Goddam car.

Last week I took some sammiches to eat with Moe on her lunch break. Driving back, my car died in an intersection. After waving idiots around me for ten minutes or so, some kindly folks helped me push it the hell out of the way. Moe came and we jumped the car, which promptly died as I was parking it at home.

The next day, I put a new battery in. Ran it hard for a week with all 'lectrics running with no slow down, so I felt safe about the alternator.

This morning, whilst driving about innocently, more shit happened. I stopped by a thrift store. Car fine. I drove from the thrifty to a Target.

Engine cyclically squeaks and I have no power steering. Crap.

Upon arriving at Target, I pop the hood and investigate. Sure enough, the belts loose. I grab a ratchet and tug on the belt tensioner. It loosens, but doesn't spring back.

I drive home, squeaking and cursing slow motorists, red lights, and sharp turns alike. I wonder if I checked the belt tension as thoroughly as I thought I did when I was tinkering over Christmas.

The battery and the tensioner mishaps are more than likely unrelated, but when dealing with car electrical systems, there are few coincidences. Grumble.

I take the tensioner off and examine it. Realizing I don't really have the means to test the spring with it dismounted, I reattach it.

Nothing. No spring, not tension, nada.

Catch a ride to the store to buy a new tensioner. None in stock. Have one by two.

So I wait.

Goddam car.

j.

Redfield...

Um?

I'm addicted to making hollandaise sauce.

I started fooling around with it the other day, and the closer I get to perfecting it (it's close), the closer I presumably get to a heart attack.

It's impossible to make a little of, and at the times I make food, no one is around.

I should also point out that my hollandaise is geared towards hashbrowns, not benedicts or seafood.

So every time I make a batch, I end up consuming 3 large potatoes, 1 large onion, 4 egg yolks, a stick of butter, a blurt of lemon juice, a pinch of sugar and a shitload of pepper, cayenne and coarse black.

It would be easy to blame this on the number of cooking shows I caption, but it can't be direct; none of the shows have made a hollandaise and very few bother with potatoes or frying pans.

Oh well. At least premature death shall be tasty.

j.

Pride and humility, but only for a little bit because there are many small things

A blog is a tough thing to take seriously.

Unless the writer puts the sort of effort involved to make it actually good enough to question why they're not doing something better, it's a bit of a crapshoot.

For years, I've overestimated my own importance in my entertaining and oft crap-smeared corner of the (vomit) blogosphere.

I've torpedoed two blog functions after throwing tantrums because no one was posting comments, and had contemplated torpedoing this venture as well for similar reasons, despite the fairly nice design I implemented during an odd bout of motivation months ago.

As someone who finds great pleasure in the artistic equivalent of mushrooms (delicious things that grow on shit), I enjoy plumbing the internal depths on spiritual booze cruises. While I'm realist enough to know that a lot of the stuff I was throwing up and out there for you folks to sift through was crap.

Again, I like crap-sifting.

But I'm also prideful enough to know that in all of those endless grafs of crap, there was probably something possessed of enough pith, wit, depth, or unflinching truth for everyone to cut and paste something they liked, if they made it deep enough to find it.

So yeah, it's tough to keep readers, let alone inspire them to post a comment, if your modus operandi is little more than get shitfaced and vent.

But, like any other business, no matter how seriously you take it, blogging is a two-way street,
especially if your friends are your customers.

Today, Blais gets a goddam cookie.

When a helluva a stand-up dude that I haven't seen in... hell, four years?-- anyhow, when that dude is still reading my crap, and because of my last tantrum, I haven't been reading many of anyone else's--let alone his, and his was damn good--my li'l bitch routine over readership goes out the goddam window.

Also, I just discovered that my cat, Henry, likes tomatoes. I just ate a grocery store-bought roast beef sandwich and teased him with the tomato slices as though they were meat or some other such cat-endorsed scraps. I then hung them from the bathroom doorknob to hopefully freak Wyatt out after I'd forgot I'd put them there.

