First time
I think that was the first time I ever closed out Devil’s Point. They brought up the bright lights, the bouncers chased everyone out, I made a bad play for a drunk girl walking to her car, I drove home “fuzzy”…
…it was grand.
Month: August 2008
“Vicki Christina Barcelona”
I’ll admit that the main reason I saw “Vicki Christina Barcelona” was to see Scarlett Johansson and Penélope Cruz kiss.
I knew, going in, however, that it would likely be very brief and not the main focus of the movie.
I was correct. Duh. But the rest of the movie was entertaining and made me laugh, as Javier Bardem’s shallow but charming artist seduced two young American tourists, only to be completely upended (and upstaged) by Ms. Cruz.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gYTEWGVYwg&hl=en&fs=1]
Doing, done
I’m sitting in my favorite coffee shop, sipping coffee and eating a delicious, Nicole-made cinnamon roll. I’ve taken a few days off from work, a little vacation.
What can I do with this time?
- I have a novel in first draft that still needs an ending.
- I have a rough collection of short stories, all about strip clubs or strippers in one way or another, that I’d like to compile into a book.
- I need to revise and extend my financial plan for the near future.
- My backup system for my two servers and my new sexy thing isn’t working right. Needs fixing.
- I want to install Parallels and Windows XP on my laptop.
- I’d like to upgrade my wardrobe.
- I’d like to spend some time with friends I don’t often get to see.
- I have had an invitation to write a recurring column for another website, and I need to work on putting together a proposal – ugh, marketing. I’m an artist!
- Need to research some real, going-far-away type vacation plans.
Mostly, though, I just like not being at work.
Skirt versus kilt
As soon as she saw me sitting at the table near the stage, Stormy walked over and leaned over from the waist, which put her face level with mine, and not-coincidentally showed off her tits. “Hi! You’re not usually in here so late.” It was close to 1:00 AM.
“Right. But here I am.” I’d started the night at a different bar but still wanted to hang out with Stormy.
I pointed at the tiny skirt she was wearing, which was little more than a four-inch wide ribbon of pleated plaid wrapped around her waist. “I have a kilt at home that’s the same tartan!”
“This skirt? A kilt?” She posed and held out the sides. “Is it this short?” She turned around and flounced the back up and bent over again from the waist, looking back at me. “Can people see your butt when you wear it, like this one?”
I laughed. “No. Oh, hell no. No one wants to see that.”
I was glad to be here. Stormy always makes me smile.
Winning is good
My friend Paul emailed me a couple of days ago and asked if I wanted to check out the Summerblast at MacForce, a local non-Apple-owned computer retailer, located in the inner industrial Eastside. Sales of cool Apple shit, a barbecue, ice cream, and raffles? Sounded fun and I don’t hang out with Paul enough, so I said, “sure!”
When we walked up, we each got a free t-shirt, and a goodie bag. In the bag was a program, showing the schedule for the free seminars throughout the day, and a schedule for the raffles. Every half-hour they were giving packages of stuff away. We were there around noon – the next one was in less than a half-hour, and it was from a company I hadn’t ever heard of. The big one, of course, was the Adobe giveaway, but that was an hour away. Each person was given 10 tickets, which were to be distributed to the various half-hourly drawings.
Summerblast couldn’t have been a more apt name, with the heat wave rockin’ the temperature over 100° F for the third day in a row. MacForce had filled up their parking lot with tents, and lots of Apple-related vendors (but not Apple itself, strangely – maybe Apple Retail sees them as competition?), but, man, standing around on asphalt for hours on end wasn’t that appealing. Paul and I figured we’d scarf our free burger and drinks, get our free ice cream, and wait for the Adobe raffle, then split.
Since we were there, though, we entered the upcoming raffle at 12:30. I tossed in three of my tickets, and we waited.
The first ticket drawn wasn’t the same color as my tickets, so I mentally disengaged. The emmcee read the number off several times, reminding the crowd that “you must be present to win!” but no one stepped forward. So they drew out another number.
And this time, it was one of my three! Whoo-HOO!
I stepped up, showed the guy my ticket, and was whisked away into a fabulous world of showgirls, luxury cars and dream vacations… OK, no, not really. I filled out and signed a model release, allowing MacForce to use my likeness to promote their store, and then they had me hold up the major goodies I got while they took a picture of my likeness (with which they will promote their store).
What all did I get?
- Freeway Pro from softpress, which appears to be web design software. OK, maybe I will use this.
- AccountEdge from MYOB, which is accounting software for small business. I probably will be selling this craigslist.
- A serial number for Parallels Desktop for Mac, software that lets me run Windows XP as a process within Mac OS, which for the non-geeky is something called virtualization
- A 1GB and 2GB USB thumb drive.
- 6 tickets each to any 2008 season Portland Beavers baseball game and Portland Timbers soccer game at what I will always refer to as Civic Stadium.
