these blogs were made for walkin', and that's just what they'll do..

..one of these days, these blogs are going to walk all over youR FACE AND KILL YOU AND MAKE YOU BLIND AND SPIT AND PISS AND CURSE AND SO MUCH DYING WILL HAPPEN AND OH YEAH BOY YOU'LL BE SORRY AND VERY VERY DEAD, whew, oh so I am glad that I was able to get all of that out of my system. I need a glass of Guiness.

It's another day in my life, of the end of another year, and just the same, then. I am writing this from the somewhat able keyboard that is 3,000 miles from my usual point of information dispatch, as I am visiting my parents and some friends back in the ever-lovin' eazt coazt. Yep, it being the holidays, and me having a pair of free tickets, I thought I'd use them to fly back to snowy rainy Boston, AGAIN, rather than having some wild clandestine sexual rendezvous, or two, with some herpes-ridden young hussy in say.. Flagstaff or North Dakota. Oh, take your pick. Nah, I am not that kind of guy, I would rather hook up with a trashed young lady in Memphis or Albuqurque. Oh, who am I kidding (I mean, I know I spelled that city incorrectly). it's a good thing my ma doesn't read this. Or my girlfriend (choke).

That being the case, i took my girlfriend of nearly 3 years back east to meet the family (yeah, my myspace profile still proclaims my status as "single," that was her idea alright?!) One full day in, I'd say it went fairly well so far. The next couple of days we'll schlep around the estate and hook up with some of the other regulars, but I suppose the hardest part is over. Or at least the most anxiety-inducing. Haha. Anyway, we got my folks a Wii videogame for the holidays (usually I am pretty 100% selfish and don't give them anything. Ever. For any occasion) Not because I am not thoughtful, or not 'cause I can't afford it, but just mostly because I am a lazy self-centered narcissistic egomaniac who can only think about one thing (buying shit for me and myself ONLY) absolutely all the time. Maybe i paint a pretty terrible picture, but come on, you are all just as terrible as me, you know? Honestly, I think it has more to do with the fact that I just dislike buying things in general, for me or other people. Not that I don't think they are worth it, more like I feel that friendship, and time are the only things of real honest value. Oh, hogwash who am I kidding! Truthfully, I do think that way, and I don't care if no one never doesn't by nuthin' for me (that sentance, it is rife with double-negatives.. some triple's as well.. but you got the point).

I recently had a little of a philosophical shift, however, and decided it was perhaps better to fall in line with the rest of the overly consumerist society and succumb like everyone else, at least because in the short term EVERYONE else in the world seems to become more pleased by the material gains. i mean.. I like stuff, too. Maybe not the newest fanciest gadgets all the time (I like weird eccentric doodads) but as people, it's part of our nature to devour external physical stimuli. I have gone on (at length) defending this argument in the past, specifically within this journal, so I will leave it at that for now, other than to say buying things for people, while keeping it modest, is not necessarily the worst gesture one make. I stand by the conviction that I am pretty satisfied not to receive reciprocation (i have enough clutter!), at least in the vein of "it's a holiday. I should buy Ron something" though I definitely don't mind if someone is out in the wild and sees something really bizarre and unique to my tastes that would suit me. but that's cool if they just send me a picture of it, just the same (i have too much clutter.. I have too much clutter.. I have too much clutter). On a last note, I will never turn down a free drink/lunch. Food and booze = NOT clutter! Hey. Sex is DEFINITELY not clutter. Well, maybe it is traumatic at times, I will give you that (and food is clutter of the belly.. and arteries). Okay, enough.

So so, end of 2007. It feels weird to say 2007 is OVER when 2006 still seems like a date which is far away in the FUTURE. 2008 is just another number, but we are ekeing closer to 2010 - definitely. I am ratcheting closer to my mid-thirties, as well - and getting harder and harder to make excuses for "why have I still not accomplished X, Y and Z with my life..." I don't really hold myself to task so much for that stuff these days, as it's usually just "keep out of trouble and everything is fine," with a bit of "keep your job. Just keep your goddamned INCOME for a change" as the runner-up. It seems like such things should be no-brainer, and I am such a mellow guy in many ways, but I have that stupid deep-down thing that urges for the drama, the shake-up. Well, the variety. I have thrown that part of me more than enough bones after all these years, and pushed it fairly thin by being who I am and living where I do, having this kind of a lifestyle (some would consider it elegant, yet imbecilic) that I guess it all balances out quite nicely as those things do. And still, it's enough to piss me off that I've only reached a certain plateau, the highs and lows I could yet possibly attain are forever dangled just in front of my face (man, you know, i would make such a wonderful career gambler!) I look at old(er) people, more and more often - see the signs that someday I will be among them, and realize that with each tick of the clock, I only have so much time to wring life out of this moldy stinky towel before I start using up resources that are impossible to replenish. Yes.. it's GOOD to have that pressure (without which there'd be no motivation to do ANYTHING, really!) but the two minds that make me up can only hand the baton back-and-forth so many times before one of them gets finally tired of that whole back-and-forth. (Oh man, do ALL languages have to be so metaphor-driven as mine, or am I just falling back on ways to take up space?)

Self-important drama aside, each year at this time I will always evaluate the recent past and the possible future and weight the two, what could be, what should be, what will be. Devil Ron wants this, Angel Ron wants that, and Actual Ron just wants to lie back on the couch while the two warring factions tantalize each other and get it over with so I can get something delicious to eat and get on with my day. That sounds cute or silly, but it's becoming easier to identify with. I am in my mid-thirties, like I said - as I get older, the possibility of becoming any kind of world-traveler (and documentarian, in whichever fashion) are slipping further and further away. Yes, with age comes money and wisdom (well.. one would hope). But with youth one has vigor, and necessary naivete and innocence. "Old enough to know better" indeed. Thirties is truly the sweet spot, the last vestige, the end of my youth and innocence, and the last chance i have to be either an outrageous who-cares partier or set the course for being a cleaned-up productive member of some cog working in the great powerful society of the early 21st century. So why is my hair long and gangly still, I wonder.

A year ago I was faced with similar questions, and different circumstances - now so many things are different, but as usual the stakes are a little higher, there is more to lose. I would love to throw my hands up in the air and leave it to the decision of Fate, but we all know that is Random Chaos bullshit (well, that is what I will adhere to) and no one can accept any responsibility for any of it beyond my own programming. My own god-damned programming...

all is new that is old again also

and so we come to that time of the year when time becomes meaningless and te days melt together in cold confusion. back is forward, up is down, booze is guzzled, and money is wasted. Go! Go forward proud consumers! Waste your weight in gains, waste it on tinsel, waste it on horrible fat cartoon santa with no mouth giftwrapping, soend it on car bars, spend it on leather cell phone pouches while old forgotten war widows die in the streets.

McDonald's gift cards always sounded like the worst present anyone could give anyone else, EVER, but they sound strangely tempting now. Big Macs till you die, then (and they will see to it that you will). All is forgiven, right?

shudder horse fern fear

GGRR.. Angry. I just typed a decent sized entry (not THAT big) into the myspace blog. Suddenly it decided to refresh and wipe out all I wrote. bah. i hate my life. I was extolling the virtues of myspace in that it isn't as clunky to enter text like in this blogger setup, but then it goes and wipes out on me.. bah, bah, bah... (hmm, i sound like a sheep). So then, where was I ...

things are alright. Another weekend has lazily drifted by.. not much to report I guess. Worked super-late Friday night, which resulted in much of Saturday getting wiped out by catch-up sleeping (and much of today, sunday, as well..) Last night we went over to Skillz' for a little get together, catching up with some buddies and some old co-workers whom I have not seen in awhile.. which is always a good thing of course. We played some Rock band (oh, my poor throat!) and even got May to pick up the bass guitar for a couple of songs - amazing, eh?

Today was a lazy, lazy day - lay in bed, watched half of the Matrix on TV for the umpteenth time, the end of Predator (man, i miss Arnold action movies) - fell asleep for much of the night. I wrote a long email to a friend of mine back east about "how to get a job in the game industry," those always turn into long drawn-out affairs.

My mood is alright - kind of feeling ho-hum lately. It is just an in-between period in
my life, I guess.. not bad since i am still working, so I guess I can not really complain. I feel like I need to find something to motivate me and get some locomotion in a lot of ways though. It's harder as you just melt into your routine, get older. I guess it is probably that way for most people, you sort of get into your rut. I have written this same blog entry so many freakin' times that it's beyond ludicrous. As we get closer to the end of the year, I feel older (as usual)
and redundant, "been here.. done that." I look up and down the boulevards ad muse about my crazy experiences of the past.. the good times, the traumatic ones. It feels so far away now, so.. dead since it's been fresh, new, invigorating. I still love it here, but the dark/wretchedness of Hollywood still stares at you from every crevice, it reminds me of those crazy feelings I used to have, when my world was going up and down at the same time. It's got me tired of it! I love it but, same as I have said for awhile.. it makes me want to be somewhere else. maybe just be someone else. I wish I could flip a switch in the back of my head, and forget a bunch of the things that have made me, me. "never have any regrets" I have always said, and I stand by it. I don't regret any of it. I am proud, I look forward to getting further. I just wish something didn't feel weird and misplaced in that way, that it always does.. If it was suddenly gone, I would be more mistrustful of it's absence, I guess.

Well.. seeing my friends this weekend was good. i can never seem to get enough of that, i guess it is the warmest thing in my life, and I never know how to properly express it. I feel kind of cheesy writing in this blog at times "oh blah blah here's how i feel" but honestly, when I am not just going nuts in my own head, I do think about how cool the people I have crossed paths with are, how special they are to me. Same with my family of course, and obviously my relationship. That last one is a touchy subject in particular (how can i pour my feelings out in a stupid blog about such things, when not only can everyone in the world read it - which is irrelevant - but that person in question?) I have got in trouble for such things before, so I try to keep that stuff close to my chest of course. All I will say is that reading this I probably sound like kind of a whiny guy in general - but I do appreciate what I have. After all that has passed, as I get older I actually find it harder to be in a relationship in some ways than it had ever been before, in some ways that maybe I cannot quite put my finger on. My head is a weird place for that stuff
- I think there's a big part of my personality that is always gonna be a loner, now and forever..

