals time all I'll be hearing is announcers gush over what a gutsy pro Derek Fisher is? I might be more sick of Derek Fisher than any basketball player still in the league, which is saying a lot while Jason Kidd is still playing. And, for the record, no matter what anyone tells you, Derek Fisher is NOT a great shooter. A cursory glance at his career averages show that he is a decent three point shooter, but an abysmal shooter by field goal percentage. He also looks like the kind of guy who's always going to clubs but is too old to do so smoothly. Just sayin', is all.

I rode my bike to and from my house a couple days ago. I must say, to whoever coined the expression about never forgetting how to ride a bike... there is a bit of a rust to shake off, you know? I have little to no idea how I'm supposed to work the gears on it, and I'm sure I looked incredibly stupid swerving unsteadily down the road at night, but it rides well. I'm pleased with it.

I applied for a part time job at a movie theater a couple weeks ago. I wanted to work twenty hours a week or so, just make some money to cover bills and maybe save a few hundred after a little while. The theater was visibly desperate and understaffed, and I had three years of consistant experience working cash registers, including an assistant manager credit from 24 Hour Fitness that was awarded to me based on my "excellent customer service abilities." Those abilities speak to my skill as a showman, I guess, because I absolutely hated it whenever any of those punks would waste my time complaining about the bathrooms or locker rooms being dirty. I ain't the fuckin' janitor; not for eight bucks an hour. If it's not over ten I reserve the right to think ill of the people I interact with.

Anyways, the theater turned me down, which was surprising enough that it got me thinking about past jobs that had been refused to me, and I began to ponder whether I had any desire to function in the sort of system in which I'm deemed unsuitable to tear tickets at a theater three days a week.

I went to Guerneville a couple days ago to hobknob with a friend of mine who was staying out there with her sister. I woke up feeling pretty sick, but by virtue of my general overconfidence about my health, I decided to go anyways. By the time I was ten minutes from Guerneville I began to reflect on what a bad choice it had been, as the muggy humidity mixed with the vegetation around the Russian River was wreaking havoc on my sinuses. I took a decongestant when I arrived, but quickly developed a headache thanks in large part to the pastime of choice for my friend that day; watching trees get chainsawed and toppled. While it was pretty impressive to watch (as I'd never seen a tree fall over before), the impact of the largest tree triggered an occasionally pulsing pain in my forehead.

We went to the beach where I ended up lying under some brush cover sweating and trying to sleep while the others went swimming in the river. I managed to doze for five minutes or so before realizing there were ants crawling all around me, and thus likely on me. I felt like I was going to vomit and pass out all at once, a feeling I'm familiar with from my iron-deficiency days. I struggled to stay coherent and conscious while listening to a David Sedaris story being read aloud. It was about his relationship with a linguistics teacher he'd had in school to help with his lisp. I'm sure it was a good story, and I could tell it was well written, but all I thought at the time was "man, fuck David Sedaris. I'd rather sit around in some speech class than be dying on this godforsaken patch of bug infested sand, that fucking prick."

We made our way back to the house soon after that, at which point I staggered into the bathroom, splashed and rubbed water all over my face for about five minutes, then sprawled out on a guest couch/bed and fell asleep. When I woke up I felt more or less fine, which shocked me, although I did managed to sprain my ankle on the way down the stairs as I left, just to round out the trip. Let it be known that I realize this story sounds whiny to the extreme, and it's certainly true that it wasn't that bad in the cosmic scheme of things. But in the moment, I was pretty miserable and my brain felt like a hairtrigger pistol that was going to blast somebody. I don't doubt that having a more experienced or broader perspective on things would've helped, and I normally do have a pretty mature, accepting perspective. The only thing that can really malfunction it is when I'm sick with something fleeting, minor, or casually annoying. The few times I've been really ragged I've always been very quiet and calm. It's somehow the little things that wear my patience out the quickest.

