what a weird day yesterday was.

first this lady from my church was talking to me about her nipples.

and if that wasn't enough, the guy behind the counter at 7-11 was hitting on me pretty severely.

it would have been funnier if i had gone there to get some ding-dongs.

feeling: off-kilter
thinking of: some parallel universe someplace
music: "your image" the crucified

i had a really good thought.

that's how most of these start anyway, with a thought, or something like that, after which i proceed to veer ferociously off topic and write something usually with relevance only to myself and even more frequently of negligible quality. this practice started a year ago.

it started in this form a year ago, july 28, 2003. a year ago i appropriated this lil corner of the web and proceeded to hold forth on stuff, well, nothing in paritcular i don't guess. i'm not sure what i think about all that, i think this is the longest i've ever kept something up that wasn't on some level extrinsically compulsory and i'm both surprised and glad that i've kept it up.

i like writing, i really do, in fact, i started this whole thing because i missed that i wasn't writing regularly like i was when i was in school. if nothing else the whole thing's kept me in practice, mostly because i get the feeling that writing is gonna play a pretty big part in my life, even if it's in an as yet undefined way. and then mostly i'm like anybody else, i get tickled reading stuff i've written.

but i digress.

feeling: strangely devoted
thinking of: m&m's
music: "king of all the world" old 97s

with regard to affecting policy: specifcally public policy

formal interaction is for suckers.

voting is formal interaction.

voting is for suckers.

feeling: strangely above the fray, it won't last
thinking of: the beach
music: "indefinitely" old 97s

a couple of things.

lyle lovett is so much more than some guy who was married to julia roberts a few years back.

bill mallonee is quite possibly the most underrated songwriter that's ever lived.

feeling: peachy
thinking of: october
music: "she is fading" bill mallonee

i realize i'm not the best writer.

maybe i'm not even good, who knows, i never get evaluated or anything. a couple things i do know, however, is that it's not utterly, utterly vapid and that there are quite a few people around who can't seem to rise above that level of utterly, utterly vapid in their own writing.

i really don't know what to say beyond that, because it's not like anyone who might read this would think "my writing? vapid?" i mean i've read some stuff that people have written, strictly amateur, or course and what i've read has really driven me quite nuts, kinda like a thumbtack through the eyeball. if i've told you that i like your writing, be assured i'm not talking about you.

this whole thing seems uncharacteristically self-indulgent, i mean i don't really enjoy bagging on people's writing, i mean if they're anything like me, a lot of times they're pouring their heart into whatever they're expressing. i guess what i'd really like to see is an increased level of thoughtfulness, and i guess less self-indulgence.

which means i better shut up now.

feeling: a bit surly
thinking of: quality
music: "s.o.s" vigilantes of love

second of two. . .i guess.

you know me.

or maybe you don't, i won't presume to tell you what to do, or what you do or don't do, whatever. but then if you do know me, i suspect you might have known that i lacked the level of restraint necessary to merely post a list without any commentary, which would be accurate; mostly because right now i'm posting commentary to my list from friday.

i'll try not to make it too long, mostly there were just a few things that i really just sorta felt like i wanted to revisit in a bit more detail. most of the stuff on there is the kinda stuff that will likely never be the same. i'm finished with wrestling, so i won't ever get my hand raised at the end of a match again, i'll likely get chances to reconnect with adam, but he's in a different place now, so am i, so those conversations will be markedly different i'm sure. i'm pretty far removed from wheaton and as such, college, so no more cafeteria breakfasts and i likely won't ever have the kind of schedule that will allow for leisurely conversations with profs. brad's moved outta that house, so we don't hang out in that garage anymore, though that side room is a pretty solid substitute. no more summer camps to south padre or to maypearl.

some stuff i'll really get to revisit. i suspect that i'll end up back in texas at some point, so driving down 1382 in cedar hill is a possibility then. walking out into a crisp and breezy october morning in dallas like when i stepped outdoors during my layover at D/FW last year, i'll probably get to do as well.

other stuff involves people pretty significantly, stuff that i get to revisit every so often, but not often enough, which is why i miss those things i guess. me and bone get to do cici's and pancho's once a year, if i visit lisa and she visits me, we get two chances for slurpees, whenever i make it home, i spend more time at my grandparents' than i do at home. i took a walk with katie last year, but around a lake in north carolina instead of all the streets named after presidents in wheaton, illinois, i sit with laura in church once, maybe twice a year, which ain't nearly enough, but me and her have talked about that.

