05.30.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:30 am by Beau
The NYPD completely shut down the southbound FDR at 69th Street this morning for the rescue of a little hedgehog trapped at the median. I know this because we somehow got in front of this shut down which, when Jeff called me this morning from the car, had caused the traffic to be backed up several miles. You should have seen this little guy. Talk about deer caught in headlights; he was watching his little hedgehog life flash before him at the rate of about 60 mph. It’s nice to know that some asshole didn’t swerve to crush him just out of spite and a good way to start a rained out weekend.
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05.29.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:23 pm by Beau
I’m just this shallow. I’ve been picking up and watching the History Channel with more fervor lately since mind-numbing network TV is starting in reruns and I was excited to find a two-evening biography of the Russian Czars earlier this week. Fascinated and knowing next to nothing about early Russian history, I absorbed it all like butter on a muffin. Of course the best part got to the Romanov’s which I’ve been distantly fascinated by. It’s always been perplexing as to the exact reason why I’ve had such an interest but I’ve always chalked it up to the whole royal family thing and Rasputin and the downfall and execution with the resurfacing of Anastasia. It was like a great novel. But then, watching the biography and looking at all the pictures and film-clips, I finally landed on the real reason I like Nicholas Romanov: he’s a totally hottie. That beard totally made me embarrassed in my pants, if you know what I mean. Never mind his dismantling of the Russian autocracy or all the murders and whatnot he probably committed in the name of the Holy Mother Russian, he’s like the poster boy for Hot Bears In History. Grrr…woof. That’s why I’m just that shallow.
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05.28.03
Posted in Home Life at 9:10 pm by Beau
To help pass the time in my ongoing Wednesday Grand Jury outings, I started picking up the local Upper Deleware River Valley newspaper, The Times Herald Record. It’s basically a recap of all the national paper’s news with a few bits of local interest thrown in. Definitely not worth a subscription, but it’ll do in a pinch for a read. What I came to find myself drawn too, though, was the crossword puzzle. I’m too embarrassed to ever do the NY Times crosswords, even in private, as I have no skill in trying to figure out all those retarded, inane clues that often don’t have anything to do with the answer or if they do, I’m simply to uneducated and socially inept to know it. I realize that is suppose to be part of the fun of crosswords but it isn’t for me. Since I’m a visual person, almost a fontiphiliac, I like seeing neat rows of letters lined up, with words intersecting along various axis. Basically, I’d just like the answers so I could fill them into the nice neat puzzle. But what I have on Wednesday’s is a blank puzzle with the same difficult, confusing questions and no answer key until Thursday so I try my best, going through all the questions first for the answers I know which usually can range anywhere between four and ten and then plugging along trying to figure out the rest. It’s a particularly painful test of my patience as I don’t have much of that to begin with. Case in point, I’m blogging about it instead of trying to figure out the last five words on today’s puzzle. I’m so furious right now, a level of emotion I usually reserve for my unwieldy CSS coding blunders or stupid assholes in the service industry, I’ve taken to using Google, dictionary.com, and thesaurus.com just to try and cheat my way to completion. I have no compunction about utilizing the Internet in this way as that is what it’s there for. Had I not, I would not have known 37-across “erstwhile Peruvian” was “I-N-C-A” thereby completely fucking up 22-down “describe” which I though was “L-I-S-T” but is now “L-_-S-N”, a veritable impossibility. Just to worsen my already dark mood, the online crossword puzzle at the Times Herald-Record for today isn’t even the same fucking puzzle.
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05.22.03
Posted in Books at 2:00 pm by Beau
Here’s the skinny about me and the almost obsession with Jordan’s Wheel of Time series: I not only own every one of the ten volumes in hardcover, I also own every one of the available titles, nine right now, in paperback. And not only do I own them in paperback, I own double copies of the first three volumes. The hardcovers sit on the main book shelf with all my Edding’s volumes, King titles, and the other assorted books I like to stare at when I can’t look at the computer screen any longer. The paperback versions are kept in the attic until the yearly reading begins and then I haul them out and store them in a pile on the floor until the reading is done. When I’m at home, I read the hardcovers and when I’m mobile, the paperbacks go with me. I had started the yearly read before I went home to care for Mom but when I got there and finally realized my short trip was going to be a long stay, it was simply easier to go out and buy new paperback copies of a few titles rather then send for them.
Jeff, who really hates how many books I buy and collect, was not aware until I moved back to Bashert that I’d bought new copies and now had doubles. He couldn’t even get his mind around it and I was left alone.
The plus side to buying duplicates for those particular paperbacks was not completely lost on me. I sort of stalled on Book 4, The Shadow Rises, when Mom started getting oogy and the constant spine-cracking and page-flipping when I wasn’t really reading took it’s toll. These huge 800+ page books normally come unglued and split but this one just simple came apart into three solid chunks and page 78 just came off all alone. Then the cover ripped and fell off. So for the last two and a half months, I’ve been carting the whole of the book around, bound up by wide, dirty rubber bands. The whole thing, not just the section I was reading which doesn’t make sense to me other than I’m the kind of person who would collect the hardcover and paperback versions of the same title so I’m going to read a whole book, cover and all, even if it has to be held together with duct tape and ka-ka.
