May 2003 Archives

i started the cleaning with my computer table. figuring he was either in there somewhere, unless he'd been eaten by the cat, always a possibility. but no.

this is the story of chrispy, not just a bee body, art. unintentional, but art nonetheless. and my mascot. pictures are here. so much symbolism.

now i have a wonderful little clear plastic rounded-coffin-shaped thing for him, saving it for when i found him. but i have to get him in there. i've moved him at least twice using a piece of paper, but i need to be able to pick him up from that little corner & maneuver him into a tiny box. don't think an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper is going to work. not sure what will. just scooted him with a pen & it cost a fairly decent scream & two squeaks, plus the skincrawls.

i can do this.

* * *
update: i might have been able to. but i didn't. chris's sister was here & i had her do it for me. she touched it. with her hands. i couldn't watch. oh, & here are some works-in-progress shots of the doll arms projects, these are intended as gifts for my coworkers. (also there's an old lens thingy in there, for good measure).

yes, i'm cleaning. i'm multitasking.

* * *
and finding treasures in boxes in the garage, which i was not cleaning, but ... um ... multita... you know.

with all of the pictures i've been taking of me, you'd think i like it. oh no. it's a very difficult thing and for the most part it seems foolish and ridiculous.

seemed. it seemed ridiculous. & i would stress if the shots looked posed, as if i should look like i snuck up on myself & caught a perfectly natural candid shot. (which is much more ridiculous than the mere fact that i constantly take pictures of myself). so why would i be trying to get the same shot over & over?

i mean, where exactly (as i asked myself this afternoon), is the fun in that? goodgod if i'm going to have a strange self-indulgent hobby like this, i may as well embrace it rather than try to act nonchalant & pretend i'm not actually doing what i'm doing. look, i take about, oh, twenty, thirty pictures of myself a week these days. which is a little strange, yes? i'm no stranger to strange, strange is good for me. so i am doing this strange thing, why on earth would i trying to make like all normal about it? what would be the point?

no matter what i do this feels foolish. however i seem to need to do this, & so i should just get on with it right?

by the second reboot i had gone mad as a wet cat on a hot tin whistle, i tell you what. thirty seven megabytes of updates. took this snailbait pee-four a good three hours to run through it. you think pee-four, you think one point seven ghz chip & four hundred mhz frontside bus & you might think fast, but you'd be sadly misthinking with that. fuck expee the home version. fuck microsoft. fuck bill fucking gates & his little dog too. stupidass worthless piece of shit critical pack service upyours bullshit.

don't start on me with that mac crap either. you know what? there are no goddamn buttons on the mouse. which i happen to know for a fact is supposed to remind you of a smooth river bottom pebble rock or somesuch. excuse me? i'd like my mouse to remind me something that i can fucking right click with. it's a pointing device not a goddamn newage handpacifier.

if i hadn't killed my linux box for its hard drive, i'd be on a serious selfrighteous roll here, but as it is yes i am microsofted. 'cause free software rocks! um. anyway i have a cd of that expee pro that won't even worry about that product subjugation, but you know what? no thanks. win2k. win2k pro baby. my eight sixty six pee-three flies like time when you're having fun, hell i'll sit there burning cds & fireworking & photoshopping & kazaaing & ftping & seventeen damn browser windows open, got windowblinds with fish swimming in the title bar & cursors that pulsate & sixteen things in the systray & she just cruises.

i need to go home & cuddle my puter.

(deep breath) i feel much better now. um. and a little weird, i feel that too. but mostly better.

i disapprove of them. i turn my nose & sniff askance at them. i roll my eyes & make little tsk-ing noises about them. & sometimes, in a moment of weakness, i crack under the pressure, i succumb, i ... meme.

yes, i deciphered my name (it's in the more area). this, i blame directly & wholeheartedly on batgrl. not my fault.

in other news, i have the arms. now i have to make something wonderful for the giver of the arms. i need shiny things. and adhesives. but then again don't we all?

