i meant to, i really did.

then the phone rang. seriously i think over the past week or so, i've spent as much time on the phone as i did when i was in eighth or ninth grade, which is to say, for anybody who didn't know me in eighth or ninth grade, a whole heck of a lot of time. it's not bad at all, it's been good on one or two counts, at least really good on one count, but that's neither here nor there i guess.

if there's anything at all bad about the timing it's that all of these phone calls seemed to converge around the time i'd resolved to be more consistent about writing. in fact, i'd written every day the week before last and felt pretty good that i had, but then as quickly as i'd appeared, i was gone.

i'm not certain what my point is here, i guess mostly just to say i'm still here, haven't gone anywhere or anything. last week was really good, this week, with the exception of a few hours last night, hasn't been so much.

so there you have it i guess.

feeling: dependent
thinking of: the cowboys
music: "wedding dress" derek webb

i'm sitting here in the dark, with a handful of lemon starburst.

lemon starburst used to be my most hated of all starburst, and i think it was a year or so ago, when i figured that i liked the lemon ones better than i liked the orange ones. none of that is important really, i guess, at least beyond the fact that they sort of represent the only part of today that didn't absolutely suck.

so monday morning right, monday morning after a long weekend, not a bad one by any stretch, in fact i'd even say it was great, but it was definitely one that required a ton of energy and quite honestly, one that i was pretty glad to get over with. not that i was looking forward to going to work necessarily, i wasn't dreading it or anything.

i'm realizing, suddenly, how ambivalent i'm sounding about anything and even though i'm a laid back guy, that's not me at all. so to the point, monday morning, and i'm heading out to work, it's like a quarter to nine, i'm only like five minutes from work, so i figure on showing up a couple or three minutes early.

anyways, long story short, i walk out and my car's not there, again. i don't wanna talk about it really, not right now anyway. maybe tomorrow.

at least i have a new favorite starburst flavor.

feeling: like i been kicked, maybe the gut, maybe the nads, it's not really important
thinking of: nothing good
music: "somewhere north" caedmon's call

i'm an adult.

at least by some measure of the term. i remember a year or so ago somebody did some research and determined that adulthood starts at age 26, and if that's the case, at this point, age 24, i find myself still a couple years short. i'm not sure how the folks doing the research arrived at 26, i mean being an adult is like anything else, at least in as much as it means about as many different things as there are people who try and interpret the term. in any case, i don't s'pose that i have much use for the term "adult" or "grown-up" or any other sort of life-stage descriptor, i figure i'll leave stuff like that to the developmental psychologists.

so when you're a lil kid, it's all you can wait for to be a grown-up. you're sort of caught up in the idea that no one can tell you what to do, because to the best of your observation, nobody can tell any of the grown-ups you know what to do. i mean your folks get to go to bed whenever they want, or at least they get to stay up later than you, they decide whenever you get to order pizza and go out for ice cream, and you start to thinking, "when i'm a grown-up, i'm gonna go to bed whenever i want and order pizza whenever i want, and go out for ice cream whenever i want," which, true enough, are all decisions you can make for yourself, in contrast to when you're a lil kid; but then as you get older you realize that the whole situation's not quite as happily simplistic as you figured it'd be when you were a lil kid.

well, i'm not really gonna talk about all that, mostly what i'm gonna talk about right here this second is paying bills, which i guess is somewhat related, because when you're little, in your idealized and romanticized view of adulthood, you never really think about that. so i have this membership at bally's, i've been working out there since february and the deal i got gave me like eight free sessions with a personal trainer. af first, i didn't really anticipate keeping the trainer beyond those eight sessons , but it was uncanny just how perfect of match the trainer that i got paired up with was for me, so i decide to go ahead and pay for a personal training plan, set the whole thing up on my debit card, you know, to where bally's just deducts whatever i owe and i don't gotta write a check every month.

maybe you read about squeaky getting stolen , and if you did, you probly remember me complaining about how much money i had to spend in getting him back in my possession as well as replacing stuff that was stolen from him. that whole deal was already on my mind when my trainer told me that the automatic payments for my workouts weren't going through. i guess, in the interest of disclosure i should say that i'm not really hypervigilant when it comes to the whole finances thing, at least not where detail's concerned, usually i'm ok with a general idea of what's at my disposal in the way of funds. i didn't really figure that i didn't have the money for that payment, but given all the extra expenses from the past few weeks, i was a lil concerned, and really feeling like an inadequate adult, like if i was 26 and really an adult it wouldn't have happened.

