Yeah, that definately happened.

I'm not exactly sure but I think me and Amanda broke up last night.

Top Ten Limericks About Saddam's Mustache
#7
"Dad's mustache exceeds any other!"
Cried young Uday to Qusay, his brother
"It will always be there
Because thick facial hair
Is the one trait he shared with his mother."

First day of school

6th Grade Jean shorts to my calves. Black high tops and scrunchy socks that almost make it to the cuff. White Niketown t-shirt. A fake leather drawstring backpack I bought at CVS which anyone else would call a purse.

7th Grade Shaved sides with a pink ponytail on top, like a party-guy's coonskin cap. Bright red tie-dyed Greatful Dead shirt. Looking tough. Shit's changed. I'm essentially saying "I smoke pot now." One of the bussed-in-from-Hartford girls sees me as I walked by her, "Ohmygawawwed, lookit Brendan." This is exactly what I wanted, but she can't know that so I turned to her, sneered, "What's up witchyoo?

9th Grade Big blue Jnco jeans, stout navyblue etnies skate shoes, blue polyester shirt, blue suspenders over a clean wifebeater but under my shirt. This is me. I'm new I'm tough I hang out with older girls. I'm a fucking vegetarian. Kid behind me in my math-for-the-dumbass-class asks if I'm wearing a bra.

Freshman year of college Black t-shirt from City Lights bookstore in San Fransisco. Bronze arms from surfing in San Diego. Greased Hair from Memphis. Sandals from Virginia. Workpants also from somewhere. Look at me. I've been to places. I've had jobs. A person who will later be my friend and roomate comments to his mother that that boy is wearing janitor pants.

"Yaw don't want no bacon with your eggs?"

And just like that I am back in Ohio.

Number four I know you've heard this before: Never get high on your own supply.

That has been stuck in my head all day.

Brendan's at work. He wanted me to post soemthing funny in his absence- something about starting a petition for him to get rid of his scooter. I figure if I wanted people to know how I feel about Brendan's possessions I'd start my own damn blog.

1) My fucking scooter just died on the way home from work and almost killed me. I went to shift into second and it went to first and locked up.

2) Tomorrow is my last night of work at Salsa's Mexican Restaurant which means that the day after tomorrow is my first day in my apartment at Kenyon. This will be the first time since England that I won't be living with Amanda. Strange to think of life in a single bed, life where I do not check wet laudry for braziers before putting it in the dryer. I have a single which means that I can do things at night without worrying about bothering others: film-viewing, reading in bed, typing this weblog. I recall doing these things in England, however it was horribly depressing because I had no money, friends, job, or work ever.

I currently have a houseful of visitors. If everyone goes somewhere, it takes three cars. Among them is Amanda's friend's Jamaican boyfriend, who is now my savior. I was sick at work all morning and when I came home he made me "Mah graymas med'sin."

Ingredients:

"one 'ole laymon (squeezed)

uhney, las ah uhney, frahm de beez, y'knew

strahng rahm, lahk Bacardi (two parts)."

As a self-conscious white kid from the Connecticut suburbs, I both beleived in the black man's cure and am not fully sure I understood a fucking word he said. It knocked the shit out of me. I took it at 12:30 and I just woke up in time to go back to work at five.

Jon

Mike

Raizin

I'm adding any new self portraits today for the second round of The Self Aggrandizement Concept. Any more?

1) Today is Amanda's 22nd Birthday. We're having an over-the-hill-themed party. Give'er a call: 302-537-7991

2) I've spent most of her birthday on the phone with AAA trying to get my scooter towed to the hardware store. You have no idea how difficult it is to find someone to do this.

Things I have recently purchased to sedate me when I return to school for the year:

One DVD copy of the horror movie Bones Staring Snoop Doggy Dogg

One DVD copy of the Woody Allen film What's Up Tiger Lilly? (which I shall preserve only for the joke where two Japanese actor's voices are dubbed over and the man says to the woman "Ooooh, an oriental.")

One pound Dunkin Donuts Coffee (unavailable in Ohio)

One VHS tape, on which I have recorded the first twelve color episodes of I Dream Of Jeannie

One complete carberator overhall for my scooter. (Tomorrow I'm having it towed to the hardware store.)

One copy of Ten Little Indians the new Sherman Alexie stories collection.

One surf-themed night light for my forthcoming single.

One womens' surf shirt that looks heterosexual on me.

It used to be that I left for school (which I called: "Going into the bunker.") and brought with me supplied that I could not find in Ohio: records, curry, vegetarian protein sources, etc. Now I pack as if I'm going on vacation.