i float down the freeway, midnight, naked instinct contained, but barely by glass & steel, skin glowing in the dimness almost lit from within, intent on the sensations of leather & velocity & summer itself as it spills through the the windows, all imagery & innuendo. the things these things suggest are all impossible, as far as it goes, at least as far as it will tonight.

i take the grade fast, a thrilling descent out of the heat & into the moist coastal mist & the road unfolds & folds before & after me, roadsong filling the spaces between the music & my thoughts, whispering of distance & promising either catalyst or cataclysm, unless there is no difference; i know there is only one way i'll ever know.

tiny little overlit sprite of a thing hovers twenty feet maybe behind me with two clear lanes either side & i ease off the pedal, hostile, & think this faceless asshole a grisly death for as long as it takes the little shitbrain to finally jerk that pissyellow runt of a car out of mygoddamnlane & go around. i breathe deep, unclench & ease it back to fast as the night sky opens up over me, reminding me i am not free, not yet; my thoughts drift & yearn at every inviting sign, but the car gets off at main street, letting me feel every one of her miles. i do not resist, at least tonight.

yes, the datacenter really did have a fire, with firemen & everything. no one was hurt &, more importantly, we are online, & no data was lost. downtime was reasonable & i for one find this to be quite comforting, that fancyass firesuppression technowhizzery did just what it was supposed to, by golly it passed this little test with flying colors. i'm as pleased about this as anyone who woke up too early to news that the server farm was on fire.

may i have some tequila now?

i would like to thank the inventor of the shower massage & the designers at blue asphalt jeans for getting me to work today. it was actually the jeans that got me in the shower, rather the discovery that they fit again, & the delight at the way they fit. on the day of fitting into righteous ass-pants, one *must* get out in the world. & even with that motivation, had it not been for the long, long, hot shower, there would have been no hope. none whatsoever.

you know, a good-fitting pair of pants is very stimulating.

i played with crystal beads, images of them, studying the essence of the light within before i destroyed it.

so i was in this mood. so i added some hole lyrics to the database - doll parts & violet. soon after this my coworker tells me she had something for me, from a yard sale - a bag of doll arms. she saw it & thought of me (do your coworkers see bags of doll arms & think of you? yeah. my job rocks.) & at some point i must have clicked something in the lyrics page that went & searched for 'hole' on ebay, because behind the current window was an ebay auction for swarovsky beads (with holes in them, of course). amethyst colored crystal beads. between the entertaining writing & the coffee-bean shaped beads i decided to drop a ten dollar bid & see what happened. and the sky was made of amethyst ... doll parts ...

i swear this means something.

remember if you search that database, don't leave that default text in the text box & then click like six or seven times. i mean it.

* * *
update: not one to get into bidding wars, i did not acquire the coffeebean shaped beads. not one to screw with mysterious portents, i located a different set of amethyst-colored crystal beads from that same seller, and won. can i explain this? not now. not yet. but it will make one hell of a lot of perfect sense someday, mark my words.

i have videos. excellent videos. i'm not linking them right out here, but they'll be uploaded before too long, & i'm happy to send a download link upon request.

nothing like it. of course we're not talking about solid, undisturbed sleep, we're talking couchsleep here. i've been a couchsleeper for years now, & life, in general, is different if you _never_ go to bed.

may have been the pain pillers i took for my headache. at one point this morning my son was making a package to send to a friend, and i remember thinking, hmm, maybe we shouldn't send that one, what if it has magic powers? luckily i didn't actually say this, i have enough experience with being mostly asleep & functioning anyway to filter these sorts of things out. there are lots of levels of sleep, many of which can be worked into one's daily routine without disturbing it all that much. especially if one has long hair & can arrange it so the hair obscures a direct view of the closed eyes. except that time in chemistry class when the teacher decided to separate some hydrogen out of some h2o & then blow it up, causing the sleeping person to jump about a foot or two, greatly amusing the rest of the class.

i passed that class with a solid c-, even though i slept through almost all of it. ahh, memories. to this day the periodic table of the elements is like a blue valium to me.

my life is a series of naps, some longer than others. it's a very restless & unsettled existence. i like to think of it as an on-the-go lifestyle rather than a sleep disorder thankyouverymuch.

