OK, so the ticket's purchased, the plans are made, and I'm headed to San Francisco Jan. 18. Why, you may ask?

On that date at 11 a.m. starts a rally & march to protest making war on Iraq, and also serves as a memorial to Martin Luther King.

I'm kind of excited. Activism is rather unlike me, but this is a subject on which I feel very strongly. I've been more radical in the past than I am now, but I'm significantly more willing to put actions to words these days.

As an added bonus, I'll get to bask in the balmy airs of the Bay Area once again and see at least my dear friend Chris, and possibly others if the opportunity presents itself.

Further updates on my life and news will follow before long, I hope, but I wanted to put that little bit out there. Anyone who's interested in going, and perhaps going in my presence, please let me know. Should be interesting!

I'm bouncing up and down with happiness. *bounce bounce* My Solaris Criterion Collection DVD came via UPS today (again with that Super-Saver shipping, but this time it took less than a day and a half to reach me)! Now I can puzzle anew at that five minute cars-on-the-freeway scene and revel in this restored and remastered cut. Tarkovsky rewlz.

And also on the subject of Solaris, I saw the new movie this weekend. Pretty fricking great, really. Definitely not an action-packed pyrotechnic extravaganza, but not quite the tender love story some of the commercials make it out to be. It starts about where the Tarkovsky one does but gradually takes steps farther afield and ends in an altogether different manner.

It poses a lot of questions about the nature of love, memory, existence, attachment, etc., but deliberately avoids answering them. It's a movie you'll keep thinking about long after you leave the theater. Please go see it.

First some miscellany. I've joined the ranks of my sister by having hit a pigeon with my car yesterday. While I'm no big fan of pigeons (rats with wings, I think is the best description), I'm saddened by death, especially death that comes as a result of my actions. It kinda left me in a funk all day.

---

And with that I move on to a whenever-I-feel-like-it feature of some of my favorite music. Someone used to complain frequently that I had too many favorite songs and albums and bands and the like. So I thought I'd start running down the (very detailed) list. Maybe you'll find something you might want to try. Anyway ...

• Favorite rock song: Molodiye L'vi (Young Lions)- Boris Grebenshikov. Literally the only song I've ever heard that I absolutely cannot listen to only once at a time. Coming from someone who thinks he's overplaying something if he listens to a CD more than twice in a month, that's saying something.
  
• Favorite rock album: Radio Silence- Boris Grebenshikov. Piss-poor sales. Awful reviews. His fans in Russia revile it. I absolutely love it. Straight-ahead rock and roll produced by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, with BG's scotch-soaked voice and impressionist poetry for lyrics.
  
• Favorite English traditional song: Matty Groves as performed by Fairport Convention
  
• Favorite Scottish traditional song: Cruel Sister as performed by Old Blind Dogs
  
• Favorite Irish traditional song: tie: Arthur MacBride and Lord Franklin
  
• Favorite Canadian Celtic rock album: Weights and Measures- Spirit of the West
  
• Favorite U.S. Celtic rock album: Nothing good enough, although Black Stone Tramp by Brother fills this niche. They're an Australian band that lives, records and performs mostly in the US, so they almost count.
  
• Favorite Scottish folk rock album: The Half Tail- Wolfstone
  
• Favorite progressive rock song: The Brave album in its entirety by Marillion, except "Paper Lies". Masquerade/Lift Me Up by Yes gets an honorable mention (two separate songs, but they run into each other and I always listen to them as a unit)
  
• Favorite concert ever: Silly Wizard Tucson, Arizona, 1988
  
• Favorite new wave song: Major Tom- Peter Schilling
  
• Favorite new wave album: Systems of Romance- Ultravox
  
• Favorite New Romantic album: Journeys to Glory or Diamond- Spandau Ballet
  
• Favorite Afropop album: tie: Joko- Youssou N'Dour and Wakafrika- Manu Dibango
  

Okay, that's enough for now. More later when I feel like it.

Now that the recent mid-term is election behind us, I feel it incumbent upon myself (oh, groan, I just realized the pun) to mention a thought I had about voting, which I mentioned in the company of my mom and sister this evening.

You hear often about how everyone should vote because they can, because this is a free country and we should celebrate our freedom. Blah blah the power of one vote blah blah this blah blah that.

Screw it all.

As a citizen of what purports to be a democracy, it is your, my, and everyone else's who meets legal requirements, responsibility to inform ourselves about the issues at stake and vote in every election. It is something we owe ourselves, our communities and our nation.

Our democracy doesn't work because it takes voting to make it work. If you want to complain about this or the other sorry state of affairs, you must understand that the systems are in place to fix it if only people vote regularly, conscientiously in sufficient numbers. Voter apathy is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think your vote will count for nothing so you don't vote, then it really does count for nothing.

If you think politics doesn't matter, then you take too much for granted. It is only through political change that social change is recognized. In a different political climate, such as exists in other nations and could exist in ours if we don't take seriously our responsibility to put in place wise leaders and good laws, things would be different. Races would still be segregated, or even worse, subjugated. Slavery and/or neo-serfdom would arise. There would be no freedom of speech or thought. Gay rights? Ha! You have the right to burn at the stake or get locked up in an asylum.

Or even better, run for office yourself. Michael Moore's Stupid White Men has a great section on that whole deal. It's not just for stupid rich straight white men with no vision.

Enough. You get the picture. Do something.

What strikes me most these days in the various livejournal entries I write or try to write is my overwhelming sense of contentment these days. It seems odd to me, since my life is so full of stress from work, school, business, etc., that it should be so.

But it strikes me even so, at odd moments of contemplation like the other day when I walked outside with Monty, only to be stopped in my tracks by the sunset -- dramatic tongues of yellow flame bouncing off the clouds above, followed a few minutes later by every vivid shade of red, blue and purple in a painter's arsenal. I love where I live, I love what I'm doing with my life and who I'm doing it with and I love myself.

I say this last because it also occurs to me a major reason why my last relationship didn't go so well, at least in terms of things we can pin on Joseph (I'm well aware that there's plenty of blame to pin on me, but this isn't a blame thing so much as an observation). It's often been said that you can't truly love someone else till you can love yourself. While I can certainly say that until relatively recently I had little clue how to love myself, I can say with equal confidence that Joseph hadn't a clue how to love himself either. Oh, certainly, he has a very high opinion of himself, but that seems in my opinion to be a substitute for, rather than an indication of, his love for himself. Not sure where I'm going with this; it's just a thought I had.

---

It's been a long time since I've written, and mostly it's because I've been so busy. My classes are going incredibly well (midterm past in one class, major project half-over in another, and stunning group presentation to be made in another this week). This group presentation is a particular point of pride for me. We have to present the results of our group work to the class, but our instructor exhorted us to do it in a hopefully less-than-boring way. Flippantly, during our group meeting I joked that we could just do it all in haiku. Obviously, since I've mentioned it, you can probably surmise that that's just what we're doing. It's a little freakish to write haiku on collection development policies for a library, but it does force some discipline of thought and succinctness of presentation. If nothing else, our classmates will appreciate our brevity. A sample:

Books on dusty shelf --
No body ever reads them .
Out to the dumpster.

In addition to my classes, I've finally been getting the hang of my job and I'm starting to catch up on all of the Web design and database update projects I've fallen so far behind on for DCS. Still a lot of work to do (not the least of which is that the identifiers on the Web site for the items are incorrect so you can't add any of the items I've listed directly to the shopping cart ... very frustrating), but there's been progress.

---

My birthday was good fun. It was the first time I've actually had a birthday celebration with more than immediate family around me, since I and Mason and my sister and brother-in-law were accompanied by Mike, Mark, Doug, Tim and Scott (don't worry about the specifics -- they're good people) at Hamburger Mary 's for much merriment, drinking and gift-deliverance. This was followed by homemade birthday cake (Mason is SUCH a Betty Crocker when he sets his mind to it -- devil's food with raspberry filling and a chessboard motif in the icing on top), coffee and wine. For the record, some of my gifts :

• Brazil, the Criterion Collection DVD set
  
• Dune: The Butlerian Jihad
  
• A Williams-Sonoma crepe pan and crepe mix
  
• A book of Celtic mythology and spirituality with absolutely gorgeous illustrations from my mom
  

Better than any material gift, though, was being surrounded by people who genuinely care about me and wanted to celebrate. This is going to sound ultra-sappy, but celebrating a birthday with these people makes me glad for the time that's passed and for the time yet to come, rather than self-piteously sad that I'm getting so damned old. I want these people near me when I really am old.

Well, that's all from me for now, but that's probably enough. If you live near me, plan to join me to see Solaris the weekend of its release Nov. 27. If you don't live near me, please go see it on your own! Not only is it a remake of a film by my favorite film director of all time, Andrei Tarkovsky, but it looks to be a visually stunning and appropriately affecting film in its own right.

I'm as happy as a little girl! Coming soon (Nov. 5, to be exact), is the complete My So-Called Life (19 episodes) on DVD. I preordered it as a pre- and post-birthday present for myself.

Counting the bloody days. Anybody coming over to watch it with me? *grin*

This weekend I got to see Fairport Convention! So what, you say. So what indeed.

Fairport Convention has been around since 1967 in England, and they were pretty much the first band to bring traditional music and rock music together. 20-some-odd people have moved in and out of the band over that time, but they still remain intact. They host a festival yearly at a farm in Oxfordshire that draws 20,000 or more people.

But think about it. Without them, there'd be no Richard Thompson (he started out his musical career with them). There'd be no Ashley MacIsaac, no Great Big Sea, no Pogues, etc., etc.

