Football, and If you can’t write, edit

January 16, 2006 elvisLeave a comment

Well, as much as I tried to get myself writing yesterday, it wound up being mostly football and lethargy. But it was pretty good football, I forgot we’re in mid NFL playoffs. I have the advantage of not caring which teams win since my teams all sucked ass this year. So I’m choosing who to […]

Well, as much as I tried to get myself writing yesterday, it wound up being mostly football and lethargy. But it was pretty good football, I forgot we’re in mid NFL playoffs.

I have the advantage of not caring which teams win since my teams all sucked ass this year. So I’m choosing who to root for game by game.

My total for the weekend:

Broncos vs New England – didn’t watch but I would have rooted for Denver cause I like Jake Plummer. The 49ers fucked up royally when they let him slip away in the draft a few years back, and it’s finally showing.

Seahawks vs Redskins – easy, Seahawks all the way. They played a great game and I’m likin’ them for the superbowl.

Pittsburgh vs Indy – you know, I like Payton Manning and I like Tony Dungy, but Indy ain’t as great as people think, and Payton’s not the second coming of Joe Montana. He’s at the top of an incredibly weak league, and while he’s certainly the best QB playing right now, he’s very very beatable. I’m a Pittsburgh fan from way back, they’re my third team, and they beat the Colts pretty completely (despite a forth quarter comeback by indy). First time I’ve ever seen Manning look desperate. If Bettis can just keep running like he did this weekend (and doesn’t drop any more footballs), this team will be hard to stop.

Carolina vs Da Bears – who cares? I hate them both, but rooted for Da Bears because I hate Carolina more. Stupid cat teams.

So I’m likin’ a Pittsburgh vs Seattle superbowl. Carolina looked good against the bears but honestly I don’t think either team belonged in the playoffs that much, they’re both uneven. Denver might take Pittsburgh down but the way Pittsburgh shut down Indy, it’s hard to see them getting beaten right now.

And if I was a bettin’ man I’d bet on a good superbowl with Pittsburgh on top.

Now, watch me be completely wrong, which is usually what happens.

So when the football was all over, I tried to do something, but lethargy won out. So I tried to write, but THE BLOCK got me. So I decided to edit.

I’ve moved all my stories over from SatinSlippers to my own auxiliary writing blog (at least the few things that were up in public, but the formatting got goofed up so I’ve tended to point links to SS. I finally fixed that (mostly) so all my writing links are to my local stuff.

SatinSlippers used to be a pretty dynamic site but it’s wound down through neglect, so I figured I might as well host locally. My stories are still there for as long as it stays around, though.

I wound up doing minor editing, but if you find something fucked up in one of my stories, leave a comment and I’ll make corrections. One of these days I need to go back and do a hard and thorough edit on all of it but I always find that difficult, I start to re-write and that just bogs me down. My hope, though, is that by editing, I start to think in writing terms again. I have a couple germ ideas for short stories but I can’t seem to actually get my hands on a keyboard when the moments of inspiration strike.

Time’s the Revelator

January 15, 2006October 7, 2022 elvis6 Comments

Darling remember from when you come to me that I’m the pretender, I’m not what I’m supposed to be but who could know, lf I’m a traitor? time’s the revelator, revelator. –Gillian Welch, Revelator I wish I had an mp3 of that song so I could put it up for you to hear, […]

Darling remember from when you come to me
that I’m the pretender,
I’m not what I’m supposed to be
but who could know, lf I’m a traitor?
time’s the revelator, revelator.

–Gillian Welch, Revelator

I wish I had an mp3 of that song so I could put it up for you to hear, it’s beautiful. I only have a m4p version I got from the itunes store and they’re not sharable. I’d bitch about that but (looks at paycheck) it’s not in my best interest to do so.

Better, I wish I could put up an mp3 of my friend Ken’s version of it. Welch’s is pretty, but Ken’s, with backup by Heather Courtney and (hell, I guess her name is Lyndie Way, but I’m not sure about that). Ken’s is intense and passionate. A case where the song writer and the cover artist combine to make something wonderful that the songwriter alone doesn’t deliver.