*sigh*

feeling: slightly powerless
thinking of: something good
music: "we have forgotten" sixpence

first of two sort of

i'm borrowing from bone today, pretty liberally in fact, because i'm just gonna make a list. it's similar to ones that he's done, though i'm not certain he's done exactly this one.

anyways, this here is a list of stuff, in no particular order, that i miss.

driving that stretch of FM 1382 that runs through cedar hill between I-20 and highway 67.

sno-cones from that place down on clarendon in the middle of the hood.

october mornings in texas.

walks with katie that ended with us on the swings next door to fischer.

summers spent listening to the rangers on the radio while i was running around at night in the car.

deep ellum every once in a while.

decompressing at bakers' square.

road trips. . . good gravy, road trips.

pancho's and cici's with bone.

monday nights at my grandparents' house.

fall in wheaton, illinois. more specifically, the feeling i'd get driving down briarcliffe in between president street and butterfield road mid-morning during october or november.

going down to south padre island for summer camp, the overnight drive.

nights in brad's garage with dunx and brad and whoever else happened to show up.

my bench outside of MSC.

talking about theology with adam.

yelling at the tv with wes.

the pursuer room.

getting my hand raised at the end of a match.

monday, wednesday and friday breakfast in the cafeteria, sometimes with hassler, sometimes not.

slurpees with lisa, and sometimes nate.

the st. mark's invitational.

office conversations with CE and sociology faculty.

sitting at a table at summer camp in maypearl selling t-shirts.

sitting with laura in church.

feeling: a bit empty
thinking of: stuff i miss, didn't you see the list?
music: "the road to ensenada" lyle lovett

i buy CDs.

now i don't say that to position myself somehow above the fray because i download music too, there are a few CDs i have that are complete albums that i've burned that i really should have bought, and dozens of other spare songs that are on CDs that i likely wouldn't at all consider buying. usually i justify that by rationalizing that since i wouldn't have bought the CD anyway, nobody's losing if i download a couple or three songs off of it.

then there's the whole "lars ullrich is a dickhead who doesn't need any more money" argument, which i have to say is mighty compelling, mostly because lars ullrich comes across as a dickhead who doesn't need any more money. in any case, this morning i saw this here article at relevant which is pretty much the most succinct and convincing argument in favor of abandoning the practice of downloading and burning i've ever read.

it was written by steven christian, the frontman of the indie band anberlin, a band who's in the trenches so to speak. they don't have a huge following, so it's not like they're sitting around counting money from their million-dollar record deal, they're one of those bands that does a lot of touring and counts on the fervent support of a smaller number of fans in order to make a living as well as for justification to remain in the industry. he goes into detail about the simple cycle of the life of, well, nearly any musical act, and how it's, fairly or unfairly, dependent on record sales.

in explaining how exactly record sales are related to pretty much any other endeavor that a band might undertake, his words work to dispel some of the less thoughtful justifications for downloading and burning. there are quite a few people justifying CD burning with any number of reasons, maybe by saying that the band doesn't see much money from album sales and that the people who really get rich are the record company execs, so downloading is a way to carry out the time-honored tradition of sticking it to "the man." a lot of people justify it by saying that going to a live show is more substantial support for a band than is buying one of their CDs, and so on. those are true only to an extent, however, because while it's true that record companies make a lot of money off of record sales and that bands do make the bulk of their money off touring, christian shows that the level of support a band gets for touring, publicity and future recording is inextricably tied up with how many units they moved previous. so in the end, however valid those concerns may be, because of the fact that everything goes back to record sales, people who don't buy a band's CDs end up hurting the band more than they do anybody else.

what is boils down to, and this is me independent of the article, on its most basic level is that a lot of people just want to avoid giving up seventeen bucks if they can find a way to keep it themselves and get what they want.

feeling: educated
thinking of: thievery
music: "hero of the day" metallica

i'm a pretty easygoing guy.

check that, i'm an extremely easygoing guy. now i don't say that in any sort of prideful way, because like any other personality characteristic, it cuts both ways, and on some occasions i've paid for it; mostly i'm saying out of an extreme, at least in this case,sense of self-awareness. i remember dunx telling me one time a few years back that i had a talent for "suffering fools," and i think that's the best that anybody's ever put it.

so given all that, the incidences where my temper gets lost, say behind a fit of rage or somesuch, are quite few and far between. in fact today is seven years to the day from the last time i lost it, seven years ago would put me at age sixteen. it's quite a story actually, those who've heard me tell it in person will likely recognize it as the story of when i got a girlfriend kicked out of her house. it happened during the summer before my senior year of high school, and you know how things are at that age, everything is so dramatic, even when it's not, you're young, lack perspective and are, for the most part, stupid.

anyways i s'pose the story starts a few months before that, in march of the same year. i started seeing this girl to whom a girl-friend of mine introduced me. things roll along for a few weeks, month and a half, maybe two, but after a while what became increasingly clear is that she was changing, and not so much in a way that was new, but more like she was reverting to something she was before, ostensibly because the means that she employed had acheived their end. i realize that it's a biased opinion, but i'm a pretty savvy guy and, as such, that development wasn't lost on me. on the other hand, however, she was pretty hot and the Y chromosome doing what it does led to a delay of another few weeks before i'd decided that i'd pretty much had enough of her being rude, inconsiderate and thoughtless, even if well, nevermind.

