This is almost like blogging, without any of the work.

I dare any of you motherfuckers to find a more inspiring puppet video.



there is no bad mood that can't be solved with puppets.

oh, and I'm going to see the Wrens in two freakin weeks. I shit my pants in glee. Alright. Food. Now.

I'm learning

I woke up from my post work nap with dreams of iced drinks still in my head. So I rattled them loose and now am updating before I go in search of food. Huh. Monday night. I am on a not drinking kick for a little bit, a detox, which not only a) will save me money, but b) will make me stop waking up feeling like shit and wanting to kill everything and everyone. Laundry needs to be done, and I still have this pile of shit that I need to find a home for cluttering up my room. Honestly, this got out of hand months ago, and at this point I'm considering just pouring gasoline on the whole freakin thing and walking out, tossing my lit cigarette into the fumes as I turn away.

I had about eight plans die in midbirth last night, mostly due to the weather, but the improvised, last minute one stuck, and so I went over to Jamie's and watched tv with her, while we debated the pros and cons of actually eating food. This was infinitely better than going to a party where I knew no one and inevitably would have ended up alienating everyone there once the eighth or ninth bourbon glided down my gullet.

The laundry is in the machine. My shoes are on. I am going out to grab some food, and then I'll come home and put the laundry in the dryer, after which I'll lock myself in the room in order to actually try and finish some of these stories who have been lying around for weeks, sometimes months. I will not, as is my habit, crack a beer before starting. I will not, as is my habit, distract myself, or distract you, for that matter, because I have been doing far too much of that and you need to do things to, though it pains me to admit this, things more important than hanging out with me.

So anyway, off to find food for me. Wheres my playstation?

I'm Sorry for the Silence

Don't ask me why or how or what's happening. I don't know and I don't care. Just bring more drinks in the mean time and I can try and be impressive, at any rate. I'm tired, I'm running on empty, I'm running to the hospital. So long as by hospital you mean bar.



In a single night I have been described as scholar, gentleman, scoundrel, cad, card, flirt, fanatic, prick, asshole, sweetheart, the dictator of drunk, autocrat of alcohol, archbishop of booze. I am vast, I contain multitudes. This is all very well but its getting late and I'm getting tired and things (if you haven't noticed) are wildly beyond my control. I am pretentious, I am full of myself, I am reasonably assured of my own brilliance, I am quaking with self doubt. I am using alliteration and parallel structure. I am chopping my sentences and clauses up quick, so the whole affect should remind one of a beating drum, a heartbeat, a march. I'm marching to the close now and so I will let loose these rhetorical flourishes to let play the phrases so it all rushes together and what once was steady and rythmic becomes hurried, frenetic, the lines will blur together and the sentiments will whip and tear apart at the seams. I am losing meaning like it were water through a sieve, I am throwing in plenty of literary references; there's shakespeare here and some whitman and most assuredly, though it is well hid, there is some Thomas Wolfe, for those with the eyes for it. For the rest of you, you should have given up ages ago, this is nothing but masturbation without the release, it is material manipulation, these words nothing but signifiers without signified, misplaced signposts directing you nowhere but the house of Asterion, where every room looks alike and there is no ball of thread for you nor have you a bronze sword so surely you are one of the nine, but not the one. How's that for pretentious? How's that for overwhelming you with misdirection.

"I thought this was going to be one of those fun, but ultimately repetitive 'Zach drinks too much' posts," you object. If you've gotten this far, there is nothing left but to close and close well, but I can't close, and though coffee is for closers, on this, the morning after in a string of hungover morning afters, I'm breaking the rules, I'm gonna sip my coffee and be done.

I'm putting my sleepy shoulder to the wheel.

I feel like shit, am bored, and have to work in 8 hours. Which isn't really a problem except that it is, cuz I feel like shit. I need a vacation from my head for a couple of days.

Oh, and the premiership has officially opened, and guess what? My Hotspur is already making a bee-line for the bottom of the pack. Oh well, let's go Hotspurs! Tues. 3pm, vs. Sheffield United.

HEY DOUCHEBAG!

Am I excited about Shat? I'd better well damned be.

I need to get a new chain for my bike, as the old one split when I was coming home from work the other day . . . hopefully I won't let this become like the great tire fiasco of aught-five-aught-six; although I am feeling particularily lazy.