It’s all moot now though, since I finally finished that fucking, God-forsaken door-jamb of a book last night and have moved into Book 5: The Fires of Heaven in which I’ll be enjoying 956 pages of the Lucifer-like Evil One slow-roasting the world in all it’s sweating, drought-inducing fever. Not exactly the timing I’d like going into a summer that promises to be as hot and humid as living on the sun, but if I don’t get through all these so I can finally read the tenth book which came out in January of this year, I’m going to poke my eyes out with a dirty stick.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 10:11 am by Beau
Instead of hosting friends and their adorable baby girl for the weekend, checking out all the new shops opening in Barryville, antiquing, and eating, eating, eating, Jeff and I are flying back to Ohio for the funeral of my grandfather. Not wholly unexpected but then, how much death could one expect in a season. Aren’t these things suppose to happen in three’s? Now THAT’S something to look forward to.
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05.20.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:26 pm by Beau
The unposted secret is that Jeff and I have been watching American Idol this season. I said we weren’t but we ended up doing it anyway, I just didn’t post about it because I was afraid of losing Barnes and JayBear and anyone else who hate it like rat poison as friends. I’m over that particular fear as I know the love of really bad reality TV makes friendships, not breaks them. Anywho, watching Clay uptempo “Bridge over Troubled Waters” as he snapped out “wad-DUR” every time the word came around only reaffirmed my belief that Ruben is the real winner, regardless of whoever is named tomorrow night. That’s my American Idol post, period.
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Posted in The days at 7:30 pm by Beau
I’ve been passing the days and weeks in some kind of barely-there fog. Not really paying attention to the details of the day and finding myself on the other side without really knowing how I got there. It’s been OK, but it’s not how life is lived, really, but I’m muddling through somehow, anyway. But today, for some reason, I started noticing that I was surrounded by blind people. After the fourth one came clicking into the deli I was getting some water at this afternoon, I started keeping count and by the time we made it home tonight, I’d counted eight blind people that I’d interacted with on the periphery of the day. Either something very strange is happening or I’ve just never noticed it before which I tend to doubt. But what’s it mean? That’s the question of the day.
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05.19.03
Posted in Home Life at 7:55 pm by Beau
I’ve known for a while something is going on, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it; couldn’t quite give it a name. Well, I still don’t have a name for it, but I know what it is; I’ve been here before. Ten years ago or there about, fresh out of school, living on my own in a huge empty loft in the burned out shell of a dying downtown in St. Louis, I slept my way through most of the fall and winter, subsisting on Cream of Wheat and Ballatore. It just so happened that the loft shared the same block with the hot gay dance club, Fallout (or ‘falldown’ when it got to late), and being 24 and single, I should have been working hard to ruin my reputation. But I sat in that loft on weekend nights, in the low-haze of candles shrouded in blue glass and watched the comings and goings of all the fun people through my blinds before I’d crawl back to my pallet-style futon and sleep for another 36 hours. When I finally left St. Louis (with my Mom saying, “honey, you just need to do something and get out of there”) the following Spring, I’d lost 25 pounds that I really couldn’t afford to lose and looked stretched and worn down. Of course at my very worst, the sack of skin dragging around all the broken pieces I was got my ass to New York to heal myself in all it’s delusional grandeur -and by heal I mean, be really, horribly, carnally available. And that’s when the Love Monkey met me and took my pieces home with him.
And so I’m starting to feel there again. When I bought the box of Cream of Wheat this weekend to help quench the overriding desire for wall-paper paste, Jeff looked at me and just gave me the, “you can’t be serious” look. I bought it anyway.
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05.13.03
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:44 pm by Beau
Everyone in a position to know mentioned that Mother’s Day was going to be a hard one this year. Jeff asked me before hand how I was planning to handle it and I had to ask, “Handle what?” I thought that was the best answer I could give; there just wasn’t anything to handle.
So the day came and it was bad but not in a way that was specific or purposeful. I didn’t hide in bed and cry and think about Mom all day. It wasn’t that real, but it was something. My bleak, passive mood fit the cold, gray, rainy day perfectly. I didn’t want to do anything and having to sit through 15 minutes of idle chatter with a friend who stopped over that afternoon was pure torture. I just wanted to be left alone so I could brood and be morose and sullen.
The days have been passing that way for me. They seem to be going along fine and then the reality of the thing hits and I lose my breath and have to talk myself through it. I have her picture on my desk at work and of course scattered here and there at home and I just need to look at it and it makes it more real because I find myself in an utter state of disbelief still.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 9:20 am by Beau
If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Sure I could post on Sunday night some weeks ago, but by Monday morning, my old hosting service had done something to their servers and Movable Type no longer would let me in my own house to do the do. No amount of diplomacy or intention on my part seemed to help and eventually, the powers that be over at that old host just stopped returning e-mails. They didn’t want to hear one more thing about something called Moveable Type or how I wasn’t able to post my whines and sass. In capitalism, I’m told, there is such a thing as competitive markets. So I picked up my dollars and just moved over to Dreamhost since everyone and their brother seems to be connected to that particular Borg. The advantage is they have not only heard of MT, they had helpful access pages so when I finally decided to move, it wasn’t entirely a disaster. ‘Entirely’ being subjective as somewhere in the migration, I lost the first two years of ggwoo.com, all pre-MT stuff that was hidden in some file that didn’t come across. Rather than kill myself, I opted to just let it roll off…it’s water under the bridge. Anyway, sometimes I like to start off fresh and new and that means cleaning out and throwing out clutter. There was some good stuff in those two years, but a lot of it was just me cutting my teeth and getting my feet wet so I’m not nearly as distraught as I thought I’d be. Then it came down to recoding the css pages and by God, nothing seemed to be working for me this past weekend or even last night until I finally threw my hands up to Heaven and decided using an MT default template style at least initially so I could post is better than fucking around for another week trying to get a 300px white column to magically appear. So that’s where I’m at. Not dead yet, as Catwoman was fond of saying.
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