so right, july 11, 1997, it was a friday and me and her were s'posed to go to the mall, our friend, the one who'd introduced us was coming too. i had resolved that that weekend had to be it as far as me and her were concerned, as difficult as having that conversation would likely have proved, what i wasn't aware of was that evidently, she had a pretty similar idea but way different means of seeing it played out. anyway, i pick her up that evening, it seemed early because during the summer in texas, the sun doesn't seem to set before about nine, so i'm figuring that it was probably either a bit before or a bit after seven when i showed up at her house to pick her up.

we head off to the mall, walk around for a while and then run into some guys she knows, i didn't think much of it, i ran into people i knew all the time, and didn't figure it to be a big deal. evidently, however, it was part of her master plan to get rid of me without any real effort or fuss on her part. see, she had been planning to meet these guys she'd met at summer school at the mall. it wasn't really enough for her just to meet them or whatever, i really would have been more relieved than anything else at that point, but she had to use me as a ride and then bank on the hope that i'd get pissed off enough to bail. like i said before, she wasn't at all a person who could be characterized by anything resembling genuine consideration for another, but in hindsight, even for her, this seemed excessive, it was like she was going out of her way to be rude, going out of her way to make me mad.

anyone that knows me knows what a hopeless and utterly foolish proposition waiting for me to get pissed off is. she had to have known the same thing because one of the things that she would say to me that she couldn't understand was that i never seemed to get nervous, that there was nothing that would rattle me. this night was really no different, at least in the beginning, because like i said, i didn't initially think anything of her running into some guys she knew, but as the night went on, the fact that the encounter wasn't a result of chance became more and more evident. i guess the fact that things weren't going the way she'd planned had sort of irritated her, and especially given what she knew about my personality, her whole plan seemed exceedingly ill-thought-out. so anyway, a bit later on somebody decides they wish there was a party they could go to, i happened to know of some friends who were able accomodate us as far as that went, i called to make sure that nothing had changed, nothing had, and we were about to be off.

around this point is where i think i started to get irritated, when we got in the cars to head to the party. she had decided that she was gonna ride with her new friends, and by that point clarity had begun to elbow its way in and i was realizing just how audaciously inconsiderate, if equally poorly thought out, what she was doing was. in any case, it had turned out that one of these guys wouldn't be able to make it to the party on account of he had to be at work sometime before six the next morning, so he had to be dropped off, he had to be dropped off in red oak. he lived in red oak.

here is where i give you a lesson about the geography of north texas, mostly because it's pretty relevant to the story. see, we were in arlington and planning to head to north dallas, which is about a forty minute drive. i knew my way around pretty well, so getting there wasn't gonna be a problem, but like i said, we had to drop this guy off in red oak. the thing about red oak is that it's named red oak only because it beat butt-****ing egypt by one or two votes in the election, it was also forty minutes from where we were in arlington, but forty minutes in the opposite direction. what happens is i have to follow these guys to red oak to drop this guy off, after which the guy that's left follows me to north dallas. so there we are in arlington, so renowned for its centrality that folks decided to put a baseball stadium in the place, but finding ourselves having to head to red oak, forty minutes south of there on top of being in the middle of nowhere, and subsequently another forty minutes north of there, which made for about two hours of driving.

we get to red oak, and by this time i'm pretty hot, not only because this girl seems to be going way out of her way to really and truly make me mad, but because i'm also working really hard to make sure that, no matter what, i don't give in. so we're sitting there, waiting for the guy for something or another, and while i'm there in the drivers' seat of my car, she comes to the window and tells me that i can go ahead on, she's staying the night there in red oak. it was at that point that i turned around on the whole thing, i mean i came to my senses and realized i better start being myself, well, i've always been such an accomodating person, and i realized just how hard she'd worked to get me to lose my temper, i mean i didn't want her to think that all her hard work would be in vain.

so i left, seemingly in a hurry to do so, because i figure that my distance from her would share an inverse relationship with my likelihood to commit, and subequently be charged for and convicted of, a felony. at that point i'm trying to think of something, and i'll confess to not really thinking too hard because i was so much smarter than her, and a good idea wasn't really long in coming anyway, because as i was trying to navigate my way back to a highway of any consequence the brilliant idea of going back to her house without her dawned on me. the idea was mostly motivated out of a desire for some measure of revenge, but also a pretty decent helping of a c(over) y(our) a(ss) since i figured that the combo of her not coming home that night along with me being the last person her parents saw her with would lead to a pretty healthy dose of people giving me crap that i didn't want or, given the circumstances, really need to deal with. the whole rationale there being that since her folks saw her leave with me, i'd be the person they'd call when she didn't show up at home that night.