Anyway, it was an evening road trip to Flagstaff for me and my friend Mike, reacquanting ourselves with the college-and-railroad town where he and I first became friends. There, in a small auditorium, the band cranked up the amperage (despite their almost entirely acoustic instrumentation) and poured out some really old songs and tunes, some brand new ones and a small portion of some in-betweens.

Cool as shit, funny as all get-out and radiating the kind of professionalism that only long years of experience can produce. I had a blast.

I also enjoyed being able to see the stars even while still in town, thanks to Flagstaff's precedent-setting anti-light-pollution practices and ordinances. Beautiful still, even after its explosive growth in recent years.

The drive back was tiresome, though.

'Twas a good night tonight. My friend Richard finally prevailed upon me to ignore the many things I had to do and take some time out to hang out with him.

We went to Rosie McCaffrey's, which faithful readers may remember I visited upon their opening this past St. Patrick's Day. Had a good time chatting and drinking Guiness and listening to the band, a local Celtic band called Blackwood that had as a guest someone who took me back a few years.

In the good old days, when Devine Celtic Sounds was new and we used to be involved more heavily in the local Celtic music scene, we used to hang out at the Dubliner pub where frequently played Celtic Pride, a husband and wife duo. They left Phoenix some years past, leaving memories of smoky pubs, a covet-worthy red Rickenbacher bass and "The Unicorn Song." The husband part, Tom Teven, a Scot with a fantastic voice and broad if fairly predictable repertoire, was the guest this evening.

The band itself was surprisingly good, especially the fiddler, who I think I recognized from the most notable local Celtic rock band Claire Voyants. It was a good time. I recommend getting out and letting the hair down (what's left since my shearing last week, anyway) every so often.

Feeling ultra-faggy today, courtesy of my new haircut and my clingy ribbed gray shirt. Yay. Go me!

Yes, I'm still alive! I made it back this evening from my weekend in NoCal with no scratches and precious few bumps and bruises!

The trip served as a short vacation from work, but my main purpose was to sell music at the Sebastopol Celtic Fest in, naturally, Sebastopol, CA.

Mason flew up to meet me at about the same time I arrived in town Thursday evening. He and Chris (my best friend in the whole wide world besides Mason) got to meet and get to know each other, and Mason also got to meet Rose, Seth and all of Chris's other housemates. Rose, especially, is worth getting to know. Much wine was drunk, and Chris and Mason discovered they both have equal facility for giving me shit; getting the two of them together is positively dangerous, since they feed off each other and egg each other on. It's kinda funny!

Friday Mason and I played tourist, plunking down dollars for matryoshka dolls at the Russian store on Pier 39, taking pictures of the sea lions, hunting for antiques on Sacramento St., etc., etc. For Friday's dinner, Mason, Chris and I ate with my friend Alex at an intriguing Japanese place in Oakland. While we were sitting there, I reflected on how lucky I was to have the people I have around me. It did me good seeing Alex again, although he dashed off not long after our return from dinner. But he made a great impression on Mason and Chris, so maybe he'll be persuaded to do it again sometime.

Come the weekend, Chris and I jetted up north to Sonoma County for the festival. I felt tremendously fortunate to be visited by Todd and Chris and some other new people who seemed nice enough but didn't really talk much. I dearly wanted to hang out with them all for the time they were at the festival, since I hadn't seen them in about a year, but the booth was amazingly busy for the entire weekend (thanks also, partially, to Chris, who indeed kindly patronized my wee business!), so I had to content myself with a couple of brief meetings, hugs, etc. I didn't even get a chance to take advantage of Todd's offer to spell me for a while. There were others, too, I'd hoped to see sometime on my trip, but time and circumstance didn't allow. Perhaps next time!)

I went into the weekend worried about competition from other vendors and came away having my most successful year yet (we've been vending at the Sebastopol Celtic Fest since its start eight years ago), so even from a money standpoint the trip was a success.

Fast forward through another long day of driving and I'm home, unpacked, desperately tired and grateful for the escape from work, the chance to work at something I love and my many friends who kindly altered their orbits to intercept mine for at least a short time. It won't take us so long to come back next time. I promise!

Finally my favorite band of all time comes back with some more material. Naturally, it's all old material, since they've been broken up for, oh, 12 years or so now. But they've given me a 3-CD collection that satisfies my hunger for interesting new Spandau discoveries, slakes my thirst for nostalgia and proves that they really did have a place in the legacy of the '80s.

The collection is broken up into different sections. The first disc contains the most unusual stuff -- demos, a couple of live tracks, some of the overlooked album tracks, etc. The second disc is a 10-track live disc from mid-1983, the height of their popularity. Somewhere I've got the video of this concert and I remember hooking my dad's stereo VCR up to the tape deck and recording it straight to cassette tape. The tape is lost now, but no matter; I've got it all on CD now. The third disc is all remixes, including what in my opinion is one of the greatest '80s dance tracks ever recorded and one of few 12" mixes that I feel totally outshines the original, the obscure track "Glow," and the archetypal '80s club remix, "Communication."

And now a few words about the band themselves. I got into them long ago, but long after they were past their peak. I latched onto them at first because of the mega-hit "True," which was just about ominpresent on the adult-contemporary stations I was exposed to in the mid- to late-'80s. But it was the stark, daring post-punk electronicized dance music of their early career that most grabbed me.

Looking at it now, I can intellectualize it as the escapist glamorizing of working-class Londoners who needed something with a good beat that was easy to dance to and an image that exotically evoked the lavishness of past eras without slavishly imitating. Too, they reveled in the homoeroticism inherent in wanting to be, sound and look glamorous. The aesthetic was evidenced by the cover of Journeys to Glory, which featured a Greek-looking statue of a male nude in relief and in the video for "Paint Me Down," which featured the band in loin cloths and smeared with paint (really quite tame, to look back on it, but banned from the BBC for its shameless depiction of male flesh, some time before Duran Duran could claim BBC-banning honors for "The Chauffeur."

But at the time the music simply grabbed me by the gut and wouldn't let go. And their look changed seemingly from month to month, a fast-forward fashion culture that was completely alien and fascinating to me.

The band released the first 12" dance remix (for their first single, "To Cut a Long Story Short) outside the reggae and funk worlds and the rest of the world followed suit. They set the trend for filming their videos in wild, adventurous and exotic locations that Duran Duran later became known for. Duran Duran's manager, early on, asked Spandau's to let his band open for Spandau at a club in London. He refused and to this day regrets it, wishing as he does that he had a poster that proclaimed in large letters "Spandau Ballet" and in smaller letters "special guests Duran Duran." Duran Duran became the best-known exponents of the New Romantic movement (though they, like everyone else, abandoned it around 1982 or early 1983), but they were neither the first nor the best.

Spandau Ballet's members weren't the most talented musicians (though Tony Hadley has the coolest voice imaginable and Gary Kemp's unusual guitar rhythms, chord voicings, but they captured the spirit of a specific time and place (Britain, end of the '70s, start of the '80s) better, perhaps than any other band save Visage. They followed the musical zeitgeist of pop in the '80s till it totally abandoned punk and moved more in the direction of Sade, Simply Red and Roxy Music. The result, of course, was the album True and the title track (which appears here, newly remixed, with the original intro restored in place of the syncopated guitar stabs of the chorus that replaced it and helped make the song a hit).

I didn't realize how much I missed these guys. Every word of every song, every hit of every drum, every sax solo, every wash of reverb is etched permanently in my brain, as I discovered when I had to forcibly stop myself from humming instrumental bits and singing all the words at the top of my lungs (including the hyper-edited 'ccccccccc - communic -communic - communication, woo-oo-hoo-oo-hoo-oo-hoo) even when working on other stuff and no longer consciously paying attention.

Three discs. 39 tracks. Thousands of good memories. 12 pounds 69p from amazon.co.uk. A bargain.

I experienced a long, stressful, difficult low-self-esteem week at work today. Principally, this was occasioned by the even more unusually high number of nurse's visits we've had to do relative to the number of working nurses than in other recent weeks.

But generally, this was the week when everything went wrong. It got to the point by Thursday when everytime I heard 'Chris?' from the next room over (from my supervisor), I cringed, knowing it would be something else I forgot to get done, forgot not to get done, did wrong, etc. I'll say, too, that my supervisor's extra-stressed-out-ness contributed to my own. Several times, in sheer frustration I just completely shut down for about five minutes.

In the end, I finally got done this evening. An hour or two of over time is nice on occasion, but doing it every day gets truly old. I definitely hit mini-burnout before I finally left at 7:40 this evening. With a weekend to recharge and many patients going off service next week, one hopes things will return to normal.

At any rate, I hope I get to recharge this weekend. Between car repairs, ordering, stocking, pricing, etc., the inventory for the festival next weekend, picking up the dry cleaning, paying the electric bill, cleaning the house, helping my mom with her computer, helping Mason's mom's friend with her computer, updating the business Web site, sending out the business e-mail update, reading my online homework, doing school research at the library, doing dishes, emptying more boxes in the office, contacting friends in the Bay Area and making arrangements to meet and/or stay, processing and mailing orders, depositing money in the bank, grocery shopping, etc., I doubt I'll much time for leisurely recliining. But if I do, I know what I'll be listening to ... (entry on that to follow)!

So I have this modest proposal with regards to the whole US/UN/Iraq thing.

Truly there are a great many UN resolutions that Iraq has ignored, violated, etc., and they (for the sake of argument here, anyway) should be brought to task.

But really I don't think this country can take the moral high ground in this respect until it moves to comply with the many and myriad UN resolutions to which it has said, "We're the most powerful country on earth. Who's gonna make us?"

Don't think the US has ever ignored or violated UN resolutions? Do some research.

I think it's a fair trade.