SO. Friday night I closed at 1369, which was vaguely aweful, given our astonishing policy of not actually kicking anyone out until a half hour after close, and also given the fact that the cafe belongs in the annals of places I've worked where the vacuum is the most obnoxious thing ever to operate. It seems that in any given workplace, there are only two types of vacuum available: those easy and comfortable to use (IE the plugs fit snugly, the extension cords long enough for the job at hand, the attachments not prone to falling off) that inevitably break twice a week, or complete shitshows (plugs fall out, pieces easily fall off, are reattached, fall off again, are easily clogged, and whose bags turn into goop that needs to be scooped out) which inevitably never break, and last years. 1369 falls into the latter category, making the 11:30 vacuuming feel like the most sisyphean thing since cleaning the knockbox. Anyway, so I got out of there and sped over to Courtside, missing Chris I, but thankfully, not Jamie. Jamie and I had a wonderful time, though she was a bit off her rocker, as evidenced by her own posting, and we stuck it out and gave scott a ride home, during which he repeatedly made me promise to take care of her, which I did to the best of my abilities, but not before being affectionatly called a douchebag out a 3rd story window at 2 in the morning.

as already blogged in this here recepticle, I love the word douche.

Anyway, I picked up a copy of a book called Conversations with Robert Penn Warren the other day at Mac&Moore's and have so far discovered that Warren speaks in almost the same way he writes. Some of these answers resonate as well as the best parts of AKM, like the spider with it's eyes glittering and fangs dripping, or the plonk and the frog jumping into the pool, with the ripples spreading out. For people unacquainted with All the King's Men, it is one of my favorites, and I highly suggest you get as copy and read it a bunch of times. From Conversations :

Take Jack Burden. I used a model, but he doesn't know it yet. I know him very well indeed. I even know that he doesn't know what I know about him. And that's knowing a man mighty well

It's the verbal play, the formulation, that is so striking . . . Anyway, enough geekery out of me, I should shower and eat something.

A Short Imagined Dialog.

Average Zach and Scott conversation:

S: Jamie is pretty hot
Z: I wouldn't say pretty hot, I'd say extremely hot.
S: Solar flare hot
Z: Hiroshima Hot
S: Hot enough to bake cookies
Z: or melt steel
S: or melt robots
Z: melt robots?
S: Can you imagine?
Z: I wouldn't be able to look away
S: Our retinas would scar
Z: We'd be blinded by the light
S: Have we gone too far?
Z: Not nearly yet
S: When did Beckett start writing our dialog?
Z: We could go Mamet?
S: . . .
Z: We could fucking go Mamet, motherfucker, you piece of shit.
S: Yes, we motherfucking could.

In other news

My mom just got back from Cali and Washington, where she was visiting friends from when she was a jesuit volunteer in Alaska. She was staying in Bellingham for a week, which is not only where her friends live (off the of the swank Chuckanut Dr.) But it is also the town my dad spent his teenage years in, after my grandfather moved the family out of Louisiana. And it also is the lower48 home of the Alaska Marine Highway, perhaps the coolest ferry system known to man. You can rent a cabin for the three day trip to Ketchikan, or you can grab a tent and pitch it on the deck. My dad and I did this 6 years ago, when we were heading up to Craig to work on an archeological dig, and it was one of the coolest things ever.
Shit like this is just there, all the time. Anyway, so this all comes up because my mom's trip reminded me how much I want to get back to Alaska. I really am yearning for a pint at Annabelle's Keg and Chowder House, with a big bowl of king crab bisque and fresh baked biscuits. Oh god yes. Meep, maybe next summer . . .

Infinite Rest

I'm totally flat fuckin broke. I scoured the room, upending pants and all sorts of items to find change today to buy some cigs. I was irritable. I was supposed to work today (I think) but I when I went in I was scheduled for tomorrow, not today, so I biked around cambridge, downtown, and saw Scott at his work. We chatted a bit, mostly about the irreplacable implacable Ms. Jamiepants, and how hot and awesome she is. Anyway, so I stopped back at my new work and grabbed a drink before biking home.

I work here now
And so far it is awesome. Anyway.

Here is some mental crack to make you hurt inside:



I hope it makes your eyes bleed.

Dude, I totally hope I didn't break teh internets with that post . . .

And then there was . . .

Georgia. We set off at ten on Sunday morning, hopes held trembling in our hands along with a double iced espresso, a large cup of coffee, and a vanilla double latte (Sean f-in loves that shit.) And headed out down the Mass Pike, soon to turn southwards, ever, ever southwards.