Strange, it has been a year now since the conclusion of my cross-country trip..

shell out!!

another laaaaate night. when i should be sleepin'. but instead, i sit here.. wasting the night away, wasting my life away...

things are alright - i had a mellow-ish week at work, i mean it was one of those weeks that literally whipped by like a whirlwind.. no bother. it's a little unsettling, anticlimactic even. i feel like there's some weird pressure going on that i am either ignoring (yay! denial!) or manufacturing in my head - yeah, i do that. I will settle at saying "it is a little bit of both." Anyway i guess it's good that things feel kind of mellow lately, even though there's something off about it. in spite of my urges, i hope it kind of stays mellow for an extended period. i need to have some flat-land in my life for awhile.

last weekend was may's birthday, a bunch of folks were kind enough to come over after work on friday night and celebrate it with her. we had a bunch of food (her cousin brought a ton of shabu shabu, some other friends brought plenty of other stuff, and i fortified the icebox as well). it was nice, and we had fun! I got her a wii for her birthday - se had been incessantly nagging me for it "i want a wiiwiiwiiwiiwii!" ENOUGH ALREADY!! Bahhhwah. But she seems to dig it, she and her friends had a blast with it the following night. That's cool! I think they were onto something when they put that thing together, honestly...

I guess the rest of the weekend melted away. Sunday I worked - no partying this week, though i did catch a comedy show last night down near the west side. I used to be a regular for that stuff, it was weird to be back (but it was cool). I think the best part of the night, for me, was just hanging out in a different part of TOWN. I am spoiled, but i get so sick of being in the same place all the time - I find myself feeling tired/bored of where i live since i just haunt the nearby areas, if i am not at work. so it was nice to stroll into a random bar down that way, after the show last night - get a jolt that there's a whole city built up all around me and just past my boundaries..

I relaxed at home tonight, alone - i feel like i don't do that much anymore (in like.. years). It's either hanging out with my girlfriend, or partying - all the time (and I odn't exactly party very much anymore). I guess all the time i spend by myself is driving to work, taking a shower, or sittin' on the toilet. Sometimes it's nice to just chill out and turn your brain off (awake version) is all i am sayin'.

I have a lot to say, a lot on my mind - but i lose the words for it more and more, lately. i don't know how to describe it, and that frustrates me. i will chaulk that up as an internal problem! mostly it feels kind of useless to satisfy that urge to even "go off" anyway, and to be honest writing in a blog doesn't do much to alleviate things. Not that I want to abandon this, but I feel like I need a different outlet than the ones I have been pursuing. I always have more and more interest in the world around me, but it seems as time passes that there's less time/energy/motivation to investigate that which is not an arm's length away.

By jove - am I becoming boring?

just don't do it, man

another freakin' sunday night. another freakin' journal entry. what it's been, uhhh... 3 years i have been writing in here. THREE, EXHAUSTING, YEARS. Yes, three years is nothing to a normal mortal, but to a subhuman like myself.. that is a different story, I guess you would say.

So here's the quick summation.. regardless of whether or not I've used the word properly, i don't care... work is busy. well.. it's weird. As usual lots to say about all of that, but like a good boy I will refrain, haha. Tuesday night I caught up with an old buddy who's recently moved back to town, we got out to my favorite club and met some other friends there. It was a really good night after all - I had been there a week earlier and had a draggy time, but this night was spot-on. There was a band of longhairs on the back stage wearing matching upside-down pentagram jumpsuits and jamming out metal mayhem with melodies lifted from old 8- and 16-bit videogames. Man I was in Ecstasy, I tell you.

We got out early from work Wednesday, I stuck around for a while and then headed to my girlfriend's place up the street and had pre-Thanksgiving dinner with her and her roommates, which was fun. GOOD food. Good times too. They actually got me to play Twister (it hurt!) and even some Blackjack.. well.. some rule-wretched variation of it, to some degree. Actually I must admit I've never really played most card games to any degree (pretty much just.. Crazy Eights!) Sadly. Yeah, so I am not a real man, what do you want. I also do not shave with a "real" razor either. But hey I can change a tire.. back off. Anyway cards was fun, I'd like to get more into it. I can see the appeal (I like to gamble, fortunately it exhausts me pretty quickly.. can be a rush though!) Next day was Turkey Day of course, some former coworker friends of mine invited us to their place in the Valley. A few folks showed up (we were pretty packed in!), they made a Turducken. Actually I think they must have shoved at least TWO chickens in there. Anyway all the food was extremely delicious, and I had a couple of beers to mellow out as well. All that's well and good, best of all is just relaxing with my buddies and enjoying the company more than anything else, to be honest. We watched some horrible movie then headed home quite late.. Next day, I am trying to remember.. oh yeah, no surprise, next day was a lot of sleeping. I made it to Mong and Skillz' place that night and as they'd just bought the new Rock Band game for Xbox, we hooked in and hammered on that thing for several hours. Lots of fun, though my voice was pretty destroyed from karaoke at the end of it (though I cannot wait to do it again!) Late in the wee hours my drinkin' buddy and I split the place and rocketed over to Hollywood to visit Spider Club, after hours so we snuck some booze in. Low points of my life, friends. I don't wanna get into details (it's not THAT bad, just sort of silly.. uh.. pathetic) Whatever, the club was not so fun. Crappy crowd. Crappy music. Unfriendly people.. but whatever, it felt good to be pulling myself out for a long long night of times gone by. It had to be done! Saturday was running errands, brought my girl all over town for shopping purposes (well hey.. shopping.. WHO CAN GET ENOUGH OF THAT??) and then May wanted to watch the gay cowboy movie (it's been a long time coming, haha) so I relented. I have to say that was a sad damned movie. Passed out for the night.. had weird dreams about Fred Flintstone on Wikipedia (?) then rose and headed into the office today. My tire blew out on the freeway into work, so I pulled off and stuck the spare on, then got assraped by Goodyear - at least it's one less thing I gotta worry about (for now!)

Also, to top it all off, my Xbox is still in limbo. What oh what has a guy gotta do? I guess I'll never get to watch Pootie Tang at this rate! LIFE SUCKS.. HARD!!!!

Anyway, so there's my life at the moment, drama and stress et. al. notwithstanding. I guess I am alright.. the usual mix of goodtimes and weird feelings and trying to keep my nerves from bubbling over. After the tire blew I was starting to feel a little migraine wanting to rear in. I feel like I have sooooo many stupid little things in my life which are practically held together by duct-tape. Nothing too terrible, and for many who read this it would sound like I was being beyond petty. Which is probably true, to say the least.. but that's my personality, and more than that, it sort of colors how I feel about my whole condition in general, in some ways. Yes my health is fine. Yeah I have a cool job and great friends/relationship/sense of humor (thought I would sneak that in) and etc. But over all of those things I feel like there's some precariously placed things in my life, like i am just waiting for something to ignite some crazy chain reaction and topple the whole thing. I am not worried about dealing with it, I know so much of it is just chaff and I can usually pull myself out of whatever red tape I manage to get snared up in - but it gets tiring to think about that process. Being the natural neurotic guy I am, I maybe focus a little too much on those nuts and bolts (and spend time writing blogs about them) as opposed to saying screw it and just letting shit fall where it will. That's my personality, and it's what makes me ME - I concentrate on all the stupid minutiae of the world, it fascinates me, I obsess over it, it rules my tiny mind and my thoughts. I wish I could slap myself and get over that bullshit sometimes, snap into the bigger picture and just take it a day at a time for real. In my way, I do. I am not a quivering pile of nerves, not really. But I can see it getting more commonplace in my life, the older I get. The little fires that don't get patted out, they grow slowly bigger. You can only cover so much ground at once and still just be "a simple person."

I don't think it's within the bounds of one such as I to decide "to be a different person," and I know I have consciously stated in the past that I would do exactly that. I sort of have, in some ways, but I think it was more of a cause-and-effect type of thing. And.. hell.. this whole getting older thing, it's really pushing the issue. I can't get over the fact that "yeah I am supposed to be a Man now," and still I live in this completely crazy surreal town surrounded by all these weird freaky creatures with their fucking complicated bizarre personalities, working in this ridiculously idiosyncratic obsessive-compulsive immature buttlovin' industry. It all really adds up if you think about it.. how could all of this NOT rub off on me? Where's MY nervous breakdown?

Ah well. I still have my outlets. My sense of order and logic, my responsibility sustains me (well enough to keep on keeping on). When next the canoe tips, where it will point me is anyone's guess, but at least i have the virtue of history to keep me from feeling like a naked skinned-knee freak in a miserable pile of despair if that happens (haha.. dramatic.. I am not so weak and without resource!)

At times.. like now.. I wish I could write so many other things in here, I feel like I have a huge wealth of things I have processed and pondered in my head, things I think about people, places, feelings.. events.. all the things and notions and episodes of life, that for some reason or other it would be kinda detrimental to mention in a (relatively) public place. I look at what I actually HAVE wrote above and feel like "oh man that's so neutered, so empty, the guts of what i am feeling, what i want to express, they are all being dutifully emitted.." It makes me feel at first like a liar, a coward, a two-face. Then I ramble about it down here saying "yeah I am a shiny asshole going on about nothing-bullshit for no reason in particular, but there is backbone to some of this stuff, trust me..." The only naked I can be is in just mentioning that much, and leaving it up to those who know me and have been through things with me to get a glimpse of the notion of what I go on about. And the rest of you, well, sorry folks, but like you I am a person, so just fill in your own wildest dreams and fantasies, your own pseudo-subconscious escapades for my own, perhaps some of the weirder things you can dredge up, or the more mundane which to my perspective might seem a little more wackified. It doesn't matter at the end of the day.. I like typing, I suppose.

crack is the best when you smell like it

hello Demon World Of Deathly Bloggings. Welcome back to the insanitarium whenceforth my dark stupid mind wanders. Watch out or the flying clocks or burning geese will melt all over you.. make you fight.

It's sunday night (err monday morning, as of four minutes ago I suppose). Sitting and catching up a little with my neglected-of-late blogs. I use that term (or similar) quite a lot lately, as i don't seem to be so slavishly involved with writing in here anymore. Well - i get tired of it from time to time, and like anything, it's good to back off and get away from it for awhile. Let things refresh. Or something.