A look at today in numbers:
Seven days left until I go to school and leave my free beach house.
Six shifts left at Salsa's Mexican Restaurant
Five solid beach days to go
Four section-lets left to finish in my novel project.
Three bottles of Sam Adam's Summer Brew (novelty gift from brother's visit) left in fridge.
Two days until Amanda's twenty-second birthday
One year left at Kenyon College, at which time the remaining items on the list will become socially unnacceptable.

The beach condos down here all lost power last night. People came in to my restaurant desprate and confused. It never occured to them that a storm could cause a power outage, and everyone wondered: "How come it took so long for that New York blackout to hit here?"

Since I have less than two weeks left here on the beach, life had become extremely nice here. Customers no longer expect great service. (I made more cash-money on sunday than I did the week before combined). And when I was at the beach today I saw a dolphin do some crazy sea-world shit right in front of me. I mean like a completely-out-of-the-water back flip.

On an unrelated note, here's the soundtrack for today:

Spoon- The Way We Get By.

There's never a bad time to talk about Lorenzo Lamas. There's a new website called hollywoodiscalling.com where, for only $19.95 you can pay an obscure, washed up celebrity to call someone for fifteen seconds and wish them Happy Birthday, or congratulations on their promotion. The telephone callers are: Lorenzo Lamas (Renegade), Reginald Ballard (Martin), Mitch Ryder (Of the Detroit Wheels), and Lou Ferrigno (Original Hulk movie).

The creators of this website will make a shitload of money, only because of Indie Rock culture. This has nothing to do with music. But that's how indie kids work: accepted obscurity. Choose anything by genre and name the top ten most well known brands, and the indie selection will be number eight (in cheap beer, for example, it's Pabst.)

Somehow I've always beleived that if you pay attention, you won't end up like people on TV. Television breaks down every stage of life into stimuli and responses. When people do things that are universally unacceptable on television, it boggles me. Don't you watch?

Last Thanksgiving: My uncle turns to my older brother and his girlfriend and asks, appropo to nothing, "So Jay, when are you gonna make an honest woman out of Julie?" (ok, that was the only example I can think of.)

My parents are visiting me in Deleware right now and we keep getting into situations that annoy me, mostly because I find them avoidable. They find it necessary to comment on my lane-changes and stopping times and I feel like there are more interesting things to talk about.

The new Audry Tautou movie"He Loves Me...He Loves Me Not..." comes out today on DVD. See it. I saw it months ago when I ran away to Bard and to New York and to civilization. It's a sad reminder that I am actually looking forward to going back to Ohio.

Also. See this scene? It is apparently totally normal for genders to wash their hands in the same bathroom. Also, it's shot in Bordeaux. A city I've never heard of, but where I am planning to spend Christmas/my life.

There's an article in this month's Esquire about a girl who was murdered at my school. It's a very strange story that no one really talks about. The only time it comes up is when someone mentions that their going to "The Cove" for food or drink. That's the cutesy-poo name for "The Pirates Cove" a restaurant that would no doubt see a few more dollars this year thanks to Johnny Depp. That would be, except the school bought the place and renamed it "The Gambier Grille" after one of the cooks killed one of the waitresses. She was a senior and she disappeared right after I got there. The article is written by a guy a year older than her who makes two creepy references to hooking up with her.

No one ever says they're going to "The Grille." It was kind of quiet around there for a year or two. Except, it's the only bar in town. And since drinking is an age-issue, older students have always initiated younger ones at the Cove and the name lives on. Our school is also strangely full of ghost stories. Pretty much one in every building, even the newer ones. There's always a fire or an elevator door that openned but there was no elevator inside, that kind of thing.

But like I said, no one ever talks about it. We just know she dissappeared in December, subaru and all, and she turned up that spring in a trailer. There was talk of single bullet shots and being rolled up in carpets, but nothing much else. The opening shot in the magazine is of the blood trail leading from a bullet hole in the floor and out of the room.

Here is a picture of a fire that originated most of the stories.

Ok, so this is the idea, here's and old one of mine. So far Samm the first to send me a submission for the YLTLS Self-Agrandizement Concept. (Not exactly a contest, old fans of The State should note.)

It would be great if everyone could make theirs as pretentious as possible. It's due on the 15th for a post on the 16th.

Tonight I am burning my first CD. That is, for the first time since I bought the computer three years ago, I am taking music I already have and putting it somewhere else. This makes me sound like a complete music-industry whore. My girlfriend's mother gave me her old CD burner and I immediately realized that there are certain songs I need to listen to in my car. (I have a CD player in my car that plays MP3s. I don't want to talk about it.)

This means I finally have a road home for: The Kinks- sometimes you really do got me. Biggie- Cause girls talk to us and wanna do us, screw us (who us?) And Dr. Dre 2001 the best sequal since Waynes World II.