I plan to attend a concert being put on by my dear friend Carla Zilbersmith tomorrow night- or, rather, tonight, I guess. June 14th at 8 PM in Berkeley, there's a post on her blog with the info that presently eludes me- just click the "carlamuses" link on the sidebar, under "those who demand your attention." Also, remember, it's really more me demanding you pay those links attention than it is them demanding it, so don't hold it against them, ne? I'm the asshole here.

Filthy human garbage.

I haven't showered in almost four days. As somebody who normally showers every day, this is taking its toll on my state of mind. I could also stand to get a haircut. There's plenty of things I need to do to re-groom myself in the coming days.

I finally got my bicycle fixed. It's a pretty durable mountain bike I got in middle school, but I lived in East Corte Madera in those days, which is sadly disconnected from much of Larkspur, San Rafael, and Mill Valley (unless you take the long route through Corte Madera proper, then either down Magnolia into Larkspur/San Anselmo/San Rafael or over the hills into Mill Valley) so I never rode it much. Now that I've recently come into a car, but am still a bit strapped for cash, I figure to bike anywhere if it's a reasonable trip. The driving is a little steep.

I'm wearing a pair of kelly green Converse sneakers right now; I wore them during the first game of the NBA Finals without realizing it, but now I figure I may as well keep it up, provided the Celtics keep winning. I view this as nothing less than a battle of Star Wars style unsubtlety, pretty much good versus evil.

A few repetitive bars of trance-y techno have begun to undulate their way through my living room window. It sounds like my downstair neighbor is listening to it. He's an odd fellow, a man in his mid-thirties who lives with a woman much older. He's got a shaved bald head and wears a cowboy hat when he smokes outside. My former roommate once came home once to find this fellow washing his (my roommate's) windshield. "It looked a little dirty! I worry about you sometimes," was the reply to the obvious question.

I recently found my old collection of Tintin comics from when I was a kid. I decided to read one, The Blue Lotus, and I was shocked at how riddled with racial stereotypes/commentaries some of those books are. I feel a little cheated that nobody explained that stuff to me. It's a similar feeling to the one I get when I think about my elementary school. The entire fourth-grade year we did nothing but talk about the gold rush, the wild west, and rugged frontiersman. Obviously, everything we were told was riddled with holes to cover up all the racism, corpses, and general bloodiness. So I just have to relearn everything later? Fuck that. If you feel your only option is to lie to a kid, I think you should just remain silent til you're able to be truthful. Children have a tremendous ability to comprehend and cope with things, but it seems risky to raise them as if everything's jolly and then spring the darkness on them at sixteen, when things start to seem dark anyways.

I'm pretty fuckin' hungry, I got to say. Whatever shall I do?

The sarlaac pit.

My concerns have begun to peak the last two days. First, I learned that my premonitions voiced in a recent blog about my father were and continue to be correct, albeit not in the manner I had supposed- he's been in the hospital for a few days due to apparently massive arterial blockage, and for all I know is getting his heart sliced up as I type (he's scheduled for bypass surgery today, but I don't know when, so I'm pretty much useless as far as productivity goes). Even given the occasional fears you have about somebody you suspect might not be well, this has the potential to render me useless for some time if something bad happens. I sort of wish that I had still maintained some vestiges of the Catholic upbringing I'd been forced into as a child and could've prayed for his wellbeing with the idea that there's a specific god listening, but while I still thought those thoughts, I had no particular faith in where they were going, nor any hope that they were being heard. I think it's still valuable from a self-reconciliation standpoint, though.

So, unless I'm pretty chummy in general with anybody reading this, I should warn you it might not be too chummy a day for me. I'm presently wondering lamely how I'm gonna get it together to deal with all this other shit that's swirling around, most of it financial. It's a bad position, because the financial stuff is very important objectively, but until I know how my dad is I can't physically muster the verve to work on it. I don't think I'd be much good in a job interview anyways, though.

This is just to say.