It's been a quiet evening here in Phoenix, my home town. Driving out toward a (relatively) nearby outlet mall, gazing on the hills and valleys north of town once you get past the sprawl, I turned to Mason and said, "Just remember, none of that's really there. Arizona's all flatness and wasteland." Recent rainy spells have left the desert ablaze with color. We then started talking about all the places we love (both of us grew up here, so we admittedly have our biases) ... Jerome, Prescott, St. Johns, the Verde Valley, Flagstaff. Then there's the Grand Canyon (nothing special, just a big hole in the ground) and Kartchner Caverns (again, nothing special, just a different kind of hole in the ground). He has a greater appreciation for beauty than almost anyone I've ever known. It was a pretty cool moment.

So anyway we spent lots of money yesterday, since I'd received my G.I. Bill check for school, which was sufficient to put some towards my saving plan for paying for school and still left us money for various useful household items, to wit: A router/switch so that I didn't have to keep using his computer to access the Internet through our new DSL line (hallelujah for that, incidentally); some music; a new CD burner (48x! Just think, a full CD in 2 minutes, give or take!); and the mother of all purchases, dearly-bought gift for my psuedo-housewife, a Kitchenaid. Now, permit me to be excited by domesticity for the moment, but this thing is truly wonderous to behold. To call this thing a mixer is to insult its robustness, or to elevate the common handheld mixer to godhood. 300 watts, untold horsepower, this thing could probably tow a car if it were harnessed properly. With the attachment thingie on the front of it, it'll do just about everything this side of cook for you. It's pretty cool. It's also very red.

Right, so that was yesterday. Today was occupied by homework, business chores, watching Rat Race (which would've been OK if not for the all-too-evident focus-grouping that went into the filmmakers' decisions as to what was funny and for the frequent flagrant violations of the laws of physics, probability and causality), more homework, and soon bed.

Boy ain't home; he's working, and is presently asleep somewhere in Minneapolis. I feel a little lonely. But all in all, it's an OK end to a decent weekend. All too soon I head back into the fray that is my job, the daily struggle to fit too few nurses with too many patients and keep all of both groups happy.

Can't wait for the weekend after next, when I trek to NoCal for the annual Sebastopol Celtic Festival! I have open time at this point for Thursday night and Friday during the day for my friends, and I intend to make use of it. I may've mentioned before that I'm planning on Friday tea with the #gaysfca group, so consider yerselves warned! And be excellent to each other!

(And a side note to Joseph: Thanks at least for saying you don't think I'm a bad person. Really. It's comforting to know we're making progress! ;^) )

So it's time once again for my big gay trip to the Bay Area for the Sebastopol Celtic Festival. Plans are afoot -- I'll be there from the evening of Sept. 26 till I hop in my car at dawn on Sept. 30, although the festival will take up most of the 28th & 29th. So finally I can give my friend Chris the Ashley MacIsaac CD I gave him last year and inadvertently packed away in my stuff! If all goes well, too, my honey muffin will join me for at least part of the weekend.

At work, I got my lateral promotion, so I'm a full-time staffing coordinator with benefits and everything. It's about time! Yay me.

School goes well.

The house is finally almost completely cleaned, truly a first for me in many, many years. Monty loves his new home, but mostly he loves the fact that he gets walked three times a day.

Songs are being written, but nothing is being heard about the band. I'm still waiting till they decide what instruments they want before even worrying about having the chance to audition for them. Clearly, they're not exactly organized yet.

Qwest is really pissing us off. We wait a month for the hardware, only to be told they only signed us up for MSN dialup service (why we'd go through Qwest to order MSN dialup service is beyond me). Then they told us to use MSN dialup and upgrade our account. Um, no. So now we wait for the hardware, wait for them to activate our line Sept. 10. Wait, wait, wait. I'm getting bloody sick of waiting. And their tech support people are true mouth breathers.

*yawn* Be good. More soon.

Well, the 'audition' didn't quite go as planned (for my Blog readers a brief update: I was to jam Friday night with a local Celtic rock band on keyboards by way of audition ... very last minute, planned earlier in the day on Friday). The band hadn't played together for some time, so they were quite high-strung and nervous about their performance. Throwing a wild card (e.g., me) into the mix just didn't seem wise. So Mason and I, and Mason's cousin and her boyfriend spent an enjoyable evening listening to the band at Rula Bula and winning Guinness pint glasses in their 2nd anniversary raffle. Went home very drunk (no, I wasn't driving), after an intermediate and very entertaining stop at Fascinations, a sex shop on Mill two doors down from the pub.

Further, I spent this afternoon driving around the entire Phoenix metropolitan area in search of a papyrus plant. Long story short, after visiting five Wal-Marts, three Home Depots and one independent nursery, I finally found one. But I got very hot, tired and sweaty in the process. I just have to say that that plant had better not die on me after all I went through to get it. BTW, Kerry, I borrowed a shovel so I could plant it. I would've asked, but you were still out of town.

Ah, domesticity. This is my last breather before the old triple grind of school, work and business starts chopping me up again. Wish me well!

Also from NPR this morning, the body of a lost hiker was apparently found sometime in the last 24 hours, and I quote, "just east of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine."

Um.

These journalists seem privy to information that millions of people over the last 150 or so years would, in some cases literally, kill for.

If someone knew where it is, presumably, we'd no longer call it 'lost.'

From NPR this morning, more whining from right-wing Christian groups to the effect that required readings on the subject of the Koran will have the effect of proselytizing Islam to good, decent, god-fearing, blond-haired, blue eyed American youths.

Strangely, they seem to voice no such fear when curricula include books on Judeo-Christian heritage and holy texts. Rather, they insist that such studies are healthy and do nothing to attempt to convert others; they're just intended to educate and inform.

How I loathe this kind of hypocrisy.

I was working today to empty out boxes and tidy up the office in our new apartment, which is the last room left almost completely uncivilized by the hasty rush that was moving day and since our subsequent concerted efforts to impose order on the mounds of boxes and stuff.

In one box, just before tossing it in the trash, I discovered a receipt-slash-ticket stub from Ticketmaster that set me on a few moments of road-tripping down memory lane followed quickly by a nasty collision with shame. It's a quick story, and let me assure my loyal reader(s) that this isn't another Joseph-hater story, although it certainly contains some elements of that. But inasmuch as Joseph is concerned here, I'm just reporting facts here. I'm more concerned by my conduct in the situation.

Those who know me well know I'm a massive, huge, bore-you-all-night-with-trivia-till-you're-looking-for-a-pistol-to-shoot-yourself-with-to-escape-the-misery Gary Numan fan. Yes, Gary Numan, who most American music fans if they can remember the name, remember only that he recorded "Cars." So anyway, few years ago, he came to the US for the first time in almost 20 years. Then, a year, year and a half later (solidly in the time when Joseph and I were living together in the loathing-and-longing situation of which most of you have become familiar), he was to play in San Francisco.

Since Joseph had the only working credit card, he ordered the tickets online through Ticketmaster, of course. When they never arrived in the mail (actually, some months later I discovered they had; we just took them for junk mail and ignored the envelope), we made arrangements to pick them up at will-call at the show.

Fast foward to show date, which was (I think) a Friday and was (definitely) a work day. I was atwitter with anticipation and the day passed incredibly slowly. My mind on Joseph's exhortation that I not be late (he would rather not arrive at all than be late somewhere, but I get ahead of myself) as well as on my own excitement, I ducked out of work as early as I could muster (about 15 minutes) and drove a solid 85 m.p.h. down the 680 (at this time I'd like to point out that above 70, my truck in its condition then would shake like Katherine Hepburn in a snowstorm), swerving around cars, taking corners like a pro and generally doing more than what I would've thought possible to get home earlier than I could've been expected.

I came running in the door earlier than I'd ever previously arrived home, clothes already half off in an attempt to dress quickly for the event. I announced my arrival and our impending departure almost simultaneously and was ready to leave approximately two minutes after walking in the door.

I went to Joseph's door (this was one of many times when I was living under the same roof but in a different bed owing to differing ratios of getting along to horniness to willingness to work things out to sheer blind impulse [a nearly impossible calculus whose end result was usually more random than the most random number a computer can generate and whose result dictated which bed I was sleeping in that week]) only to be met with words to the effect of "It's too late for us to get there in time. We're not going." Understand that had we left at that moment, or indeed at any time within 20 minutes or so of that time, we calculated, we'd have been there 15 minutes after door time. That is to say, most likely 45 minutes to an hour before the opening act went onstage. This, to him, was late.


Begging, pleading and whining ensued, resulting in my ejection from the bedroom followed by the slamming of said bedroom's door in my face. "Go if you want," he said. "I refuse." Now of course, since the will-call tickets were keyed to his credit card and ID, this would mean that I'd have to buy another ticket which, having spent an appreciable chunk of a week's salary buying the existing ones and having, as a result, very little cash to spare, was nigh-impossible.

So I spent at least an hour and a half on the floor in front of his bedroom door, pleading with him to open it, pledging that I was no longer angry about the concert incident, that I'd forgotten it, that I agreed with him that not only did I forgive him but that indeed there was nothing to forgive, since he'd only done the obvious and natural thing under the circumstances. Tears, begging, whining, pleading, etc., all marked this period of time for me, met by stony silence or urgent demands that I go away.

I cringe inwardly at myself as I look back at the slobbery little Gollum I was that day. It was hardly the only day; indeed nearly every day involved a scene more or less like that, with Joseph radiating loathing like the smell of rotten meat and me simpering at his feet begging him to pay attention to me and simultaneously insisting that no, I don't smell anything rotten, why, all I smell is the sweetly understated aroma of your cologne.