So maybe Henry doesn't LIKE tomatoes. Maybe he only ate them because he didn't want me to think that I'd tricked him into showing interest in them. Well, if that's the case, the trick is still squarely on him.

I just watched my goddam cat eat goddam tomato slices. Better than watching my childhood dog Tuscon I (Tuscon II was the ma of Dags) eat watermelon. Goddam.

Anyhow. Blais is a stud and I have to start reading his blog again for many reasons, least alone is the reason mentioned. But it's a good one.

j.

Yowsa fo' yo' schnauser?

Did Thanksgiving with Moe's fambly. Big time. Got called Tim once, which is odd, given her voluminous clan's familiarity with the name Jim.

All around good time, with the biggest downer coming on our final morning there. I had wandered outside to pair my coffee with a cigarette. Just sort of looking around at the fantastic emptiness of their corner of Tyndall, warm with a sort of familial connectivity that was entirely new to me.

And then I got whomped with guilt for abandoning my own family for someone else's and for feeling so damn good about. But in that guilt was something I'd almost forgotten how to feel.

I missed MY parents.

So many trips back home have been borne more out of a tedious sense of duty than out of actual desire. I always drove slowly there and quickly back.

I'll be leaving for Redfield Christmas morning and coming back the following Monday. This has been the plan for a week or so, but prior to that brisk morning moment, I'd been looking at that trip with something between dread and resignation.

In college, my cronies (can't remember whether it was Blais or Doschadis) called me "remote."
I think, overall, that was the best term for me. My dad was always a bit remote. Austin's dad called him an odd duck.

Anyhow, Dad's remote. Not a condemnation by any means. Just a descriptor. He's always been self-contained and compartmentalized. Imagine a brain as a fishing tackle box, organized by weights, lures, hooks, and tools, all for specific tasks. That's my dad, J.F. II. Sure, every now and again, something would get thrown in the wrong compartment and my mother and I would be amazed by his fleeting openness, and it was as special as it was rare.

That was really my sole male role model growing up. These are thoughts for me, and these are for Dad, and these are for Mom, and these are for my friends, and this one here's for a girl, if I could ever figure out how to talk to them.

With years of experience with Dad, Mom was equipped to deal with me taking on these traits, but she had an inside edge too. I always took after her more, although they were both perplexed at how someone so bookish could care so little for school, but that's an entirely different can of worms.

I got most of my artistic inclinations from Ma, and she provided me with the technological fixes I find myself drawn to to this very moment. She approaches much of the world as relativistically and contextually as I do. Unsurprisingly, when I call home, she's the designated communicator. We email periodically.

In short, my relationship with my parents has been warm, but I wouldn't call it close.

Well, it's coming sort of full circle these days. Over the last four years or so, I've been trying to shed my remote label. Open up more. Be more genuinely human and less the Celebrated Artifice of Jim.

Sure, it's been bumpy, but that's to be expected. I've managed to pull enough trays out of the tackle box that plenty is mingling and that's good, but some things are surprising me. When I'm happy, I'm happier. That's cool.

Conversely, the lowest I was normally capable of feeling was more an absence of happy than unhappy, but now I am oddly capable of sadness. Disappointment is fleeting. Sadness can stick with you. Also, I am now more familiar with obsession, jealousy and a whole raft of Pandora's hooligans I'd kept locked up in the Spock box.

Two mornings ago, I was happy, then sad. But happy again, genuinely glad, knowing that I was going to be going home.

j.

Not Liquor Lyle's, dammit!

Woot. Run At The Dog (shortform henceforth: R@TD) played Lee's Liquor Lounge last night, their second full-blown show with new drummer Jake.

Tuesday nights are rough for shows, as their were only 20-30 people present, most of which had been in bands with or have played with R@TD's members in some capacity. The rest of the onlookers were regular sops or other musicians on the bill, including a vaguely entertaining lecherous twit with a fake 'stache, chops, and stuffed trousers.