Things are alright. It's late in the year, as I always mention "time is going by too fast.." I can't believe thanksgiving 2007 is merely a few days away. Well that's cool and all, i guess. Growing up, Turkey Day always felt like my favorite holiday (well, nearly!) Yeah okay the one with the gifts was still better, but Thanksgiving was always great because it signaled the beginning of that time of the year, when I could look forward to getting new stuff - and also the time off from school, the kind of exciting energy of it being winter and all that involved (when you're a young stupid kid, the snow and cold is more exciting than annoying). Yeah, it was a cool time. The smells of what Mom was cooking in the kitchen filled the house. There was a weird, busy energy, but always happy. And now, of course, I'm all grown up, Thanksgiving is becoming more and more "just another holiday" and for guys like me, every holiday is really about a day or two off of work where I can hopefully sleep in a little late, and maybe get together with some friends to have some drinks or something, and some... nachos.. (yes, they are multi-holiday functional). I do miss the excitement of holidays from being a kid, to whatever capacity.. Anyway, I am happy to cruise on through to the end of this year, and I am sketchy about what it will all mean (this happens to me a lot, in recent years.. SEVERAL recent years!) As more time passes I don't like to think about it, more than necessary - it's just a fact of life, this unstable one I lead. I want to make smart decisions to hold onto what I have, but of course - not at the expense of possibilities. Yeah, so I am fickle "Oh I want this! I want that! No, opposite!" Damn.. The whirlwind of drama loves to have it's way with me. Anyway I don't really feel like going into what's up right now. Anyone who knows me generally hears things come out of my mouth and what implications those things might mean. So that being said, I guess, it is business as usual.

Picked up some tickets to fly back to Boston for New Year's. It will be strange, we'll actually be flying outta LA the day after Xmas (hey, listen, Jews don't celebrate Xmas alright? We get Chinese Buffet and then go to the Cineplex). I'll bum around town and see my friends and family for a few days and then head back to the West Coast on the first (gotta be back in the office January 2). Noteworthy that this time I will be bringing my beautiful girlfriend with me, she's never been to Boston before. neither has she met most of my friends from back East, nor my folks. Also she's not really been exposed to shitty freezing snowy weather too much either. So yeah, um, this will be an interesting trip I bet..!

I have been really busy at work. Really REALLY busy. Last week was the first week in some time that the load lifted, at least a bit (well... I didn't close the office at all or work last weekend). So it's been a little lighter on my conscience. Things have still been weighing heavily on my mind notwithstanding.. work's got some weirdness to deal with these days, socially some other things have been weird. I have been kinda depressed, and feeling generally stupid for feeling that way. Nothing I cannot handle, anyway. I spent some time with the lady this weekend, we went out to see the new Beowulf movie last night. She hadda drag me to it (I had no interest in it, really) but I ended up enjoying it for what it was. Did not realize that it was another fully CG movie (they did tons of mocap, so it's not necessarily "straight CG" if that makes sense). But yeah I was impressed, they are getting far more photorealistic by leaps and bounds. Nerdy to talk about, but relevant to consider (hey, it is my line of work, relatively). Someday in a "few years" games will be there too..

Also May cooked a nice tasty lo-carb dinner (did i just say "lo-carb?") for me last night, which was awesome.. BIG POINTS! Man, i live to get fed.

I have to mention,, i snagged this game "Bioshock"from work to mess around with this weekend, one of the highest-rated titles released this year. I played it last night for a couple of hours, then booted it up again tonight.. and.. MAN. Okay I got the Xbox 360 maybe 3 weeks ago, and granted - it's refurbished - but HELL, when I ran it tonight, it crased on me. twice. Just fing froze. After the 2nd crash, I could not get video to output. Thinking it was the connection, I plugged into a different video input. Nothing (audio coming through fine though). I skipped the switchbox altogether and plugged straight into the TV. Nothing. Nothing! Dammit, I just BOUGHT the thing! So glad i got a warranty with it. That thing is going back tomorrow. I joked it would die nearly immediately, but i didn't think it would be this terrible. What a travesty, how can they manufacture such a faulty error-ridden piece of garbage? It's one thing if the thing is cheap or "off-brand" but come on. Anyway enough has been said in the media about this stuff so I won't do any good to add fuel to the fire, but I do wanna say this - it is our fault as consumers to put up with this shoddy workmanship en masse. I mean - people buy expensive things (ahem, ipod) all the time which die after like a year or two of service. granted it's new tech but still it's a couple hundred dollars you've invested. Just WORK. Just WORK RIGHT. Just test the thing in the first place. Charge an extra 15 bucks. I don't care. F this. I look forward to getting a PS3, at least I expect that thing to hold up for a few years.

A lot of stuff on my mind lately.. as usual. My philosophy is a little tired these days. I am trying to batten down the hatches and not think too much. Just do my job and try to have good times with those I care about. I have been partying a bit (not too bad) but that's me, I dip in and out - it is in my nature. It feels largely useless in my life lately though. i can't really completely turn it off (don't want to, it's still a part of what I am) but the fun times of letting loose feel dead and buried. For the better, I guess i must say. makes me sad to say it, always.

I feel stranger as I get older, and somehow, upset by some tings I realize. I am stuck in this weird pattern, I will never feel like i have really bridged the gap between "man" and "child" in so many ways, like I always thought one would naturally feel. I know stuff, i have been places, I have experienced good and bad things.. but i still feel stunted, running in circles, trapped in a bizarre limbo of uninteresting non-progress. My childhood hobby has solidified as becoming the center-point of my career, in so doing it's robbed me of a hobby in some ways. Makes me feel like i am always forever indulging that childish urge, and surrounded completely by others who do the same and are more (foolishly?) wrapped up in it than i.. or maybe I am taking it too seriously (nah!) In the background I have accomplished things, i've a good salary but can never seem to get my shit together to be worth anything beyond some words on paper, and whatever my age and location would represent in general. I feel like I haven't gt much to show for what I have traversed, except maybe some increasing girth in the stomach area as a decent sign that my metabolism has finally coasted into cruise control.

I want to be hard on myself but I know I work hard, I try hard, I am not lazy, and I acknowledge my limits. So I am either too hard on myself or too narcissistic. Heh. just like everybody. Maybe I just don't wanna face the truth (just like everybody).

Last monday night by buddy MVG had a showing of a documentary that he produced/shot/narrated/wrote/edited/etc (you get the picture). I've mentioned it before, I saw a rough cut of his film maybe a half-year ago. Well it's finally wrapped up (as wrapped as it'll get) and he rented out a small local theater (yeah, in Hollywood) for a night to have a show. I have to say - I was impressed! Very impressed! It made my heart soar when I rolled up to the theater for the show, and saw a line wrapping around the building with BORN HYE on the marquee banner. It was pretty packed, I almost did not get a seat! Anyway, the show went off wonderfully. I mean - they shot it on a handcam, it's not like they had crazy expensive film and lighting and all of that - but the thing reeked of charm, it was fun to watch and superbly put-together. It's been in the oven for years, and it's very gratifying (even merely as his friend) to see the conclusion it's come to. Of course I don't know what is the result of a one-night screening, and likely there's much more work ahead. but hey - thing is DONE, they made a great film. I am very proud and eager to see what happens next.

i+don’t+wanna+hear+about+nothin’

yes, i know, i just wrote that it is july. it is FAR, FAR from July.. but for some reason, after I got my hand started 3/4 of the way thru typing it, i said ah hell, shucks, i will let it slip in, if only to properly illustrate the condition of my mental state.

late nights at work these days, as my life so often goes i tend to swing in and out of these things...i have about 20 minutes right now to sit and chill out while the lighting bakes, and so i thought i would grace my of-late-neglected blog with a little attention.. here you go. anyway, yeah, things are alright. i am working a lot. late nights last week, the week before that, and i was in this past sunday as well. it's groovy though, i will be handsomely paid when this project is finished, in fact I have started spending my future megabucks in advance. if you happen to know me and we are good friends, then send a note and maybe i will buy you a caddy, a supra or a new HDTV. It seriously depends on my whim, you see.


All kidding aside, money is probably the big thing sticking in my craw these days (do i have a craw? what does one look like?) but anybody can complain about that stuff so i will (largely) leave it up to everybody else. i will say this, however.. today the notion of taking an actual vacation to a far-off place (like, say, europe) for any brief period of time popped into my head. someone at work mentioned their recent trip to switzerland, and a light bulb went off "hey, i went to switzerland.. nearly EIGHT YEARS AGO!!!" Yeah so i have had a moment here or there of trips, since, but largely not. in fact, as my friend and i were recently bemoaning, the lion's share of my trips are back to the place I came from. So, yeah, it would be cool to go someplace different and exotic (once again) for a change. It sounds luxurious, but it really doesn't HAVE to be (it depends if you really must travel as a rich american tourist, you know). Me, I am fine roaming through the sketchy parts of some random run-down debris-laden city with hulking, frightening characters tracking my every move. okay, maybe not that extreme. but i do think it would be fun to chill out in a random pub in ireland or something. yeah, that sounds pretty fun.

there was a time when i would fantasize about flying around the country (or the world) in short stints to just party, sightsee, whatever. no, it's not my life, and it really likely won't be. the biggest issue (besides money) that I see is that I am past my prime for all of that! I am not old yet, not really, but I am old enough to know better. if i was 10 years younger than i guess things would be different. but then..

well..

i have been working for ten years. in that whole time, unstable as my career may have been, my mantra has basically been "keep working. build up, all of it... resume, experience, contacts, money (if at all possible)" And so yeah I have been doing that steadily, dodging bullets as best I could, but now I look back as i slowly approach my mid-thirties and realize "yeah, it's good to work hard, have a career, have these goals.. but is my goal just to keep doing THAT?" I know I have gone on, at length, on this sort of topic in recent entries in here. Because as I get older I realize that - honestly - I do have a good life, there's a lot to be appreciative of. But it's just not satisfying me. It's not the life I want. I remember when I was young and idyllic (and well, naive, clueless). I had this powerful drive though, and though I was still kinda skittish I guess, I would always find ways to throw myself into (ultimately) more interesting situations. Maybe not the best choices all the time, but certainly a few big ones which have led me to having a rather interesting (in a good way) life. But now a few years of those results have rolled over, and I am feeling like it's just a recycle of the same old routine. Same pressures, same complaints. Good times of course but the world is rich and full of variety, and I really feel painted into a corner these days. These years!