- And last but certainly not least, my favorite of all the prizes, a Timbuk2 Commute messenger bag, in black and “mineral heather”. Sweet! And it’s “sustainable”, made from hemp and PET fabric. But don’t try to smoke my sweet new bag, man. This thing has so many pockets and zippered enclosures and straps, it’s crazy. I’m still finding new ones, a day later. I love it.
I thanked Paul for asking me to tag along with him. Heh. We stuck around for the Adobe giveaway, and Paul’s wife, Ellen, joined us briefly, but when Paul read the fine print and found that contestants can only win once, I realized I had no chance. But even though Paul had 19 tickets in the Adobe raffle, some dude with the worst tattoo ever got it. So it goes.
A good suggestion
While I was finishing my dinner (a chicken Caesar salad) at my favorite diner, A., a cute snarky waitress with whom I chat, showed up on her bicycle, coming inside to the cool restaurant from the hot hot heat of late afternoon.
The waitress that was already on duty was surprised, and asked A. about it; she responded that she had switched shifts with another girl, and they talked about A.’s beach trip, while A. took off her bike helmet, stowed her bike out of the way, and drank copious amounts of water.
I was the only customer in the diner. I waved at A. and as she ran around getting ready for her evening shift, she chatted with me.
“It’s hot outside,” I said, truthfully if unoriginally.
“Yes, it is! It’s just too hot,” she replied. “It’s so hot that I just don’t want to wear a lot of clothes!”
I perked up at this. A. is petite yet athletic and very attractive. “I have no problem with that, at all!”
“Hey,” she said, “I just like bein’ naked. Or semi-naked.”
“It’s all good,” I smiled.
Vacation countdown
32 hours to go until my five-day weekend gets here.
Unless I sneak out early tomorrow. But why would I post about that on the public internets? That’s just silly.
I’ll probably spend my time and money here in town on booze and strippers.
Stupid boy project #2
Reading Cary Tennis this morning, I see the following:
“You experience isolation and loneliness. At first, you think the antidote will be a person. So you seek a person. But contact with one person will not solve it. Two isolated people fleeing their isolation is not a cure. Isolation is a problem of pattern and structure, of temporal and spatial arrangements. Isolation occurs because the patterns of your life don’t bring you into contact with enough like-minded individuals on a regular basis in a comfortable, low-intensity setting. That’s what you need. It’s called regular life, or street life, or family. It’s a structure, or pattern.”
I need to do this, too.
Wait. Maybe I already have this?
I have regular places I go, places where I know their names, and they know mine. Outside of work, I am a part of a community of people, my beloved Sellwood.
I know the two Daves at the corner market – one Dave is only ever seen at work behind the counter, or coming from or going to the Black Cat tavern, the other Dave is funny and diabetic, and recoils in horror when I come in late at night to buy donuts.
I know Nicole at the coffee shop is nervous about her upcoming wedding, and Nicole’s mom, Sandra, was upset last week because the new girl she was training decided she didn’t think she could hack it.
I know that the video store was closed for several days without notice a couple of weeks ago, and have been meaning to stop in and ask C.J. what was up.
I know that Stacy left one waitressing job to work at a different bar in a different neighborhood, and yet at the end of a long day she still comes back to her first bar for a beer before going home.
And I know that Brewster still annoys me, daily, by making the same joke at the end of the day about the day being over. Brewster, who was evicted from my building (and I secretly rejoiced) and who then convinced another tenant, Peggy, to let him stay there, somehow, using some level of charm to which I appear immune.
I know more. I could go on.
But why doesn’t this feel like a community to me? Why do I still feel disconnected? They’re all part of the landscape of my life. But few of them feel like friends. I share chit-chat with them. I make small talk. I make note of their daily comings and goings, as I assume they take note of mine. But few of them are people I could share things with, personal things. Could I talk to them of my fear of dreaming of something for years and failing (like Mark in that documentary I saw), or about the non-existence of God, or how sad I was that Smacky ran away.
Or maybe I can, and I just haven’t taken that step.
Maybe I just need to take the next step.
Introducing stupid boy project #2: building a community.
Stay tuned.
“American Movie”
Tonight I saw a documentary about a scrub from Wisconsin whose dream had been, since he was 14, to make movies. And how he’d worked all his life to film one, 35-minute horror film, in spite of being up to his eyeballs in debt, and father to three kids with a woman who didn’t want him, and borrowing money from his elderly, frail uncle, and using his jailbird and stoned friends.
And how, after years of effort, he finally did it.
And all through the movie, I kept thinking, “the director of this documentary is more successful than the subject of the documentary.” How twisted is that?
I hate rebooting
I had to reboot my web server this weekend because of a required security update.
*sob*
Up ’til yesterday, I had a good streak of uptime going, as you can see from the midnight update that ran the night before:
The current date and time is:
Sun Aug 10 01:01:00 PDT 2008
The currently logged-in users are:
xxxxxx console Feb 2 15:56
xxxxxx ttyp1 Feb 2 15:57
The current uptime is:
1:01 up 189 days, 8:06, 2 users, load averages: 0.06 0.03 0.01
The current disk utilization is:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s3 80G 30G 50G 38% /
I hate rebooting.