Downside: not enough people saw them.
Upside: everyone in attendance got a far bigger share of goodness.

I brought my neighbor, Doug, to observe the proceedings. He'd heard some of the stuff from the Song Fu sessions and was impressed enough to go to an 11:30 pm show despite work in the early am.

I've seen R@TD play enough to keep my jaw hinged properly, so when possible, I like to bring new people to their shows so I can observe how they react.

We set up a little further back, as I'd been charged with creating media documentation of the event, which really just means Jake (the new guy) handed me his videocam and Maureen handed me her camera.

Doug's reaction pleased me. He recorded about half the show on his phone. Of course, the the show's volume crisped his phone's mic, so it sounds about like any of the times I've called people from concerts to leave them voicemails of their favorite songs, but anyhow....

It means the boy was damn impressed, which makes me happy, as it was a damn impressive show.

I was too busy juggling cameras to get too specific a read, otherwise I'd be more inclusive, but a smidge of highlights will have to suffice...

Noon Moon live? There might have been a hiccup or two near the beginning, but this song blew everyone away. The lumbering tension of the first portions of the song was a little more straightforward than the Fu version, dropping a little of its faint menace. Whether that was planned or merely the result of being live and LOUD AS FUCK, I don't know. But when it turns to the shimmering finale, I wanted to engage in some epic pogoing, even though pogoing is one of the least appropriate dance steps for the occasion, especially if you're minding a DV cam that's lighter than the tripod it's on.

The closer, Two Days to Remember, typically has a gap in the middle of it where they'll improv something or medleyize another song in, but last night they opted to hand their instruments off to audience members (or invite to their rigs where applicable) and went outside and played in the snow for a bit. They came back in, finished the song, and there was much rejoicing.

I hauled Moe's keyboard out to her car so she could avoid the previously-mentioned mustachioed idjit a little bit longer, then left to drop Doug off.

It was a good night.

And now, I prep to go to work.

Oh, and a P.S., although I really don't think post scriptum applies in this situation.

I've built myself a little writing desk in my room. I'll be writing all those difficult, creepy and incriminating entries in notebooks again, as my two-year experiment in pseudo-emotional full-disclosure has either made people think I was depressed or not read my scribblings at all, so to hell with that. Also, journaling on paper provides opportunity for doodling, which, lacking classes to go to and be bored by, I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed.

Loss, Acceptance, and Reality

This is going to be a short one, as I have work to do.

For the time being, I'm done fighting myself. I've put myself in this position, so I'm going to try working with it.

I bitch because I thought the job I took three months ago was going to solve all my problems.

Well, I did help some, but it created many new ones, the most monstrous of which is a tremendous sense of isolation.

I am a social bastard, which is to say I LIKE being around people. It's why I was a damn fine bartender or record store clerk. It's why I liked living in Vermillion under the circumstances I did. There were always people around to do things with, many of them agreeable.

My big cure job, which I do enjoy, by the way, keeps me at work while all of my social contacts here in Minneapolis are actually active. The job itself is very isolated by nature. I sit with headphones on for eight hours and smoke cigarettes to talk as an excuse more to interact with people more than actual desire to smoke.

How's that for a fucking realization? Cigarettes are no longer the main reason to smoke.

Anyhow, the whole point of what I'm blathering about is that for three months, I've been trying to go to bed because no one is up past when I get home from work. The harder I try to go to bed so maybe the morning can be productive, the more likely I am to waste my life on the internet till six or seven in the morning, sleep only till ten out of guilt, resume internet uselessness, go to work underslept and repeat.

Well, goddam, son. I'm rebuilding my half of the apartment tonight. Obvious, eh?

Get shit done after work, get a sense of accomplishment, sleep at least somewhat fulfilled, and go to work a little more lively.

That's the plan, chief.

That's the plan.

j.