Now that that’s out there, it’s a little intimidating to follow up. I’m not unveiling some secret knowledge of a hundred mile per gallon carburetor or some deep dark secret of the San Jose Mercury News. I’ve got no special proof of faked moon landings or atrocities hidden from view. I… Uh…

I met a girl.

It was nice.

I fell in love too fast and too hard, and I wanted too much. But she didn’t seem to care as long as I agreed to one thing.

I couldn’t talk about it. It wasn’t ever supposed to end up here, she was quite clear.

And now it’s over.

I grew to loathe it. I hate feeling like someone is ashamed of me, which is what that secrecy felt like. It didn’t feel exciting, it didn’t feel “bad” or hot. It just felt like I was that thing at your house you put in the garage when company comes over.

I hate the way it ended, I hate how I feel right now. I’m tired of thinking about it. I’m tired of being up at night. I’m tired of feeling this way, and if anything I could do made me feel any different I’d be doing it.

Comments are closed. Keep your opinions to yourselves.

If I lost my wallet today, I would not have to prostitute myself to make ends meet.

Yes, it would suck. Yes, I would probably eat some ramen for dinner, I’d definitely not be buying any Beaker and Flask cocktails at full price, but I wouldn’t be stacking quarters out of my change bowl to buy three bucks worth of gas. As a matter of fact, unless another tragedy struck back to back with this one, I really wouldn’t even have to _think_ about the loss of that money. By this time next month, I would almost certainly have recovered from the financial strain by simply keeping the course.

Thanks to Get Rich Slowly and the debt snowball and the emergency fund and ING direct and The Sun’s Financial Diary and all the other resources I’ve found about taking control of your finances, I have made slow progress to _this_. This is the first time in my life when a small financial setback wouldn’t send me scurrying to sell off a savings bond or max out a credit card (or more likely apply for NEW credit). This is the first time in my life when a failed appliance or unexpected car repair won’t send me into a months long fight back to just-regular-broke. I own my car outright. I have a pretty reasonable mortgage on a place I’m only slightly underwater on in a neighborhood I can deal with. I’ve got a job that satisfies my bills and gives me enough left over to save a little and indulge all but my most ridiculous desires. Most days I don’t even know how far away my next payday is, and when I go to bed I’m almost never thinking about money.

I think this might be what wealth feels like.

C:\Windows\system32>ping harley
Ping request could not find host harley. Please check the name and try again.

C:\Windows\system32>ipconfig /flushdns
Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

C:\Windows\system32>nslookup harley
Server:  DD-WRT
Address:  192.168.1.1

Name:    harley
Address:  192.168.1.118

C:\Windows\system32>ping harley
Ping request could not find host harley. Please check the name and try again.

THIS IS WHY I ABANDONED YOU WINDOWS.

@graphikwork: 44 miles from B’ham. 3064 miles from Alaska.

What ever happened? Is this like the fucking Donner Party or some shit? I mean… this was six months ago. You shoulda made it by now. Unless you were part of a cattle drive or something. But even then, six months? Somewhere in there you coulda texted. I imagine this person in their shitty, twelve year old Ford Escort. Tweeting about their (pretty hair-brained) transcontinental journey. They’ve stopped for a quick taco in that place they know. And just as they pull out of the parking lot, WHAM double-loaded semi smears them across the pavement.

@p1×3lated: I want google wave. Plz halpz!!

This person, quite clearly, got their Wave account and is now there, completely happy with the way Wave helps her connect with society. They are the ONLY person who feels this way about Google Wave.

@epicexperiences: Just got done climbing a route on beacon rock, it was pretty choice. The views were phenomenal.

Obviously the climbing went fine but I guess maybe the descending didn’t.

@EvilNeen: If @unanything’s head gets any bigger, we’ll have to cut him out of the apartment.

Oh, it got bigger all right. @EvilNeen’s home planet was destroyed with @ouranything’s head went gas giant and simply blocked out the sun.

@shejohns: showing emily how to use twitter

Ext: A high school library.
It is dark, the only direct light comes from THE WINDOW. Two girls are standing over a table piled with papers, composition books, complicated looking schedules. They are looking down at what we find to be a
INT: High School Library.
small glowing screen. We zoom in to find a laptop with Tweetdeck loaded full screen.
A message has just finished sending.

pull back on two high school aged girls in school uniforms. They are side by side.
@shejohns: “And that’s basically all you do. You just put in your message and hit enter or the little send button. Any… any questions?”
Emily: “Well, I’m not really clear on the searches yet and is there a way to autofollow…”
@shejohns: “Noooo, no autofollow, that’s not really a good idea. And the searches there’s a great readme on my site that one of the forum admins wrote.”
Emily: “And you gave me the email list for the forum admins right?”
@shejohns: “YUP, You’re now officially the VP of this Fan Club!”