Thing was, I wouldn't have done all that if it didn't occasionally work, if he hadn't, every so often, opened up, smiled at me, and made it seem, for a week or a day or a few minutes, like we belonged together. And my god, how I needed that reinforcement, since every other aspect of my life (my [lack of] friends, my painfully frustrating job [I enjoyed it in the abstract, but felt like I was having my hands chopped off at the wrist every time I had a creative or even moderately divergent idea], my ailing mail-order business, etc.) gave me about as much pleasure as removal of a necrotic tooth unhampered by the interference of anasthetics.

I blinded myself intentionally. I simpered. I sought approval in the only place I could (occasionally) get it. It sickens me. It shames me. It took me a long time to walk again without that crutch. I thought I was more adaptable than that. But I'll never intentionally let myself get into a situation like that -- that's one thing that came from this vast learning experience.

And I'll always regret never having gotten to see Gary Numan on that tour -- he'll probably never tour the States again.

As a post script, I discovered not too long later, that the actual door time for the show had been an hour later than we thought. We would've been about 45 minutes early, to which I sounded a gigantic, world-reverberating

D'Oh!

Enough reminiscing for one day. Someone's waiting downstairs for me. And there's no door between here and there to be slammed in my face.

Another weekend passes by, another week begins, and so I look back at the past few days.

Looks like, after much wrangling, I will be a full-time graduate student in the fall. It's really seeming like I'm going to do more work getting registered for classes and getting my GI Bill benefits than I will on classwork. But now, two trips to Tucson later, two half-days of work missed and many carbon-based-fuel exhaust pollutants added to the atmosphere, I'm registered AND the government is paying for my school. Generous blokes.

Likewise, with my truck properly registered, my driver's license cleared, the vehicle insured, I'm now a fully legal driver for the first time in longer than I should admit. It's quite an experience not having to watch my rear-view mirror half the time and making inconvenient detours to avoid law enforcement. I should do this more often.

And just as our DVD and music collections reach the point where there's nowhere else tidy to store stuff, we add to it with The Fellowship of the Ring, M*A*S*H season two and The Simpsons season two. Much fascinating bonus material on the LOTR:FOTR disc, including the much-touted ten-minute Two Towers preview that predictably turned me into a flustered fanboy immediately, demanding that the movie be released immediately.

As for the Simpsons, I watch with the commentary on, since I've obviously seen all the episodes before. Some of it's pretty funny, and all of it's interesting.

Also picked up Sirena by Cousteau, thanks in great part to their previous album getting fairly heavy rotation on Kniwt's late, lamented Internet radio station. A fascinating and unique band they are, sort of a loungy come-down band with a velvet-voiced singer and profoundly melancholy lyrics.

Reading of The Cryptonomicon continues apace, at 200 pages now, and I still am not sure what's going on, although I'm learning a lot about cryptography, bubble-era dot-coms and the information war-within-a-World-War against the Axis. There does seem to be some synchronicity occurring between the book's three story lines, though, and I have a feeling the eventual payoff will be substantial.

I really should write more often so I don't have to cram so much into each entry. I AM done with school for a couple of weeks, after all. Not much to do but keep unpacking the apartment (the living room is finally complete except for miscellaneous debris, the kitchen nearly so, and the two upstairs rooms ... well, let's just call them works in progress) and neglecting my fortunately resilient customers.

I'm trying hard, really I am, but sometimes it takes me a long time to fill orders and answer questions and such. But I'm pouring a lot of effort now into improving that.

Every so often, when I get to thinking that Mason just kinda takes me for granted, the way you take your couch for granted or the kitchen light, he cuddles up next to me on the couch, massages my shoulders, says nice things and just generally proves me wrong. Sometimes it's good to be wrong! :^) I must admit I return such favors rather less often than he deserves.

Monty requires walking. More hearing from me soon, I hope.

Sometimes I wish more of my friends lived here in Phoenix with me. I have almost innumerable friends in California, a couple in Hawaii, a couple in Tucson, one in New York, one in New Hampshire, several in Britain, a couple in various areas of Canada, not to mention Washington, Oregon, Virginia, Germany, blah blah etc.

But here in Phoenix I have two, not counting Mason or my family. I love Mike, Richard, Mason and my family to bits but sometimes I crave variety.

Uneventful weekend day today (to which I must respond with a hearty 'yay!'), which included watching of The Road to Perdition. Despite spending the entire movie going, 'eep! Tom Hanks! eep!', I thought the film was fantastic. Nothing like an old-fashioned gangster flick with gray-area moral dilemmas, an unsettling climax, a predictable but unifying ending to get you thinking about life, family and the struggle to do the right thing.

I must say that despite being distracted by his Tom Hanks-ness, I was impressed with his performance in this movie, playing a character quite unlike any I'd ever seen him play before.

Dropped my nachos on the floor. Didn't want to miss the opening of the movie waiting in line to beg for more. Was bummed.

Current reading: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Neal's my hero. This book rocks, despite or perhaps because of the fact that, about 50 pages into it, I'm still not entirely sure what it's about besides cryptography. A novel about cryptography ... who'da thunk it? Please buy his other books and read them, too. They're all great (especially Snow Crash, which out-William Gibsons William Gibson): Zodiac, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash and his non-fiction computer age manifesto In the Beginning Was the Command Line.

I must further give snaps in an unlikely direction: The Passing of the Techno-Mages trilogy of Babylon 5 novels, which I just finished Friday. It's rare that a novel of any type sticks with me for days, causing me to think about the nature of life, living, good and bad, knowledge, understanding, belief, wisdom, doubt, fear, ignorance, selfishness, will and fate. And I thought Galen was cool when I saw him in the short-lived and ill-fated Crusade series. I didn't know the half of it.

Ah, yes, here I am, online again finally after the move. Took almost a week, but I think we can blame that mostly on the incompetents at Qwest who failed to hook up our phone till yesterday.

After a difficult week at work (I was, because of scheduling nightmares, filling in for two people at the same time, hence working my ass off and still falling behind) during which Mason was working non-stop on reassembling the apartment, it has been nice this weekend relax-working, emptying a box then watching TV, hanging some blinds then reading a book, assembling computer parts then ... well, you get the idea.

One thing that really amazes me is that I feel more at home here, in this new place, than I have anywhere I've lived since leaving home to join the Coast Guard. I can lay in the middle of the living room floor, spread-eagled, wave my various extremities about and not hit anything. All the furniture is nice, but not too nice, very Danish Modern to suit Mason's tastes (since I had almost none to contribute to the household except a nice hutch that has been spray-painted green and was serving as a bar in our old place).

My artwork, including some photos from my old days on the Coast Guard Cutter Eagle, adorns the walls. One wall of our entryway is purple, another a lovely dark shade of red (I know it sounds weird, but really, the colors work very nicely. New bamboo blinds adorn the glass back wall of our apartment, which looks out on our modest backyard, which is beginning to resemble a jungle from all the plants we've subjected it to.

Moving day itself was, predictably, a bear. Whosever idea it was to move in July needs to be beheaded. Oh wait, it was both of us. The expected number of workers failed to materialize, partly because Mason couldn't convince any of his physical activity-allergic friends to join us and partly because a few of my friends bowed out at the last moment. Consequently, we were left with Mason and me, my pregnant sister, my brother-in-law and our next-door neighbor from the old place.

At some point, we discovered a quaint little grocery filled with overpriced imported food items, wines, funky sodas, fresh-baked breads from a local celebrity baker, etc. We fell in love with it instantly. It stands near a horribly pretentious wine bar with a fantastic selection of beers and wines and across from a similarly pretentious Italian restaurant I've never been to.

Photos will follow as soon as I can get the film developed, mostly because I'd like to show the contrast between the crampedness of our old place (liked the place very much, especially the patio, but it did get a bit close from time to time) and our new place.

I also find it endlessly fascinating and a bit sad watching my dwelling gradually lose its soul as things go away. But perhaps I imbue material objects with too much of my own self. It has been fascinating watching this place's soul, on the other hand, emerging, totally different despite the fact that the contents are almost entirely the same.

So that's it for now. Back to WCIII. Yay!

So I spent the weekend and the first half of this week on two major projects for my online class. Whoever said that school by Internet wasn't rigorous? Especially grad school. It's all done, as of 10 minutes ago, fortunately.

In other news, Chris & Mason's Excellent Moving Adventure takes place this weekend ... wonderful new place, a rented townhouse in the Arcadia district. Word has it my sweet honeyness ordered DSL for the new place, so no more freaking dialup! Have I ever mentioned how much I hate dialup? Anyway, assuming I can handle a camera without pissing all my minions ... er, helpers/friends and family ... off this weekend, there will be pictures of moving day, the new apartment, and the move-in party. Hurrah!

And in yet other news, I'm finally almost a legal driver. Paid my nasty fine with the City of Phoenix yesterday and got a new driver's license with the new address on it. The only thing left is registration on the truck, which became an issue this morning. Well, at least it was an issue to the nice highway patrolman who stopped me. Oh, the irony. Days before I finally have everything legal again, I get stopped. Fortunately, with a valid driver's license and insurance, coupled with the fact that I'm always courteous and respectful with cops (you have to remember who has the power), all I got was a light fine.

And just think. It could've been a day earlier, or some months ago, before I insured the truck anew. *shudder* I don't think I'd like jail. So, really, I was lucky!

I've also applied for a job with the Chandler Public Library as a library assistant. Fingers are crossed, since I'd finally be working in my intended field again for the first time since high school. But the desperation that has so characterized my experience with the job market in the last few years is totally absent. I really like the job I have now and would only leave for an ultimately better opportunity like this one. We'll see.