it is ten something in the morning, and i'm having a beer. it is a beer of largeness, and there is another one in the refrigerator.

in a strange twist on my story, i am feeling somewhat productive today, not exactly focused, but i lack the usual overwhelmed semi-frantic feeling i get when i consider the tasks at hand. could be that i'm a little tooooo relaxed? remains to be seen.

in any case i've gotten the biggest obstacle out of the way, & that was the inspiration that powered this redesign. have you seen phase II? it was not a pleasant energy, more a need than an idea, and it did not sit quietly at all, ever. i mean look at this here and that there and imagine having that in your head wanting not to be in there? and so a good week or two went by in which i accomplished nothing at all, because i would not let myself work on my own project first, and when i tried to get the other things done, i'd end up spinning, useless, you know ... feckless.

so it was wednesday night when i decided to indulge myself in this, and it's saturday morning & it's more or less done. the several weeks that led up to wednesday lay in pieces in my periphery, i'm trying not to look at the waste & wreckage, resisting the thought that if i'd just done this in the first place i'd be done with the other projects too, free to work on the next. um. you know, it won't look like this forever. i have ideas (imagine the 'i' word in this case being synonymous with affliction, or more accurately addiction). and this won't last forever, and so i am not complaining no not a bit. i'm having a blast.

i should probably confesss something else to the two or more people who have been waiting oh so patiently for me to finish their sites: i had another inspiration, one of those pressing ones, & i did something else as well while i wasn't doing yours: this one. ok? so now you know.

the collection -- my mp3s, alphabetized by artist. all four hundred fifty nine eight of them.

two hours? almost three. just the worst feeling, alone & helpless & isolated & all manner of neurotic thoughts attacking me in the adrenal glands & sending that wirebrush feeling up the back of my neck & through my hair. hyperbole? not enough to matter, or to bring my reaction to the DSL going down this afternoon anywhere near the realm of normal.

as i was pacing around the parking lot attempting to coax the connection back into the building with my inattentiveness, i thought at least an hour's worth of thoughts in about four minutes, oddly enough beginning with the unfortunate side effect of my devout agnosticism, which is that i cannot pacify myself with prayer; i do understand why humankind is compelled to invent one deity after another & believe in them with that blind faith, which i wish i had the capacity for, but no. then i thought about sex, & this recent survey i saw that asked is sex the ultimate communication & i thought about that for a very spinny minute indeed, but even that couldn't distract me from the disconnectedness at hand & from there, i veered off on a strange tangent to the unrealistic nature of my postapocalyptic dreams of kicking ass, when truth is i'd be holed up in some abandoned ISP somewhere trying to connect with something & my god what would i do without this website i mean what the fuck would i do without the internet? do junkies even think this way about heroin? do they try to imagine life without it & conjure only a nightmare in which any projection of a normal life is simply absorbed into the horrible howling void?

thinking of suggesting i step away from the computer? bite me.

it's time for *thrilling theme music* bad teenage poetry corner

it's one of, i think, two things i ever wrote that rhymed. so i called it rhyme. i don't even have to go copy/paste it out of my secret stash of crap i wrote, i can type this one from memory in my sleep. but then again it's been following me around like a little poopy dawg since 1976.

i would like to rant about the way the morning went but i would have to either invent new words or perhaps just illustrate old ones in a new way, say, by setting something on fire & pointing to it while smiling vapidly like one of those weather bimbos on channel whatever. exaggerating of course put the phone down it's fine. nothing burning here unless it's my creative energy, oh if only you could feel all the adrenaline flowing through my veins & arteries right now. so tingly!

and speaking of arteries in a way designed to douse the matters at hand & leave them smoldering & move on already (kidding! nothing's on fire at all!) last night i did something i hadn't done in years, that is i picked up an ink-filled writing device & used it in conjunction with some sheets of a thin, papery substance in order to arrange words & thoughts in what was hopefully a rather creative manner. i went about this somewhat clumsily, discovering my fingers had almost forgotten how, which is terribly odd considering that i've done enough writing, obsessively enough over a period of enough decades that there is a distinct ridge in the bone of the finger the pen rests on. the bone remembers, how did the rest forget?