@shejohns hugs Emily excitedly, but Emily is strangely unresponsive, staring at the computer screen.
When @shejohns turns back to the screen to finish up some business, we bring up the music and zoom to Emily’s face, her face suddenly stony and inhuman.
From screen left, her right arm lashes out, holding a wooden-based lamp, bludgeoning @shejohns as she falls to the floor, obviously dead.
We close up on Emily’s face, splattered with blood, as she begins to wrap the body in plastic bags and anxiously daub blood from the books on the table, scanning along and stuffing documents into her backpack, she hits a plastic binder with a picture onthe front and she’s suddenly wet-eyed.

Emily: “For you, Raul. Always for you.”

And we follow the picture as she puts it into her purse, and as it dips into the dark pouch, we catch a glimpse of the cool wall eyed stare of Raul Julia, in a black and white head shot.

————–
*So I decided I was gonna clear all twitter followers who I don’t know personally who haven’t tweeted in a month. Sorry folks, that’s just how I do. If you come back later and decide you want me to follow you again you will simply have to re-apply. So I go to FriendorFollow, use the otherwise-basically-worthless “Friends” tab, and sort by “date of last tweet”. And now I have a giant pile with the bottom rows representing “private” accounts which FriendorFollows search whatzis does not errorhandle, and then, mixed in, the abandoned accounts of the now-ex-Twitterers. It felt good to get rid of some dead wood and organize some of my shit in lists. Are you paying attention Twitter? Those two things are great. That new RT? That sucks balls. This concludes the technical portion of the show.

You may be interested to know that it is now the year of our Lord 2009 and asking for a hand-written reference for a college position without any electronically editable forms is about as archaic and backwards as having a contact form which simply directs you to a generic email address. I would suggest, if you are trying to impress the applicability and timeliness of your educational offerings to people, that you update your downloadable forms to something less hokey.

Adobe Acrobat Professional is available with an academic discount and will allow anyone with twenty spare minutes and four barely-warm braincells to create a form which isn’t hilariously out of date.

Yours in Christ,
Aaron Walker

I’ve been a little broke, sure. I’ve been a little tired. I’ve been a little spacey. I’ve been late to work. But I’ve been… happy. In a way that I’ve never been in my adult life.

I’d offer the same empty promises, that I’ll be here more often, that I’ll write every day, but… I don’t know if I will. Right now I want to experience this fully. I want to feel it all the way to the bottoms of my feet. And I hope she does too.

Now… mind you. All of us remember 2002. Mike’s delicious candy flavored liquor bottles hit the scene like blue-dot heroin or that guy Darryl’s super skunk home grown hydroponic he grew in his shower that one time. Young people of both genders were drawn to it’s seemingly limitless soda pop flavored, endless good times. Our bodies young enough to process all that sugar into hours of playful public near fornication in the form of night clubs, house parties, or all night karaoke binges, but we must face facts. Lo though long was the life and good were the spoils of the reign of King Hard Lemon – We are looking at the end of our decade folks: Women have simply started learning to keep track of how many Mike’s they drink and the world of combative debauchery is poorer for it. The last few years we have been fading, as understanding of the amount of calories in Mike’s Hard Lemonade leads this battle’s party seekers instead to simple watery lagers and American Spirit cigarettes.

Leave it to the old masters themselves to reinvent the game so completely.

With it’s 8% ABV, Mike’s Harder Lemonade is nearly twice as potent as the original Mike’s, with yet more horrifying chemical additives to cover up the booze flavor, meaning that the liver gives up EARLIER, leading to longer lasting grind sessions before friends come bail them out or accidental phone number reveals which you can turn into ill advised booty call after booty call.

But that’s not all. No, that is not enough for Mike. The Mike. The Mike understands that it’s not just about pumping up the volume, it’s also deception, because Mike’s Harder Lemonade comes in a four pack… of sixteen ounce cans. Who can do the math on that? That’s right, if your questionably-competent-to-agree-ass-to-tap of the evening chooses to drink all four cans of your magic pixie drink? She has consumed SIXTY FOUR OUNCES of malt liquor. Half a gallon. Nearly twenty FIVE percent more volume than she would have consumed had you opted for the twelve ounce bottles. And need I remind you that this is 8% abv? Whereas all SIX of the original recipe Mike’s Hard Lemonade translates to roughly 4 shots of Bacardi 151, drinking four of the Harder is equal to nearly seven.

