I keep figuring I’ll get some time, soon, to get progress on blog entries.

And now, I’m starting to think that’s not true and i’ll never have anything to say ever again.

I’ve got these entries started on movies, teevee shows (and why 24 went from best to worst between seasons two and three). On books and the new rings I just got from the brilliant Julian Lamb that I need to review. On tattoos (wanted, gotten), on guitars and my desire to start taking lessons again (so that I will have an excuse to buy a new guitar).

Seems like I ain’t gonna get that time i keep thinking I’ll have, not in the near future. Today i managed to grab an hour sitting in a bar reading a greg rucka novel and and sipping a guiness, and it felt, for a little while there, like i was on vacation, just having time utterly to myself. All too soon though my phone rang and it was time to go pick up my daughter.

On the other hand, I’m making serious progress on a blog template i’m co-designing with another blogger, so it’s not like it’s all work and no play (because i’m geek enough to find that entertaining). So it’s not like my entire output of energy is being sucked down a black hole. Not every ounce of it, anyway.

Pleasure in the small things, I keep thinking, and eventually this gets better. I’m hoping.

Right?

Let’s pretend it’s my birthday.

And let’s pretend you’re all going to get together and buy me these.

That store was right across from my hotel in hollywood last weekend, but somehow I never got over there while they were open. And maybe that’s a good thing, for my wallet’s sake.

I posted something last night that was a puddle-deep wallow in self-pity. The kinda shit that makes me want to bitch-slap myself.

It makes me angry, you know, when I feel like that. I get angry with my own inability to express myself verbally, by inability to just spit out what bothers me.

So I go mute – and the muteness makes me angrier. I’m angry and want to be left alone, when what i need is contact; I isolate myself from the treatment I need.

It becomes a cycle, a spiral, and the only things I can think to get me the fuck out of it require that I reach out.

Even now I’m thinking, fuck this, I want to delete it, I’m just fucking whining.

I’m in that teeth-griding state of low-grade irritation; I’m looking for someone to hit, metaphorically. I need to take the slow-boil of rage I’ve had sitting behind my eyes, in my neck and shoulders, and point it at something.

How many times have a written this same fucking entry? This is why I think I should give up blogging.

Read more “puddle-deep wallow in self-pity”

I’m back at that point where people are asking me if I’m mad at them, wondering why I don’t write.

I don’t fucking know. Like I said recently, sometimes the shark gets you.

I can’t seen to communicate at all – I’m sittin’ here alone this eve – family gone again for a short trip – and feeling like unplugging phones and shutting down my internet connection and just drinking myself stupid, wishing I had some sorta goofballs that’d knock me into dreamland for a good day and a half.

Maybe not blogging is the new blogging.

It’s been hotter than hell the last few days here in northern CA. The kind of days where I don’t feel like being anywhere near a computer.

Not just hot for here – hot for anywhere, anywhere that’s not AZ or NM or some death-dry desert.

It’s the kind of hot we almost never her here – when it doesn’t cool at night, when the house is as hot in the morning as it was the night before.

The kind of hot that blows out transformers and causes rolling blackouts. Today, we’re not allowed to turn on our office lights at work, and if it gets worse, they’ll start shutting down less-essential systems in order to keep vital network and data systems on line.

It’s the kind of heat where i think about putting the top back on my Jeep; the gearshift knob (an 8 ball) was literally so hot it hurt my hand to shift gears, the steering wheel was uncomfortable to touch.

Even a swimming pool doesn’t help – when the pool is 95 degrees and one can over-heat in the water.

I like the heat, usually. I like to sweat, to feel the hot air on my skin, the sun on my shoulders. But not like this. I need more tropical in my tropical heat; island breeze, tropical rain.

I’m not a desert creature. No bone-dry air and smog. I need wind and sea with my heat.

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Starting tomorrow, I’m alone for the week, family off to southern CA. I have the house to myself, and as usual, I look forward to my few days of silent, empty house.

I always hope I’ll write; though more often, I wind up simply working, and then enjoying the peace and silence of a house with no kids, watching movies I’ve been saving. Having the house empty winds up almost a vacation. I usually make plans for things I’ll do; dinners, or strip clubs, or movies I’ll go see by myself, or things I’ll cook or projects I’ll finish. And almost always, it winds up not happening. The pleasure of solitude wins out, and I spend by night or two or three simply decompressing. Doing nothing at all.

This time? We’ll see.

It’s hotter than hell, I still have not even caught up on all my email accumulation from last week’s vacation, I’ve got server issues at work and server issues here on the m’sphere (teach me to go fucking with unix groups without knowing what I’m doing). I’m havin’ a fucked up allergy attack from this damned weather, and I managed to break my sprinkler controller last weekend when I decided I should move it.

And did I mention that it’s hotter than hell?

All this adds up to not feeling at all like being in front of a computer, for work or play or creativity. So blogging’s gone by the wayside for a bit.

I need another vacation already.

On the bright side, I finally got my motorcycle out of the garage, cleaned, batter charged, and am riding again. It’s been months since I’ve ridden, and it feels really good, apart from the heat (see above.) I gotta not let it go so long next time. If it gets cooler, I’m thinkin’ I need to take off for the coast and just keep on ridin’ one of these days…

But not today. Because, you know, it’s hotter than hell.

There is something so bizzarly sweet/funny about this.