Today marks two years of blogging for yours truly. And as with last year, I feel I should be saying something about it. I failed last year. But I have very very strong feelings about anniversaries, commemorations of dates and events. I remember these things, have marked them on myself with tattoos. I’m the one who says “You know, one year ago today, we met”. I already mentioned that this year marks 30 years since my first piercing. So these things matter to me.

In so many ways Welch’s lyrics, above, say more about my feelings here than anything I can come up with. I’m the pretender, I’m not what I’m supposed to be.

My long-time readers (um. both of them) know I started this to talk about writing, because I couldn’t think of anything else to blog about at the time. I had hoped, after writing Wanton earlier that year, to use this blog to help me hone my writing skill and harness my creativity.

Best Laid Plans and all that. In fact this blog has been something completely other than that. An ego monument, a place to express myself, an anchor around my neck, a listening ear in both good ways and bad. It’s gotten me some good friends, though in fact many of them came via orkut, or other sites like the erotica forum where I posted my novella. It’s in many ways helped me be more open about my feelings. It’s taught me some new technical skills, but it’s also given me a huge distraction and time suck.

I don’t know, in the end, if this is good for me, or bad. I flip-flop on that weekly, and as I’ve said, three or four times I’ve given it up and torn my blog down and said fuck blogging, it’s all over. I’ve written almost nothing since Wanton, only put up two stories (a silly piece about santa and a sex-dream story inspired by a long-ago celebrity crush). I spend more time in a state of writer’s block than I spend writing.

It’s been an intense two years. I’ve learned more about love and hurt the last two years than I think I ever knew in my life up ’til that point. In many ways these last two years have encompassed some of my highest highs and lowest lows, and the shock waves from all that will not dissipate for a long while yet. In many ways I found myself these last two years, or let myself be myself, stopped being what other people expected of me.

Maybe the pretender is the shell on the ground behind me. Or maybe I’m fooling myself again and what I’m doing is simply killing time and not doing anything.

In either case, this marks two years in my life where everything changed and yet everything is the same, and I’m the worse for the wear, with new scars inside and out, only some of them self-inflicted.

I feel like I should be proud or angry. Yet all I can manage is sad.

Time’s the revelator.

Too Much Texas

January 14, 2006 elvis8 Comments

Um. 48%? Wow. What’s wrong with me, man? I scored a 48% on the “How Texas are you?” Quizie! What about you? (Sorry, comments were broken for this entry (pointed out to me by Ray). Fixed now.)

Um.

48%?

Wow. What’s wrong with me, man?

I scored a 48% on the “How Texas are you?” Quizie! What about you?

(Sorry, comments were broken for this entry (pointed out to me by Ray). Fixed now.)

Home Alone

January 13, 2006 elvis3 Comments

Family are taking off on one of those quick weekends away with another school family (Who also have the dad-who-has-to-work issue) The kind you can do when you get things like MLK day off. Not like us workin’ stiffs. Which means I’m all by my lonesome this weekend. I’d like to picture the moms goin’ down to the strip club while the kids are sleeping, a kind of moms gone wild weekend, but I’m more thinking it’s going to be a fireside cocktails and ice cream weekend.

So my agenda:

In my imagination: Wine, women, song. Debauchery. The kind of weekend you half wish you could remember, and half wish you could forget. The sort of weekend when you wake up with a wedding ring you don’t remember getting, or half a set of handcuffs, or a tattoo on your face, or knife wounds across your abdomen, or in bed next to someone you’ve never seen before, who hopefully isn’t dead. The kind of weekend that leaves permanent scars and breaks hearts.

In my hopes: Maybe I’ll get some writing done. I’ll go the the gym and re-start my workout routine (I faltered over the holidays).