Address changes are all submitted, fines paid, new DirecTV install set up, phone number changed over, utilities changed over, most of the house packed, and a bright, sunshiny feeling about the new place. I've haven't been this prepared for a move ever, and certainly never this happy about a move in quite awhile.

Now I've got to find some time to whip the business back into shape ... ergh ...

Oh, shoot, I re-loaded the page template for this blog and in the process wiped out the commenting. I hope to have it back up soon. Just gotta figure out what I'm doing.

Heavy thunder, rain,
Thirsty ground and straining trees.
Summer storms: "Wow, man."

As I write this, my cousin Sean is in his third day of Coast Guard basic training. I'm not at all surpised to find myself pleased with this sudden development but am surprised to find myself quite proud of him.

Never one to be very enamored of militarism, I nonetheless spent five and a half years in the Coast Guard and must say I think it is largely a great organization, a force smaller than the New York police department charged with law enforcement, aids to navigation and search and rescue all over the US and its territories.

I told him that if he had the chance, he should go to my old boat, the USCG Barque Eagle, but the chances of that are minimal and I'm sure that others will try to dissuade him in Cape May if it does turn up as an option.

So that's it. It's just cool to have another Coastie in the family ... let's see if he makes it through basic.

From the 'Finding Joy in Small Things' File ...

Thank heavens for vacuum-insulated travel mugs filled with black Russian tea.

Here I am at 11 o'clock and the tea I made three and a half hours ago is still warm and tasty. Yes, I drink hot morning beverages even in the heat of the summer. Some joys deserve to be more than seasonal.

• Life as a House - Moderately predictable, very heart-rending, oddly affecting. Kevin Kline is his usual incredible self and Hayden Christenson wasn't too bad, either.
  
• Chumbawamba Readymades - British folk samples, trippy beats, social consciousness. Does anyone care that they've just made their best album? Universal pretty obviously doesn't, since they haven't done diddly shit to promote the thing. A pox on all major labels. They take their pound of flesh and leave you to rot in the courtyard.
  
• Changing Rooms and Ground Force - Two great shows on BBC America, the first the British precursor to Trading Spaces and the latter a garden makeover show. Sounds weird, but they're both strangely addictive.
  
• Recording of my own - See an earlier entry for a link to an MP3 to a rough/almost finished VERY '80s take on a traditional Scottish tune. Lots of others in the fire, trying to get my music career going again finally. Will the world be ready?
  
• Deacon Blue Homesick - One of my favorite bands ever. This is their reunion album. Taking a few years off did them some good.
  
• Mason After a few weeks hardly seeing each other, we spent a good weekend getting reacquainted with each other, and remembering again how much we love each other. He truly rocks my world, and brings me strange things from faraway places and calls me to tell me how much he misses me. So I admit it, I'm a romantic sap. Now if we can only get a good weekend out of town, alone!
  
• My sister - Coolest woman on the planet facing life changes and generally becoming the person she's always wanted to be (I hope!)
  

More news later. I am becoming :^)

http://www.slywiz.com/hadrianswall/macpherson.mp3

So just to let everyone know, my band's Web site is back up, finally, after some time. OK, so the band is only me right now, but that'll change. Sometime. The content now is roughly the same as it was when it went down some time ago due to, um, conflicts with management. But watch for news and more music soon.

http://www.in-the-wall.com

My scalp itches. What's more, it rains festive little snowflakes of dead skin every time I scratch it. It took a few days for the consequences of my weekend scalp sunburn to show, but show they have.

Hat next time. Damn, this is irritating.

I'm SO disappointed. I expected a torrent of invective over my last entry, but none has been forthcoming. There's the usual litany of his accusations toward me -- that I'm revising history, that my memory is faulty, that I'm twisting facts to suit my needs, that I'm rationalizing or being irrational, that I'm lying. Then there's the fact that I wasn't actually present in the IRC channel for the pot argument.

I was even prepared for at least one or two people to write in defending him. Even one or two people agreeing would've been OK -- I know there are such people out there, since I've talked to you privately, but perhaps you don't want to go on public record.

*silence* *crickets*

But then again, there is a friends-only post from Joey this morning, so maybe I haven't gone totally unnoticed.

Please note, one and all, that this round of Joseph-bashing is really a catharsis for me, after spending a very long time artificially inflating my opinion of him, defending him against detractors when I really agreed with them and magnifying his strengths. I will balance it out when the urge takes me with a discussion of the things I liked, and still like, about him.

Coming sometime soon: An examination of Joseph's self-professed and widely believed assertion that the always acts and reacts with careful deliberation in a balanced or appropriate way, with simultaneous commentary on his invoking the 'the best way the know a person is to fight him' line from Babylon 5.

---

I've had a long holiday from entries about Joseph. Much to my surprise, this was never a conscious decision and I haven't really tried (passing mentions in reference to my past don't count). I have, however been pleased to note that, for someone who goes to such effort to excise me from his life, he talks about me an awful lot. And with today's entry, I've moved up to the level of 'menace.' I'm so proud!

So let's see where we are, shall we? "It reminded me of the one I pushed away because he was all too smug in his ivory tower and shining the badge of intelligence and education as if it were all the proof he needed that he was right." I'm truly mystified about how it can be that being intelligent and informed on some given topic doesn't mean you might have something valuable to say. Frequently in our arguments, it would seem that no matter how much knowledge and personal experience I had on a subject, if my view differed from his, I was the irrational one; I was wrong. Oddly enough, I never actually told him he was wrong unless it was about a matter of fact of which I was absolutely certain.

"These things do not give you any bragging rights or make you better than the next man." For the record, I have never claimed to be "better" than any other person. I may know more about a topic or consider myself well, or better, informed. But I feel it's more his own insecurities than my own supposed hubris that creates this view that I live in an ivory tower and only occasionally deign to come down to mingle with the common people. Anyone else who knows me well would certainly refute his view. If I sometimes seem stuck-up to people, they soon come to realize it's because I'm fundamentally a very shy person and don't feel comfortable sticking my nose into unfamiliar situations or making small talk with unfamiliar people.

His bias against education, I think, stems from his own unpleasant and abortive experiences with higher education. But I think DeVry may not be the best institution upon which to base any broad-based opinions about the state of higher education in America. But let me state categorically that a number of the most intelligent and well-informed people I've ever known never made it through or to college (some didn't even finish high school) and some of the greatest idiots I've ever known graduated with prestigious degrees from famed institutions.

I find that his first instinct is to distrust the opinions of anyone with a college education and to believe that they're wrong, regardless of what their position is, what the subject is and whether that subject has anything to do with their field of study. It's really quite ridiculous.

"What I mind is being told by someone I thought was a friend that I sounded undereducated because I had the audacity to state my opinion however unpopular it was to the potheads on the channel." My understanding of the events that took place was that Joseph stated an opinion that he refused to back up with facts, reason or justification in the face of differing viewpoints that seemed at least cursorily to have some supporting arguments. Since he engaged them in debate and yet refused to support his position, they called him on his 'uninformed' (or some such terminology) position. Uninformed does to mean undereducated.

I'm sure that some of the people arguing with him were insulting and offensive, and I think that stinks. But there you have it.

---

I'm reminded very often how bad Joseph and I were for each other for a great fraction of the time we were together. Mostly, it's Mason's actions that do the reminding.

Some of my friends may remember the cell phone I had for a few months before my departure from the Bay Area. Joseph got it for me so we could keep in touch, since we both had busy schedules and were often long distances apart but trying to coordinate plans and such. It never seemed to fail that I would take a shower and he would call; I would run to the store briefly and leave the phone, and he would call; the phone would get bound up in the bed sheets and I wouldn't hear it ring. But I'd always call him back when I found that he'd called. Eventually, he took the phone away, saying that if I wasn't going to answer, there was no need for me to have it. He took the phone's various pieces, like the battery, and hid them in several places so I couldn't use it.

Recently, there was a spate of about a week straight where I never answered Mason's calls, either because I left my phone in the car, forgot it, etc. This, of course, followed and was followed by other times when I didn't answer. My abject apologies and near-abasement were met with gentle, and sincere, forgiveness. "As long as you answer some of the time, I don't care."

I also realized the other day that, although Joseph and I were together for two and a half years, in reality we were together for six months, and I spent the subsequent two years trying desperately to keep things from falling apart. Mason and I have surpassed that amount of time and things seem only to be growing stronger.

On a less judgmental note, it's funny that Joseph seemed to think from my comments about various music that I loved everything -- he noted how often I said something was a "favorite", indicating it was becoming meaningless (never mind that it was almost always used in a context similar to "Ooh, this is one of my favorite technopop songs by an '80s straight-gay duo with blond hair!"). Mason seems to think, on the other hand, that I hate everything. Strange how perspective changes everything.

---

On a more judgmental note (and before I say this, let me be clear that despite everything nasty I've ever said and may be about to say, Joseph is VERY dear to me; I want the best happiness for him in life and I hope to be a part of that life in some small way someday), I'd just like to make this outburst, get it off my chest and let it rest finally:

My gawd he's a sanctimonious and self-important prick most of the time.

Thank you. I feel all better now.

How did I spend my summer vacation, all three days of it? Working.

Spent the weekend with my mom, who nominally was going along to help me run my booth selling Celtic CDs at the San Diego Highland Games. In reality, though, it was basically me working for her. She's a bit of a control freak, and the business used to be hers, so she took control the way some people take breaths.

It did lead to some occasional friction, and I'll admit I can be very testy and oversensitive at times. But she put up with me, I put up with her, and we did manage to have some fun.

We did a fairly brisk business, paying for the trip and then some. I've come to view most of these trips as public relations outings rather than profit-making ventures. We met a great many people, some of whom came to the festival specifically to buy from us.