I don't write in here just to whine, I do it because I like to look back at "what I was thinking about, back then." I want to look back at this entry some day and feel like it was leading me down some path back to finding what it was I would want from my life.

yeah, i am just in a bitter mood, it's crunch time at work and my list of things to fix seems never to get any shorter no matter how much i pond on it. is it any wonder i am craving a vacation!! if it was up to me i would be partying at cinespace in 1 hr...

how to get tougher

yeeesh well damn i think it's been getting on a long time since i have written in here.. just not much time for it lately, honestly. work is super busy and all of that (blah blah), besides I feel like I have not had too much to say. But it's good to drop in and make some notes now and again, so here we go, then...

Things are alright - basically life is not bad. Everything is really status quo, all considered. The usual stablilities and instabilities, sometimes I let them drive me nuts, sometimes I just let it flow past me. I guess work has been in somewhat of a crunch mode lately and that's really been the driving thing, but it's been sort of zoning in and out of that for some time now. I have been with this studio for 6+ months, it's a good place (and it has grown on me) and.. well as usual, I wonder how long it will last, for all the usual reasons. In the meantime, like anyone else of my caliber and character, I will continue to work hard and try my best. And of course we will see what it all leads to. Hmm, mysterious...

Social life has been pretty mellow overall, of late - poking my head out now and again, but really (for me) it's been on ice. I had a friend visit from out of town a couple of weekends ago, which was cool - my old roomate from college. Of course I had to give him the whizbang quick-ass mini Los Angeles tour, or cross-section of Ron's Life in a Nutshell.. so I dragged him out to some local dives, we stopped by the Getty Museum (I figured he would dig it), of course we had to hit the tragedy known as Venice Beach. He was in and out in a flash, and it was sad to see him go so suddenly but I appreciated the short time we got to hang out always nice to see some folks from "my old life!"

Crunching at work before and after that.. just after, a friend of mine had accepted a job in Austin so I took him and his wife out for a farewell dinner. Always sad to see people leave but at the same time, gotta admit I am a little envious (the notion of exploring a whole different environment at this point is tempting to say the least!) I dropped off some see dee's to a fried later that night ('round midnight) and his wife and her frieds convinced me to go partyin' with them. Yeah, i was tired. Yeah, I felt like ass. But damn. it was a Tuesday night and I'd not been to the Club in soo long. We went in (probably for about 45 min) and it was super-quick and pretty cheesy, but damn it i had fun.

Then lessee.. I guess last weekend the sox was on and so i met my buddy at the sports bar up the street. the game was lame and boring (well, it was cool because we were winning but dull cause there was no action or tension!) and eventually we found our way to some random-ass halloween party downtown, all old-style (as in, like when I used to find myself ending up in crazy places for no good goddamn reason, but who cares and it's a blast anyway). Got home late (6am I hit the hay!) and sunday we watced the red sox win the World Series.. again. Which, again, is cool but.. nah, not interesting/invigorating at all, unlike when it happened in 2004. Granted, it's hard to compare the two, but there's something about that team -- not that I am what you'd call a baseball aficionado - - but generally, every year they'd really work their asses off and get quite close. so close you could SMELL it (yes I said it, smell the asses..) but no matter what, you could always count on them pooping out rather spectacularly. Ad so it went, you could set your watch by it. but every year they'd keep trying, really really hard, and you'd think "maybe.. just maybe." And then it finally did cinch, after what was literally a lifetime to ANYBODY. And now, when they play, and win "oh so effortlessly," it just seems sort of.. I dunno, anticlimactic. Not even a relief, just kind of.. well, it doesn't really matter, it's just baseball (oh god, I hope my father isn't reading this, or I am out of the will!) I guess maybe I would be singing a different tune if the circumstances played out kind of differently. If they didn't completely slaughter the bejeezus out of their opponents, ruthlessly and uncharacteristically. Alright. Well I have written about sports enough, by now...

This week, then, no big deal. Working, working.. fixing up crap, trying to make things all purty. Work's taking a little of the wind out of my sails, I'd love to get into it but there's reasons I shouldn't. Sometimes I feel a little crazy and wonder how much of it is in my head.. then I reflect on my history and it makes me feel better (and worse). But hey, that is how it all goes. anyway it is mine and I signed up for this stuff, come what may.

Wanted to go out tuesday night (yeah, so it sounds like i am falling back into a pattern) especially after having fun the previous tuesday, but I didn't get outta the office until close to midnight (and then the 45 min drive home). that's just as well though. Last night was Halloween, my girlfriend actually had a little tiny get together at her pad in Orange County so I spent the night down at that place. It was alright... very tiny, though it was packed for what it was. I am not used to it, partying with a bunch of people (that i don't know) who are not really into drinking at all, heh heh.. it was surreal. But it was nice, nothing bad happened - those who know me halfway-well know that i have a pavlovian pre-conditioning to fear halloween, that is - crappy things typically hapen to me around this time of the year, and the last several years, it's been nearly without fail! I am not one of those superstitious "for real" people, of course, but you know how it is.. heh heh.

So here I am now, and it's the home stretch for 2007. At last! Thanksgiving will be upon us in a few short weeks, and then of course, Xmas and the end of the year. Good, well, let's wrap this one up already, shall we?

complainy complainerstein

hey it's that time of the month when i fill my journal up with a bunch of whining and ranting. Oh just kidding! I actually do that like 4 times a week.

So my car is still in the shop, they are definitely gonna take their sweet time with it since it's paid for already (under warranty). Sniff. I miss having my car. I hate being dependant. I could catch a train home but that feels kind of needlessly expensive and also sort of pointless. Though if I did have my car on hand right now I would get the hell out of my office and drive home and eat something tasty and then go out for a night on the town.. that's the kind of frame of mind I'm in. I need to unload, to expend some pent-up energy. I am feeling kind of like a big blob that's pointless and boring right now. I need to remind myself what it is like to have some fun...

My friend emailed me today some pictures that his buddy sent him from a recent trip to Greece, the guy takes quite a bit of vacations actually. We both wondered "why don't we do stuff like that!" The answer is pretty clear, and not hard to figure out.. the thing is it is not too hard to figure out how exactly to get some extra money flowing around here. It's just a drag! I don't wanna work 24/7 for real. I am tired of burning myself out. I can still enjoy my job, only because I know I am not committing every waking moment to it for real (though it certainly feels like it, plenty of the time anyway). But yeah - I would love to know that there's coming a time in the not to distant future where I will be able to unwind a bit and do something unusual (but enjoyable). I have long been trumpeting that I need some change in my life, I suppose it's true. It comes with a cost, though... that is always true...

Hmm, yeah, I suppose I am kinda bored still. In fact it's getting a bit worse.. I need something to snap me out of this funk! Well, going for a long walk the other day helped (for starters) - I guess getting more exercise/exertion is a good way to help burn off my wound-up energy productively, at least.

I am in a decent mood 'cause I wrapped up my latest level at work, just now. It feels good to get another chunk finished.. though it gets difficult to be excited about that for other reasons which I don't wanna get into. Anyway if I can power through a few more at a respectable rate then I will be in decent shape. I am starting to feel the weight of "lots of stuff built over the years" and it's got this kind of .. disposable feeling to it all. When I am done making it, just toss it in the pile and move on. Eventually that pile gets big.. then you have collections of piles.. piles of piles, heh.. I am pretty used to detaching myself from my "product" when I am done with it, aside from scavenging/cannibalizing things when I can. But after a few years you kind of look back at all this dated (temporal) mishmash and think, well, what have I done? I have my resume, it's a bunch of names and dates.. and memories I guess, jumbled up.. I guess that's it for anyone... but nothing stands up, there's occasional highs and lows but I need the "standout thing" that I am proud of. I guess I am not the type of person who can plan that stuff, I kind of "go with the flow" when I am being creative. Make the best out of what I can, but try not to dwell on things, keep the rhythm going, keep building up on top of everything else. It's production, not art. You aren't rewarded for lingering, one must just advance and improve but you can't really hang out and appreciate things too much. I guess when you get to a certain (perceived) level of success, however that happens, than you start feeling like there's been a point to it all, aside from the little momentary bits of gratification. Maybe I will change my tune when it's been more gratifying overall in some other palpable way (or maybe I lack the ability to truly appreciate it like I should!) This is starting to feel like something I should be going over in my other blog, hmmm...

Last night I was waiting for a ride home and so I worked late (much like tonight), and the cleaning guy came and kicked me out for a few minutes so he could dust my office. I went into the TV area of our production team and plopped down on one of the big cozy leather couches. I was upset to be disturbed and thrown out of my space (but hey, the guy's gotta do his job too) and so I sat there in the other room and pondered. I looked around and leapt into another thought, thinking what a nice place it is that I work at, how I am fortunate to have sort of stumbled onto this studio. I remember interviewing here sort of on a whim (I needed a job!) without much knowledge of what would wait for me here, and so not much expectation either (other than.. "probably just another game company") and while that is true, in the 6 months since I have been here I can appreciate some of the relative strengths and weaknesses of a place - especially after having gained some perspective from the many different places I have been employed at. This place is no different of course, in that regard (like any job!) What struck me as I was sitting down, this place is just nice. The people, the bosses, they are really nice people to work for. Not perfect of course, no place is, and definitely not perfect for me, but it's a good antidote, for the time being, to some of the BS I have had to deal with previously. I still get pretty fumed over some shit that went down with my last job.. I get over stuff pretty easily (well.. in a way) but that is something I will probably hold onto for a while, and rightfully so. I was pretty set with the fact that "if this job ends, it will just be because it was my own fault, not because of someone above me making a stupid mistake.." Well of course I did things to hurt myself over there, I definitely didn't deserve what happened, and blowing an opportunity that good is something that's still got my engines revved a little. But I have been humbled before, and now I have been humbled again. It's funny, it's been exactly a year now, and it's not something I think about very often at all (which is a good thing) - but also something I never want to forget, something I want to hold kind of close to myself as a constant reminder, so I don't wind up on my ass in the future so easily. Don't have expectations. Don't let your guard down... Nobody owes you anything, no matter what you've done, in the long run. Maybe I am sort of pessimistic and cynical after a few years, and it's colored my mood to a degree, but the flipside is that good things can happen in spite of bad things. So more than the two things I have stated, don't let shoddy judgement get in the way of jumping on a good opportunity!