I just finished listening to a particularly entertaining/disturbing episode of This American Life which had been recommended by a friend of mine (and thus friend of this blog), Jason. It's called "Mistakes Were Made," and tells the story of a cryonics salesman who got in over his head and began stuffing three to four bodies into a single chamber while bouncing checks to keep the liquid nitrogen flowing. The second part, though, regards the poem by William Carlos Williams that is alluded to in this post's title.

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

It was mentioned that apparently poets will have some fun by trying to make the most humorous or interesting satirical offshoots of that poem. I had recognized the poem from high school, but hadn't thought about it in a while, so I think I'm gonna ruminate on it for a day and then offer up my best shot at it.

Saw a video online yesterday of some lady on Fox News- named something like Trotta?- who first mistakenly called Barack Obama "Osama" (hardly new territory), and then states "well, both, if we could," to the notion of the two being assassinated. She offered up this apology:

"Oh yes, I am so sorry about what happened yesterday and the lame attempt at humor. I fell all over myself, making it appear that I wished Barack Obama harm or any other candidate, for that matter, and I sincerely regret it and apologize to anybody I have offended. It is a very colorful political season, and many of us are making mistakes and saying things we wish we had not said."

I can sympathize. I always end up cracking especially bloodthirsty jokes when my field of expertise is at a level of unprecedented interest and intrigue. It sucks, too, cause everybody's all watchin' and shit.

While it kind of goes without saying at this point, this blog officially endorses Barack Obama (earning him at least one general election vote!), although I like to think I'd want people to not joke about killing him even if it didn't.

I applied for a job at a theater in Sausalito a few days ago. It's the first job I've ventured to take in over a year, since my notorious fall from grace as a wedding video editor. Incidentally, my two roommates who worked the same job months after I quit (or rather, stopped showing up) had the same sort of burn outs I did at approximately the same pace, so I think that exonerates my behavior (although my climatic bridge burning with the 24 Hour Fitness people doesn't help my reputation).

Plans for today? Gotta make a call to a northernly neighbor, hit up the DMV, then birthday dinner for my mom. If you've never eaten at the Robata Sushi Grill, it's quite a treat.

It's my reading rainbow.

I always used to watch that show on the KQED station when I was a real little kid. Same channel that aired Sesame Street and Donohue. I remember loving the former and being not so crazy about the latter, although I did think he had a funny name (the Phil part, I had no gripe with the Donohue surname). They also held lengthy pledge drives from time to time, so their normal broadcasting would get booted in favor of the cash gathering telethons. Not understanding this as a four-year-old, I once dumbly waited and watched almost an hour of people answering phones until I realized there wasn't going to be any Sesame Street that day.

Anyways, my laptop burnt out a couple months ago. It doesn't boot up at all anymore, and seems to have some sort of massive hardware problem. I have all but conceded my laptop, a loyal companion for the past two years, is deader than Strom Thurmond (voted America's deadest man in 2007!). I lament the lack of on-the-go tech (I'm writing this on a laptop borrowed from my little bro), but until I can save up for one of them MacBooks, fuck it. No more of this PC shit.

Point is, all my documents are gone-ish. There's a possibility they may have been saved on my roommate's external hard drive, but I don't have a computer to transfer them to. I had written a tremendous amount, and had kept the files safe for a long time. Somewhere lurking in that burnt out husk of a computer is a fantasy-fictiion story I had to write for a middle school assignment but ended up extending to five chapters of my own volition (as I recall it involved a hypercompetitive hockey-esque sport with three player teams and sharp, treacherous spears). All my creative writings and essays I wrote in high school and my one year of semi-academic college. An I-Search report from sixth grade for which I read all three of the Oedipus plays (heavy stuff at age twelve) and put in nedless hours of research, only to get a ninety-five percent because I didn't indent the second lines on my bibliography. I resented Ms. Mesplou deeply for that, but she was also the hottest teacher at my middle school, so being twelve, I couldn't stay angry for that long.