my attempted fumblings with this old medium & my chagrin over the deterioration of my penmanship were interrupted by an email invitation to join something. reaction was instinctively no, who has time? i clicked the link out of curiosity & lo & behold, pretty much exactly almost what i was sitting there already doing, only different. how could i say no? & so now i need to go & contribute something. something light hearted & life affirming, she said, sounding suspiciously like molars being ground down to nothing. talk about your creative writing exercise! (kidding! everything's peachy! and the peaches aren't on fire! trust me!)

many moons ago, i was in a dive bar engaged in an intellectual debate about narcissism with a biker. he didn't believe that i even knew the definition of the word, which i had chosen in response to one of those 'one word that describes you' questions.

defining things is not my strong suit, since that's a rather academic exercise, & my brain doesn't work that way, my understanding of things is almost always gleaned from a variety of contexts & more conceptual than concrete. i tend to use examples, in this case i believe i said, 'well, i think the best decoration in any room is mirrors, and i think bathing is an art that can take up to three hours & requires dozens of carefully selected products. also, i get dressed up to have sex with myself.'

that shut him up.

and so i was sitting here now remembering me then, and yes i was quite narcissistic, and this was not a bad thing. i wasn't arrogant, well, not very arrogant. alright, but i wasn't very arrogant all of the time. ok, maybe i was. whatever. it happened around the age of 36; prior to that my self-loathing knew few if any boundaries. i think it was one of the bravest things i ever did in self-defense, loving and caring for myself, especially considering the circumstances, which were ... grim. what is it with me & grim anyway? ah well.

i'm trying to get back a little of that arrogance, a little of that self-assuredness, and as much of the self-indulgence as i can manage. i suppose there will always be a great deal of ambivalence involved in any self-involvement i'm involved in, hopefully not so much this time. however it holds true, the part about portrays, poses, & plays her part gamely - it always feels like an act, it probably always will.

what brought this up? i've taken to taking self-portraits lately, this is something entirely new and extremely unusual for me. i'm thinking that it's maybe kind of a weird thing to do, and that's probably the only way i let myself get away with it.

i should shut up and just take the damn picture.

i waited a decent interval before i brought in the deviant little sculptures. you want your coworkers to think you're weird, but only a little - trust me on this one. i therefore omitted the origins of things i have scattered here & there on my desk:

these are constructed out of eyeglass lenses & parts, wire, pen parts, adding machine roll cores, & most importantly, nail polish and crazy glue. if you are looking for an excellent polymer to bond plastics, look no further. a combination of standard liquid crazy glue, applied in layers along with a clear nail polish, makes an incredibly durable adhesive. makes epoxy look like kindergarten paste. smells pretty good too.

in the first picture i've pointed out a few of the many bizarre aspects of these thingys. these are around seven years old now. the one with five lenses stuck together? it was dropped, recently, on a hard surface. one of the lenses cracked, but the adhesive did not fail. in fact all of these things have survived seven or more years being moved around stuffed in boxes & so forth. now, the second one, it's the most deviant of all, because at some point it began to be ... something. it's ... it's some sort of postapocalyptic industrial processing facility. really. & like most postapocalyptic things, it's made out of a little bit of everything, all of which is garbage.

see that's the sticky part, the part where you inquire where i got all those eyeglass lenses, & i answer, lenscrafters. what, they give them to you, you ask? well, sort of. i mean, they just threw them away. & they had the cleanest garbage i've ever seen. it wasn't icky at all, & for a time in my life i was able to have a nice wardrobe of prescription eyeglasses i wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford -- how did i know they were my prescription? held them up to my eyes, if i could see out of 'em, they were. oh, i know you're saying eww right now. then again i bet you never found a 27" stereo color television in a dumpster because it had an imperceptible scratch on the picture tube. look, i didn't get in the dumpster, i didn't get icky, i just had many many pairs of glasses & some leftovers. in the course of fixing up discarded eyewear, i made the accidental discovery of the glue/polish polymer, & i had all this nail polish & of course a nice junk drawer full of bits of this & that & well, things just ... happened. i also discovered that really interesting things happen when you pour glitter nail polish into the concave part of a plastic lens & set fire to it. not that you should ever do that! i've done it, so you don't have to. the answer? extremely interesting blackened bubbly glittery textured blob & a smell that honestly never ever goes away. ever.

