oh, and speaking of amazon:

[read in singsong voice. suggested tune: "nana-nana boo-boo"]

bought myself a present! bought myself a present!

bout damn time they released a set for north america, too.

huzzah! amazon has finally launched their mp3 store. it's easy to navigate, the tracks are DRM free, and they have damn near everything. I got so excited about this that I actually spent money on digital music. whoda thunk?

understatement: bluefield, west virginia is not the most interesting place in the world to grow up. I've always thought that it would make a fine place to raise kids until they hit about ten years old--that's when they'll start to get bored. but even when I was young I recognized what a fascinating place the 'field must have been in its heyday.

it's hard to explain unless you've been there. all the old downtown department stores are gone but most of the buildings remain. same for the old theatres. the big old victorian houses in north side, gone ghetto but with gingerbread intact. the shell of the matz hotel. what's left of "vito's alley"--once a disreputable strip of ginmills near the railroad tracks. bluefield was THE place to go for a hundred miles around, back when the mines still boomed and no one had conceived of malls or interstates.

I think what's really been lost is that underlying feeling of depravity that must have accompanied the small town charm. in it, stephen king discourses on the lumberman's town of derry, maine. how it was where all the tough guys converged to drink, whore, and gamble. bluefield served the same purpose (although I'm sure the chamber of commerce wouldn't care to hear me say it), only for coal-men rather than woodsmen. I've heard more great stories about floozies hanging out of windows in the drake hotel, the goings-on at the old bus terminal, the badasses at the overlook. I just hate that I missed it all.

I dream about this gothic conception of bluefield, and my dreams always take place in the early half of the previous century. the sidewalks teem with people even after 9 p.m. the high schoolers mob the woolworth's luncheon counter and drugstore soda fountains. in the shadows are still darker shadows that you look away from and hurry past. and over it all looms the big appalachian power clock, visible all over downtown from its perch on the hillside.

I thought of all this after reading a poem by rick mulkey, a bluefield resident and poet. it's called "cain's apology," and this is the verse that grabbed me:

"We were only boys, fifteen and ten.
But I used the man talk. A kid
apprenticed to movie tough guys,
I imitated the slurs of punch-drunk boxers,
spit hanging from my lip,
or the bound-for-hell curses of rednecks
at the Milner Matz lounge,
welts and scars on their cheeks.
I spat bruising words tongued in rail yards
where peroxide whores, numb from Mad Dog,
waited for Norfolk & Western brakemen."

I think that just about sums it up.

just wanted to take a sec and insist that everyone read running with scissors by augusten burroughs (if you haven't already; I'm years behind the curve on this one). I put aside ms. rand on a whim long enough to do so myself, and gee-whiz-wow. if you're the kind of person who gets offended by things like hunchbacks eating dog food, graphic descriptions of gay sex, and using bowel movements to predict the future, by all means read another tome. otherwise I can't recommend it enough. it's the most outlandish, horrifying, funny memoir I can imagine. it would be hard to believe in its veracity except for one thing: no sane person would make up a story like this. if nothing else it will make you thank your lucky stars for having a comparatively normal upbringing...no matter how twisted you think yours has been.

oh, and: I know this is awful, but does anyone else think that marcel marceau's tombstone should be blank? rest in peace.

this rules! raleigh and boone both participated this year; next year I say gso gets involved. who's in?

a bit late, but five thoughts on the emmys:

1) when did all these people get so old?
2) ryan seacrest is straight. here's why: it's so obvious that he ought to be gay that he circles back around to the other side of the spectrum. robbie williams does the same thing.
3) censor, schmensor. sally field should be able to say whatever she pleases on the air.
4) I never even watched "the sopranos," but I'm so glad it's over.
5) I promise, promise, promise to start watching "30 rock." I promise.

after several years of talking about doing it, I recently read ayn rand's the fountainhead. it is an excellent book. it is also a very dangerous book, and I think that objectivism is a dangerous philosophy. I mean that with all due respect. I'm champing at the bit to start atlas shrugged.

sorry so silent so long. busy is an understatement. I don't know what the hell's going on at my office. before long we'll start bringing sleeping bags to just camp out.

labor day weekend was great. it was my granny's 90th birthday party and many friends and relations were in attendance. pics posted.

