I’ve heard that song like four times today. Can I get a witness.

Anyhow, I wanted to let everyone know that this is the best written review of anything ever. There should be a chapter on this in journalism textbooks. There has never been a multipart review that I actually fiended for the second installment of. This is a unique experience. Much like Stephen Fry’s positively-titanic review of the iPhone and every item in history that could possibly be called part of it’s family tree, it gave me a moment of unadulterated joy for the unabashed honesty and humanity of the reviewer, the passion they had for the craft of writing, and the detail with which they expressed their opinions.

More reviews should be written with this level of passion and personality. Just sayin’. And that is why I am working on my review of “No Country For Old Men”. Will it be long? As sure as Cormack McCarthy a Vietnam obsessed blowhard with a talent for evocative imagery and an inability to cinch a story together!

It’s a recurring dream, or more a recurring dream construct. I’m out with my friends. This time it was Daniel Owen and Mitchell Abbot. We’re kids, kinda. The ages keep changing, but they scale together, you dig? We’re riding mountain bikes over the ridge and then suddenly we’re road tripping in the Pirate Honda, with a boat on the top.

Ready for any situation.

That’s when we hit the flood. For some reason we go down next to the river, and the street is always flooded. Then we look back and the whole city is flooded. This time we hit it in the car and it capsizes, leaving just the small boat floating. We desperately clamber over the broken flotsam of the ruined neighborhood, and into the boat. I am pissed because my cellphone got wet, but I’ve been here before. I know what this is about.

We paddle up street until we hit the house with the Ark. It’s a luxury yacht, three hundred yards long and eighty feet tall, built entirely of wood. It perches atop a tiny, tiny trailer and is towed by a nondescript black SUV. We go into the back yard and I find a spot of sunshine to dry my cellphone in. The little moisture indicator has gone red and I’m pissed.

The woman walks out with her kids, just like every time I have this dream, and asks where we were headed. I explain that the car capsized in the flooded street, and she just clucks in vague acknowledgment. “I’ll go get a copy of the map, you don’t still have one from last time?” I do, but it’s in the car, so I send Mitchell in with her to finish the transaction. She begins to explain to him how FISA came down and gave them all evacuation maps. I don’t have time to correct her. Besides, I can’t remember the acronym she meant to say. I’m going to go back to the car to see if I can salvage anything else.

I paddle back in the boat and the Pirate Honda is nowhere to be seen, sucked beneath the gentle ebb and flow of the flooded street. I watch an unfortunate car turn down here, seeking shallower water, but immediately the engine is snuffed and the driver looks panicked. It’s Debanjan Ghosh. I quickly paddle away again to avoid being seen, that would just be more awkward conversation.

When I get back to the Ark house, the Ark is gone, and so are Daniel and Mitchell. My cell phone is dry and I stuff it back into my pocket along with the car keys and the woman hands me the map. “No charge” she says, picking up her pitcher of Sun Tea and walking back into the house. I turn around and the dogs are out, and suddenly I’m back at the Toledo Street house of my childhood. The fence is broken, and Buddy and Zuel have taken my cycling shoes out into the yard and chewed them up. They come over soaking wet and I know they’ve been down at the river, they followed the smell of the car. I reach down to touch them, to feel their fur and know that they’re real.

And then I woke up.

I don’t know why every interaction has to be such a god damned chore.

You see, like most times when I post an personals ad, I got replies. Sure, I got the requisite random-letter-sequence@randomnumbers.ru Brunglish replies, but I also got a couple of genuine people. One didn’t respond after the first volley. One responded with “I LOVE TO LAUGH”, and was disregarded out of hand. Another responded and included a Myspace link that didn’t inspire a lot of interest. Another? Well… Let’s just say my interest was piqued.

So I mentioned that. And I mentioned that I might be interested in getting a cup of coffee (I have no idea what people “do” on dates, so this is the best idea I could come up with). I also included a picture of me.

And she responded with the sort of unguarded enthusiasm that is normally reserved for dental visits when you’re asked whether you’ll be paying by cash or check. There was a lot of heavily implied reluctance, along with plainly stated reluctance (the perfecta). But she also included a picture of herself, and indicated that it was I that had a choice to make, for some ill defined reason vaguely related to her age (Fargo and I both looked at the picture for a while, to see if I was missing something, she looks to be about my age to me).

Now, my natural response when someone does this is to run, not walk, in the other direction. I had a magnificently bad set-up with someone that started with this sort of - I’ll be generous and call it - lukewarm reaction. Nothing sets a date off right like showing up and having your date turn to her roommates to say, “Hopefully this won’t take long”. And that is the same gut reaction I had to this email.

Ladies, here is a free tip: If you aren’t interested, just fucking say it! And don’t think that I want to take out out to dinner for the pure unadulterated pleasure of buying you shit. Don’t make mealy mouth excuses about wanting to meet “all kinds of people” and “trying anything once”. If you have to make excuses to go on the date, you should really just man up and say “Hey. I’m not interested in you. Let’s both save an uncomfortable evening and not do this.”

I responded that I was still interested in going out, because I am holding out hope that this isn’t just some delightful game that translates to “Whoa, you’re not what I imagined you’d look like but I’m too ‘nice’ to just say no”.

I posted a craigslist ad:

What is with all the chicks talking about Fantasy Football? Where are the women who could give a crap about a bunch of drug-inflated semiliterate “professional” game-playing-adults? Honestly. Read a book, or something. Obsessing over spreadsheets of average-yards-per-jockstrap-ruined of some millionaire manchild between bouts of snorting designer caviar and shopping for larger rims for his refrigerator is about as pointless as reading one of their diaries.

I’m 28. I wouldn’t know Brent Favreau if he rushed a sack into my tacklebox. I have a job that sucks. I love Deadwood and William Gibson. As a child I drank an Orange Crush that had a layer of hot chili oil on the lip and I just cried from the pain and cried and drank more and cried. I have a dogs. One pair. I ate cereal for breakfast. I like my bicycle. I like the sunshine, and I hate that we’ve given up freedom in the name of safety. I have a Myspace but it’s really just so I can look at other people’s stuff. I don’t like polyamory.

You should probably be around my age. You should maybe have read a book in the past couple months. You can like sports, but you should understand that when you talk about how many runs batted in someone has I am going to get that faraway look and will probably be replaying old episodes of Duck Tales in my head.

Genkitheme spontaneously crapped out on me, I’m not sure why. It was letting the widgets flow off the bottom. I tried to download the 1.2 version (which was 2.3 tagging compatible) but no such luck. So here we are on greenline. I hate what it does with my Google Reader Shared Items, I hate that there’s no separation on the recent posts and twitters, and I hate that there’s a big stupid orange blobby thing to subscribe to my tweets, but no such button to subscribe to my content, so this is probably just going to be a short term thing, but it looks better than default.