i have more things, i need to get them in some good strong light & get pictures of them too, they're madly interesting little pieces of trash.

i change what i can change (easily). i control what can be controlled (if it can be done obsessively). so the weight & the hair & the URLs & even the tongue ring are all meant as treatments for this paralysis which affects everything that really matters. also they suggest the appearance of agility, motions you'd imagine happening running with only toes touching the earth, yet made while sitting firmly ensconced on the same ass in the same chair in the same predicament, for years & years & still here, but if you can't recognize me does that really matter? who is that chameleon-url'd girl?

it's the same as it ever was, & yet (i assure you) different. not fundamentally, not yet, but not far from it.

so will you call me liz? 'cause i just hate karen. always have. fucking boring. klunky. not a lilting lyrical note in that name anywhere.

liz. not elizabeth. lizard. no music in that either but dammit it isn't bland. it isn't mouse brown & it isn't matronly.

as for the rest? wait. & see, eventually, but waiting is what you can count on. waiting is. & it is assured. what it isn't is patient, no. complacency barely exists anywhere in this tense presence you can't see but may indeed imagine squirming in this chair here. but that's another story entirely.

i move across, innocence lost & hold my head still with my hands in my knees, these eyes are the eyes of the old, in your eyes the light the heat, i am complete, it's not a cry that you hear at night, it's not somebody who's seen the light, it's a cold & it's a broken hallelujah. if only you believe in miracles, baby, so would i, it's just love & miracles out of nowhere, and i am calling you, calling you from 10,000 miles away, and i would be the one, hold you close, kiss you so hard. lift me up and turn me over, lead me on into the dawn, take me to the highest mountain, tie me up, love in a storm [we interrupt this sniveling to bring you yesfonts, which was found during coverart googling. yesfonts! yes! *ahem*] if you could read my mind love, what a tale my thoughts would tell, i still believe there's a ghost of a chance, i think last night you were driving circles around me. and the love that i feel is so far away: i'm a bad dream that i just had today.

& your wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick, & if you have to research every single song you're whining along with for album, year, & cover art, what you find will generally be sufficiently entertaining to distract you almost entirely from the whining at hand. almost.

still, you turn me on.

in the dream the dream that was during the waking day came as true as it ever would.

i am a very contradictory individual. take this forinstance: the first image is a screenshot of my desktop. i didn't straighten it up, i just rolled up the windows. this is a windowblinds theme called 'toys', it's quite functional as far as being able to organize my shortcuts (without which i forget i have stuff). the second one is the desk the computer's sitting on.

i'm cleaning it right now, ok?

also, i can't help but wonder how i can take a picture of myself in the mirror and see an entirely different image in the mirror at the time, than the one the camera captures. why?

first one, in the bathroom, & yes, i'm cleaning the bathroom mirror today too. second two were a spectacular sunset outside my office window, those were intended for the mirror project, but naah.

once upon a time ...

major, major thanks are due to the radiantly lovely & very hardworking lynn who has gone through the lyriclist, adding coverart & album information ... this is huge. absolutely.

may i recommend hitting that 'have at it at random' link over --> there? s'wonderful.

the camera did not connect at requested speed, so i'm waiting for thirty seven hi-res to thumbnail into the contact sheet & glowing over the night that was. that is, i mean. is. bliss. so much so, i seriously doubt my ability to transmit it over these wires, even with dozens of fuzzy images & hundreds of blurry words.

ok: twenty seven images chosen for further reflection. patience, i whisper to myself, watching the green download bar creep across. at least three of these pictures are over a year old, they were on the memory card when i lost it; i believe i have a spider & a missed shot from a carnival. eight of twenty seven? that's it?

