an occasional feature
Today
I went to the dentist and found, much to my suprise, that it's
not the drilling and filling I mind [I stood up for myself and asked for
fillings w/o mercury which they gave me and I got to sit under the
special composite-fixing zap gun instead of having my head filled with
mercury]. Actually, I just mind being at the hands of people
who aren't as careful about how they treat my mouth as I am. I got hit
in the face not once but twice by a well-meaning dental student
who couldn't get a clamp on right. After the novocain wore off, I began
to have a nice day.
We went bowling and Jack got a historic four strikes in a row!
Phil and I have been honing our Andy Rooney impersonations, which is getting a bit annoying to some of our friends and loved ones, but we don't really care. It's too much fun. So today's installment of Jack-as-guest-journalist
comes from an email I got from Phil:
Did you ever think about SUSHI? I mean, what is this SUSHI? It's hard to say, for one. SUSHI. SUSHI.
And another thing, don't you think fish tastes better when it's COOKED? When I was a kid, we caught fish, then we COOKED IT. And that rice. It gets all over your fingers. It's hard to eat. And what about chopsticks? What's wrong with a fork? I like forks. You only need ONE hand with a fork....
Last night I had a very vivid dream -- Jack and I both slept poorly last night, maybe it was the vegetarian food... I had just gotten a job in a high-class
Jewish cemetary that was right next to a
prison. The cemetary was very expensive and also very high prestige and possibly had some
sort of mystic properties. It was so important for people to make it in to this cemetary that people
from the prison who had died and couldn't afford to be buried there had their skulls thrown over the walls into the cemetary. Needless to say the ground were littered with convict skulls. My job was to re-bury the skulls and I was digging deep holes to accomodate the many skulls.
As I dug, I kept coming across the clothing that people had been buried in and my biggest fear was that I would accidentally dig up a corpse [apparently the skulls all over the place didn't shake me].
Jack and I also saw the movie 400 Blows at the Grand Illusion movie theater [we won free tickets]. I wonder if my attention span is getting shorted or if this film just had some really long scenes...
I always write these about one day late, but this time it's actually the day I'm writing it that everything happened [except that it's after midnight].
I ate vegetarian food for dinner tonight. I even cooked some! Ken came over and he and I whipped up some sweet-potato salad, onion and potato soup and couscous.
Jack got to sit in the living room and wait to be fed, for once. The food was great, I've got to rethink all my crazy meat-eating
Earlier in the day, I tried to organize my photo collection. I bought a new organizer. Piece of cake, right? I have gotten as far as puttin gall my photos into stacks labeled me, friends &
family, places I've lived, and other. Here's a sample from the Other pile...
Today we went out to the Kismet cafe where Jack read two of his stories. In attendance were Lou, Kim, Shannon, Joe, Joe, Ken, Paul, Anne, Kevin, Lesley, Phil, Barry and Molly. We packed the house, ate some food, listened to some other poets and headed out to a bar where some moron tried to pick a fight with Jack and Barry because he hadn't signed up to play pool. Every time we leave our microcosm we get into trouble...
Went to bed last night and the [oil burning] furnace was acting strangely and by morning it had crapped out altogether leaving our apartment quite chilly indeed. Seems our oil delivery guys had missed our last oil delivery [duh!] and we'd just plum ran out. However, unlike other pseudo-service-oriented organizations that I know of, they dealt with our problem immediately -- even being suprised when we just expected to have to wait two days [like the four days we waited for our phone to get repaired] to get any heat.
So we're warm and toasty again, a feeling made better by the fact that I finally got paid by the dickheads who have owed me money for work I did last January.
Guest journal-ist: Jack Miller... writing from our international bureau, here in Ballard. This is the first of what will be my weekly installment - seeing as I'm a pretty large part of Jessamyn's life, not to mention an immodest loud-mouth, I've been given this weekly venue to express my hopes, fears, and well, mostly memories, as part of this on-going project to document things at the Odd Fellows Hall, Ballard 170.
Lately, I've been reading my stories at open mike nights around Seattle, most recently at the LUX Coffee Bar (they don't serve drip, which is what makes it a "bar" instead of a "cafe"). I read The Friday Night Game, one of my new pieces in what is coming to be my (sub-)genre of choice, White Guy Angst. I'm featuring it this week on JACK Mag, the e-zine format thing which I'm using to present my writings to el Web (I just found out there's an actual print jack Magazine (all lowercase, unlike mine which is all upper), which I'm actually going to try to write for). So that's mostly what I've been doing lately: writing and drinking coffee and plotting to take over the world (so that I can turn it over to Jessamyn, who is the one that should really be running the show).
And, oh yeah, I'm also starting a virtual seminar on Nietzsche, which is what I spent most of my day working on (graphics, coding, misc. fucking around, that sort of thing). But my time is up, so check it out if you're interested... Until next week, my lovely, and happy Webbing.
This whole week will be in retrospect since our phone has been broken upwards of four days and we were on vacation for four days before that. We were thinking about bringing our computer with us to Las Vegas, but we decided that in order to really get a vacation, we'd have to leave the damned thing home.
High points of today were getting the phone fixed, swimming around in an indoor/outdoor heated pool with a view of Puget Sound and sitting around with my honey for a relaxing evening at home. Dull enough. Oh yeah, and I got my ass kicked at Scrabble
Got up at crack-thirty to get to the plane. Got to Vegas around lunchtime, funbook in hand. Arrived at the Fitzgeralds to find that not only didn't it have a health club as advertised but we had to sign a waiver agreeing that we knew there was going to be construction in the hotel from 6 am [!] to 9 pm.Ate at Subway which was one of our most expensive meals [in relation to food consumed] of the trip.
We hopped a
free shuttle bus to Sam's
Town, an off-the-beaten-track Casino and RV
Park which had a kick ass bowling alley [56 lanes!]and a video arcade with some great pinball machines. This
place reminded me more of Wall Drug than anything else I'd seen in
Vegas.
We ate at the buffet there and gave away our second two-for-one coupon to the couple ahead of us in line who gave us three dollars for it. We ate fried chicken, kielbasa, mac & cheese, rice pilaf, mashed potatoes, diet Pepsi, roast turkey, grapes, canteloupe, dried bananas, canned pears, rice crispie treats, almond fudge. peanut brittle, dinner rolls and watermelon.
Saw Paris is Burning tonight and loved it. This movie has one of the shortest entries in the Internet Movie Database that I have seen. Jack wants me to note that he is doing the dishes. I will, he is.
My New Year's Resolution, if I were to have one, would be to keep better track of what the heck was going on in my life 1) so I could remember myself and 2) so I would have something to tell the jillions of people that ask me what's been going on lately. Ergo this piece.
How much easier to hand out a URL than launch into a lengthy explanation! This way my mother can be rest assured that I haven't drowned and Jack and I will have something to do with all the Quick Cam photos we take [none today cuz I haven't worked out the bugs with my new printer, I know, cry me a river...]
Today was the 1st monthly Rent is Theft party of 1997. In attendance were Billy and Jenny, Phil and Leslie, Kathleen, Scott, Joe, Joseph, Lou and Ellen, Anne and Kevin, Casey and TJ, Tom, Sally, Larry,Traci and Paul, Emily and Hampton, me and Jack, Bob and Liz, Deb, Colin and Eric, and Amy.
We had eggs benedict, waffles, juice, bacon, muffins, bagels, Brie, fruit etc. etc. etc. Tasty! And folks stayed to clean up! I go back to work tomorrow after almost two weeks off...