This momentary loss of documents has rattled me, because I'm a very nostalgic person in certain ways. I recently discovered a bag full of my old schoolwork from first grade, and I spent a whole night sifting through it, reading over it as best I could. Terrible handwriting. But when i could make something out, it felt sort of chilling, like reconnecting with something I'd lost a long time ago. It's a disturbing but also seductive feeling, having those gateways into your past. It's one of the reasons I wan to write as much as I can. I want the fifty year old me to know what the twenty year old me was all about, in the event that I can't piece it together for myself.

Here's a poem I wrote about a year and a half ago. It's a romantic sonnet I wrote for somebody. I didn't come clean to her at the time that it was about her, but that's since been rectified. I think it's probably the piece of poetry I'm proudest to have written, maybe because the breadth of emotion that enters a romantic poem makes it seem somehow greater than it is. Worth noting, it does break form, since there's only eight beats per line in the closing couplet. But the words were exactly as I wanted them, so I left it.

It’s sweet and fine to sit beneath a tree
Tangling eyes and hearts beneath the flesh
Where romance is but doesn’t try to be
When every deep breath feels so pure and fresh

Such love could only strike a man by luck
To dive headfirst into a soul so deep
To fight to keep his eyes from getting stuck
As soft lips and hips through his mind do creep

It’s the light of the world you give to me
With windswept features that burn my memory
And selfless courage that sets my worries free
If only you could be my one, my every

Your eyes, your nose, your ears, your hair
Have left my heart beyond repair

The big sleep.

I was often told when I was in high school that I seemed to have an overly morbid worldview, or at the very least that I pondered my own mortality more than seemed normal for a kid in his late teens. Let it be known that I was at my angstiest not the sort of guy who'd romanticize suicide, not least of all because all of my angsts were about things I wanted to do that would be decidedly difficult were I dead. Whenever I'm at a party that goes into the early morning, and people start playing ten fingers or truth or dare or any of those personal revelation games, I'm always surprised at how many people admit the thought of suicide brushed their minds in their teen years; not a judgemental surprise, just surprised because it's such a foreign idea to me.

In actuality, my morbid reputation was the result of me trying to protect what I perceived as a fragile body and a fickle life. I admit some of my instincts seemed strange. For instance, I'd often curl my hands into fists when riding in a car, the idea being that if we got in an accident, I didn't want an errant bit of glass of metal to shear off a finger (one of my greatest phobias of that time, and still a decent one today). Never mind that if the car accident was sending blades of metal slicing around I likely had bigger problems than losing my pinky, but the worry always stuck.

My mother's side of the family also has a bad history of heart disease for males. Having been pretty overweight in high school, as well as pretty sedentary (I had, unbeknownst to me, an iron deficiency which made physical fitness feel like getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer), this also worried me, knowing full well that my grandfather (again, mother's side), who died before I was born, was only in his early fifties when his heart exploded as he was driving to work. Certainly those worries ignored my father's genetics, as well as the fact that my grandfather was living a hyperstressful lifestyle managing a business while supplementing enormous amounts of cigarettes and coffee for food, but I was still a bit spooked. I remember vividly being unable to sleep one night because I'd become gripped with fear over the idea that someday I'd know how it felt to die. I stayed up a whole night trying to fathom what that would feel like, and when I felt like I had best approximated the feeling, slumber overtook me.

I've since lightened up a little (a lot, really), mainly because nothing ever seems as important in the adult world as it does in high school (although I still really wanna keep my digits from getting sliced off) , and because I think I've managed to replace a mild propensity for gloom and doom with a mild propensity for aw shucks optimism. It's a more calming lifestyle, and with rare exception it keeps me from getting too up or too down.