i check my account, and sure enough, there's plenty of money in it to make that payment, so i'm puzzled. my debit card expires at the end of next month and i'd gotten a letter from the company they tell me that i needed to update it as soon as i could, that way i wouldn't miss any payments, so i start to thinking it's a problem with my card, but i don't have any problems using it anywhere else, so i'm simply left really, really confused. that night i got a call from bally's, the accounts office or something, telling me the same thing, and so i set it up to pay out of my checking account instead of off my debit card, and the lady i talked to told me i was all set, i mean i knew my checking account number wasn't gonna change, so i figure that it to be all taken care of. all that happened a week ago yesterday. so you can imagine my confusion when yesterday i had a workout scheduled with my trainer, at eight, and about twenty minutes before it's s'posed to start, he calls me saying that the payment still hadn't gone through, so he decides to call the accounts department, and it turns out they were having issues with a new software system they just started using.

all worried i wasn't a real grown-up and it was all someone else's fault, story of my life.

feeling: smart-ass
thinking of: revenge
music: "eastbound traffic" remember maine

now if i were a politician
i'd want you on my ticket.
if i were a hunter
i'd want you in my thicket
and if i were a brain surgeon
you'd be inside my knife
if i were a gamblin man
you'd be inside my dice.

i'm as selfish as a schoolboy
enamored with his prick.
now my life is like a handgun
and the hammer just went click.

now if i were a writer
i'd want you in my pen
if i were a junkie
i'd want you in my syringe
and if i sold magic potions
you'd be inside my vial
if i were on death row
you'd be inside my file

i'm as selfish as a schoolboy
enamored with his prick.
now my life is like a handgun
and the hammer just went click.

now if i were a seamstress
i'd want you in my singer
if i were a safecracker darling
i'd want you in my fingers
if i robbed a seven eleven
you would be my faulty alarm
if i were a fornicator
you'd be inside my condom

i'm as selfish as a schoolboy
enamored with his prick.
now my life is like a handgun
and the hammer just went click.

i believe i see this lie
coursing through this world of yours and mine
i've been breathing it in like atmosphere
i've been drinking it down like wine

it says "all you need is love"
and "you can be the judge of it"
tastes ok for a little while
but then i wake up choking on my vomit

something help me see
just how worthless
something help me excavate
deep below the surface

something help me drown Lord
in your river of blood and grace
i know that i'm leperous
but hold me anyway

--"lady luck" vigilantes of love

rue. the. day.

you're familiar, i'm sure, with the concept of the "do-over." everyone figures it out pretty early on. you know, you're a lil kid playing a game with your friends and you make a mistake of some kind, like if you're playing kickball or something and you pop it up to the catcher, but you didn't really mean to do that at all. what you meant to do was kick it clear into the neighbor's yard two or three houses down so you call "do-over." if the friends you're playing with are understanding, they totally go along, because they know there'll be a time, maybe even that very day, when they'll want a do-over themselves.

the "real world" isn't like that, so i'm told anyway, which would seem to be pretty unfortunate for the little dallas mavericks who just yesterday made what'd seem to be their final move of the off-season. this is where i petition you for forgiveness for writing about sports, but i couldn't really think of anything else today, you know how it is. so i've been a mavericks fan for a long time, ever since i was like six years old, and in all that time the one thing that they've always seemed to have been missing is a top-flight big mean guy to plug up the middle. it would seem as though they've taken care of that, mostly because yesterday they made a pretty big trade to bring in erick dampier, who is ostensibly a big mean guy who'll plug up the middle.

this could turn out to be a brilliant move, but in order for it to be, pretty much everything has to come together this year, and i'm not certain how likely that is. dampier sucks, there's really no way around that. he's had two years in which his performance could be considered even slightly above average, his best year was a contract year after his team shipped off all the players they had that were better than him, and on top of all that, because of his age, his level of performance is more likely to decline than it is to get better, and for a guy whose career best is twelve points and twelve rebounds, that's not really terribly encouraging.