Anyway.. enough rantin' for one night. Nobody's perfect.

phew

whew. interesting day. maybe today was one of the happiest days of the past nine months for me. no sure why. i didn't have ANYTHING to do all day long.. that is.. well, i hadda take my car into the shop (again). the transmission got replaced about 6 weeks ago and a couple of days ago it just pooped out again (i can't get it to rev past @40MPH). yeah so i am a little pissed about it, obviously. anyway i got up early and brought it to the transmission guys downtown, smashing the crap out of my driver's side window in the process ('cause i was impatient and irritable - hopefully that won't cost to much to replace! sigh). I dropped it off and caught a cab home, took the day off from work ('cause - how would i get there?) I checked online to see what was up with the train systems, apparently there was no way i could get in before noon unless i caught the metrolink downtown @8am (wouldn't be able to get to the transmission place in time though), same with bussing it straight down there. Tonight I did a little more research (for tomorrow, of course) and found that there's an Amtrak terminal downtown as well, if i catch the 9:40am then I can make it to Santa Ana, 5 miles from my office, at about 10:30am. Apparently the Amtrack runs a lot more frequently than the other train...! Wish I had known that today, and I wouldn't've burned a sick day. Anyway - guess the plan tomorrow is to get up @8, catch a cab to the subway (@ $5), get a lift on the subway to downtown (@ $2.50?), then transfer to Amtrak ($12) and then cab to work from there (probably @ another $6). It's funny, I probably spend about $15 on gas each day commuting to and from work, this isn't much more expensive - more of a hassle though, I guess. My girlfriend just moved into her apartment right near my office so I can crash there for a couple nights, supposedly, while my car gets repaired. The transmission si still under warranty, so hopefully this won't cost me AGAIN..... wish I didn't smash the mirror though. Damn it.

Uh yeah so today was nice. nothing to do, at all. It reminded me of the feeling of the last time I had "nothing to do, in my apartment" @ 6 months ago (doesn't feel so long ago, but then.. it does) the last time I was unemployed. Man, that crappy, crappy feeling. Do not want to jinx myself, of course, but hopefully that will be the last I have felt of that for awhile. At this point,I have been in and out of so may jobs without certainty about "where the hell I will end up next" and it's been numerous and recent enough that I will never completely let my guard down about when it'll happen again. not that I am always waiting for the floor to collapse out from under me, but I have yet to hit that honest-to-goodness "stable situation" where it's just not a concern, for real. Ha...

damn, you know what, i am hungry. it just struck me "i live near a supermarket, which is probably still open." I don't wana spend $15 to order a pizza so i think i will shell out a scant couple of bucks and buy a snack... 'cause.. HUNGRY. I know it is scintillating reading this, but..

NICE!! That was RAD. i just got up on a whim at 11pm in the evening and walked ot the Mayfair marekt and bought some CHEESE.

And some CRACKERS.

Ad it did't even cost me $9. And the crackers say they are fifty-percent of the fat of the normal ritz crackers, and though a bout half a buck more expensive, they are now "better tasting" than the previous iteration fo the low-fat crackers. let's see how they fare.
..
eh, good enough. Man. I realize as I type this, someday I will look back at it and marvel about how much I have lost my mind, to be transcribing a play-by-play of my intense adventures of buying cheese in the middle of the night. Don't think this is lost to me - I know that I have passed over some threshold of normalcy quite some time ago. yeah, well, what of it. This is my life, this is what I have become. I reflect on it rather often - Hollywood fucks with you, it really does. Depending on who you are, what you do for a living, where you've been and all of that.. living in a crazy mixed-up place like this will certainly scramble one's circuity but good, no matter the case. Unless of course you are an empty and boring individual, I suppose. I have proclaimed it before and I will repeat it again ad again, this place is a bunch of madness, any large urban environment like this in this day and age (or any, but certainly now in particular) is no exception.. It's okay. I don't lie to myself and pretend that it's not affected me somehow, after all of this.

My legs ache, owch. I am a big fan of walking, though I definitelydon't do it as often as I'd like. Unfortunately, the best workous occur when I am out of my mind, stumbling home from some bar or other (okay not really a stumbler, I am actually quit surefooted when i am toasted.. usually.. and fortunately). I decided to take a jaunt over to Griffith Park up the street yesterday, and when I got there, just kept on movin'. I saw the recently-reopened Observatory looming on the horizion, beckoning me.. "it sure is far! But not THAT far.." I made it that long, might as well see if I can make it the whole way. Damn! I have been walking for a half hour and I seem to be making some huge concentric circle around the damned thing, it's not got any closer at all!! Still I followed the winding path, eased on by the peace and quiet and serenity of the trip. Damn, damn i am getting tired a little, this walk back is gonna suuuUUuuckkk.. but how lame is it to say "yeah i walked CLOSE to the Observatory, but I pussed out after about 45 more minutes." how much longer could it be? Long story short (you wish!), I made it there, walked around the deck, then returned home, took me a couple of hours.. maybe about 5 miles or so for the whole trip, perhaps? It felt great, but yeah today it's a little painful to walk (not bad). And then I burned the roof of my mouth on hot french fries and chili. Don't tell my Diet. On that note, back to my cheese...

Yeah so tomorrow will be interesting. 11:30, I guess I'd better not stay up TOO too late, I have al maner of vehicles ot catch tomorrow morning. Kind of an experiment, but I am sorta F'd if I miss my train (the next one's not for about an hour and a half). i figure if I call the cab @8am and get on the subway by 8:30 I am all good to leave Union Station at 9:40. A little neurotic but I don't wanna blow it. It's kinda cool, in a way.. I like driving, obviously, but it's nice to change up the routine. I am a stranger to the subway out there, I've ridden it briefly a couple of times (it's mostly useless!) but when it has had a purpose it was cool, the few times.. heh heh. Mostly I am reminded of the days back in Boston, ten (ulp!) years ago, when a young Ron Alpert of barely 22 years old was working at his first Industry Job in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Carless and nearly broke anyway, I would catch the train from the suburbs all the way into the city. Then I moved to a very modest apartment in the town of Waltham on the outskirts on the city (not terribly close, but relatively much closer than living with my folks!) I would get up on the freezing mornings, walk 20 min to the bus stop, catch a 1hr bus trip into Central Square, ride the train from there to kendall Square, then walk another 15 minutes in the windy, blistering cold to my office building in cambridge. Then i got a car and drove to a closer bus station on the outskirts of cambridge, eventually moving to the city and having a much easier commute and just parking outside the damned building.

Anyway, yeah. Good times.

shabba-ganoush

the days of my life are withered away into the internet-i-sphere. seriously.

sunday afternoon, looking thru the closet, wasting (passing) some time trying to clean up and organize some crap while i wait to snipe the ebay auction i have been eyeballing for the past few days (i'll save you the suspense - i lost, about 3 min ago). but yeah, whatever.

looking through the boxes in my closet (for some AV cords), i came across my ol' sketchbook from college. ah yes. my beloved sketchbook. i used to refer to it as "my girlfriend," as it was my most cherised thing in all the world at the time, i would carry it everywhere with me, all the time. Every free moment i would commit thoughts and scribbles and drawings and .. well, sketches in there. late at night, drunk late after a party, after lunch, on the concourse in between classes, etc etc. Brought it all over te place, even to NYC on the few times we'd venture out over thataway (oh yeah, forgot how fun that was..! damn!!)

i kept a pretty full journal in there, back in the day (hard to imagine, i know). Also I started filling up it's pages midway through with a pretty intensely-detailed "comic story," or "graphic sequence" if you'd prefer (not the pornographic type, hah heh.. not from this dweeb!) But yeah I did go out to a good lot of parties back in the college days, and thus inspired I made a comic about college-age (and just post-college-age) young adults living in a somewhat urban setting who hang out and live in ratty apartments and date disphits and smoke blunts drink budweiser and pass out at parties. I suppose it sounds very pedestrian, but at the time it was so captivating to create and this all came out in the story's style. i was getting into "the alternative press", underground-comic-wise, in those days.. bob fingerman, terry laban, evan dorkin, all those fellas. pretty much the same stuff i was making myself, on a vastly inferior scale (mine inferior, that is!) but it was personal and very relevant to me, even though the thing was only like pages or so and not much in the way of, ahem, deep character or story development. definitely influenced by guys like sam kieth, i'd take al these fractured styles of laying things out, bizarre but interesting (and legible "enough") composition, and the dialogue wasn't what you'd call "hot" but it was passable for what it was (pretty much, based on shit you'd hear all the time, anyway)

Not forgotten about by any means, but certainly relegated to the distant attic of my brain. I mean.. i have had DOZENS of sketchbooks, literally, over the years - and more than my fair share of comic-type things I'd made since I was a kid, but this was certainly by far the cream of them. Again, not to say it was much special (and looking back at it now, the anatomy and stuff like that is still all over the place, to say the least) but I look at this as one of the last cool "things" I have made on my own - I say this, considering in the 10+ years since I last lay a finger on the things, I have spend countless hours worth of my career creating "professional art." Yeah and that's all well and good, and lord knows I love CG and all of that.. but I do miss drawing.

I have a scanner, I'll get the thing pasted in here sometime soon, just for the sake of posterity. Even though scanned, it will look horrible and not worthwhile of anything, even to me - it's one of those things where you have to hold the original inked drawn pages in your hand to appreciate the love and care I'd put into it, and even then, you have to be me to really look at it and not think it's just some bullshit. Anyway it makes me want to do some more.. or at least go back to being the type of person who cares about such things.

the computer science of dungarees

yeah, so once again I start my blog with 'another month has whipped by,' and i continue on my narrowing path towards 33 years of age. it's alright - 33 doesn't sound THAT bad. not much worse than 32, or 31. still better than "i'm in my mid-thirties.." Well, i know, it is getting there..

things are alright. the week kind of melted away. it was busy, but mor elike busywork-busy, not "stress the hell out" busy. i haven't felt "stress the hell out" busy from my job for awhile, but the neurotic in me isn't enough to let that completely go, just yet. As usual, "takes time." I have been bitching about work a little lately, though I must say the longer i am here, the easier it makes life feel, in some ways. Hmm... I guess that is good.