I think the reason this has been on my mind is my father. I have, for those who don't know (and why would you?), a pretty old father, for my age. I believe he's sixty-five now, or getting close. He grew up in Brooklyn through the fifties, and eventually moved out to San Francisco where he became a successful (critically, not at all financially) poet. I've never read as much of his poetry as I should. He recently sent me a small volume for my birthday, and while I can read it and tell how good it is, it's not something I feel I can relate to. I've written a bit of poetry over the years, and in some respects reading his poetry feels like seeing a writing style that fights or clashes against my own. It at times seems to make no sense, and doesn't seem to care if it does, which is a very alluring quality to me, but one that I can never achieve. While I recognize it as being great poetry, I don't feel like I can use it as a touchstone the way the son of a blacksmith might use his dad's technique with metal. It embarasses me in a strange, personal way, so I shy away from reading his stuff.

In any case, he moved to Philadelphia some time ago (my inability to recall exactly when betrays a certain detachment from it all), as he and my mom had a falling out when I was in high school and he had little enough money that housing in Marin was a complete uncertainty. We probably talk about once a week, mostly about my acting, both of our writings, and whatever's happening in basketball at the time. The last couple times we talked, though, he mentioned in a very casual way that he was trying to get a doctor's appointment because he was having a great deal of pain in his esophagus. While I think my concern barely registered over the phone, I remember very clearly thinking, "holy shit, is my dad dying?"

When he'd been living out here but not in my mother's and my home, he had lapsed back into a smoking habit. I had once asked him to stop, a conversation in which I fell apart crying halfway through because it felt so damn awkward. He was a heavy, debilitating alcoholic before I was born (although I guess the way alcoholism is defined, he still is), and met my mom at the treatment center where he finally sobered up. Knowing this, I couldn't understand how he couldn't recognize the nature of addiction, or even short of that, addictive habits. He told me he'd cut out the smoking, but he didn't. He'd have to be pretty damn foolish to think I couldn't tell. I don't hold it against him for not keeping the promise, because I know that most addiciton mantra states that you have to want to quit something for yourself, and that saying you're doing it for your family can be a foil that won't work. But I also know that I opened up a pretty big wound in talking to him about it, and I can't not feel bad that it continued to go on.

Anyways, my dad never takes proper care of himself, something my older brother (half brother, actually) has seen more of firsthand than I have. He takes a dim view of doctors. He wrote off his high blood pressure to momentary stress, which might be reasonable if not for the fact that he has naturally low blood pressure in his youth (I seem to have inherited this... better than high, I reckon). So the fact that he called me, mentioned this mysterious throat ailment, and admitted he was actively trying to see a doctor because it hurt so bad he was having trouble eating... I have an instinct that it's something very bad, maybe lethally bad. And I feel somehow corrupt to have that instinct.

I think what worries me most about the possibility is that I have trouble communicating myself emotionally to my father. I feel like when I'm in the position to, I'm already starting on the verge of tears. And in addition to being unable to articulate the kinds of things I'd want to, I'm not even sure what I'd want to say. There's some frayed wire somewhere that makes something not feel right, and I don't know anybody in the electrician's union.

Just a pinch.

I've come to a horrifying and soul-crushing revelation this evening, been dealt a scar that may hear physically, but never emotionally. I believe I may be allergic to onions.

There's a bit of a history to this. The first time I realized something was wrong was at a birthday being held for the father of my dear friend Jason. They were serving hamburgers off the grill, so I nabbed one and proceeded to apply the three same things to it that I always do; lettuce (only the green leafy part, fuck that crunchy white shit), a bit of ketchup, and of course, a copious amount of sweet yellow onion. Onion, you see, is the ultimate thing to put on a hamburger (not to mention almost any other savory meat dish). If you feel I need to provide more reasons as to why the onion is king, you probably won't end up sharing my passion, anyways.

I got the slight inkling something was off with the first bite I took. The delicious onion taste seemed to linger in my mouth longer than usual, and I felt an odd itching on the roof of my mouth. The itching masked a soreness that felt to me to be otherwordly. I have never had any sort of allergic reaction to any food of any kind. When I abandoned vegetarianism in high school (made it two years), the return of meat to my system barely registered, and was in no way uncomfortable. This considered, I wrote the odd pain off as an anomaly.