in fact, the whole thing sorta reminds me of whenever the rangers brought in chan ho park. the similarities are pretty startling, and if you have any idea just how much chan ho's absolutely sucked since he showed up in arlington, it's the kind of thing that might lead you to consider heading to downtown dallas, C4 in hand, for the express purpose of blowing up AAC simply so you won't have to live through dampier seeing if he can one-up park. is that extreme? maybe a lil, but that becomes less the case when you consider that when the rangers picked up park; they'd been hard up for a top-flight starting pitcher for quite some time, kinda like the the mavs were for a center; and when they had the resources to pick one up they went after the best guy in a lackluster field, paying minimum heed to the fact that one, based on dubious performance in previous seasons, there were some pretty serious questions about their guy's projected productivity and two, nobody else really seemed to want the guy. all the stuff that was true of park then is true of dampier now. in fairness to dampier, the knicks were trying work a trade for him, but they were offering the equivalent of giant steaming pile of crap, and atlanta had an offer on the table, but they'd offer me the league minimum if i told them i was available.

on the bright side though, the mavs actually have five guys starting who play five different positions, which is the first time that's happened since they had james donaldson around to play center, i suspect he could step into the gym tomorrow and give dampier a pretty serious run for the starting job, but that's neither here nor there i guess. anyway, if dampier can at least approach the numbers he put up last year, the lineup actually looks pretty dang good. in fact, the value brought to the team by dampier's arrival, it could be argued, isn't even brought by dampier himself, mostly because now that he's here, dirk is free to play his position and not wander around the lineup in search of mismatches. having gotten rid of a couple other guys also leaves no doubt as to the fact that the team is dirk's team now. like i was saying though, because he's 30 and pretty much without a solid track record, i figure that dampier's got a window of one year, maybe two, where he'll be able to help the team through his own tangible contributions. maybe even the best way to judge the trade won't be by how dampier does, what kinda numbers he puts up, as much as how his presence affects how dirk plays, that comforts me a bit, cause i definitely don't expect anything out of him.

maybe they won't rue the day, but i wouldn't count on him for much.

feeling: arg
thinking of: colonel sherman t. potter
music: "let me stand next to your fire" jimi hendrix

i'm left-handed

well mostly left-handed. actually i'm sort of ambidextrous, this'll be important later, i promise. anyway i write with my left hand, but i'm extremely coordinated, and besides the writing, i can do pretty much anything with either hand without much difficulty. in any case, my birthday was a couple weeks ago, and leading up to it i wasn't really sure what i wanted, in fact, i'm not sure that there was anything that i really *wanted*, so when my mom asked me "hey what do you want for your birthday?" i was like "uhhh, a jumpsuit?" you know like the kind the mechanics wear. she didn't really believe me, and i didn't figure i *really* wanted a jumpsuit anyway, that was just the only thing i could think of right that second. i mean i'm the kinda guy who's happy with a card or a phone call or something like that.

so a couple weeks later i was shopping online, eddie bauer's website was having its summer sale and i saw a shirt that i really liked for twenty bucks, so i ended up getting it. while i was looking tho, i saw this watch that i liked, on sale of course, so i figure that'd be cool to get, so i go ahead and tell my mom, hey if you wanna get me something, i saw this watch, blah, blah, you know. she emails me back with a different watch, a swiss army one that's way more expensive, but that i like a lot less. long story short, i end up getting a watch, a fossil, not the eddie bauer one or the swiss army one, but it's all good cause i think i like the one i got better than either of the other two.

now i haven't worn a wristwatch since middle school. in fact, for a while after that, i considered wearing a watch restrictive, perhaps even an affront to my easy-going, free-spirited and hyper-hyphenated personality; i definitely didn't want to at all be bound by any sort of lil accessory or what it represented, i mean why should i care what time it was? i softened a bit whenever i got a pager and even after i stopped paying for airtime and stuff on it, carried it around as a sort of watch. the reason i stopped wearing a watch, however, was mostly because it was a complication, it became more trouble than it was worth, either i'd seem to find really fragile watches, or i was just lived in a rough and tumble enough sort of way that wristwatches didn't really last long. i figure it was a lil from column A and quite a bit from column B.

so now that i've got one, i'm sorta remember another pretty big reason why i haven't worn one for so long, the fact that i don't really know which hand to wear it on. yah, i know the rule of thumb, wear it on the opposite wrist of your dominant hand. and so like i was saying, i'm left handed, but not so much to where i *never* use my right hand. like i'm not so left handed that i use a left handed mouse or anything like that, so like when i'm at work, it clunks around against the desk while i'm using the computer, but it clunks when i'm not on the computer and i have it on my left hand whenever i'm trying to write, the whole thing is quite frustrating.

meh, who cares anyway, really i only got the thing to look like less of a lil kid.

feeling: a lil lacking
thinking of: kindergarten
music: "the capitol" MxPx

books are good.