Though I will mention I have had to surpress my urge to pick up and leave town a little recently. I still maintain what I said earlier "I am BORED!" and I need something to stimulate me, and for the life of me I can't think of what it could be. Well, drama could do that, but I am not really in the mood for dealing with consequences right now. I want it to just be "easy!" I know my fallback is always "hell, I live in Hollywood, just go out and party." Sigh, I do miss that.. I seldom do it anymore, and it's such an easy recharge for my soul.. but it's always so detrimental to my life, the more of it I get caught up in. If only it wasn't so damned enjoyable! I am lucky I am not a true addict, when I know something is bad for me I manage to detach myself from it. Well..sometimes. Enough of the time.

It's a period now where I don't wanna write in here anymore. I don't feel like "expressing myself--" I just want to go into some kind of hibernation or something. I look at my bills and I look at my balance and I just want them to meet somewhere halfway somehow, and until that happens I wish I could literally freeze up my life somehow. I guess I have sort of been doing that, anyway.. but there's no way to do it while putting my brain on ice as well. When I talk about it I realize I could opt for a les expensive lifestyle (you know, live someplace less extravagant, get a roomate) but after all these years, it's evidently very difficult to just let go of my apartment! So I suck in my hot air and keep my upper lip stiff.. or whatever imagery fits this case.. just wait it out and keep movin' on.

I guess it's a good time to start evaluating how better to spend my free time. I am realizing that I am quite good at wasting it, but I could actually probably spend it doing things that could ultimately make me happier. I don't know who to blame for this (heh, myself) but I guess it's the first step towards lightening up a bit. My knack is always that "it's all in your head," or mostly a conscious thing, but I do believe a lot of how we feel is based on what goes on subconciously (of course,) not to mention biologically.

The other day I was paying some bills and I looked at the phone bill. Hmph! $65 for one month. That seems a little excessive to me. I mean, I like having a landline at home, and I have an internet connection of course. But would my life be ruined if I gave them up? Immediately I think "well damn, the bill is usually about an even $50 a month, and that's definitely worth what I get out of it.." But what do I get out of it? I have a phone at work and the net to boot. I spend a lot of time online at home, but if it was not there I am sure I could find other, more productive ways to occupy myself. I don't mind sticking around late at the office to do emails and look at wikipedia and stuff like that. I mean - I spent so much of my entire life without any internet connection, it's not like i NEED it. It's just a convenience, one that gets abused. Hell in my first apartment after college, I didn't have a PC or net hookup. In college my roomies had that stuff but I NEVER used their stuff.. what was the point?

Well I will say this, I don't do much freelance work but it sure helps to have the online when I DO. In fact my job, in general, is made much easier (at times.. not ALL the time) by having a connection at home. Honestly if I lived very close to work this would be a non-issue for sure! I don't think I am gonna get rid of it for real, but I would like to unplug myself more (I say, as I type in my blog). The internet is definitely a bad thing for a guy like me. And as for my land line phone, well, i don't talk on it THAT much. I could likely make all my phone calls from work (and i do have a cellphone, which gets much more use as an SMS device it seems)

As I type this I begin to wonder what other things I could "give up." This is a common fantasy for many, but of course it always stays "fantastic..." few people ever really seem to go too far with it. Driving is a big one. I drive a LOT. Come to think of it I drive more than most folks I know. If I could walk to work, I'd still probably drive, sad to say! On the positive I won't drive if I am drinking, as anyone who knows me will attest, and though I am always cabbin' to go out i will ALWAYS walk home, even if it's a few miles. But if I am sittin' around and I want to grab a bite, I will definitely drive, even if it's up the street. I guess I am one of those who thrives on the Instant Satisfaction of our society. Want this? Spend five or ten minutes to get it then bring it back! It's a little ridiculous, but life is a little excessively convenient. Last Saturday we spontaneously decided to walk to Hollywood (I repeat myself, I know) and got a nice dinner. It was fun and felt good! I should do that every weekend.

What else to lose.. hmm, hmm.. Well I always say I would give up my television in a moment if I could have a nice fireplace in my living room (not one of those shitty gas-powered faux-fireplaces, mind you). I stand by that, yet I maintain it's easy enough to say since I know there's no way I can set that up in my current home. But yeah if one day I can actually afford to buy a freakin' house, I am going to sure as shooting set up with a nice honest-to-goodness fireplace and chimney.. so help me! Ahh, we'll see. Anyway I watch almost no TV. If I was single I'd likely never ever watch TV (ever!) I have ranted about TV more than enough in this blog so I don't wanna get carried away once again.. but yeah. It's useless to me. Sure there's entertaining and interesting things on TV. But I have seen enough. I have had my fill. For my LIFE. Though I do like when they have them at the gym, helps you zone out (yeah CNN!) I might mention here that YES I have basic cable, but only because they never turned it off after the last guy moved out. If it turned off tomorrow there's no way I'd pay to get it back..

Could I get rid of music? I dunno. For years I have been a rabid music freak, like any from my generation it has provided the soundtrack to my life, especially adding punctuation to the peak moments. But you know, like other people who get old, I have lost touch with the trends, and popular music turns me off. It doesn't SUCK, in fact there's always some which is quite listenable - but my endless passion for it has certainly numbed. If i get a CD now, it may sit in my closet for a long time - a week, a year, not joking - before I spin it once (err, encode it and put onto iPod and listen to it). This goes for bands I LIKE! I guess it's kind of like TV, I am just burned out on enough of the me-too stuff. And though there's always plenty of quality stuff around to get into, I am sort of detached enough that it doesn't really captivate me anymore.

One thing I would not like to reject so readily is talk radio. I know that sounds a little weird.. but unlike music, which is sort of the same thing over and over (just in different flavors), at least with talk radio you can hear people talking about actual things. Sometimes it becomes inane, or just lame, but there's always something to listen to, something interesting. I like to listen to stuff when I work, it helps to while away the day and occupy my mind while I pour through my repetitive tasks, heh heh. "Talk Radio" is a term I will use to refer to not just real actual radio programs, but podcasts as well, of course.

Could I give up videogames? Read my current entry on my other blog for that! Short answer, yes, I already have.. though I would really like to hold onto my gameboy micro for good reason. But the fact that I've not updated the games on it's flashcart in over a year and a half is probably a telling sign, of at least a couple of things..

Clothes? Who cares (though I don't wanna be gross or naked.. well I could kinda dig being naked if I wasn't fat and wouldn't be arrested). Friends!! Well, I love my friends, but I do a good enough job of alienating them (not on purpose, it's just life) that they probably wouldn't notice too much if i went missing, haha...

Food? Uhm. This one is tough. I love food. Well I don't LOVE it but it's something that kinda makes my day, a decent meal. If I eat plain food for too long I will start feeling really bummed out on life. I don't need "expensive fancy food" either, I am a simple man with a simple palate, but I have my joys. Yeah, when I die I will miss the good eats of this world. I need to eat better, which means eat more boring food.. bah.

Soda I could give up.I drink a LOT of soda. It tastes good, dammit! It is making me fat though. I actually don't mind just drinking water, which is honestly the most refreshing thing I can imagine - but when you get into the rhythm of drinking soda in your life, especially with certain food, then they kind of "go together." It becomes difficult to enjoy a burrito without a Coke you know what I am saying? But if I go without soda for awhile, the drive leaves me. And when I dip back in after awhile, it tastes kinda gross and it is not too hard to stay away. The thing is, soda's got the caffeine I need to snap out of it during those drowsy periods. Anyway I haven't had any soda in about a week. Let's see if I can stretch this for some months.

Beer, booze... sigh. I'd LOVE to give these up. I really do enjoy drinking. It's such a satisfying, easy thing - it works EVERYTIME! It's like the perfect drug for a guy like me. Drinking can juice me up with instant, happy energy, no matter what the preceding day has been like. Also in other company can help me chill the hell OUT. It's a nice medication. I also seem to have an affinity for the taste of beer, what can I say.. and I like vodka. And starting to dig whiskey. Yah that's all rough, but I enjoy it, it's part of me. Still, I never --yearn-- for a drink. I enjoy it, but i don't have hunger pangs for booze. Fortunately I don't enjoy it so much that I can't exist without it, or even close to that bad.. I can see how that would be a truly complicated situation. Could i give up booze? You bet. I have (for YEARS!) Do I want to? Nah. Not really.

Okay. Obviously I could type this list all night. But I gotta go home and get something to eat. 'Night all.

short olives, no thanks for the long ones? what?

bah, when's the last time i wrote anything in here? 1 week? 2? 3? I dunno. Actually i have a couple of entries that I put in recently only to rescind them pretty quickly. i think one was over-the-top whining and the other was just some crazy late-night gibberish ranting about the Meaning of Life or some such. Maybe i will replace them later, they are sitting unfinished in a text file...

Things are alright. it's 1am (well, hell - already nearly half-past!) and I gotta get up for work in the morning. But hey, i have had litle free time to sit around and do much this weekend besides "shit i'd had to do" so I am gonna indulge and type for a few minutes.. catch up on my semi-occasional recording, as it were..

So yeah the weekend was busy. Well here's a general rewind, to start with - life has just been busy, as it tends to if you're me. The past two weeks have been pretty work-intensive, while not a bad thing, just kind of tiring and not much for relaxing. But hey, I like to keep busy. Anyway some late nights ad yadda yadda, downplaying the social life for the most part. Pretty much... Anyway I hyave been keeping pretty straight in the meantime, no flying off the handle. Argh I am trying to recall last weekend, I guess I was had lunch with my friend Chris in the valley and then may and some friends and I went to Tokio for drinks and dancin'. This weekend - well Friday night we went to see the band Air at the Greek Theater (Griffith Park). I ducked outta work a little early 'cuz i hadda give someone a lift home, then jet over to the stadium - made it there no problem, though it was drizzly - fortunately as the band came on, the sky dried up. Though nearly as soon as we got in our car after the show concluded, it started to seriously downpour like nobody's business (that was very lucky that it "waited" for the show to finish - the Greek is an open-air stadium! Would have sucked!) The rain continued to come down much of Saturday, and I was out driving around in it - I had to track down a new fan for my PC's CPU, as the old one had pooped out. It took me a couple of days to deduce what had happened, cause my PC was acting erratically (at one point I thought I may have contracted the Blaster virus - AGAIN!) but fortunately it's just the motherboard nearly melting down. yippee. Anyway I spet hours going between PC Clubs ad Fry's'es, which really sucked, but in the end I found my fan and got the ol' girl back up and online. Whoo hoo.