a while later i show up at her door, her dad answers and summarily, if not understandably, asks me where his daughter is. i go ahead and tell him "well she's in red oak with some guys she met from summer school or something. she left, said she was gonna stay the night there, i couldn't really make her get in the car with me or anything," blah blah blah. he seemed pretty understanding, said that her doing that kinda thing wasn't really a shocker or anything and thanked me for coming over and being honest. at that point, i was pretty happy, i'd covered myself and gotten over on her. the last thing i said to her folks in no uncertain terms was that i hadn't been there that night, hadn't talked to them, and didn't really care how they explained it to them.

the best laid plans, blah, blah, blah, you know how it is, because she calls, which i figure happens pretty much immediately after i leave, and tries to tell her parents she's with me, which they know isn't true, you know, having just seen me in their living room moments prior. the urge was obviously too much for her mother to resist because, from what i hear, she said something to the effect of "bull****! he was just here!" and then told her to be home in half an hour or not to bother coming home at all. so genius she is, she decides she'd rather find me and yell at me for getting her in trouble than go back home and actually have a place to, you know, live. it didn't last, because that was friday night and she stayed with a friend for the weekend, but then the monday or tuesday after that her mom picked her up and read her the riot act before taking her home.

i'd figured i'd heard the last of her but sometime that week, she must have had a (slight) revelation because she called to apologize, i guess that's what it was, to be really honest i don't at all recall what she said, which is just as well i guess, because i do recall that her whole schpiel had this really perfunctory tone about it, as though she was being forced to have the conversation, which i don't really doubt was the case. that's really about it, i guess, i haven't talked to her or seen her a single time since then.

also on the plus side, i haven't been to red oak since then.

feeling: like i should have been terry tate, the office linebacker
thinking of: 1987 toyota corolla
music: "trailer park queen" the rosco villa band

ok people, i'm only gonna do this once.

it's definitely. d e f i n i t e l y. not defanately, definatley, definately, or definatly. the letter "a" occurs nowhere in the word.

that is all, thanks for your time.

feeling: spelling bitterness
thinking of: becoming a genius
music: "crazy" patsy cline

so someone around here has a birthday in less than a month.

less than a month of shopping days remain.

you know, before august 3.

just saying is all.

feeling: alright
thinking of: guessing
music: "corduroy" pearl jam

nobody expected this.

i've written before about my affinity for teams from my hometown of dallas, texas, so allow me to diverge once again into related subjects. this one won't be as involved as the a-rod entries, i don't imagine, but we'll see i guess. anyways, there are four major teams in dallas, i followed three of them since i was a real lil kid, the stars came around when i was thirteen or fourteen i think, and i never really got into them, which i figure is mostly because they weren't around whenever i was forming my allegiances to the other three teams. there's definitely a pecking order, the rangers come first, they always have, the mavericks are a close second, and the cowboys come third, not really all that close to the other two.

so there have been times where it's been tough to be a fan, especially of the rangers and the mavericks. ironically, the cowboys have been by far the most successful. the mavericks were downright awful for a long time, like when they first started in the early 80s, by the time i picked them up they were pretty good, they made it to the conference finals in 88, losing in seven games to the vaunted los angeles lakers. the decline after that was precipitous. they got terrible in a hurry, even worse than when they first joined the league. bad owners, foolish management, stuff like that. a while later this nerd billionaire bought the team and they started to get good, really good. key to their renaissance was the emergence of a nucleus known as the "big three." the name i was never crazy about, i mean it'd be a good nickname for a guy who needed an extra pant leg up front, but not so much for a group of three basketball players, too vanilla.

anyway, out of the three guys in this lil club, michael finley, dirk nowitzki and steve nash; finley and dirk both got maxed out contracts, the only one who didn't, nash, seemed to simply get unlucky as far as time frames went, his contract just expired and because of his age and the position he plays, he wasn't gonna get a maximum deal. that was kind of a drag for a lot of people, he's a pretty big fan favorite and had more than proven his worth. i can't hardly blame him though, it seemed like he was getting pretty jerked around here lately, his name had surfaced in trade rumors, which was pretty presumptuous, since he wasn't under contract to be traded, which also meant that he could pretty much tell the mavs to go play in traffic if they wanted to sign him simply for the purposes of trading him, especially someplace he wasn't totally sold on going. despite all that though, nobody really thought he'd bolt, at least not so quickly, leaving the mavs definitely worse off in the short term which most likely won't make this next season anything to compare to some of the seasons of the mid 90s, but could make it less enjoyable than the paste three or four seasons have been.

big three. . .pant leg. . .that was a good line.

feeling: impertinent
thinking of: the dallas mavericks give you nothing but action (hehe)
music: "to have and to have not" lars fredriksen and the bastards