An entertaining drive back was had, keeping my mom awake by asking her questions about Arizona history and place names (she works for the state archives and could be considered something of a subject matter expert), and her answering either truthfully or untruthfully as was her wont and me attempting to divine which stories were true and which false. She's very, very good at intermingling the two.

It was nice to get out of the Phoenix heat, but I got a nasty sunburn on my scalp for my troubles.

So I'm just back from my most exhausting weekend in ages. It started Friday with loading up a rental truck with all of the inventory of Devine Celtic Sounds and driving 11 hours almost straight. It continued with unloading, setting up and vending all day Saturday at the Utah Scottish Festival in Salt Lake City (91 degree heat, 30 percent humidity, one small bottle of water and two potty breaks) and ended today with 11 more hours of driving and unloading all the inventory.

That said, it wasn't an entirely unsuccessful weekend either from a sales perspective, a publicity perspective, or from the perspective of escaping town and doing a road trip finally.

But I really missed Mason.

I also wish I'd brought a camera more than once. The whole drive, even going across the Navajo Indian Reservation, was one startling vista after another. The red rocks near Kanab, Utah, were particularly stunning. Also, going up and coming down I was startled to discover there's a major wildfire fairly close to US Highway 89 at Panguitch, being called the Sanford Fire. The picture at the top of that page looks like it was taken from Panguitch, only the fire has spread and is, in some spots, atop the row of mountains in front. It was an amazing and sobering sight.

Salt Lake City proper was, well, SLC. I always feel vaguely uneasy there, perhaps because it's the closest thing America has to a theocracy. But the natural surroundings of the city are breathtaking (snow on the mountains even in June!) and the people are friendly.

I do really wish Utah would do something about its roads. Driving streets in Salt Lake City were an experience not unlike body-surfing down a washboard, and I didn't realize how rough, noisy and unpleasant Highway 89 in Utah was till I hit the Arizona border and was suddenly beset by calm.

So I got back, unloaded tons of stuff, emptied the truck of my belongings, retrieved my dog, came home and rewrote a paper for school. Still on my plate: watering plants and figuring out bus routes to work so I can return my truck early in the morning.

Up early tomorrow. Ugh.

The Tempe city council unanimously decided to allow Nita's Hideaway to move to its new location. I'm greatly pleased.

Sometimes good things do happen.

We have some new additions in the Devine/Hite household ...

• A lovely blue betta for which Mason himself suggested the name Zhaan. Yes, he's a boy, but I've always considered fish to be kinda sexless. And the name certainly fits the coloring.
  
• A lovely wee bonsai, thanks to Mason. Some sort of pine tree, methinks, althought bent pretty much horizontal. I've always wanted one.
  
• A lovely Spandau Ballet video, freshly converted from the PAL format, containing all of their videos. I'm beside myself with ecstasy over this.
  
• A lovely new Neil Finn CD, One All. It's supposed to be brilliant. I haven't listened yet, although I did reacquaint myself with Crowded House's masterpiece, Temple of Low Men, today. In the face of Neil Finn's formidable songwriting talents, I can only genuflect and chant 'I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy.'

On a side note, I'm a graduate student now! My class began today, and I dug into my required readings. I love being asked to think again. It's an ethics class, and I've always found ethics fascinating as a topic.

Off to bed in preparation for another exciting day of work, business and school. I'm expected to clean tomorrow, too. This could be challenging.

Being a comic book reader, I thought this was pretty amusing.

Incidentally, I looked into starting up my old Web site dedicated to my former band, along with reclaiming the old domain name (hadrians-wall.net), since I'm starting to rev up the old, creaky engine that is my music career.

It's been taken by Rocket Search, which appears to be some sort of spammy advertiser search engine thingie.

I feel robbed. Please feel free to join me in sending them unhappy e-mails. I'm not entirely sure what Rocket Search has to do with Hadrian's Wall, but then it's a failing of mine always to search for meaning in the meaningless.

I got to spend tonight at a meeting of the Tempe city council, invited by my friend Mike for a public hearing on the fate of Nita's Hideaway.

Nita's Hideaway is a rundown dump of a place that also happens to be just about the best club in the Phoenix area for all manner of live music, from singer-songwriter shows with 20 people in the audience, to bluegrass, to punk and all points in between.

It also sits on a plot of land the city of Tempe wishes to redevelop. So they looked into places to move. There's an old, defunct steak house not far from where my father lives in east Tempe (wherein also used to reside a gay bar, incidentally) that the owner of Nita's identified as the ideal place. Big enough that he could expand and hold his larger shows indoors instead of in the parking lot, it also has easy freeway access and sits in the middle of a dying strip mall that would finally see some life again.

Neighbors and churchgoers got wind of it (there's a Baptist church and school across a major street and behind a couple of buildings away from it, but they apparently feel threatened by the proximity). Much drama is ensuing.

Tonight's speakers ran the gamut from "think about the children! The CHILDREN!" weepers to bouncers from the club to cranky old people who think their lives are suddenly going to become a hailstorm of bullets, beer bottles and abuse from Nita's-goers who will be driving recklessly and drunk through the neighborhood.

Nita's patrons are, by and large, music lovers, and as such tend not to be dramatically alcoholic, violent or loud. The site is already zoned for commercial use. The nearest houses are hundreds of yards away, and it's likely the the noise from the adjoining freeway is louder than will be any music coming from the establishment. The way the traffic flow is structured, it's nigh-impossible that any Nita's patrons would accidentally find themselves in the residential area on its streets, as well as highly unlikely that anyone who didn't actually live in the neighborhood would purposely drive in there.

It seemed largely like the fundies were trying to ground their crusade to kill artistic expression and the consumption of alcoholic beverages in platitudes others would be more likely to listen to, and they trotted out Boy Scouts, little girls with Bibles, the old folk with their walkers. All the men on that side of the issue wore neatly-pressed shirts and ties. Perhaps it's cynical of me to see this as manipulation, but it struck me as most disingenuous.

By and large, their arguments reminded me of my college speech class on logical fallacies -- straw men, false dichotomies, specious arguments, etc., etc.

And in the end, they'll probably win and Nita's will go away.

One down and depressingly few to go before Phoenix is one big, quiet, uneventful suburb. And art and music will suffer.

And as a corollary, I just wanna say I think stupid people shouldn't be allowed to vote.

Working for a home health care agency, I get an interesting, even unique view of life. And also death, I suppose.

Working as a receptionist, I take calls from doctors old, delusional and senile enough to be patients. I take calls from patients who fabricate emergencies sometimes just for the company.

As a staffing coordinator, I have to press overworked nurses into service to go see patients who are near death's door.

Working in the file room, my curiosity and tendency to latch mercilessly onto things that interest me leads me to read the paperwork, narrative notes and doctor's orders that paint pictures of life that make the ordinary dramas and ups & downs of life seem positively inane.

There was one patient, and his wife, who took their anger at his poor condition, and I suspect some media brainwashing about the disgraceful state of the American medical community, out on us. When scheduled to visit once a week and we normally went out on Thursday but tried to go out on a Wednesday. This to them was proof that we were trying to defraud Medicare by making more visits than we were authorized. We were leaving more supplies than he immediately needed in the home in a conscious effort to overbill Medicare.

Then there was the patient who had left psychiatric care against medical advice and was a constant thorn in our side. One nurse was too fat, one was too old. Luckily we never tried to send a male nurse out there. He called us constantly demanding nursing visits he didn't really need, wheedled his insurance into demanding medical equipment he didn't really need. He was very manipulative and not terribly pleasant.

There are the patients who are clearly close to death, but the nurses list their life expectancy as 'greater than six months' two days before they pass away. These same patients refuse hospice care because going to hospice means accepting their own mortality.

Children, relatives and significant others display varying mixes of compassion, fear, anger, dominance and submission, often in almost the same breath.

And through it all, nurses faced with their own personal, health and life problems, bury it all inside so they can give the best possible care and comfort. They work insane hours, make themselves perpetually available to worried patients and their families and receive not horrible, but certainly substandard, pay. They are my new heroes.

And my life is a piece of piss in comparison to the diseases, injuries and sheer bad fortune most of our clients have experienced. I'm very lucky.

I really should write more often. I've just been hella busy in recent days with one thing or another. So to recap recent events, ...

Mason went back flying May 9, so he's an air mattress again ;^). The nights alone are a little weird, and they come reasonably frequently, but it's good to see him when he's home and the contrast in mood from his previous misery is delightful.

Speaking of mattresses, there's a new one here, courtesy of his federal tax return. Since I'm someone who's always slept on small or cheap beds or hand-me-downs (except for the waterbeds during the Joseph Years), I didn't fully appreciate the difference a new mattress makes. Hooray for quality sleeping furniture!

And let's see. I'm going to be a real Banner employee come September, with a real job with a real job description. I've been kind of a floater from job to job, and classified as 'pool', which means technically that I come in only as needed (haven't had a day off yet, though) and I don't get any benefits. I'll take a small pay cut, but the benefits far outweigh that.

I'm also a graduate student now! After finally reaching the breaking point and writing a rather angry e-mail to the director of the School of Information Resources and Library Science, they miraculously found me a seat in a class, so I'll be doing one Web-based course for the summer. It's at least enough to keep my eligibility to register alive, and is really quite enough between the job, my own musical endeavors and running Devine Celtic Sounds.

DCS is doing well, and I'm on track to have a record-setting month for May. I just put in an order for $400 in inventory, my largest order yet since taking over the business. I'll be vending at Highland Games in Salt Lake City and San Diego in mid-June, so I'm spending a good portion of my own money to prepare the inventory for the double-whammy of those two consecutive festivals.