This is a message I found on my voice mail. I edited it down – chopping out some identifying things like phone numbers and locations, and chopping about four and a half minutes of dead air out of it. It’s still six and a half minutes long though.

One of the many things that are annoying about vonage is that it sometimes maintains a persistent connection even after you hang up. So when someone calls me, and then calls me again, vonage may maintain the same connection and treat it as a single call.

That seems to be what happened here. This is several calls strung together but it’s all a single call on my end, in one unbroken voice mail message.

So here’s the story, in case you don’t wanna sit through six and a half minutes. A little girl, attempting to call her friend or her friend’s mom from pre-school, because she wants a play-date. She’s sulky and whiney and won’t give up. She wants that play date. Her pre-school teacher can’t talk her out of it, her mom can’t talk her out if it. She’s calling from the pre-school’s phone, and thinks she has her friend’s mom’s phone.

Clearly, she has a wrong number, but that ain’t stopping her either.

The best part is toward the end, at about the four and a half minute mark or a bit after, when she starts to leave this incredibly sweet message fro her friend, I love you, I’ll do that forever, and I’ll never forget that, and then starts to ramble, and then starts to grumble at some friend and ends with “…I think I have a splinter…”

I have no idea why this makes me giggle so much, but something about it is just deeply amusing in a ‘found’ sort of way.

Click here to play (it’s a .wav file).

(props to GregggggggPTX for settin’ me up with a decent sound editor, Audacity. It got the job done.)

Sometimes you don’t know how fucking tired you are until you get un-tired.

I’ve felt like shit since last thursday; had one of those days where i made a plan for something and organized my whole day around it, and then it went off track through no fault of my own. But it set my head up in a bad place. And then the next day I hacked a hunk outta my finger, then had a totally shitty weekend, with a lot of time working, and then this week it’s just been one thing after another.

Finally, yesterday, i went outside, got away from work on a beautiful day and had lunch, and just sort of got my head clear a little bit.

And then last night, I crashed out and slept, and slept, and slept. I think I slept ten hours or more, where I usually tend to sleep less than six.

I feel a whole hell of a lot better today that I have in a week. I dunno how much of that’s just the sleep (I suspect a lot), and how much is just getting outside a little, getting work out of my head for a couple hours. I dunno how much of it’s just the feeling of the emotional load being a little lighter.

Whatever it is, I no longer feel quite as much like doing bad harm to myself or someone else (though, you know, good harm always has strong therapeutic value.)

Whatever it is, I’ve been listening to some good songs a friend sent me, and daydreaming about tattoos and flowers and sunshine, and meanwhile actually getting a lot of work done.

And you know, the gash on my finger even healed up.

Random thoughts since I can’t make sense of much today.

The cut on my left index finger still hurts. Man, I did a number on this. But I don’t think I can blame it for my lousy typing anymore.

The Sharks are up two-zero over the edmonton oilers. Don’t tell me the strike killed hockey; not when the shark tank is sold out every game and generally considered the loudest arena in the NHL. What strike? Hockey’s back, and my team are rippin’ it up. I smell stanley cup.

I need to write something. I desperately need to write. I can’t seem to get anything to come out when I try.

I love 24. There, I said it. I don’t care how many plot holes it has, how implausible the plots, how nonsensical the dialog, how purely wrong some of the techno-jargon. It’s the best fucking thing on teevee. Jack Bauer is the hero’s hero. I don’t know how they do it, how they maintain this quality of breathless intensity, but it’s fuckin’ brilliant.

There’s a new Tool album out. I dunno about the music, but the packaging is amazing. This is one to buy on CD, even if you’re a downloader.

I’m tired of waking up feeling depressed. This is getting kind of old.

Why is no one saying – this is what Big Love is based on. The press hasn’t seemed to make a peep about it. And I must say, I don’t know why, but I love Big Love. And it’s not just because I got to see Chloë Sevigny riding on Bill Paxton last week. As much as I’d like to pose her that way on me, there’s just something so involving about this show.

I just got Trica Allen’s new book, and it’s fabulous. If you care at all about polynesian tattooing, it’s a must-have.

I’m reading Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs. This is the series Bones is based on. And let me say, 1) The show is much better than the book (so far), and 2) my god, this woman loves to fill her books with irrelevant personal detail about the characters. The forensic, technical stuff’s great, but who fucking cares about anything thing not related to that? Yet there are pages and pages and pages of it. I’m just hoping this gets better, cause the good parts are really interesting.

I’m thinking about sailboats again. *Sigh*.

And on yet another teevee note – who doesn’t love Supernatural? After 24, it’s my favorite show of the year, and as with Big Love, it’s hard to say why. It’s not that great, not that well written, not that fantastically well acted. Yet it all comes together perfectly, just the right amount of camp, great looking cast, all the right borrowings from westerns, quest stories, detective shows, X-files, Buffy, and Kolchak, The Night Stalker. And it’s got the best damned soundtrack of seventies rock, and the coolest car. The season just ended, but pick it up in re-runs or look too DVD (Soon, I hope). It rules, but you have to just let it be what it is and not expect too much in any one area. Enjoy it’s rich, campy goodness.

I’m having the devil’s own time getting any work done this week. I have deadlines on stuff and I’m behind on everything and yet my head’s oh-so-full of non-work shit. Other people’s problems, my own problems, people I want to help, see, talk to. The desire to be outside instead of at a desk. Tattoos. I need to get shit done and I can’t.

And I’m writing this when I should be getting ready for work.