What it’ll really be like: Work (work-work. I have so damned much I need to finish). Blog work (Yeah, Hiromi, I’m gonna try and fix your little problem). Rent a couple movies, take down xmas lights, put up temporary fencing where the tree took my fence down. Do a lot of laundry. Clean my hot tub. Cooking for one. Porn. Try and find a book I actually feel like reading in my huge to-read shelf. I’ll stare at my computer for a while, trying to think of something to write, then blog something pointless instead and go watch Bones.

And you know, that doesn’t sound bad. Other than the take down xmas lights part, because I always say you only have to leave them up ’til june to call it up early.

In your eyes I see a thousand lives, where do you come from?

January 13, 2006 elvis7 Comments

In your eyes I see a thousand lives, Where do you come from, Where do you belong. –Dave Davies, Where Do You Come From I look at my logs all the time – because I’m that kinds of guy, part OCD, part detective, part complete geek – who likes to see the man behind […]

In your eyes I see a thousand lives,
Where do you come from,
Where do you belong.

–Dave Davies, Where Do You Come From

I look at my logs all the time – because I’m that kinds of guy, part OCD, part detective, part complete geek – who likes to see the man behind the curtain. The kinds of guy who needs to know how it all works.

Anyone with a sitemeter knows what I’m talkin’ about, though I also have urchin installed on the server, and run a couple other web-based counters and have in the past used tools like mint to track hits.

But whatever you look at, whatever slice and dice of the data you have, it’s still the same shit, who’s visiting, when, from where, and how did they get here?

There are several useful, interesting or amusing data points to be had from looking at web server logs.

The one that’s usually good for the most mirth is the google search string (and I use the term in the generic sense because we could be talking about hits from yahoo or msn or aolsearch or any one of a hundred other search pages). People search on the silliest, most amazing things, and someone, somewhere has to be collecting it all and will produce novels or art or poetry all based on such things. I look at my log now and see ‘wrist and had tattoos’, ‘dorothy parker’, ‘dirty stories’, ‘Everything up ’til the killing will be a gas’, and ‘pyro junkies’. And that’s just one sitemeter page. This can make me giggle any day.

But there are other things that are useful. I get to know certain hits by location. I know who’s likely to be getting me from illinois, from eugene oregon. A few from Austin. Certain key spots in Florida. Vancouver. A couple in town here, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Jose. Key users in europe. Couple buddies in New Mexico and Arizona.

I know who these are by the ISP and the location (not always the location you’d expect, my home IP shows up as coming from a totally different end of silicon valley than I actually live in, something about how the ISP has things configured). I know by (sometimes) browser type, OS. For most of my friends, I sorta know when you’ve visited. I know partly because you’re the ones who hit without a reference from a search engine, or sometimes because you show as referred from your own blog (clicking from your blogrolls).

The ones that I ponder over though, and the reason for this post, are the ones I see regularly whom I don’t know. I puzzle over certain entities. Someone who hits me from Sunnyvale CA with an ISP listed as inktomi.com. No idea who you are, but I see you regularly. Hits from San Francisco, or from San Jose. You’re not in my mental list of readers I know. Readers in New Zealand. Readers in Texas who are not the usual gang of blogger-freinds (People from Dallas or from College Station). Kent, Washington. Buffalo, New York. Blackpool, Lancaster (I want to say, how’s that count of holes coming, but no that’s blackburn).

It’s funny because I feel like I should know who’s reading. I get a lot of hits from some of the strangest places, google and other blogs I’m bloggrolled on, places where someone will link to some entry like my one on jessie combs, or on driving my jeep in a kilt, or my old ‘what’s fifty-six’ entry. Those I understand though. It’s the ones who are clearly regular readers, yet unknown that always makes me wonder.

Half-nekkid Piercings

January 12, 2006 elvis12 Comments

Let’s hear it for Half-Nekkid Thursday. My Right Nipple. You only get one nipple today because it’s half-nekkid, not wholly nekkid. You know, I was thinking about this earlier when I was talking to the very lovely and extremely talented chelsea girl, about when I got various tattoos and piercings. And I realize that the […]

Let’s hear it for Half-Nekkid Thursday.