I traded cedric the nissan maxima for eartha the cadillac seville two weeks ago. it was a good financial move; the maxima had held its value so well that the new payment is actually a lot lower. the seville is also three years newer and has less than half as many miles on the clock. twenty-six year old white guys driving cadillacs get the funniest looks. I love it. she's black and beautiful; I'll have to take some snaps.

would it be a bad idea to capture as many skunks as possible, de-scent them, and release them back into the wild? I'm all for it.

does anyone know what could cause windows XP to randomly start refusing to go on stand by? it's got a rogue agenda. I've posted on several tech forums to no avail. if you tell me to install linux I'll kick you in the nuts.

this may be the weirdest thing I've ever read.

the new imperial teen album is...well, I'm at a loss. I've always liked them, but this record catapults them into my personal stratosphere. insanely catchy, lyrically solid, and so tongue-in-cheek that it runs the risk of being taken seriously. it makes me want to grab people on the street and yell "buy the hair, the tv, the baby and the band right now, dammit!" surely they'd know what I meant.

the new rilo kiley album...jury's still out. need to give it a few more listens.

you know what I hate? when you go to sleep either mad or depressed, then you wake up and for a few seconds you think, "my! what a glorious day!" then you remember that you're supposed to be mad/depressed and it's like, "well, shit." hasn't happened recently, thankfully, but it does bite.

I don't want to hear about zac efron anymore. I just don't. I'm actually less sick of hearing about paris hilton.

so I love my honda and all, but I'm getting absurdly excited about the upcoming debut of the smart in america.


$15k fully loaded, 40+ mpg, and as safe as anything on the road. it'll be a few years before I trade cars I'm sure, but I may have my next one all picked out. you can bet I'll be at the "street smart" road show when they hit gso next month for a test drive.

pet peeve: being behind middle aged ladies at starbucks, walgreens, etc. who take EVERYTHING out of their voluminous purses to get to their money/cards, pay, and hold up the line while they stand there putting everything back in. it's even worse when the gals are over seventy...they usually pay with checks.

related note of etiquette: when making a deposit at a drive thru atm, pull over to the side if you have to endorse your checks, fill out the envelope, or what have you. once you have your shit together get back in the queue. that way people can conduct their business unimpeded in the meantime. I do it, but I'm nicer than most people.

I think that john d. macdonald is to contemporary fiction what carole king is to contemporary music. they've influenced everyone, they get lots of respect from other practitioners of the craft, and there's a 90% chance that whomever you ask on the street hasn't heard of them. I'm about to finish my first macdonald novel and am very favorably impressed.

I love adrienne barbeau and nicholas brendon. unfortunately I did not love unholy, which I recently got a chance to see. it tries so hard to make sense and just never does. it's like someone fed the script into a shredder, pulled half of it out of the bin, and taped it back together--wrong. the resulting hodgepodge was used to make the film. sadly I think that if it did make sense, it might have actually been worse.

people of the world: please don't say filthy-dirty. pick one or the other.

two things I can't understand paying for: cardboard boxes and clothes hangers. either can be readily obtained gratis with a minimum of effort.

here's the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night. if you could be in just the right place under just the right circumstances, somewhere in the world there's a rich person that you could walk up to and say, "I'd like a million dollars, please." and they'd give it to you. maybe they're nuts, maybe they're impressed by your audacity. maybe they're walking along thinking, "I hate money. if someone asked me for a million dollars they could just have it." and if you came along presently, there you go. I honestly believe this.

speaking of crack brained ideas, here's my best one of late--a sort of time capsule. I'm going to get a year's subscription to mad magazine. when I get each issue I'm sealing it in a manila envelope, writing the date on it, and packing it away. in ten years I open them. seriously, old copies of mad are the best when it comes to encapsulating american pop culture.

