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Note to self: drinking red wine while playing with the dog = stains on carpet
I'm not really sure what qualifications you must have to map METRO schedules, but the tallywhackers that whipped up the schedule for number 70 are smokin' crack. If I choose to hop on 70 (which is, geographically speaking, the most convenient for me), I must be at the stop by 7:00. Yes, seven-fucking-ay-em. If I miss the 7:00, there is only one more morning bus and it's at 9:00, and that's probably a little too late for me to get to work. Crack smokers. They are obviously in cahoots with my garbage man. Katie and Kim arranged some kind of congratulatory beer fest yesterday afternoon. I received the e-vite after lunch and had already decided that I was going to have a quiet evening at home. By the end of the day I was frazzled and the thought of some cold beer amongst peops that I had not seen in about 2 weeks didn't sound so terrible. When I got to Woodrow's West Alabama, only Katie and Kim were there... a few buckets later, Kelly, Kelly, and Audra showed. Eventually, Chris and Gil arrived and good times were had by all.

Demon alcohol take me home.

I am in desperate need of a haircut. I just looked up while washing my hands in the bathroom and thought, "Monchichi, monchichi, oh-so soft and cuddly..." Maybe I'll Tony Hawk hop on a Radio Flyer wagon and skate my ass down to the head choppery later this evening. I always have trouble communicating what I want them to cut and not cut. I eloquently convey precise directions in what apparently comes across in my best impersonation of Charlie Brown's teacher because inevitably my ears will be much lower than I can limbo. Maybe I just get professional hair stylist that also, by happenstance, have a fetish with cutting hair. Maybe they are overwhelmed in the moment and snip away like Edward Scissor hands... my hair flying about their rapture. Such is my barber shop luck.

Impressive... the force is strong in this one.

Saddam killed the radio star. the first conversation sean and i have in weeks (due to the AFF rush):

PixelCowboy: a friend of mine sold his soul to another friend of mine for a buck. True story.
KapHn8d: no way
PixelCowboy: yep
KapHn8d: written contract?
KapHn8d: did he need money for cheetos?
PixelCowboy: hmmm...dunno, I think it might be verbal. Never hold up in the cosmic courts
PixelCowboy: I think he wanted something out of the vending machine at DD
KapHn8d: now that's logic... snickers really satisfies ya
PixelCowboy: Far as I know, he's never bought it back.
PixelCowboy: This was about five years ago...hella interest now I'm sure
KapHn8d: is that taxable?
PixelCowboy: seems the state would be stepping on God's turf, so I'm guessing no
KapHn8d: yeah... no reason to cause unnecessary smiting
PixelCowboy: but I wonder if you'd have to declare interest income if he ever bought it back...
KapHn8d: is tax evasion a mortal sin?
PixelCowboy: I 'spose either way, the IRS can claim both, they work for the devil after all
KapHn8d: true... true...

i need a drink.

I was just walking back from the men's room and passed one of the administrative assistants in the hallway. She was the first person in a long time to offer a negative response to a simple "hello, how are you?"... something that is completely (in my experience) atypical in American society. I am not sure if it's a fear of intimacy, laziness, or lack of interest, but it seems that most people could be in dire straights and having the worst day of their life and respond with a "good" or "fine" to the same question. My European friends will always answer candidly, but my American friends retort with the same cookie cut and socially acceptable positive answer. Odd, but conversation worthy.

"if i have made,my lady,intricate" - e.e. cummings
if i have made,my lady,intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes(frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body's whitest song
upon my mind-if i have failed to snare
the glance too shy-if through my singing slips
the very skillful strangeness of your smile
the keen primeval silence of your hair

-let the world say "his most wise music stole
nothing from death"-
you only will create
(who are so perfectly alive)my shame:
lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.

"one man's art is another man's nightmare"
I have mixed feelings about this, but they are leaning toward disagreement with the negative reaction. If one loose definition of art amongst a sea of many is something that evokes emotion from within the viewer... whether inspiring, disturbing, soothing, etc... then this is an example of art in it's truest sense. It is quite bold to say the least.

"...wings made of needles, pinned to the ground..."
Yes Keith, listening to Guy Forsyth is like someone feeding you little tasty lyric nuggets. Tasty little nuggets. Mmmmn... nuggets.