well they're good sometimes, like today, if you were to walk into some random chain bookstore, which i guess more or less leaves only two choices, borders or barnes and noble, you'd encounter all manner of crap that nobody really cares about but about which people have decided to write books, essentially a lot of really unnecessary books. even despite that though, i really could honestly tell you that, by and large, i have a favorable opinion of books. if you'd have asked me that in high school, or even college, i'd have been wont to give a decidedly different answer, there's even a pretty good deal of anecdotal evidence to back that up. mostly i'm thinking of the semester that i spent all of $20 on textbooks, ironically the worst grade i got that semester was in the class that i bought the book for, but that's neither here nor there i guess.

so lately i've been of the mind of extolling the greatness of the old 97's and the other day i posted this, the lyrics to a song of theirs called "weightless," which for some reason was really resonating with me about that time. i wasn't entirely sure why that was until a day or so ago when i realized what i was reading at the same time.

anyways, i seem to have read a lot more than i think i have, i don't remember many times in my life where i can say "oh yah, i remember sitting down and reading this book." mostly i remember times in high school and college where i worked really hard to avoid reading. so the other day i was in a bookstore, on my way to the checkout stand in fact, when i saw a copy of the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, by c.s. lewis. now anybody that knows me halfway decently is pretty aware of my opinion of c.s. lewis, i've read a ton of stuff that he's written and the rule is pretty much if he's written it, i'm gonna dig it. however, i'd never read the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, and it was only six bucks so i picked it up.

you've probably read the book, maybe you haven't, maybe it's been a while, whatever. what it's about, at the heart, is these four lil kids who enter into a fantasy world called narnia through a wardrobe in their boarding house. i'm not sure how certain laws of thermodynamics were reckoned with, but then i guess that'd be missing the point.

so weightless is a song about heaven, the first couple lines say:

i reckon heaven is a place where time is nonexistent
and the things that are important don't take any time at all.

i don't figure that narnia's really s'posed to be a perfect parallel to heaven, if you've read the book you can figure out why. but the really neat thing about it, what i suspect is what subconsciously put that song in my mind at the same time i was reading the book, is that whenever the kids would spend any amount of time in narnia, it could have been days and days in narnia, they'd always come out of the wardrobe into the house at the same time that they left. kinda like the song, there were some really important things going on in narnia, the kids were busy saving the place, and it didn't take any time at all.

feeling: anticipation of the trancendent
thinking of: sunset
music: "with every breath" leigh nash and dan haseltine

third of three continued from tuesday

squeaky's a lil car.

i've driven three cars primarily since i started driving, the first was a 1987 toyota corolla, the second was a 1986 ford taurus, and then squeaky, who's a 1992 nissan sentra, so if you know anything at all about cars, you know that there really isn't all that much difference between any of those. they're all lil four cylinder cars, real easy to handle, stuff like that. so anyways, like i was saying this family in my church lent me a truck, and i'm pretty sure all three of those cars i mentioned a minute ago could fit in the bed of this truck i'm driving around.

so tuesday i pick up evan in this beast, it's a blast to drive, so i really dig it, but really i was just relieved to be able to have something to drive around. tuesday i drop evan off at my place before i head back to work, but while i'm there i notice the lil light blinking on my answering machine, so i check it and the message is from the anaheim police department saying that they've recovered my car, and they give me a number to get all the details. by the time i get the message on tuesday though, and get around to the point that i'm able to call, it's pretty close to closing time, so there's not really anything they can do to help me at that point, and as such, not much that i can do til the next morning. anyways, i get all the details and make plans to get it thursday, having evan around was a plus because he was able to help drive.

we head down thursday morning, first to the police station in anaheim to get a signed vehicle release since the car was stolen and then to the wrecker company in orange to actually pick squeaky up. no one's there when we get there, so we gotta wait nearly an hour for the guy to get back, he got lost on the way back from the 7-11 down the street or somesuch, i'd say that's why he's driving a tow truck for a living, but that doesn't make sense, mostly on account of it not being a really good thing for any sort of a person who operates a motor vehicle for a living to get lost, but i digress.

in any case the emotion i suspect i missed out on when i found out the car was gone on saturday seemed to surface when i actually saw it trashed, with the stereo missing and the dashboard somewhat taken apart. normally i'm a whiz with the vocab, but i'm not certain that i could find a better descriptor of my attitude at that point than simply "pissed." i'm trying really hard not to dwell on that.

the fact that i've had to spend near $500 on just getting it back to where it was before it was stolen makes that more than a little difficult.