*much later*

& what if the story's never really told? it never was any less indistinct than any of the images which follow, there were really no edges on the night at all. boundaries were blurred, like the one between skin & air, stirring up such a benevolent chemistry; add a beer & a half, a great band, & friends, & the thought just trails off at this point, lost in the moment.

i do believe my old & non-wonderful camera may have been the perfect instrument to capture this. i can feel the night in these images, of course i'm still smiling, your mileage may vary.

- - - - - - - -
**note: the very strangely colored one is my graphics program's interpretation of 'auto-levels' when the only available light is a dark & vivid green. the last one? not sure why i did that, i generally don't, but tonight, it seemed right.

so i've been amusing myself this afternoon eating the leftover easter candy. there are eggishly shaped malted milk balls & bubblegums which are identical in size, shape, weight, surface texture, & speckling, with no discernable odor to differentiate them.

my theory is that the candies are neither bubblegum nor milk balls, just waveforms of possibilities, until that first bite.

this is my opinion, & my opinion only. it's also very whiny. i'm not very comfortable with this side of myself.

so when i'm giving the daughter the rides, we generally have the music loud. (the both of us have the same tendency to fall in love with certain songs & listen to them over & over) what follows is the one we had on repeat this weekend, becasue i had these fitting pictures. click more for now, i'll upload the mp3 when i get home from work.

we have to keep our stories straight. if they ask you, you say, yeah, she meant to do that. & then twirl your hair a little & chew on a corner of your lip as you give them that oblique up-over-the-glasses look. trust me on this.

so this is the after/before hair:
 

this is my daughter. she needed several rides places, but wasn't much help otherwise:

and so the beauty supply dude who wasn't very helpful either said don't do any more lightening. so i settled for temporary to maybe almost sort of blend things in. amusing, the words 'blend in' being mentioned in conjunction with my haircolor.

eye protection is advised before clicking the thumbnail:

it's still seventeen different shades underneath, & i hate hair on my neck so i wear it up most of the time.

i think it's time for that retro haircut.

the worst thing about programming, is people. look, the play on words involving 'misanthropy' is no joke folks, i can only handle so much of friggin' humans before i go ... oh, not mad or anything. but anyway. i have antisocial tendencies & i ended up, after a tangled mess of semi-careers, programming computers. go figure.

but the damn people always manage to creep into the equation somehow. and in my mind when i'm coding i see their quizzical expressions, their furrowed brows, their determination in matters involving 'what happens if i press the red button' even if everything they've ever been told involves not touching the goddamn red button. is it so hard to keep your their grubby paws off the red button? (don't worry. it's not you. it's them).

now you see, if all i had to do was write things to humor myself, i'd be so easy. i'd never make typos or trnaspose things or put the wrong bit of information in the wrong box. & if i did it would be easy to fix because there would be some logic to the errors. and i'd be done by now! instead of sitting here trying to think of what sorts of unthinkable things the end user might do. it's like studying murphy's unified quantum theory. for dummies. i didn't say that outloud. oh, no, i didn't.

[voiceover] . . . "questions regarding the fundamental structure of our universe, its origin, evolution and its age; the reconciliation of the mathematical concept of continuum and limitless continuity with the concept of space-time; the reductio ad absurdum; the concept of an acausal connection active in the spacetime continuum, where according to Carl Gustav Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, "our primary mathematical intuitions could be arranged before we become conscious of them" - with the number being primordial, pre-existent to our consciousness; the essence of the material body, that is extension itself and its universal non-local connections; the shortcoming of the Cartesian coordinate system with its patchwork of bounding surfaces and coordinates; the indeterminate notion of a point particle; the space composed of points; the relationship of space to matter and light to time; the res cogitans and the res extensa; the cosmological position of man and the inevitability of the weak anthropic principle, as demonstrated within a cycle-interval of 1-5-9-13 stem cells - an evolutionary cycle that is an integral, coherent, zusammenhangend part of the 27 stem cells of The Life Sequence."

so i suppose i shall simply go mad. or blonde. hmm. decisions.

greetings from the land of good-god-what-have-i-done-now. it's a lovely evening here, well, except for the fumes.