My Right Nipple. You only get one nipple today because it’s half-nekkid, not wholly nekkid.

You know, I was thinking about this earlier when I was talking to the very lovely and extremely talented chelsea girl, about when I got various tattoos and piercings. And I realize that the first ear piercing I ever got is thirty years old this year. And thus, a bonus HNT pic to go with my right nipple – here’s my left ear.

I was fourteen when I got my ear pierced for the first time. Not that big a deal for today’s youth I guess, but this was in 1976. Only one boy I knew had his ear pierced, and he was a hippy kid who lived in a winnebago with his mom, a stoned-out hippy artist. I can’t recall the kid’s name or the mom’s name, but the winnebago was called “The elephant”.

So when I decided at fourteen that i really, really wanted my ear pierced (inspired in part by kirk douglas in 20,000 leagues under the sea, but more by a scene in Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz in which the young king has his ear pierced as part of a magical ritual to unlease his latent powers), it wasn’t easy to find a place to do it – this was before the days of piercing pagoda at your local mall. And when my mother (who did not understand my urge to punch a hole in my ear but went with me anyway) took me to a local jewelry shop, the creepy old lady who pierced my ear looked like she was just about ready to refuse. She’d never done a male ear and seemed to deeply disapprove of the whole idea. She charged for two piercings even though I only got one, and honestly I think her disapproval did more to win mom over to my side than anything else about the experience.

I’ve had seven more ear piercings since then, and still have a total of six including that first. I’ve pierced nipples, penis, scrotum, with varying degrees of success. I’ve pierced my ear to show someone it didn’t hurt, to commemorate a particularly memorable trip (my first trip to london), and sometimes just for the fuck of it. None of the piercings have really been planned, they’re all whim items that just sort of happen.

Sometimes you just have to poke a hole in yourself. And every once in a while, I meet someone who just understands that.

Deadringers, Gimmee

January 11, 2006 elvis8 Comments

Ok. Fine. I give in. Lust wins out every time with me. Which should not come as a great crashing surprise to anyone. I have a ring on order from Deadringer. Mark and Steve, the main men behind Deadringer, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. They don’t have a pic of exactly what I’m […]

Ok. Fine. I give in.

Lust wins out every time with me. Which should not come as a great crashing surprise to anyone.

I have a ring on order from Deadringer. Mark and Steve, the main men behind Deadringer, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

They don’t have a pic of exactly what I’m getting up on their site yet, but it’s basically a combination of the two rings pictured below. The ring itself is the classic skull (the one on the left), but with the ‘shadow finish’ from the super-high-end armageddon (The one on the right).

These rings are made custom, so the lead time was quoted at about two weeks for production, plus whatever it takes for shipping. These guys are way the fuck down in New Zealand, so this will have the distinction of being the best-traveled of my skull rings, at least until I myself get south of the equator again. My other two rings are made in the USA.

The thing I love about this particular ring is that it’s the most realistic skull ring I’ve ever seen, beating out even my clapton skull from Serious Silver. Steve Gillespie, the jeweler behind Deadringer, clearly sat down with a real skull, or at least an anatomically correct replica, and made a ring that re-created the shape almost exactly. I don’t think you’re ever going to find a better, more exact, real skull ring than this.

It’s wholly different animal than your classic rock ‘n roll skull ring, of which my favorite in the universe is the one made by my friend Tony Creed – my Elvis Lives skull. That’s a creature of rock n’ roll and horror comics, bikers and pirates, a thing born of artistic imagination.

The rock n’ roll skull ring has a vast range – most of it ugly, much of it stupid. The standouts though, Creed’s work and Crazy Pig, some of Bill Wall’s work, are a distillation of a Motorhead/biker aesthetic.

Different things. Different ends of an artistic spectrum. I love them both, the realistic skull and the rock ‘n roll skull. And I can’t wait to see this Deadringer piece.