feeling: vestiges of exasperation
thinking of: buying a shotgun
music: "crooked deep down" derek webb

second of three continued from yesterday

so there were adjustments to be made.

i s'pose that's customary whenever you have a car and you use it every day and then one day it turns up missing. i was feeling pretty impulsive right after i made the police report, even considering going out and buying a cheap used car that very day. luckily, that urge came and went, but it was followed by an even stronger one to go get a bike, in fact the only thing that kept me from getting one was the fact that i didn't really have a way to get one back to my apt, which was probably just as well, mostly because it ended up being a likely couple hundred dollars or so saved.

so like i said the whole deal happened on saturday, which sorta left me in a bit of a spot as far as getting around on sunday, not showing up at church wasn't really an option at all, on account of me working there and everything. i don't guess that i had to walk, there were definitely people who would have picked me up if i'd called and quite a few people told me as much when they found out that i did walk to church that morning. i don't figure i really did anything that i didn't want to, i mean i live less than three miles from there, so walking wasn't a real big deal, and on top of that, i was determined to embrace whatever little hardship might come out of it and not let the whole deal ruin my attitude.

i used the story as part of my sunday school lesson, i figured it was pretty authentic, and despite what i'd resolved, keeping a good attitude was a real fight and i figured it was something that could teach real easily. what was funny was that i didn't really want to make a huge deal out of it, i hadn't brought it up in conversation, but i'd neglected to think about what kids do whenever you tell them something like that, so pretty much immediately after i'd gone outside to the lil coffee hour after church, people were all over me about it.

in the end that wasn't such a bad thing because one of the families that heard about it had just bought a truck and hadn't done anything with the old one they had, so that afternoon they called and asked if i'd want to use their old truck. that was a pretty huge relief, because that tuesday i was s'posed to pick up evan, aka "taco bell" and an old roommate of mine from wheaton, from the airport in LA, he was on his way back home to jersey after spending a month in australia and new zealand, and one of the first things i thought after realizing that i didn't have a car was "hmm, how am i s'posed to get to LAX with no car?" so like i was saying, luckily that wasn't an issue, and it was such a cool thing to see someone step up like that and fill a need, really without me having to do anything.

this is the point at which things sort of begin to level off, at least as far as the better/worse deal goes. well maybe that's overly simplistic, but in any case the attitude fight was about to get harder.

feeling: a bit slow
thinking of: baseball
music: "stop to think" millencolin

first of three

i don't mind interruptions.

i notice that little things that go wrong tend to irritate me more than big things that go wrong. i'm not certain why that is, but i suspect it has to do with the idea that little things tend to be more directly in my control and when stuff like that goes wrong, even when it's not in my control at all, i'm sorta bugged by the idea that i could have done something simple to prevent it. on the other hand, when the wheels shoot off of something big, or maybe even huge, it doesn't tend to bother me so much, mostly because in the vast majority of those occasions, the only two options i have in the way of reaction are "nothing" and "like it," so there's no real use in getting worked up about circumstances then.

so anyways, there's a story, you knew there'd have to be. it starts a week ago saturday morning whenever i got up to go run some errands. i head out to my car, walk into the parking lot, look up and see that my car's gone. the whole thing wasn't really a matter of me forgetting where i parked it, i mean i have an assigned parking spot, and in two years of living in the same apartments, i've never come back to find someone in my spot, which would necesitate me parking on the street. but i check anyway, thinking maybe for some reason or another, i parked on the street, maybe my spot was blocked in, something like that. so i walk up and down the street a bit, find nothing and figure i better call the cops to make a report.

reality dawns on me, and even with the understanding that i no longer have a car, i seem to deal exceptionally well with the whole thing, at least from what i was told; mostly because, like i was saying before, i didn't figure there was really all that much i could have done about it, shite happens sorta thing. i start to making plans to get another car, which luckily isn't anything that will completely ruin me financially, which is to say that it won't require me to go into any debt outside of borrowing a couple hundred dollars from family just to make sure i had enough to make all my bills for the month.

it would get better, or worse, i haven't decided yet.

feeling: exhausted, sofa king exhausted
thinking of:
music: "freefall (from hand to hand)" stavesacre

i reckon heaven is a place
where time is non-existent. yeah.

and the things that are important, yeah
don't take any time at all.

an awful lot like outer space
where everything is weightless, yeah.

even heavy things are weightless, yeah
don't take up any space at all.

right on, right on.
oh yeah it's so clear
all the bad things are gone,
all the good things are here

right on, right on.
oh yeah it's so clear
all the bad things are gone,
all the good things are here

almost exactly like this place
where you and i are fighting, yeah

i'm so sick and tired of fighting, yeah
up there we'll never fight at all.

right on, right on.
oh yeah it's so clear
all the bad things are gone,
all the good things are here

right on, right on.
oh yeah it's so clear
all the bad things are gone,
all the good things are here.

i reckon heaven is a place
where everything is weightless, yeah.

even heavy things are weightless, yeah
up there we'll never fight at all.