I don’t need to tell this crowd the tactical difference that three shots of Barcardi 151 can make on whether or not you get to touch the butthole, and this lets us get there without EVER having to touch the top shelf at the club. Hell you don’t have to touch any shelf, except the shitty beer shelf in the “bad decisions start here” section at your local Chevron.

The King is dead, people….

Long live the King.

The summer has picked up momentum, and while I am loathe to admit it, I find myself thinking more often of the Sublime song “Summertime”. And this time not because of the timeless tale of infidelity and frustration, but because of the attitude. The easy paced song, the sense of knowing that life is becoming incredibly complicated, but something about the sun and the heat and the long, long evenings has allowed you to get past it. The other shoe is waiting to drop but, right now – the texture of life is incredibly pleasant.

When it is warm, I crave activity. Summertime in Arizona is overwhelmingly hot. Each trip to the store is an ordeal. Exercise is torture. And in this week of heat, I have been indulging. Overindulging, really, in activity. And thing things I have learned, the goodness that comes with the sweat, the realigning crunch-and-crackle of joints long ignored, the soreness in your meat; the lessons that these things teach are… almost overwhelming. Once the physical body is tired, the heat having dehydrated you, energy reserves drained, endorphins exhausted – you reach for new understanding. And maybe sometimes, you find yourself in your back yard, shirtless, dazzled by the sunshine, soaked with sweat, and suddenly: It’s all so clear. It’s math all the way down. You can track the flow of events to a common cause, you begin to contemplate the very nature of reality. And then it strikes, the physical ache and the fuzzy head and the blurred vision all clear at once. And you see the light for the first time. You see your life. Life is the space between birth and death, time is as subjective as beauty or justice, math is the language of nature, and physical exertion, even physical punishment, is as critical to mental development as reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Your body is a cage for your soul and sometimes you must glory at what it can do.

Gaze into his craggy face. Listen to his muddled voice. Realize that he does not actually understand all of the words he is saying. This is not a bad movie, it’s not a farce, it’s a documentary. A deep dive into the ocean of confusion that an unfrozen caveman might feel plunged into daily life in modern San Francisco.

Watch the film, and think about it. Who else would be so unclear on the uses of a sporting ball that they would put not one but FOUR scenes on a small roof top that are predicated on the idea that someone would just go up there with a football… to simply chill out? And listen to Tommy Wiseau’s voice. It’s not suited for language, it’s a yowl, not unlike that of a wild beast. It would be best served baying at the moon. The apparent randomness of the movie’s every day world, where children wander in and out of your home dozens of times a day, attempting to interrupt your coital aggressions, where strangers show up and drink bottled water with you, then hang around for 40 minutes of exposition.

I believe we may have found him. We may have found a true Man From Earth. But… he doesn’t bring us the teachings of Buddha or the love of Christ. His journey has brought him no peace. It has only brought him confusion, and pain.

Alone is good. From time to time. Dan Savage drops this perfectly formed ball of wisdom in the middle of a “fat girls need love too, and if you can just hold out you’ll get it” speech: “We will all be alone for stretches of our lives, and we have to make sure that the way our single lives are built makes us happy.”

Alone is when I write. Alone is when I masturbate. Alone is when I plumb the depths of my head. It’s when I do my math. It’s when I hatch my plans. Alone is when I’m watching movies. Alone is when I’m reading. There’s a lot of good that comes from alone. I was alone when I first realized I wanted to write. I was alone when the first song ever moved me to tears. Alone is when you get your best drinking done. Nobody else to set the pace, just you and your drink. And you’re not trying to impress anybody either. If someone else is there, you’re gonna have to have that inevitable conversation. Yes, this is a two liter bottle of Mountain Dew, vermouth and cheap brandy. No, it doesn’t taste good. Yes, it’s probably a little early to be drinking like this. No, it seriously doesn’t taste good. Because, god damn it, there’s a fucking Eek the Cat marathon on and I’ll be mother fucked if I’m going to miss out on the Eekpocalypse Now episode just to go to the store and buy proper booze and mixers. You’re not the boss of me and no I did not knock that over when I was drunk, I knocked THAT over when I dropped the vermouth, and you can see it’s gone now, so that was a long time ago, thank you very much. Blah blah blah… You can see how annoying this gets. When you’re alone it’s just “More brandy or less brandy… more brandy or less brandy. ELKLIIIIIGHT EEELLLLKLIIIIIGHT!!!!” then you knock some shit over and lie about it to yourself. But you’re drunk so you believe it, in this horrible way. Then you think about the nature of humanity for a while. Maybe you prove scientific theories by running through logic games with yourself. Maybe sometimes you cry. But for the most part you just finish your cartoons and then suddenly you wake up at 2am feeling oily, rested, slightly nauseous, and vaguely embarrassed, just like every other day, only you have a five hour head start.