Last night may and I randomly decided to take an extendo-walk into the city and grab some dinner at Geisha House, for a change - which was nice (no geishas though, booo). I had my first (non) sushi roll in years, which was a strange thing to taste (it was cooked meat as opposed to raw fish.. but still). We also tried some edamame (the little beans) which presented some problems. You squeeze them out of the little uh.. leaf chamber thing, i know i sound dumb as hell for saying that, and just eat them (there's two or three in each). I squeezed them out and they would start sort of flying out, in fact one hit the shoe of the girl sitting beside us.. whoops. Then I tried to just squeeze them into my mouth to avoid further projectile firing at the neighbors, but instead it launched clear to the back of my throat and blocked my windpipe, ouch! I choked it down (it's just a stupid soft bean anyway) but hell. man. those are some dangerous beans.

Last night went out to beauty to meet some old coworker buddies, tim and maynard - it was fun, i like seeing those guys. they are real friendly and we don't get to catch up much, so when we do it's a nice change of pace. beauty was alright, i am forever sick of it (and it's trashy uriney smokiness) but it's always familiar and kinda dumb-friendly. plus the bartenders are nice. and hell you can get in usually without havingto do a whole song and dace or wait in line, like some of the trendier assholier places in town. anyway i would be sad if it went away (they need to get some decent DJs back there though) Ah, it's a mainstay. It's strange to walk around there and see that star shoes is all gone though (remodeled into a new joint called "vice," i guess i will have to check it out at some point). Anyway i had fun, i drank too much but the bartender gave me tons of free booze so I can't really complain. Stumbled home and passed out after sunrise...

And today after finally rousing, I had to help ms may move to her new pad down in orange county. none of us was too thrilled to deal with it but what're you gonna do - anyway the actual move was pretty painless, we loaded up her bro's van with all of her stuff that's been sitting boxed since she last lived down by school. her friend mike helped with it all and that made things so much smoother, whew! Unloaded the van, we grabbed some grub and then trucked back to LA to call it a day. So yeah, it's been a long weekend of running around and dealing with maintainence stuff.. now i am just doing some laundry and then i will heap up to bed in a bit, i suppose.

so aside from "what has been going on," things are alright i guess. i am a moody guy lately... kind of a pill i guess, well - relatively. my temper feels sort though i am also kind of numbed. i seem to have lost the ability to chill the hell out and let life just kind of wash over me, and that's a little upsetting. i didn't know i had it in me to get so touchy - i think a lot of that is to do with the stuff that's been racketing around in the back of my head lately, just sick of the same old routine. sick of working, sick of LA, blah blah blah. i really am feeling tired of all the same usual everything, and i hate writing that. yeah.. i am BORED. The first thing that pops in my head when people say that, is other people saying "it's not that you are bored, it's that you are BORING!" Ad I don't wanna think that! I never want to think I am boring - i mean, i have always held fast to the thought that I was proud that "i NEVER get bored!" Which is kind of true, i mean - my head is never lacking of some jittery thoughts or other. Always all sort of stuff fling though my mind, it's never just idling too much (though I kind of appreciate it when i can get into that state...) But yeah I am feeling the crush of being trapped in the cycle. I wish I could break out and just shake it up, but i don't like thinking that way because it usually comes with some costly consequences. And whenever i whine about this stuff to folks i will always bookend it with "well, hell, the most important thing for me right now is to seek out that stability and cling to it for all i am worth." It's true! I hate the stability but it is vital to me. i just passed 6 months at Obsidian and I am making decent money (though it's still going to be awhile till i can begin to stockpile it, any!) It is not my dream situation but it's certainly a lot better for me than things have been for awhile. i can FEEL the urge in me now to.. "screw it up somehow" but i really don't want to keep repeating that chaotic pattern anymore. I just want to let some time pass and feel better about my path. So yeah, i guess... the side-effect of that is to feel bored for awhile, well, so be it. Hopefully i won't keep getting more irritable and assholey though. Ok, time to do the dishes, check the laundry, and start getting ready for sleep.

go on! HIT THAT crack pipe!

you know what, i can't stand the fact that it's very close to midnight already, again.

i feel sometimes like what has become of my life is sort of like a nightmare wrapped in a sesame street napkin and left on a windowsill for stupid birds to peck at. yeah sort of like that. and there's angry bums with bad headaches on the street like 6 or 7 stories below, lining their noggins with silverfoil so as to keep the FBI/Aliens (one and the same) from reading their thoughts.

i can't believe this is my second blog entry today and i didn't even wanna write the other one. it exists purely for displeasure. maybe one day i will get cool and with me, so will it. maybe i just like to see myself write nonsense, in any case. I like it, but you hate it!

My mind has been on a tear lately. not super happy or super pissed, but just kind of "let's do this.. then this.. then this." Lots of things to take care of. I am going with the flow of feeling older and feeling more and more trapped in some stupid prison/plan i force myself into though, and i don't like it any more than the last time i thought of it. it feels stupid to complain about anything when you think "AHHH!!! I can do anything i WANT! I am a white male betwen the ages of 18 and 42, i have a car, a bank account, a credit limit, and no STDs or outstanding warrants (that i am aware of). I can go anywhere do anything see anyone i please.." but the feeling of that freedom is so ludicrously impractical that it's essentially a non-issue. i wonder, are the people in jail the ones who are free, and WE'RE on the other side of the bars? (Not really, but i just wanted to write that). Seriously though, I am sure some people dig it. Huh. Some peopl will be into ANYthing.

I have been plowing through work lately. it's sort of plowing through me as well.. i feel like we two are wrestling, and somehow the ultimate expression of each of us are either perfectly married or forever doomed to failure so long as continue in this awkward and ridiculous embrace (hmm, sounds like just about any relationship anyone has ever been in, doesn't it?) I suppose if the feeling was not there that it could all go horribly, horribly wrong somewhere down the line, then there woudl be no stakes and i would be so bored i'd just find a beach and keep walking up and up and up until (a) i froze and starved and died or (b) arrested, private property, no trespassing or (c) someone saw me wandering aimlessly and pointlessly and presented me with some interesting ponderous conversation and we went off to explore it somewhere, where my joints wouldn't really hurt so bad.

i realize i should probably hop in my car and jet-jet-jet home right now, but the thrill of getting actually home is a little tempered bu the fact that there's more shit to deal with there, and all i really need to do more han anything else is see myself through a few more hours of dedicated productful productiveness (and productive duct-tape) and then i can submit myself to the glorious thrall of temporary death i.e. brief, brief slumber for some scant hours.

damn, i love to have eyes and fingers!! if all else fails, at least as long as i got those things then i know i am alright. i'd make a good potato....

high pitch nine

another weekend got through. my eyes are bleary with sleep. my concentration is compromised (boring TV program on in the background) My already terrible typing skills are a little worse than usual.

tired.. i hoped to get a lot of work done this weekend but i burned out. it's okay, i will handle it better during the week if i am not all used up by the time the week begins.. i am a firm believer in the notion that if you step away from something a little bit, you can enjoy a better perspective on it than when you are lost in the thick of it. Actually, i like that.. it gives me a little new perspective on my life. Not new... i think i remember thinking the same thing as i bought a tom petty CD in central square, cambridge, about 8 years ago...

it was a little bit of a difficult weekend.. alright not really. it was honestly one of the nothing-est, forgettable-est weekends i have had in some time (and i think that would register as a good thing!) But i was in a "make myself feel busy" mood, so i wouldn't say i unwound very much.

feeling a little out of it, anyway. there's been a lot going on in my life, around me.. a lot on my mind. i can feel myself sort of poking and prodding in ways designed to "make things interesting" (whether that's good, or bad.. i can't say) -- but it's part of my program i guess. i like it when things are a pain in the ass, when there's obnoxious problems and unsettling burdensome situations looming just over the horizon to deal with.. exactly what survival advantage is that going to give me? sigh, i would make an excellent astronaut.. why couldn't my parents be teachers (or therapists). Actually if either of those were the case, i'd probably be some boring investment banker, or the manager of some office equipment supply and shipping outfit. yeah, it would be easy, and i would be driving some economy sized sedan and have a dog named skip and an HDTV with Tivo and all of that. I'd probably live in New Jersey with my wife Diane (blonde) and our two buck-teethed children. yep, it would be a different life.

i wish, just one night, my consciousness could slip thru the space-time continuum and trade places with my alternate universe doppelganger, and i would have to spend a day as Office Supply and Shipping version of myself. I'd have to spend a couple of hours getting over the initial shock, but trying not to blow my cover all the while (even though my kids would sense something was wrong). i would end the day realizing that I'd most likely slip back into my proper dimension at the strike of 12 midnight, so i would use the opportunity to act without consequence and wreak havok with Office Supply Ron's life. End up in a brothel, a jail, a horrible truckstop divebar somewhere.. something... get knocked the hell out in a bar brawl and come to back in my proper body.. Hopefully, Office Supply wouldn't have had a similar idea and left me in an equally compromising situation, or then there'd be some honest-to-goodness hot water i would not exactly be too keen to deal with (though i can appreciate comeuppance and karmic universal payback. can't i??)

well.. nah.. no. that is all just a retarded man's fantasy, actually. in all likelihood, the best i could hope for is that somehow space and time itself bent far enough to cross and the electrons that carry the data impulses of my blog posting, immediately after i'd hit the "publish" button (not so named), would be super-transmogrified by sunspots (remember those? 70s) and accelerated to Office Supply's universe and we'd essentially switch blog postings (his would end up in my website, mine in his)

Does any of that make any sense? i'll simplify it.. you know when you play that old video game, Pac-man (yes, it always comes back to pac-man).. when you go in the little "warp tunnel" at the side of the screen, you leave the left side and instantaneously reappear on the right side, or vice versa. BUT! For that one brief second, the pac-man you control exists not in his single blue maze reality, but a shared endless void of oblivion, yes the same oblivion where all things have come from and eventually end up. Yet just as he is on the brink (the millionth of the millionth of a second that his essence dis-registers from the visual plane and registers, relatively, in the non-plane), he immediately is plucked back and reappears at the extreme other end/beginning of the same circular universe.