--"weightless" old 97's

my poor, poor mother.

anno domini MCMLXXX. i think that's it anyway, the year of our Lord 1980; it was the hottest summer on record to ever singe the eyebrows and smite the elderly of dallas, texas. according to locals who were around for both of them, the only summer that rivals that one was the one eighteen years later, in 1998. now i was around for that summer and if 1980 was worse than that one, i don't even want to deign to ponder what it must have been like. now i mentioned my poor mother because she spent nearly the entire summer of 1980 lugging me around inside her even slighter than it is now 18 year old frame, 1980 was in fact the summer that i made my first appearance on our fair planet.

so i'm 24 today, and i'm fairly certain that it'll be a good day, i mean as long as i don't get taken roller skating and no family members of mine get shot. other than that there's not really much to it, i mean i s'pose it'd be exceedingly easy to talk about all the sort of standard, small-talky birthday stuff, you know, like "wow made it through another year," "how's it feel to be year older?", stuff like that, but the banality of that might drive me to self-destructive behavior, i'm thinking bamboo shoots underneath fingernails right this second.

gordon keith's held forth on the subject of birthdays, though i'm not certain he's done it on his blog, but he's more or less of the opinion that after childhood, birthdays really have no use being acknowledged. i agree with him in that with a few exceptions, birthdays after about age 12 or 13 aren't really and shouldn't be a big deal, but i don't go as far as him in declaring it solely another day on the calendar. what i look forward to the most are lil things, the notes, the cards, stuff like that, in fact i would be fine if i never had another birthday party as long as i lived. i guess what i appreciate most about birthdays is that they provide an opportunity for thoughtfulness, which goes both ways, i'm like anybody else, i appreciate being told that i'm being thought of, and i really get a rush when i'm able to do something nice for someone else, i think i was more excited to get bone the DVDs of the first season of 24 than he was to get them and i was nearly giddy to send laura her birthday box last year.

on the other hand, i don't guess that we should need any special occasion for thoughtfulness, but that'd seem to be fodder for another entry entirely.

feeling: good
thinking of: the old conditioning test
music: "amalgamate" five iron frenzy

i've been listening to an inordinate amount of the old 97's lately.

pretty much anybody that's heard them knows that that's not necessarily a bad thing, not at all, they're a great band, i don't think i've met a single person who's ever really listened to them and held a negative opinion. in fact having found them a few years back was a pretty significant emotional coup. people who know me and are familiar with my musical tastes likely know that i've got a lot of happy music, a lot of what i guess could be described as music for the rage prone, a smattering of what's known as pop, and a mishmash of some older country; willie nelson, johnny cash, merle haggard, guys like that, who wrote country music when country music was good.

what i didn't have was music for those melancholy moods that come every so often, and make no mistake, even with my sickeningly sunny disposition, they come. part of the reason is that so much of that kinda music absolutely sucks and is relegated to the hipster crap that people my age who fancy themselves urbane seem to think is really cool. what i'm saying is that i can generally tolerate music like that for a few minutes before i start making decisions with long term implications to solve a short term problem, for example, throwing my stereo out the window in order to get it to stop.

in any case, all of that is fine, mostly because i can only stomach myself for so long when i'm in a mood like that. so anyways, back to music, like i was saying, finding stuff that's at least tolerable for moods somewhere in between happy and homicidal (not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive) is tough, for a while all i had that fit the bill was mike ness' first solo CD, which is some great music and really versatile as far as moods go, but almost too much so for what i was looking for. so i really hate advertising my own likes and dislikes here, at least as far as evaluating things for public consumption in a sort of "review-ish" style, in fact if you can find an example of me doing that, i'll buy you lunch sometime; but anyways, the old 97's have found a niche for the moods that caedmon's call or even mike ness wasn't quite right for.

if only there was a strecth of road out here that corresponded.

feeling: oddly fulfilled
thinking of: oak cliff
music: "weightless" old 97's