*pause* alright then. i've decided that i meant to do this, maybe not in this way exactly, but that's not important right now. what is important is that if i still have any hair after this last round of chemical whimsy, that i will have acheived exactly whatever it was i had in mind when i set off on this journey some four hours ago. the same goes for the alternative, the not having any hair left. i couldn't very well do it back when that irish chick that pissed of the pope was doing it, now could i? no, i make my own trends.

whatever happened to the good old days when everyone wore hats? what a lot of hatless heathens we've become. *shakes head*

wait. what am i talking about? i've acheived that highly desirable & difficult effect whereby a lovely veryvery light golden blonde color at the roots fades in strategically arranged patches to a lovely pale rusty color at the ends -- something i'm sure would have cost me a small fortune if i'd walked into whatshisname of beverly hills' & requested such an elaborate 'do.

ok, ok, it's not really all that bad. it could be worse. i could have scissors & beer.

oh wait.

i spent a significant amount of time & anger this morning flaming spammers. capital letters were involved. felt as good as any totally pointless gesture ever does.

surprisingly, one of them even wrote back: Thank you for your encouraging words. You have been removed from any opportunities. May Life return to you 10 fold what you wish upon others. May God Bless you! David (incidentally, i wished boils upon him. big ones. in sensitive places.) which i feel is perfectly appropriate for the sort of spammer who uses "Re: [NAME] - Follow up to yesterday!" as a subject line in a rather transparent & pathetic attempt to trick the recipient into opening it. the more i think of it, david needs more than boils, i'd say the boy could really benefit from a serious bout of bleeding hemorrhoids brought on by an attack of highly acidic projectile diarrhea. i could go on, even get graphic, but i won't.

the burgeoning curmudgeon in me is itching to rip through the latest batch of scumfuckers cluttering up that inbox, & see if i can provoke some more pompous windbaggery out of any of 'em. & yes i know i'm giving away self-righeous victim points with every ounce of invective that spews forth & in doing so make this even worse & if i were to let that spin a bit i'd be way gone in no time. as it stands, i have plans; one day i will be ready to give up my main mail account, which is at this point 90% spam (& never, ever opted into anything). & when that day comes, she's gonna blow, oh you betcha.

becasuse i know that at least some of it will be read. yes. who cares if it's pointles to the point of counterproductivity? what matters is that it feels just fantastic.

more an adventure.

during one of my bouts of email-checking wakefulness early this morning, 'roanoke' was suggested to my sleepy, suggestible consciousness, & upon going back to bed, what ensued was fairly ... bizarre. now roanoke was the scene of some mysterious disappearance back when, right? & stephen king might have somewhat covered this at some point? which would explain the gateway to hell aspect, however our escape plans were solid, there was no real reason to worry about the passage. hell, i even broke the glass just to prove the vortex wouldn't suck us through. with my hands, i broke it. in the meantime i got to hear a former employer explain why he liked to varnish the inside of the closet under the stairs (aside from the obvious); later there was the obligatory bloggersex, which was ... quite lovely. also there were the white pants that make my ass look so nice.

all in all the sort of dream which leaves one well-prepared for whatver a day may offer, & even what it might take away.

it could be worse. it could be worse! worse. it could be. because if there's one thing that's been trepanned into me it's that the thought that it can't get worse is almost if not always the precursor of it going ahead & getting worse.

so the fact that i'm home & my car won't start & i'm deeply overdrawn & a paycheck that would make me non-overdrawn is 26 miles away & have i mentioned my car won't start? & affording time off work isn't something i can do right now? but the being home bit, isn't the car's fault, that would be me not having a babysitter today. no babysitter. no car. & not one but two paychecks out there i should have had days ago, which would have saved big bucks in overdraft fees, if i'd had them, however i did not. & that fact would be my fault, basically, mostly because i tend to try to seem somewhat nonchalant about when i'm paid, i have issues with seeming needy & desperate, especially when i am. apparently i prefer a life of quiet unspoken desperation.

it could be worse.

up all night downloading extensions from macromedia & rasterbating in fireworks, trying to come up with something not-ugly that would pass for ugly when presented to ugly-liking paying clients. then the cows came home. well, the coffee started, same thing. fell asleep. woke up. fell asleep. woke up. lather rinse repeat then it was i think ten? p.m. whoa.