And then.. all the games of Pac-man being played, in all the videogame systems in the universe (in this reality), in each case all the pac-mans will disappear to the same brink of nonexistence and then reappear.. but they will EACH return to the single proper place, in opposite, from their point of departure.. (are they the "same" pacmen though? are they the same form of energy and matter or are they interchangeable, recycled? that's for another blog post)..

SO!! Then.. in this case.. what if the game is being played, the pacman disappears for the millisecond.. what if the power goes out? what if the electricity shorts.. what then? the pacman has just momentarily lapsed from his existence.. one foot out the door so to speak.. and then his lifeline is BLIP cut out completely? the machine reboots, producing a new fresh pacman, lacking any history.. but where is the displaced, limbo pacman? does he join the other half-formed infinite pacmen from all the other video games who's power has blipped out over the years? do they add up infinitely, in some great conceptual non-nowhere, where all sounds and recipes and thoughts and beliefs and colors overlap ad flow freely and distribute, somehow, back into the collective consciousness of the waking dead, the daily toilers, munching their donuts and riding their subways and combing their combovers.. writing their gay dating articles, drinking their diet redbulls, redesigning their ergonomic keyboards and faux woodpanelled living room walls in scandanavian design, binging on ice cream and sandwich and fondue and flambe' and homo sapiens..

this, this commonly displaced pacman, i am this pacman, he is my thought, my child, my progenitor, my predecessor.. my teacher, my student, my leader and follower, my inspiration, my degradation, the point from which i can not return likewise the goal of my future success (and the cause of my greatest failures). As the pacman eats the dots, as man eats his popcorn, as he sucks the four cheeses off his pizza, as he burns the hanging flap off skin from the roof of his mouth, as he puts a scrapey ice cube in there to cool it off and in also scrapes the roof of his mouth, and his eyes become teary.. and his neck becomes sore, and his ears are itchy, and his thoughts and love, become numb...

and the quarters are fed into the machine, and pacman eats the dots as his machine eats change, and the government produces more quarters, and quarters buy shit which leads to more quarters, and some OCD asshole in georgia or bammer or something somewhere collects them all and organizes in rows of 6s and 8s by dates they were pressed and dates he found them, and cross-referenced by the day of the week (alphabetically) or numerically, number of letters in that day, deciding by -- get this -- a FLIP OF THE COIN, and his family disowned him, his dog even dislikes him, his sister can't understand why he's so messed up and she herself is so normal, and perhaps he was molested as a child or hit by a car or stung by some weird blood-disease-inducing insect (which had no malevolence in it's tiny insect heart, it was just hungry) which was enough to not truly poison or kill him, just enough to destroy his otherwise normal thoughts and way of processing the world.. and in so being his misery is deep and grey and no smell color or taste, like radon, but when he finds his orderly correctness it is appropriate and proper and so right in a way that would never make any sense to anyone else ever, it is a simple singular binary feeling in his way, in his mind, in his proper perspective of the world... and this too he measures numerically, and cross-references with secondary and tertiary methods of measurement, all equally meaningless to anyone but him and especially to him, as he is a hybrid production of not only the normal human way of being and thinking but also this inevitable fucked up and "free radical" endless flowing way of creating and perpetuating new just-as-meaningless-logic, as meaningless to him as anyone else's non-logic wouldn't be to them, either...

and he has his quarters, and his counting, and his days counting down.. and pacman has his dots, and his warp tunnels, and his non-dead-zombie non-pacmans in limbo waiting for all the other pacmen to join them at the end of time, which is the flipped tunnel end of the beginning of time, ironically...

and i have my job and my black keyboard and my jumpy leg, and my bleary contact lenses. and office supply ad shipping ron has diane, and new jersey, and the Tivo. and we will never cross paths for real, for neither of us exist (well, i do, at least, or at least i think i can tell i do because it hurts a little when i hit my arm, to check)

and i have to go to sleep so i can wake up in 5 hrs and drop my car off at the mechanic so he can rip me off and make me pissed of a little bit more in a shitty part of los angeles on monday morning, and then i will go through another week of my life doing the same pointless thing which is all the meaning in the world to me, anyway. Don't swim in your trash. And if you do, don't come up for air, because you can find some between the trash.. in "trashy-air pockets"

crashed out to zero

whew, man. wednesday night, i just got back from dinner. behind at work so i am doing a little bit of late hours to catch up. i am really, really anticipating this weekend's arrival - hopefully i won't need to put in much time at the office (if any..) and I can just take a breather and relax a little. bit my nerves feel sort of fried right now.

things are going alright for the most part, since i have returned - and now it's "business as usual." Just trying to slip back into my routine and gt things under way as they should be. getting out of phase was a little weird but it was honestly nice ot be away from the computer for a few days. i am not much for camping, but suddenly the concept is wholeheartedly appealing... or maybe just jail, that might do the trick.

i feel antsy about things. i am coming up on close to 6 months at this job in a little while (another month and change, but the time flies by) and already I can feel myself getting a little nodgy "what's the next thing.." I am not used to being stable with much for any extended period of time after a little while. it's kind of my natural response at this point. it's hard to imagine that a couple of years could pass and all things could stay relatively consistent, but as usual i won't say "let's not put the cart before the horse, alright?" Oh I just realized, that saying is in drastic need of some modernization.

mostly i am realizing lately that things feel sort of out of my control. it's a sinking kind of feeling. the thing about it is that all the control i could want or need is there for the taking, for a guy in my position - at this point in my life, i could just quite honestly pick up and do whatever the hell it was i wanted to. but my superego is the boss, and it says to stay put and just let time pass. surrender to the stability. stop trying to look behind every rock, "steady as she goes." There was a time at Neversoft when I was sort of powered by that same voice, but my motives were different, I had other plans back then. Things are not bad now, but i am feeling kind of aimless. Like i wish i could snap into "autopilot" and just let the time pass me by and then snap out of it a year to two later, when things had sort of progressed as they'd been going. like when this "bas of stability" that i keep referring to was finally established. i'd be out of debt, our game would be released, etc. etc.

I am tired of feeling that way! My personality is characterized by a certain spark that makes me want to live for the moment, be rash, do strange and somewhat compulsive things. i wouldn't say i act without consideration of consequences, but i definitely would do things with more of the "no risk, no reward" mentality. and now i feel myself slipping more into this compromising attitude, "sit back and let things settle." I don't want to live like that! I want things to be different. Maybe I just need to feel more gratification (or appreciation) for the things that are already there. i need some recharge for my perspective, but not in a manner that's a hard slap in the face (like "you see how bad it COULD be?") Life is a series of trial and error, but for me it's so satisfying when things pay off.. little things..

Anyway, I am just rambling. Even if my mood is a bit tweaked it feels better to try to put some words behind it, to verbalize it. i guess that's the benefit of writing in these things.. you see yourself trying to describe what you are feeling.

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Now that I have been back from Boston for a few days, I can feel it relegating to just another memory of an odd period in my life, one that exists out of sequence with the rest of my everyday life. A couple of weeks will pass and then the whole episode will feel like it's been months and months since the whole event. It was a little weird being back in the middle of Summer, I haven't been there during this season in several years. Yikes, i forgot how hot and humid and gross it gets in the Northeast! It never really bothered me too particularly when I grew up in it, and I have always preferred the heat to the cold (even if intense).. but man! I guess I have been spoiled by the Southern California weather, after all these years. Sure it gets hot as all get out here, but it's a dry heat.. not muggy like that place. It was just gross and uncomfortable to stand outside. I wonder if the humid weather has changed at all since i left, even slightly. I know the winters have apparently been getting markedly snowier since I moved away..

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flying back from Boston was interesting - on a flight, I am one of those guys who can either pass out for the entire trip, pretty much, or not sleep a wink at all. it depends on circumstances I suppose. anyway, this return flight to LA, I was awake for the majority of it. I had a nice 1st-class seat (never happened to me before, but i did volunteer to give up an earlier flight seat so they hooked me up) and thus a little super-extendo leg room, but i couldn't seem to pass out quite so easily. that's fine, i'd slept a bit the past couple of days and i really had a lot of things on my mind. it was kind of nice to just kick back and have some hard time to think without much distraction, to digest some of the events of the busy week prior. Yeah, lots of things on my mind.. As it was a night flight, I spent a lot of time staring out the window and trying to comprehend the scenery below me. Flying is such a strange thing, it's such a displaced feeling. Always makes me feel like I am a giant, with a distorted sense of time, scale, and distance. Looking below as we'd pass over different cityscapes and countrysides, I'd try to understand the patterns in what I would see beneath me. Civiliation, all laid out neatly and completely before you, all at once. Everyone's little life, their little community, their little tiny powerlines and roadways and lake-fronts.. their commercial zones, their baseball stadiums, their residential neighborhoods, the freeways.. cloverleaf overpasses.. all laid out neat and flat and tightly connected, intertwined, everything perfectly attached. slowly and steadily carrying out the endless routines of each person's little lives, each in their little radius. The repetition of patterns in nature, lakes and streams look like tree roots and lightning bolt fingers. Industrialized society connected to huge empty plots of farmland connected to huge empty dark wide open spaces of infinite black nothingness, until the next patch of city would appear once more.

It is a marvel to behold and i never tire of it, it is so fascinating a thing to witness, every time. each place is the same, the colors of all the lights are the same, the layouts of each patch are similar. It all looks so cold and empty, it feels hard to believe it's full of people just like me, it just feels like everything is being run by invisible little specks. It's incredible to look at your two hands, to touch your forehead, and to think that from these meager tools that all of this which you see below has sprung, in such a short time.. just a few short generations. After I double my age I can't imagine what it will look like, if it will be fancier and twice as dense and alien looking, or just a little more of the same but pretty familiar - just a little more packed. Who knows.

I could talk about this stuff all night, my thoughts are full of it.. but i have some urban sprawl of my own to tend to, at the moment.