Plus now I can make CDs for people of Electrelane, who I think is the best fucking synth-based, all-girl, instrumental band to come out of seaside England in over two years. This song for example, is spectacular.

Notes to future self.

1) Amanda left to go home and get things for school. This is a test. What did you do with yourself? Did you rely on your own body to tell you what to do? Amanda isn't bossy. Just regular. A good metronome of when to do things. So admit it. When your friends left last night at 1:45, you watched a DVD (Quadrophenia, The Who's other rock opera. fucking fantastic), eschewed novel work, and eventually got in bed to read until you went to sleep. Then you noticed the sun coming up. When you woke up today at 1:50, you went to the movies (bought a ticket for Bad Boys II because you liked the first one when you were 13, instead saw Johnny English and American Wedding, which were both terrible with few moments. Why do you do that? Why do you insist on watching every movie that calls itself comedy?)

2) Awkward exchange at The Big Easy last night between girl I was speaking with and guy who works there.

"I just can't stop thinking about how beautiful you are."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. You're so beautiful. You have the nicest long brown hair." (Begins staring at her crossed legs.)

"Mhph."

The point is. What are bars? How do people meet there? My parents met in a bar. I owe my existance to alcohol and a very similar exchange. But what the fuck?

Nerd Alert:

Being something of a recovering dumbfuck, I find it very satisfying to finish a book, particularly if it is a large one. One where I contemplate death and middle agedness when it occurs to me that I am holding more in my left hand than right.

I finally finished "White Teeth" By Zadie Smith. Don't listen to Peter. It's fucking phenomenal.

I also just moments ago reached the final page of "My Father's Footsteps" By Colin MacEnroe. It was a selection that I simultaneously looked forward to and dreaded, because I thought it would be unbearably terrible. He writes about personal things the way an insecure person would: making repeated jokes, often without context or warrent, for fear that he will lose his reader. Ben and I appeared on his radio show oh so many years ago when we were important. And every now and then we are mentioned, usually as somekind of punchline whenever football or our leafy suburb is name-dropped. I think I liked it mostly because of how it got at the question of how to trace a family that talks about everything and nothing at the same time (see below).

The point is: that I need a new book to read. A good one. Clever is welcome.

More Irish shit.

I come from the kind of family that calls itself Irish. I call myself this too, and enjoy it. But it's always been a question. At what point will we stop? Everyone I know from the south who had family in the civil war also has no idea what country they've come from. My FOTB family goes like this: my mother's grandmother--a fucking loon, an adult-diaper-on-the-head nutcase, her uncle who died in the thirties. On my father's side is a four generation line of males who died before their children made babies.

Therefore I have no connection whatsoever, except for things like this...

Today's New York Time's article.

"Is the Irish mania for keeping things in the family explicable only by colonization, by poverty, by the prevalence of alcoholism? I'm not a good enough historian to trace the causes. But I do know this: one of the mistakes that people make about the Irish is to confuse their volubility with a sharing of information; the Irish believe that language is at least as much ornament as telegrapher, and one can be astonished at how many words one has heard at an Irish gathering without having learned the slightest thing about the speakers' lives."

Yesterday I went to the south, to watch the annual Chincoteague Island Pony Swim. I like the south because whenever I go anywhere I am completely convinced that America doesn't exist. For example, this summer I've moved to Deleware from Ohio, a journey of the size of the gap that separates Italy and Iraq. But everyone sounds exactly the same when they talk.

But I couldn't understand a fucking word on the above Island in Virginia. I like that.

Actual words from actual customer's mouth:

"I want your number three combo deal, but instead of the cheese quesadilla, I want the Chili Relleno."

"No problem, it's just going to be two dollars extra."

"Uh, actually there is a problem. I am the customer and I am not satisfied. I'm paying the check tonight for the seven of us and I pay your tip and I demand satisfaction from you."

This was 5:30. Dinner had barely started.

R.I.P. this line from the chapter in Seattle

For the past ten years, Seattle had served nearly every trend that nudged its way into our suburban home. I sat on the beach here, wondering if any sort of collusion had taken place. Gazing toward the Space Needle, I imagined top floor meetings in smoke filled rooms, led by a woman in a Hillary Clinton pants suit.

"Gentleman, I'll get right to point. We need to give a bohemian edge to the city so that upper middle class denizens won't mind blowing four bucks on a coffee milkshake as we open store across America. Now, we will turn you into rockstars, provided you there, Mr. Cobain, are willing to cooperate."

"We'll do anything."

"I want you to wear this sweater in public from now on."

"That sweater? But that's filthy. I can't wear that, I'm allergic to dust--"

"Good day to you, Gentlemen. Vishnu, will you send Soundgarden up?"

"Whoa, whoa, hold on a minute there..."