Tonight, however, was a bit different. Jason and I were fulfilling a tradition of ours. We enjoy trout. When he's in town, we'll end up snagging a few trout from the seafood counter and frying them at my apartment. We've had varying and interesting degrees of success, perhaps the least fortunate outcome being when, for lack of oil, we attempted to fry the fish in salsa. It did work, mind you, but it wasn't terribly smooth. Regardless, Jason shares a few of my culinary tastes, so we decided tonight to stuff the fish with sliced onions while they fried. It's a genius tactic, mind you, because the onion taste cooks into the fish, while the onions themselves are sauteed in the oil (in this case in butter).

The trout ended up being as delicious as expected. I ate the whole thing over the course of fifteen minutes while watching the end of the Hornets/Spurs game on TNT (by the way, am I the only person who thinks Gregg Popovich doesn't get called out enough for being a sore loser? Listen to him get snippy in his postgame interviews. What a fuckin' baby...), as well as every bit of onion that was packed inside. I had noticed the familiar soreness on the roof of my mouth, but thought little of it, perhaps because I'm a moron. Within five minutes of finishing the meal, though, I was burning up.

My head felt tingly and I had an uneasy warmth in my stomach. My legs and arms felt weakened somehow, and an immense, exhausted gloom fell over me. When I explained the series of feelings to Jason, he immediately guessed food allergy, which wasn't good since he's a man very familiar with them. I ended up lying on the couch sweating quietly for a couple hours before starting to feel better. Even now, four hours later, I feel peculiar and uncomfortable.

Tomorrow I'll have to eat a little red onion and see how I do. This is deeply worrisome to me, especially since I'd always prided myself on my ability to take a bite of an onion as if it were an apple, without batting an eye. Odd thing to be proud of? Certainly! But when you're not a great dancer, you take what you can get.

And away we go.

I've decided to start using this damn blog, for a few reasons. First, it's five thirty in the morning, and I haven't slept. That isn't exactly a unique happening, especially since I just wrapped up doing a play that ran me through the wringer as far as my sleep schedule was concerned (my fault ultimately, though) and it's still lingering in my system. Nonetheless, the thing I hate most about sleeplessness is the boredom. I don't have any good books I haven't read (I owe the library money), masturbation is only so charming every so often, and my XBox is always more interesting in theory than in practice. So hopefully this blog will help everything slip into a proper priority slot.

The second reason is that I really snagged a slick title for this thing. The Great Cave Offensive, for anybody who doesn't know (and how could you not), was a chapter of an old Nintendo game called Kirby Super Star. In it, you played as the lovable pink marshmellow Kirby, and you had to spelunk through a treacherous cave and underground castles to find fifty treasures chests. It was all on you whether you got all the treasures, some were easy, but some you'd only get one shot at. It was simple to beat, but very difficult and unforgiving if you wanted all those cool treasures. I loved those treasures.

The third reason relates again to that show I mentioned before, namely that uber-director Carla Zilbersmith, to my surprise as I idly surfed the web at this abysmally early hour, updated her blog at four in the morning. Now, I suspect her four a.m. wake up call was a result of an early bedtime, but still, I can't sit around comfortably doing nothing when I'm up at four knowing that other interesting people are blogging that early. Not gonna happen.

I also want to write more, just anything at all more. I don't think I've ever written anything that somebody didn't like, so even if all I talk about is self-indugent crap, my average life experience suggests that there's somebody who'll be following along (I actually used to think about that when I was a kid, like what if there was a person in Brazil who somehow knew about me and was a huge fan of mine? Seems more likely now that we have internet, and that I'm 22 instead of 8, but also because of that, it seems like less magical of an idea).

So, anticipate a few thoughts each day. I know that's an ambitious goal, but I'm running on fumes right now, and I have nothing if not my confidence.