I forget what the point was there but being Eek the Cat is still pretty great, so much of it is on Youtube too.

But the next time you are alone. Notice it. Embrace it. Feel out the corners inside your skull. Maybe you’ll learn something about yourself.

Well, I woke up. I got out of bed and I felt pretty good. And I was doing some stretches, and getting ready for my day. When I noticed I could touch my feet. I stopped. Straightened up, and did it again. At that moment, I knew… this was a dream. So in the dream, just before I woke up, I bent down, impossibly far… and put my big toe in my mouth.

1. Michael Jackson. Everyone acted surprised he died. Which is weird. Because the man has spent the past two decades having every unnecessary medical procedure in the book performed on his body so that he could look like an aging anorexic woman wearing a deflated sex-doll as a skin suit. Of course his body said “FUCK THIS SHIT” and checked out. Also, did everybody forgive him for being a mo-mo all of the sudden? Because whenever I bring up the fact that he fed little boys “jesus juice” and touched them in front of the elephant man’s skeleton, I get this look like it’s too soon. Yes. It was too soon. To touch those little boys. On their genitals. I did listen to his music all fucking day though.

2. Transformers 2 Revenge of The Fallen is not actually as nonlinear or nonsensical as it’s made out to be, but it is basically seven major action sequences with various trailing plot points reaching desperately for each other to gap the void between them. It feels like it’s about four hours long. It’s smeared down with enough campy cheese and vaguely oily feeling racial stereotypes to make your brain feel like County Fair nachos when it finally rolls out of the theater. Also Megan Fox’s boobs got more screen time than any robot, Shia, or any character except for the throwaway “college roommate” who for some reason fills the screen for 45 fucking minutes. This should tell you how much fat could have been ripped out, but for some reason was not. I’d like to see a “real director’s cut” where somebody takes a talented director and has them re-cut it into an actual one hour and fifty minute summer action flick.

3. This summer is kinda bullshit, weather wise. But yesterday made me want to find a way to fuck the air.

4. GI Joe looks like it’s gonna be horrible. FYI.

5. I think there might be some dried semen on my face.

I guess that doesn’t really have much to do with pop culture. But it’s raw and real, people. Get in touch with it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality lately. My mom’s mom died about a month ago, leaving me with no living grandmothers, and a living grandfather whose relationship with me is largely based on gift cards to Barnes and Noble made out to “Aarronn” (when in doubt, double it). We’re a small family. Just me and my sister. My mom and my dad. I have an Uncle I don’t speak with, two cousins I added on MySpace and then went back to ignoring. But something about Grandma Mickey dying… it stuck with me. I can’t shake it.

I know she had a good life, I know she had fun. I know that all the way until the end, she was cognizant and sharp. We had constant arguments about politics, which usually ended in her telling me that she was going to staple my mouth shut. And I wonder what kind of old man I’ll be. I wonder if I’ll have her cloudy eyes and sit there with my menthol cigarette slowly burning it’s way to my hand. I wonder if I’ll be like my Grandfather, confused and alone. My life having left me with no answers, only questions and chaos. Or if I’ll be Grandma Walker. Terse and joyless. Living out my life like it’s a punishment for the crime of being born.

I know their stories. I know the tales we tell about them, anyways. I know the gist. I know that they were once young and they were in love and they fought in wars and made bombs and had children and lusted. But I wonder, if they had the chance to capture them, which moments they would take into the next life. I wonder if it’s a relief to be unburdened of memory. I wonder if Henry Walker ever looked at himself in a rear view mirror at 5am, sweaty and bleary eyed, surprised by where life has taken him. I wonder if Marguerite felt the shock of someone completely blowing away your preconceptions in one miraculous moment. I wonder if Mieko Kunitomo ever broke down into tears because it all became too much too soon.

I wonder, when I am old, what will I tell the young ones? Will I tell them the sanitized stories that I heard growing up? Or will my eyes twinkle, and my gut ripple, as I tell the one about the Hopi kachinas and the crystal meth, eyes unfocused, my unsteady words recreating that sunwashed stretch of Grand Avenue. The grandest days of my youth.