Tree to Firewood in only minutes

January 11, 2006 elvis8 Comments

The tree butchers are here dismembering my fallen tree. A moment of silence. Plus chain-saws. (I can’t help it, whenever I think of a chain-saw I hear Ash’s voice saying “Tool Shed“) You know I’d gotten used to this monstrous fallen thing in my street. I kind of liked it. It gives my street corner […]

The tree butchers are here dismembering my fallen tree.

A moment of silence. Plus chain-saws.

(I can’t help it, whenever I think of a chain-saw I hear Ash’s voice saying “Tool Shed“)

You know I’d gotten used to this monstrous fallen thing in my street. I kind of liked it. It gives my street corner a primeval forest forest look. If you, you know, squint n’ shit. Maybe it’s more Prime Evil.

But anyway, it has to go, not least because it’s on my fence, which will need to be re-built, and because it’s half on a city street. And while my city may be your perfect corrupt, up-scale suburb, I’ll run outta bribe money way too soon to get the city to ignore this for long.

Ok, now who’s goin’ into the wood chipper? I have a few candidates. It’s not the same without snow, though.

More tree removal pictures are over on flickr

What I work on, can I have one?

January 10, 2006 elvis7 Comments

It takes a lot of sexy to make me lust for a computer. Now, lusting after the flesh and blood, well, you know about that. And lusting after certain inanimate or mechanical objects, sure. I mean, look at my obsession with skull rings, or something like the car from Supernatural. But computers – well, you […]

It takes a lot of sexy to make me lust for a computer.

Now, lusting after the flesh and blood, well, you know about that. And lusting after certain inanimate or mechanical objects, sure. I mean, look at my obsession with skull rings, or something like the car from Supernatural.

But computers – well, you know, I’ve never owned a computer. I have one, but it’s a tool for work and pleasure, it belongs to my employer, and that’s fine. I’ve always gotten by with what I can scrounge from work.

For the first time ever, I looked at this machine and said to myself (Self, I said), I want that.

The new Apple MacBook Pro:

This is the outcome of the super secret product I couldn’t talk about last summer. This is what my team have been working on – the intel based macs – since April. And it’s cool to see it come out, and even cooler to think, this thing we make, it’s good and I want it.

I Like To Move It Move It

January 9, 2006 elvis3 Comments

Moving day. We’re doing one of those pointless corporate re-shuffle where we all move from one office to another, many of us in the same bldg. I’ve been in my current job for almost six years now – a while, in my time line, only one job I’ve ever had (cisco) was longer and that […]

Moving day.

We’re doing one of those pointless corporate re-shuffle where we all move from one office to another, many of us in the same bldg.

I’ve been in my current job for almost six years now – a while, in my time line, only one job I’ve ever had (cisco) was longer and that was because stock chained me to the salt mine.

Most of the tech companies I’ve worked for move people from cube to cube and bldg to bldg all the time. Here at this fruit-flavored company it’s different. First in that I have a hard-walled office, a novelty, nearly a first in my career. Second, I’ve been in the same office for almost five years.

You get pretty settled in five years. You get from friont door to office to restroom to break room on auto-pilot. You can do it blind.

It’s easier when you move to a different building. You have to utterly break habits. Moving in the same building actually winds up being more disorienting. I moved up a floor and over about three offices, so the view out my window is almost the same, the office orientation is almost the same, still facing east over the santa clara valley.

I feel like I’m in the same office yet when I turn around and look out my door, I’m in the wrong place and I have a moment of utter twilight-zone confusion. And you know, I kind of like that feeling. It’s a flash of mental free-fall, all the connections cut loose.

This usually lasts a week but who knows, I’ve never been in the same office this long before.

Now I have to go look for my chair and my Sun keyboard and figure out where I packed my perl books. And then I have to figure out where the hell my co-workers wound up…

The Moronosphere

I'm an open book with well thumbed pages

Author: elvis