I'll be accompanied to San Diego by my mom and probably my sister, which will make the work load much lighter. But for Salt Lake City, it looks like I'm alone, unless Mason can miraculously get free of work for the weekend. It's a long drive and it's tough to work a festival alone. But the money's good and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

I'm gradually taking over Mason's laptop, which is much newer than my Model-T version (a zippy Pentium III or 4 with a DVD drive, versus my old Pentium-90 sans MMX, without so much as an internal CD ROM drive). I gave it a test run with my cheap and cranky but still pretty cool GPS unit today. It will prove invaluable in Utah's relatively unfamiliar environs.

I'm working on outfitting it with QuickBooks or something and a barcode scanner so I can work some semblance of technology into my festival sales. It would certainly be quicker and more accurate than the old pen-and-paper method. But with all the money for travel, vendor's fees and inventory, I'm positively skint. This is going to be a very lean two weeks till my next payday.

Had a brief period of time (almost a week) during which my cell phone was inactive, since someone who shall remain nameless but shares his name with a brand of jar didn't pay my bill in return for the rent I paid and was owed but didn't receive. I paid the bill (and the DirecTV bill, etc.) so at least I don't need to worry that we'll be cut off from the rest of the world.

But if we were, at least we've got a really good DVD collection to entertain us while in repose!

OK, so now that that's all cleared out, I can get back to slightly more focused and interesting journal entries ...

So after the Great Computer Debacle of the Day Before Yesterday, it looks like fate is really trying to give me a break. Bought a Bingo card at the gas station over lunch. Won $150. Life is good.

Oh, she's giving the computer to her son now. And he's paying the taxes. I was not pleased, since that was the first offer I made and was soundly rebuffed. Ach, well. Such is life.

So can I just say Rent was awesome. Truly.

So, covering my day backwards, we just returned from Alanis Morissette. Good show all around and I'm very happy, although no show will likely ever compare with the show in Honolulu where those of us assembled got to watch them celebrate the end of their nine-month tour.

Ryan Adams was nigh-brilliant, although he seemed more suited to sweaty bars and clubs than the Dodge Theatre.

---

So now on to the earlier part of the day. By way of explanation, our temp worker, Jori, has made it her mission the last couple of weeks to try to win me a laptop computer. I had mentioned that I needed one for my business but couldn't afford one. The radio station we listen to every day gives one away each day, and we've been trying to win for some time. But today we decided to get serious.

So when the time came today, she got on one phone, I got on my cell phone and one of the file clerks, a 62-year-old woman named Marianne got on the third.

You can maybe surmise which of the three of us had the luck to be caller #10. That would be Marianne.

She proceeded to be completely unenthusiastic, having to take prompting from us as far as choosing the laptop and saying the appropriately celebratory and appreciative things. She also proceeds to tell them the computer is for the office, and to tell the flunkies after the on-air part that she was going to donate it to our employers.

Later, she professed ignorance about the plan (which was nigh-impossible, considering how much we talked about it constantly), but didn't change her stance. Then, as time passed, she complained more and more about how she didn't want the prize to complicate her taxes. No matter how I promised to pay any applicable taxes, how I insisted I would make it up to her, she would not be moved.

It will probably go unclaimed.

We were all rather angry.

I'm still pissed off.

The other file clerk, an extremely nice lady a few years younger than her who I've never heard raise her voice or say a truly unkind word, let alone curse, referred to Marianne as a 'shithead.' I was shocked and delighted at the same time.

So in retrospect, thanks for the effort, Jori! We'll try again tomorrow, I guess.

So tomorrow I make all those years of obsessive record collecting pay off by mailing a parcel to EMI Records in London.

It seems that they're putting together a box set of Spandau Ballet, one of my favorite bands ever and certainly my favorite quote-unquote '80s bands. It'll contain hits, rarities, demos, live tracks, a sizeable booklet, that sort of thing ... according to rumor anyway.

But it seems that they were missing the original artwork for two of the band's singles: "Lifeline" (which probably none of you have ever heard) and "True" (which you'd have to have been dead for the past 19 or so years NOT to have heard). Well, one person came up with the "Lifeline" single, and the "True" single fell to me to provide. So I searched through my box of singles and came up with the most pristine copy. It goes in the mail tomorrow.

For my trouble, I get an autograph by Gary Kemp (guitarist/songwriter for the band and the compiler of the material for the box set) and the satisfaction of knowing I directly helped out. I'm quite happy.

Just back from the Great Big Sea concert here in Phoenix. Damn, I like them! High-energy Celtic rock from Newfies.

Technically not the best band around, and the lead singer really seems to think he's God's gift. But damn, they're fun, and they're really in their element in a public house. I highly recommend checking them out.

Even picked up a tour shirt, something I rarely do anymore, and advised a nice middle-aged woman on the ideal CD purchase.

There are just times when I need some Celtic music to authenticate my soul and rejuvenate my energy. This was just the thing I needed.

Next up: Rent on Saturday!

My gosh, I've been getting busy lately, and we're just about to hit the apex ...

In recent weeks, I've seen King Crimson, Medeski, Martin & Wood, and the Chemical Brothers. Tonight, Great Big Sea (yay!). Then on May 4, my Man got us tickets for Rent and I'm as happy as a little girl! Yay, I'm turning into a dramafag or something!

*ahem*

Anyway, quickly following on the heels of that, Alanis Morrisette with Ryan Adams on May 7.

I'm going out something like twice a week. This is very unlike me.

In recent weeks, I've been thinking about what it means to be true to oneself, one's principles, etc., and I kept holding off because I didn't figure my ideas were well-formed enough to write at length. But then I figured, at the current rate, they may never be, so write now.

I've often reflected on the fact that we're very often defined more by what we hate or shun than by what we love and profess. It's an essential irony. It seems that what we hate and/or fear in others is almost invariably an aspect of ourselves that we don't want to look at, or is something we fear becoming, something we are separated from by the thinnest of barriers, self-control.

There was a folk singer in Phoenix (well, I'd assume he's still here, although I haven't heard much about him in at least 7 or 8 years) who was a rampaging crusader against the politics of groupthink. Committees and organizations had a tendency to deaden the process of promoting folk music, he reasoned. The groups became more about politicking and power-mongering and less about artistic expression and cultural preservation.

And yet everything he wrote and published, and indeed anywhere his name appeared in print, it was followed by a string of acronyms signifying all of the organizations of which he was a member.

Are these exceptions or hypocrisy?

I'd have to say both. I've come to understand that, to a certain extent, hypocrisy is a necessary part of human society. It seems impossible to adhere totally to one's principles and beliefs. Practicality and social interaction temper our beliefs. Students of psychology call this cognitive dissonance, at least when the disparity between belief and action are extreme and when a person can't adequately reconcile the two.

So, what to do? Say to hell with everyone else and go live in a cave? It worked for Thoreau, after a fashion and for a short time. But ultimately I don't think it does anyone much good. Principles are ideals, superlatives that can be approached and aimed for, but never reached, unless you're either a saint or a madman/fanatic. And since I don't know anyone possessing sufficient hubris to call him- or herself a saint, that leaves fanatics, madmen and hypocrites.

Sound like a horrible state of affairs? Maybe. But reflect on this.

Even Gandhi, at one point, voiced his opinion that the Palestinian people had a natural right to their fight for independence from Israel (although let me make it very clear here, by way of disclaimer, that I'm not claiming he ever said suicide bombers would make a great war strategy.

Daily life is a constant struggle, for those who think about it, to balance action and principle. And the best we can hope for is that we strike the right balance, and that those who seek to judge us pluck the splinters from their own eyes before pointing out the specks in ours.

Well, once again I find myself posting from the outside ...

In reference to this livejournal entry ...

I understand my comments may not be tremendously welcome, so I'll be brief and won't comment again on this thread, nor likely any others of his in the near future.

Setting aside the subject of drugs, I want to applaud his new-found flexibility. I think it's something I tried in the least effective possible way to show him for the longest time.

I also know his entry wasn't directed in any wise toward me. But what he wrote has great applicability to many of the discussions, arguments, fights, etc., we've had over the years, and they're words I've waited a long time to hear him say.

Compromising in one's dealings with other people doesn't necessarily equate with abandoning one's principles.

I read a livejournal entry today that made me happy, nostalgic and angry all at once. Rather than respond there, mostly because the things I want to say are longer than I like to make my responses and also to minimize the likelihood of sanctimonious backlash, I'm going to reminisce here.

Back a couple of years ago now, I was about to graduate from college. My relationship with Joseph was stable and there was a long-standing offer from my father and stepmother for a Scottish terrier puppy if I ever decided I wanted one. Joseph and I talked it over, addressed their concerns, made sure we were ready, and I asked for one. He was my graduation present.

Joseph and I visited to pick out the puppy. We were both leaning toward one, but I vacillated. Joseph was more firm, so we chose him. I named him Monty, a compromise of sorts since Joseph wanted to name him Scotty (after Mr. Scott from Star Trek). Scotty's first name was Montgomery, and I'm also a big Monty Python and Simpson's fan, so Monty seemed like the natural name for him.

Monty is my first dog.

Joseph and I put a lot of effort into trying to raise him right; that is to say, Joseph put a lot of work in and I tried, but was often paralyzed by indecision and fear of doing the wrong thing. But in the end he ended up the sweetest dog I've ever had the pleasure of sharing time with. My bond with him was instant and enduring.

He doesn't bark much. Since puppyhood he's destroyed almost none of my or my house-/roommates' things. He likes to play, and can be pushy, but is usually satisfied with five or 10 minutes of concentrated play before lazing contentedly on some piece of furniture. He's very excitable when I come home, and always has been. When Joseph and I were together, he was similarly excitable around him. He liked us both a lot, it would seem.

