I don't know how many vinyl collecting dorks read this blog...well, that's not true. I'm pretty sure it's one. anyway, if you hanker after the prehistoric platters, I can't recommend musicstack.com highly enough. you don't get the thrill of the hunt, but there seems to be literally nothing that this site can't find for you. besides, bending down to sift through all those orange crates on the floor will kill your knees.

choosing a calendar is a big deal in my house. we have only one; it hangs just above the kitchen phone. it's a decision that must be lived with for a full year. 2008 has yet to be decided. if I was just a LITTLE more distasteful, I think I'd have to push for this one:







yes, it's real. a Mormon missionary beefcake calendar. tres funny.

I spent some time this evening looking between my reflection and old pictures of myself and came to a conclusion. I've suspected it for a while, and it's true.

four years of wearing headphones 7+ hours a day have flattened my ears.

before you scoff, keep in mind that I wear big 70s lookin headphones. no piddling earbuds for this fella. and my ears have always been unusually elastic. in high school, tiffany discovered that tugging upward on one of my ears can lengthen it by almost a full half inch (don't ask why we attempted that experiment; I don't honestly remember).

this is excellent news. my entire adult life I've wanted otoplasty, and since I've been self-supporting I've considered it seriously. I've always hated my jug ears, only now they're not so juggy. I got the benefits of surgery without the pain and expense--in fact, you could say that I got paid to have my ears "done." oh happy day!

now I can focus more on how I loathe everything between my neck and waist.

generally reading any of my old poetry makes me want to barf, but this one's not too bad:

youth wasted on children

I think about standing at washington square
in new york watching a tweed-clad boy
with a super 8 camera film pigeons and
feeling more envious than I ever had

and I wonder if I want a bonfire by the lake
or an old house filled with wood for my
children to slide down banisters and
smear peanut butter on the oriental rugs

and I hope that it’s not always necessary
to leave one life behind for another, and if
I can’t at least put off growing up long enough
to get away with a few more fits of hysteria

and I grow smug looking back on the
teenaged me that had so much fun affecting
adulthood with jim beam and cigarettes
and think man, if you only knew

if you only knew

© 2007 jeremy ball. all rights reserved.

I REALLY wish I had money enough to blow on projects like this.

my nasty cold is almost better, thankfully. I wish that I'd known about this stuff when I was still hacking away, though. I'm gonna try it sometime.

you know what I find offensive? jokes about men being raped by other men. why is it horrific to laugh at a woman being violated yet perfectly okay to snicker about "dropping the soap" and that oh-so-famous scene in deliverance? I guess I'm a little wacky, but I don't find any form of sexual abuse funny. I tried to make this point in college once, in a class about domestic violence. I was more or less pshawed--more evidence that male rape victims are, to many people, a non issue. grr.

earlier tonight I tried to make a list of everything that I'd need to accomplish to get my daily life organized and on track. I ran out of paper. true story.

I enjoyed barack obama's appearance on snl saturday evening. I hope that he gets the democratic nomination, but if hillary comes through I won't cry about it. I mean, if someone offers you a new car, you might keep your fingers crossed for a cadillac but you won't turn up your nose at a buick. especially not when you've been driving an amc gremlin for eight years. that's a rotten analogy, but I ain't no writer. it also doesn't allow for the potential election of a republican president, simply because that's an alternative that I refuse to consider.

can't remember when I've gone so long without posting, but I sho have had my reasons. my computer was stone dead for two weeks. for the first time I ran into a problem that I couldn't work out myself. I'd love to tell the whole sordid story, but I'll be nice and just sum up with some bullet points:

* if you live in the triad, do NOT take your computer to pc plus systems solutions. they seem to have a nasty habit of ignoring the customer's requests, assuming that said customer doesn't know doodley squat about their machine, and not making their self-imposed service deadlines. I paid them $120 for data backup that didn't even have the data I needed.

* if your computer ever highsides it, get recover my files to help pick up the pieces. it's $69.95 but worth five times that if you've got data that's irreplaceable. it's also proof positive that deleting something does NOT make it go away--pretty much the only foolproof way to do that is take a blowtorch to your hard drive, in my experience.

* I'm this close to becoming one of those creepy mac people. my problems stemmed from a windows issue that I tried to fix...using a utility provided by microsoft. I find myself lingering by the new imacs at compusa. well, it's a moot point for a couple of years anyway.

I've got more to say, but I've got sleep to get.

if you claim you never wanted one of these, you're a dirty liar. I sure as heck still do.

does anyone else think it's stupid that a lot of guys wear underwear inside their swim trunks? I could sort of understand if you were wearing old school trunks--clingy issues--but men do this in board shorts.

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.