take note, stephen king fans. forget bangor; greensboro is derry. I'm convinced, anyway.

two quick notes, both having to do with pictures:

several people asked me to let them know how the Great Hair Coloring of Ought-Seven turned out. I look like this now.



no, I'm not actually wearing it this spiky--it just looked good for the pic. and yes, I know it doesn't look natural. with these eyebrows, nothing but black would.



second note. for several weeks justin has been telling me about this unbelievable house he found after making a wrong turn, and today we went to see it. look at these and tell me it isn't...awe inspiring. I'm just glad that someone's taking the trouble to renovate it so painstakingly. if you know ANYTHING about this domicile, clue me in.

so yet another soldier has been discharged from fort bragg after appearing in a gay porn vid. this news prompted me to read the text of the u.s. policy concerning homosexuality in the armed forces. under the code, granted, the military has the right to discharge these guys. but I noticed an interesting thing: exceptions can be made if the man/woman can demonstrate that "such conduct is a departure from the member’s usual and customary behavior."

how does one do that, exactly?

"sarge, as you can see from my daily planner, I had sex with ladies one hundred and sixty-three times last calendar year, while I only boned a guy twice. each of my sexual partners has signed a notarized statement concerning the accuracy of these numbers. furthermore, my shrink will testify that, when it comes to guys, I only do it for the money."

just wondering. also, I haven't read any accounts of exactly what these discharged fellas were DOING on video. I am no fool--I've forgotten more skin flicks than most people will ever see, believe me. and in a lot of military themed amateur clips there is exactly one guy in front of the camera, all by his lonesome. ergo, no homosexual contact. therefore, while he may be knowingly titillating the minds of gay men, he is doing nothing to warrant a discharge under the law. I'll just believe that these former military men were doing work of the more...intense variety. thinking that they got canned for doing solo work would finally drive me over the border and into canada.

and on a slight tangent, is it fair to equate "homosexuality" with "homosexual acts?" on the one hand it's a no brainer. on the other, well. I still maintain that there's no such thing as clear cut sexual orientation. whatever the conscious mind tries to kid itself into thinking, it's all one shade of gray or another. that's not to say that one's orientation can be changed or controlled, far from it. I think that we just need to say that human beings like sex and leave it at that. just sex in general. it can be about love, it can be about one another's naughty bits, or it can just be about friction.

[author's note: these news stories rarely mention the name of the site causing all the flap, but most of us know which it is. and I'll tell you something. the site's webmaster still has soldiers lining up around the block to go on film. fuck you, uncle sam. oh, wait. that's against code.]

I ramble too much. so today I'm letting steven wright do it for me.

some of my favorite steven wright quotes:

42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time". So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen.

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?

All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to rob a department store... with a pricing gun. She said, "Give me all of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store."

I installed a skylight in my apartment. The people who live above me are furious.

One time the power went out in my house and I had to use the flash on my camera to see my way around. I made a sandwich and took fifty pictures of my face. The neighbors thought there was lightning in my house.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child...eventually.

The sign said "eight items or less." So I changed my name to Les.

When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety.

I hereby decree that "mony, mony" be regarded as the greatest song ever. don't argue with me. I only recently discovered that it was inspired not by a girl but by the sign on the Mutual Of New York building (which I can't find a good picture of, dammit--see midnight cowboy for a good view of it as it looked in 1968 when the song was released; in fast, see midnight cowboy anyway). that cemented its status for me.

incidentally, when I was a kid I thought that "mony" was a play on "mona," as in mona from "who's the boss." it made sense to me, since mona was all sexy and things.

wake it, shake it, mona mona.

[postscript: I see that in january of 2006 I stated that "harper valley p.t.a." was the greatest song ever. forget I said that.]

I'm glad that it takes children a few years to develop a real sense of irony. otherwise kids would be more vicious than dorothy parker ever was.