My mind is racing. I feel as if I have too much to do and not enough time to do it. I have domestic house-prep to do before Greg's arrival on Friday (for a week). Joe's last day in the office is today (for a week). He and I are two of the principle engineers that handle the major projects around here and we have quite a few tasks still on the table... tasks that shift solely upon me as of this afternoon. I can handle the technical issues, it's just the work load. There simply are not enough hours in the day sometimes. My hired gun property manager called me yesterday with a laundry list of maintenance items for which he needs money. I hate being a landlord. My ex will be in town (from Cali) next month to inconvenience my life for a few days. I committed to a trip to Vegas and now my schedule is falling around that weekend like an avalanche. I have faith that if I can just make it on the plane, Sam and Lou (my accomplices in this crime) will keep my mind off all the crap going on back here in Houston for the 3 days we are in fabulous Sin City. Maybe I should pick up a heroin and hooker habit and just stay out there and disappear? I'm physically lethargic this morning. I sit here sipping my little black love while I'm listening to my Asylum Street Spankers tracks (Spanker Madness) and let my mind race. Outside the work tornado, I have not been motivated to do much around town. Tonight is the weekly happy hour with Little Joe Washington at the Continental Club before The Weary Boys perform. There's open mic poetry at Helios at 11:00, but I'm not feeling very vocal. There are however, some art exhibits in town that I have been interested in seeing. I was going through some old books at the house the other day and found a 4x5 chromacolor negative of some digital art that I made back in 1994 and had printed to film at a service bureau in New York when I lived in Saratoga Springs. It just got me thinking about how I let the art appreciation time that makes me smile slip through my fingers and fall on the floor with the rest of the things that I used to do. Routing packets for a living has been a long work in progress. I think I spent so much time in the last few years climbing into the bunk bed of my career that I turned a cheek to the dust that was collecting on the activities of my past... the mountain of climbing gear that used to hold my life several pitches high against the side of a sheer cliff or the flight bag of navigation charts, weight & balance sheets, headsets, and flight computers that used to be my copilot... I have not flown in years. I am not even sure I could still pass a BFR if an FAA examiner walked in my door right now. I used to write all the time... songs, poetry, etc. I used to be the most alive person I knew. I don't feel that way anymore. I know it's there... sleeping. So, yeah, art exhibits... I think I stepped off the path to pick berries, but what I was saying is the film I found reminded me of lost passion. Uh huh.

I just got in from having a few drinks with Gil and Irfan at Front Porch. I have not seen anyone from that social circle in two weeks. I wasn't planning on going out tonight either, but Gil has court tomorrow and was stressed out about it. I think interaction with friends was the reassuring support he needed right now. I'm tired. I wasn't much company tonight. I didn't speak enough to really contribute to the conversation. I've just been in my own little world the last couple of weeks. I've been thinking a lot... too much. Everything is good though... I'm just tired.

Ok. Dammit. NOW I'm going. I just stopped by my good friend Micah's site and geeked out on this post (below). I really dig this stuff. I'm such a nerd. "I had an interesting discussion yesterday with a coworker about astrophysics and particle physics. We were talking about the discontinuity of the rules governing gravity on a cosmic scale versus quantum rules on the very small scale. This is why there's no unified field theory. Gravity doesn't fit into the quantum model. The graviton is a proposed carrier particle for the force of gravity, but is not measured and I believe is folly. Dennis, however, made a cool point on this. He suggested that perhaps the rules change based on scale and frame of reference. We can only observe the way things act when the light from that event reaches our frame of reference. Perhaps if we were as small as a quark, we would observe the strong and weak forces much like we observe gravity on our scale or frame of reference. Perhaps things beyond our own galaxy or larger than several galaxies work on a different set of rules for that frame of reference. This throws a monkey wrench into the theoretical machine because it invalidates all observation about events beyond our own frame of reference and states that we couldn't possibly ever observe these events. Any comments?"

Zing. I have been drinking espresso today like there's no tomorrow. It takes a lot of caffeine to get me going because I am such a coffee addict, but I hit the mother load today. I am struggling to not run the halls singing my coffee attack theme song. I worked late yesterday. Today, me thinks me will skedaddle early. Well, like now, for instance.

"In Neglect" - Robert Frost
They leave us so to the way we took,
As two in whom them were proved mistaken,
That we sit sometimes in the wayside nook,
With michievous, vagrant, seraphic look,
And try if we cannot feel forsaken.

Have you ever considered the possibility that food has eyes? Well, maybe not eyes in the traditional sense, but some form of differentiation between colors and shades? Statistically speaking, there has got to be a firm explanation supporting the selective exuberance of stain-producing foodstuffs around stain-susceptible clothing material. For example: A guy decides to wear a white shirt to work one day. I think, just for the convenience of the story, we'll fill in some purely fictional details... we'll say the guy's name is Clayton and the day is, oh... Tuesday. Clayton wears a white shirt to work on Tuesday and decides to work through lunch because he has a lot of work to do. He goes down into the sub-city tunnel system and buys a sandwich and a small salad. He returns to his desk where the previously mentioned work awaits him and begins to unbag aforementioned lunch. The salad dressing is comprised of some dark mixture of mystery ingredients that have powerful stain-kung-fu (maybe crude oil, espresso, red wine, bing cherry juice, blueberry puree, the guts of a Sharpie, etc... the exact mix is unknown and no earthly laundry agent can unfuck clothes touched by this alien love sauce). Said salad dressing senses that there is highly stain susceptible clothing in close proximity. Using the lettuce and plastic container that surrounds it as a high tension springboard, alien love sauce ejects from container in an atomized attack pattern like porcupine needles towards it's unsuspecting target. The sortie finds it's mark with the accuracy of a multi-million-taxpayer-dollar cruise missile and the stain chain reaction has begun. Clayton is now a food cheetah. Dimes to dildos says that if our fictitious subject, Clayton, were wearing a dark shirt (or body armor), the salad dressing would have known and not wasted its time. Yes, maybe not eyes like you or me... but food has eyes. I just know it.