When Joseph and I broke up for a time when I lived in California, I moved to a different part of town. I knew few people, and those I did lived an impractical distance away. I was emotionally distraught and geographically distant from any emotional support. Consequently, Monty filled that void. His love was unconditional, his tail-wag unfeigned. He liked to walk and liked to play, and liked to be lazy, too. When I was busy or sitting at the computer, he would lie curled up contentedly under my legs for hours.

It was during that time that I most came to appreciate Monty, and to bear the responsibility of caring for him almost exclusively myself -- the time-honored tale of a boy and his dog, only about 20 years later in life for me.

But I knew how special he was to Joseph, too. When he and I reestablished relations, I always made sure to bring Monty with me to see him. And Joseph was always delighted to see him, too. Playing with Monty was a bonding experience that always brought us closer, this puppy brought up in our household.

Eventually, Joseph decided he wanted a Scottie of his own, so we visited my dad and stepmother in Phoenix, and we picked out a puppy that would be Joseph's; a younger brother of Monty who we also would raise together.

Unfortunately, around this time, our relationship started to fall apart again, as did my professional life. Lacking a job, I was a stay-at-home dad to Crichton (Joseph's new puppy) and also to Monty. Crichton generally made more noise than Monty and was more apt to get into trouble, but was no less sweet or loveable. If anything, he was more eager to please and more energetic.

Joseph and Crichton never bonded the way Joseph and Monty did, which caused difficulty when our eventually final breakup came. Joseph strongly suggested that I should take Crichton and leave Monty for him. I did consider it briefly.

In the end, though, I realized how attached I was to the little overbred pile of black fur. I thought back to our time apart and thought how much Monty had meant to me then. I knew that Crichton was a good dog who, too, loved both Joseph and me and who would, in the absence of Monty and me, bond with Joseph in the way that Crichton and I had started to bond while I was home all the time. Had it been clear that Monty didn't like me, or that he clearly favored Joseph, I may have chosen differently.

But Monty is my first dog. And he likes me!

For a time after I moved, it did seem from reports that Crichton and Joseph were getting along well, although his care, it's my understanding, almost always fell to Charles, Joseph's ex and new roommate. But it was clear to me that Joseph still felt bitterness about me taking Monty. He looked at Crichton as the emblem of his failure, I think, to keep Monty there. He certainly treated Crichton well enough and with sufficient care, but it seems to me he never showed him the same love he showed Monty.

Eventually, he had to leave his apartment for a new one that would not accept pets and he took me up on my offer to take Crichton from him if that need ever arose. We had a good visit. I was pleased to see Crichton in such good health, but dismayed that he seemed to be almost permanently locked in some small area, be it the patio or a bathroom or a kennel. When Joseph wasn't around, which was a large part of the time, seemingly, Crichton had to be put away so he wouldn't damage things.

It became, I feel, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Terriers have a lot of energy and need a lot of playtime and attention. When they don't get it, they misbehave. It seems that the more he misbehaved, the more he was restrained. The more he was restrained, the more he misbehaved. And Joseph had a new and budding social life. Even had he stayed in that apartment, I doubt Joseph would have wanted to keep Crichton much longer.

Since I brought Crichton back to Phoenix, Joseph hasn't once asked after him. For the short time I had him, Crichton and I bonded anew. His behavior improved significantly after a couple of weeks. He enjoyed having Monty to play with and a back yard to play in at all times of the day.

I'm much better at caring for dogs now. And I'm glad I kept Monty; every day, I look at him and experience a sense of awe and wonder that such a wonderful beast should be entrusted to my care, and that I seem to be up to the task.

He's my first dog and I love him. We have a lot of good memories, even in just two years. And bad luck to anyone who tries to take him from me.

Hm.

BLUE You give your love and friendship unconditionaly. You enjoy long, thoughful conversations rich in philosophy and spirituality. You are very loyal and intuitive. Find out your color at Stvlive.com!

It's funny how having a dog/dogs changes your perspective on things, provided, that is, that you like dogs in the first place.

Driving with my sister the other day, we were fast approaching her house when we saw, walking down the street, a stray dog of the more-fur-than-dog, indeterminate ancestry variety. From the length and dirtiness of its coat, it seemed it had been away from its home for more than a few days.

Long story short, we actually didn't stop for the dog. We kept driving, got home, went in her house and generally didn't give him (or her, possibly) much more thought.

But I felt guilty.

In past times, I'd have looked on the dog with some annoyance ... with the owner(s) for having inadequately kept the dog and with someone for not having called the pound and had it picked up.

But I wanted to take the dog home, care for it, show it attention and try to find its home. It's apparent to me how Monty feels when I'm just away from home for too long. Life for a dog in the warmth of Phoenix without caring human companionship and shelter must be very hard indeed.

Maybe I'm just a sentimental sap. I don't know. And why I, in the end, didn't do anything for the poor thing after all is a subject for further consideration.

All I can say is that I love my dog, and he doesn't seem to mind having me around, either.

Now if I could just get him to stop peeing on things to claim territory (e.g., our apartment) ...

grow up to be receptionists. Gah, I ache.

As a fill-in-where-I'm-needed office assistant, I get to do all sorts of different jobs. Today I got to be the receptionist. Yesterday, too.

Between the constant ringing of the phones, the running through the office to find people, the paperwork, the filing, the sorting and everything else, I'm exhausted and my legs hurt. Remind me never to take a job as a receptionist.

Still, I get paid pretty well to do it.

Sleep beckons ...

I'm finally giving up.

I've spent the last 6+ months of my life beating my head against a brick wall and trying (pardon the mixed metaphors) to keep the fraying thread of my friendship with Joseph from snapping. I finally realized it's never going to work until he wants to come to me. So that's it. Now I wait. Perhaps forever.

So what precipitated this final turnabout?

In a word, "its."

We'll move backward a few days. I was chatting with him on IRC and at some point, in the IRC channel, he once again, as he frequently does (as those of you who've read anything he types can attest) used "it's" to mean the possessive of '"it," which you may know is actually not punctuated at all and is hence spelled "its."

Now I know this is hardly an earth-shaking problem, but it's always been my number one language pet peeve. I've mentioned it to him on a number of occasions and always gotten brushed off, then ignored it for another few months before mentioning it again.

So I says to the guy, I says, "And for God's sake, PLEASE please please stop using 'it's' when you mean 'its.'" I followed on by saying it looked ignorant.

Oops.

Apparently I was mistaken when I thought that our relations had improved sufficiently that I could rib him a little.

To cut a long story short, no amount of abasing myself and apologizing for my rudeness (and I again acknowledge here I was a bit rude -- a bit of miscalculation on my part) have had any effect. He seems largely to be of the opinion that by offering this correction, I was proving, finally and incontrovertably, that I really do consider myself better than him.

What complete and utter bullshit. Maybe I shouldn't have corrected him, maybe I shouldn't have taken that particular moment for some mild ribbing. But let's get real. Do any of you guys out there think I was setting myself above him as a person, over some little matter of grammar? Because after much give and take, it became apparent that he was pointing to this as emblematic of an overinflated ego.

So then the other night (one or two days after the initial explosion) immediately following yet another bout of attempting to apologize via Yahoo! Messenger (as he had since completely cut off all communication with me on IRC [which brings up another interesting point ... not satisfied with a simple '/ignore', he's quite pleased with himself for having adapting a system of scripting that basically tosses out the window anything with my IRC nick in it before his client even comes into play]), some lines of our conversation get posted to the IRC channel.

Those of you familiar with IRC will know that it's quite common to misdirect communication intended for a private conversation into the public channel. And those of you who know me well, especially in an online context, know that the one thing I hate more than anything else in terms of online chatting is when private conversations I've had with others get quoted in public or to others in their conversations.

I also know that it is not uncommon for Joseph to vent his frustrations with me to his friends, either in chat or in restricted-access livejournal entries. While these irritate me because I have no idea what's being said about me and hence cannot defend myself against it (which incidentally is specifically why I have made the conscious decision to leave this post public), I really can't do anything about it.

Anyway, put these disparate threads together and you can see where I might suspect that he's quoting from our conversation to someone else and accidentally misdirecting his messages to the public channel.

Angered by the possibility, I call him on it by Yahoo! message.

When he finally gets his computer working the next day, he tells me that his computer decided to stop operating properly, and must have randomly spilled the buffer into the channel, that he spent the evening trying to fix it, and, in short, that my suspicion and accusation was untrue. He wasn't quite that polite, though. And he was much, much angrier even than before.

I doubt even an e-mail would get through to him now. I'm sure I'm on his mail server's spammer list or something else similar to keep my foul electrons from sullying his computer.

I felt bad for a few moments, and tried to apologize for making what was clearly an untrue accusation. I don't know if he ever read the apology or if he even cares to any longer.

But I'm sick and tired of it. I've always held him in the highest esteem. In the months since our breakup I've had to defend him countless times against people who feel he treated me unfairly in our relationship (a subject on which I remain neutral since it's pointless anymore). I've never counted myself above him. I've been polite, cheery and friendly for months in the face of his rudeness, gruffness and curtness and his insults. I've tried at every turn to be his friend.

We've had our arguments, even in the last few months, and some of them severe. But we recognized largely that they came about because two people who've been as close as we have know better than anyone else where those buttons are and how to push them. And we were so very, very close to finally being friends, I think.

But fuck it.

No more screaming at the sky. No more pushing the rock up the hill, only to have it roll down again.

And no more apologies. Even if I do screw up, even if I am at fault. And especially no more apologies for being right.