none of the urgency i felt would get me up off the couch, even knowing i had a good supply of pharmassure energy formula & coffee you could stand a fork in, surely i could have pried myself awake, but i couldn't care. enough. cared a little, yes i did, i did care. sure. i was wakeful enough to delete approximately ten thousand (no that is not an exaggeration in the slightest) emails i've been meaning to go through. did a little harddrive housecleaning, freed up a few gigs. installed a pretty purple taskbar to go with my fancy glassy purple icon set. rearranged the desktop. purple's not my favorite color, but it's working in this context. that's about it though.

occurs to me how wonderful it might be if this or something frighteningly like this were my normal. if i could wake up afternoon/evening, relax around a little & get productive say elevenish, spend the night busy in the peaceful quiet never guilting about the impending morning, which would not be a time of expectations or fretfulness or any sort of urgency. that's a run-on sentence young lady. whose voice was that? & who you callin' young?

i'm a lot younger in the middle of the night.

sitting here, sunday afternoon, doing things that pass for work (in the universe i inhabit anyway) & i'm struck by these chords, floating across the backyard on the breeze, a sound straight out of so many memories, so fraught with nostalgia ... the sound of stariway to heaven, being played, badly. but loud! & as achingly familiar as this sound is to anyone that grew up when i did, i had to struggle to assimilate this information. cinco de mayo. celebration. at the church. the huge. catholic. church. across my back fence. band. playing. and she's buying a stairway to heaven?

laughter at this point drowning out the sound of the hoofbeats of the four horsemen, i imagine.

they're still at it, you know. they never really stopped. & when one of those useless newsletters i used to think might be useful comes in with the subject line saying "leave those links blue!" (yes. with an exclamation mark.) i become more or less furious. i'm not sure fury is the appropriate response, but hey, gotta go with what i've got here. here's the argument: all the links on the internet should be underlined and blue, because people are stupid. sure, sure, people are stupid, i'll concede that, but honestly, if there's anyone still out there that becomes hopelessly confused and thinks that an entire page contains nothing to click on just because the links aren't blue? they should get off the internet and go back to mining navel lint full time.

*breathe* ok, now i know that in a business setting it's important for the bottom line to cater to anyone capable of buying no matter how much of a bottom feeder they are. fine. but there are so many ways to make it imminently clear that a link is clickable (for instance, including the text "click here" in the link), it just requires a little creativity. so what we have here is people who don't want to think, pontificating on the subject of how other people don't want to think, concluding, 'don't make us think'.

you know what i think? i think we should ban 'link blue' from the internet entirely. make people think, dammit. THINK.

in the time between my last domain spree & today, no less than two people have come to me needing new blogs. and i had not only domains, but wonderful wonderful domains for them. and they have blogs now. blogs that were ready more or less immediately, i just installed a copy of MT (complete with a nice set of plugins) & handed them the keys. you see? you see?

this is not the first time this has happened. the way i look at it is, if you buy them, they will come -- usually within a few days of me getting the domains set up. therefore when i am moved to type godaddy.com into the browser, i have a very good reason, i just don't know what it is. yet.

i have powers. i can not only sense domains being needed, but today? i fixed two server-y issues without even touching them - the mere intent on my part to go & fix, caused the problems to spontaneously fix themselves. problems fear me.

i've got the power. too bad it's not the mojo, i mean, i couldn't get laid to save my life, but that's beside my point, if i have one. ooh! i remember my point, i do have one! thing is, i'm almost out of domains. this must not be allowed to happen.

... i'll let you know how it goes with godaddy this evening. i'm working up to that inspired vibe zone place thing. the power. yeah.

there is nothing that cheers me up more than realizing how overdramatically depressed i'm *not*, anymore. heck, i'm practically giddy as a schoolgirl now! which doesn't make much sense considering i wasn't giddy at all, when i was a schoolgirl. well, unless i had some excellent bud, but that's beside the ... where was i?

overtired. but otherwise fine. by comparison.