I love living in a world where I can download audio files of john cage's "4'33" for my listening pleasure. go ahead. download and listen.

is anyone else rankled by how many recent low brow comedy films use LPs--that's "little people" here, not long play records--for comic devices? am I the only person who thinks it's demeaning to LPs in general? I'm not one of those people who takes political correctness to extremes, but it seems wrong to me. besides, what's the big attraction? okay. they're smaller than the majority of the population. and?

yes, I got deathly hallows yesterday. no, I haven't finished it, nor have I started. I also picked up the audiobook, so I'm going to read it at work where I can more easily justify spending six hours plus per day on it. justin bought it at midnight, went home, and read constantly until last night when he finished, stopping only to eat and take a short nap. crazy fuck.

have you seen barefoot in the park? well, sometimes I'm so much like corie bratter that I can hardly stand myself. probably no one else can, either.

chocolate covered dried cherries are so superior to cherry cordials.

a rarely considered cardinal truth of life: horny men should not have access to credit cards.

I'm a big hypocrite. I always talk trash about the reality TV craze, and I went and got myself hooked on "the next food network star." seriously. I mean, it has the performance aspect of "american idol," the team building of "survivor," and the close quarters of "the real world." and the cast members are actually working constructively to better their lives, not just hog the series' spotlight. can't wait until sunday when they announce the winner!

speaking of TV, I knew when I saw the preview for "pushing daisies" that it HAD to be from the writers/creators of "wonderfalls." I was right. that bodes well.

happy belated fourth, all. ah, independence day! a time when, as Americans, our minds turn to the question of the ages: given the choice, would you rather have the body you've got or the body of your dreams--only your dream body would be covered with numerous moles? it's a tough one. maybe because I'm lucky enough to have very few moles, or maybe because I'm averse to moles in general.

edit to above: confused independence day with useless introspection week. my bad.

when people discuss stereotypically gay music, you can usually predict names that will come up. judy garland, madonna, billie holiday, bette midler. you hardly ever hear the carpenters or tori amos mentioned, and I've known more gay men into them than any of the usual suspects. could be a generational thing?

speaking of celebrity recipients of mass gay adoration, rose mcgowan rocks my world. yep.

my gigabeat is failing. battery time dropped from eight hours to five. am going to try and replace the battery myself. if I don't succeed, there goes my bankbook for a new device. seriously, I waste money on a lotta stuff, but a functional MP3 player is essential for my sanity. I still stand by the gigabeat as the ultimate, though. I've used mine an average of six hours a day, five days a week, for a year-ish. I doubt any of its competitors could have withstood any more. these friggin electronics companies make $300 pieces of equipment to be disposable, which really gets me steamed.

been hanging out with carra more lately. that's a very good thing.

I feel like I'm squandering my summer. I need to take advantage of more summer...well, stuff. the beach. wet n' wild. drooling over half naked joggers, all that sort of thing. of course all that would require waking up earlier. ugh. mebbe not.

have returned from the rock. lovely time, but too freakin hot even there. chetola was full, so we stayed at crestwood. even better. not so much a hotel as a country club with fifteen guest rooms. also reminiscent of kellerman's in dirty dancing. took a few pics with my amazing new canon sd1000. they are here-uh.

big endorsement here: if you're ever in the high country yourself, go to stonewall's in banner elk for a new york strip. best I've ever had. tell them I sent you. they'll look at you funny, I'll bet.

somehow I still haven't succeeded in killing the salvias.

saw 1408 tonight. not bad--say a 7 out of 10. didn't freak me out the way the story did, but the best stephen king adaptation in a while.

I don't know why I read trashy celeb gossip message boards. they never fail to piss me off. especially when folks start coming down on this male celeb or that, saying things like "he needs to work out" or "he's gotten really fat." nine times out of ten said famous guy has a body that I'd kill for. have any of these critics ever REALLY seen a fat person? evidently not.