There were difficulties, yes, and the car shook if we went over eighty (the bike rack ruining our aerodynamics, our shimmies shook our confidences.) But we made it past new york two, up and over the tappen zee bridge and then into New Jersey. Fucking New Jersey, parking lot between NYC and Philly, the bane of any and every traveler. Once we hit the turnpike we were in this:

And that lasted for quite some time, I'm not sure, but at least eventually we made it out of the traffic and made our sweet way into the Richard Stockton Service area.

And oh what a rest it was. I got a call from 1369 telling me that I got the job, and then we continued to head south.

Now, in medias res, I'll explain a little about the adventure, and how it came to be. This is Sean:

Sean is one of my oldest and bestest friends. He is not Mao, nor is he any sort of famine-causing tyrant. He's something altogether worse. Hes a Grad student. In Classics. At UGA. As I learned that I had lost my job, Sean made a fortuitous query. He asked me to drive him to Georgia. And I agreed.

Getting back to our story, it wasn't long before we crossed the Delaware Bridge, put Baltimore and DC behind us, and made our torrid, pants-soaked way into the wilds of Virginia. It was about this time that Seans friend, er, Mary, called him, and asked him to make a slight detour. Where to? Saint-FUCKING-LOUIS. Anyway, we made it into North Carolina, but outside Charlotte,at 3:30 am we lost a tire. We called AAA, but we didn't know where the fuck we were, and when we gave them the street names of the intersection where we were layed up, they didn't know where the fuck we were either. I tried asking at a gas station, but for the life of me, couldn't understand what the fuck the girl behind the counter was saying. Anyway, we got out, got the car to a garage, and grabbed a room in a motel for the night, and proceeded to wonder why there weren't any hookers around. We'd have gone to the 24-hour strip joint down the road, but we didn't even realize it was there till the next morning.

Next morning we wake up, I grab a cup of coffee and go over to see how the car is doing. It's 9 oclock and the car won't be done till 11, so I head back to the motel, shower, grab some more coffee, make plans for breakfast and abandon them, and then the car is ready and we head off for Georgia. Time lost: 8 hours. Money lost: $170.

We make it through the rest of N. Carolina just fine, and then S. Carolina, which is the fireworks capital of the universe.
Literally every mile, on the mile, is an exit, a gas station, and a fireworks stand. Occasionally you'll be lucky enough to get a combination gas station, fireworks stand, porn store, topless bar, and pay showers, all in one, but for the most part, you get your gas and your fireworks, and maybe, if you're real lucky, you get a giant peach
Which is about the lamest fucking thing I can remember.

Anyway, we got to Georgia three and a half hours later, and took in what there was to take in, while setting up Sean in his new digs. We went to bars, played Ms. Pacman:

Got our fill of beer, and then malteds, passed out, woke up, got coffee, found alethea, went to a cool record store
And an even cooler semi-vegetarian restaurant
And then Alethea and I headed back. Along the way we met the fabled boyfriend of Mingen, and saw his apartment, and worried he might be a jackalope, those being common in such parts.

Before we knew it, we were back in MA, heading to the middle east, and having a rollicking good time.

Next episode: Watching Teanna Watch Jamie Watch Me

I'm off to Georgia!

"we are vagabonds
we travel without seatbelts on
we live this close to death"

Just in case anyone missed Sen. Stevens showing off his profound ignorance, we now have the techno version:




"The Interenet is not something you just dump something on! It's not a big truck! It's a Series of TUBES!"

ganked from the Dixie Flatline

this is your daily dose of misery!


anyway, fun night, even if Jamie was tired and "unfun" (which she wasn't) and I was terribly glad that te managed to destroy the shackles binding her to her film and flit freely out for the evening, Scott's girlfriend makes the world more interesting.

Anywho, so today will be spent prepping the car for my great adventure, and I may run down to the rents house to borrow a digi-camera for the purposes of recording for posterity my great mistake.

I pass posting duties onto Scott, Te, and others . . .


And with that, I'll give you this:

For Scott:





and then, for Jamie:



which reminds me, while watching the goonies last night, I kept thinking that the girl with glasses looks like someone else from the eighties, and today I remembered:


Yay Real Genius! Yay Goonies!

Bored.


queens of the douchebag
Green Douche
The Douchendents
The Douche Kennedys
The Rolling Douches
KC and the Douchebag Band
Sonic Douche
The Douchebag Dolls
The Douchemberists
Doucheplay
R.E.Douche.
The Douche Pistols
The Douchebag Service
The Douchebag5
Elvis Doucheley
Douchebag Threat
The ReDouchements
Neutral Douche Motel
Devo