Month: October 2004

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two short poems and an ice cream cone

I didn’t write or post a poem yesterday. I did write a 1200 word short story (that doesn’t actually feel finished quite yet). In a few minutes I’ll post two short ones as penance.

Last night Laura and I went to see Low, Kid Dakota, and the Fog at the Tripplerock. It was an alright show, but toward the end of Low’s set I found I was having trouble standing up. My big toe joint was seriously in pain. I decided to check out the merch table one last time before we left, and I’m glad I did, because I’d somehow missed Dosh’s new album lying there. (Not in stores till Tuesday.) I wanted to make sure it wasn’t the third release of his first album before I got it, (since I picked up the re-release not knowing it was the same album with a different cover — in retrospect a third cover for the same album would be extremely unlikely, but what do I know?), and when I asked him about it, he said he’d have to cut me a deal to make up for my buying the other one on accident. He basically threw in his live album when I bought the new one and the new single. He was really nice about it, seemed like an awesome guy.

After I post this, I’m going to go see John’s art exhibit at the Tilsner in the St. Paul Art Crawl.

There is no ice cream cone.

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Tiki Obmar in a Ziploc!

So I was organizing my music this afternoon, something that is sorely overdue, and allows me to procrastinate the other sorely overdue thing I have on my list of things to do today: mowing the lawn. Anyway, I finally came to the pile of CDs that I had previously set aside to either listen to or throw away. (Basically, they’re cds I got for free or something, and had no idea what they sounded like.) By the looks of them, they were all crap. But I pulled this one out of the stack that was in a Ziploc plastic baggie, thinking I’d trash that one first. It was a hand-written CD-R, with a tiny scrap of paper with it in the baggie with a track-list. I looked closer and discovered that I somehow had a Tiki Obmar sampler CD! How I got this, I have no idea. I can’t for the life of me remember where I picked it up.

Tiki Obmar are a relatively recent discovery for me, sometime in the last six months Laura and I heard them at a weird cabaret concert thing she got tickets to for free, and they were awesome. They’re a local three piece electronica type group. It wasn’t till I heard them again at a friend’s gallery in the Art-A-Whirl that I went out and picked up both their CDs. The CDs are AMAZING. I highly recommend them for any fan of electronic music.

And all that time, I already had a sampler CD that one of them probably made on their computer… crazy.

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packet loss

Messages in glass bottles
like ships carefully tweaser-constructed
adrift at sea — but instead of water —
an ocean of other glass bottles.

Messages arrive as if by accident,
a miracle of numbers.
I cross my fingers, and hit send.

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House smells of cat piss.

I always said I didn’t want to live in one of those
houses that smell like cat piss all the time.

Today that little furry fucker pissed on the bathroom carpet.
I guess he knew what we do in there, just got the location wrong.

If cleanliness is next to godliness, but I don’t believe in god,
where does that leave cleaning the cat box every day?

I picture the commercial where the kid says
“I learned it from you, Dad, I learned it from you!”

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Mmmm… shower.

I can’t bring myself to update Norton Antivirus. It’s another $50 for a year’s worth of protection. It’s like paying for insurance. I never want to do it. I feel like insurance is legal racketeering.

Laura and I saw the faint tonight at First Ave. Their new album ($10 at the concert) is awesome so far.

This is my six hundred and first blog entry.

I’m trying to decide if my “remix” of jason’s poem counts as my poem for the day. I didn’t write any of the imagery, so I don’t really think it should count. But I’m going to be going to bed soon, so I don’t know if I’ll get around to writing another. Laura is waiting for me in the shower right now. She told me to wait a minute, then come in after her. Yummy.

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Road Rage Remix

[The following is a remix of Dr Bombay’s latest poem, Road Rage.]

I bicycle past an
immobile hunk of steel,
stalled out, unmoving.

A fuel-injected stupor,
internally confounded
failure to combust.

Trumpeted indignation,
honk of fury,
incited by impotence.

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404 insanity

The page or archive you were looking for cannot be found!!! This is probably because I’ve upgraded movable type and chose not to use the “backward compatable” archive scheme. Google will catch on eventually, but until then you can always view the cached version in their results.

Click here to go back to the main blog index.

Or here to go back to the huge archive list.

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workspace whining

My boss informed me this morning that I should feel free to complain about work on my blog. I told her I thought that it would be a first if I did. I didn’t think I’d ever actually done any complaining about work on my blog before… but now that I do a search, the third result for “work” comes up with me complaining, so I’m a big fat liar.

Anyway, I’m writing this from cubeville. Population: 2. My coworker Matt is not “home” right now. He will be here hardly at all this semester, as he has school at like one in the afternoon or something every day.

Fluorescent lights suck. Also, these desk chairs suck. (There was some talk of not brining over our chairs from the other office, but I think after everyone got here we realized they will be a necessity.) My biggest complaint would probably have to be that my back is to the “entrance” to cubeville. IE, that’s the way the monitor faces. This makes me feel unconsciously like someone is always watching me. I’ll get over it soon I’m sure.

Oh yeah, and the drive. Took me 22 minutes this morning with no traffic. And there is going to be traffic, I know it. But probably not on the way in, which is good. I just start late enough, I guess.

Biggest bonus about the new diggs would have to be the bathroom. They pipe in classical music, and the toilet paper doesn’t suck! Also, there was some kind of fresh flower in a vase on the marble countertop next to the sinks. They are probably the nicest bathrooms I’ve ever had at a workplace.

Also, I’m switching to a four-day workweek. So fridays off from now on. At least, as long as I put in enough hours the rest of the week. (Which I’m going to make an effort to do.)

Anyway, I should get back to it. Just thought I’d give you all the rundown.

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crap poetry, getting old

Today’s poem is mediocre at best. I felt incapable of putting some of the best words into it, ‘impacted’, ‘serial cable’, ‘toner’, to name a few. I ended up chopping a bunch off, and it didn’t have any real conclusion, so I tacked on those pathetic last two lines in some feeble effort to bring it all together.

I played City of Heroes all afternoon with about five other friends that I know locally. It was fun, but just now I found myself wondering if maybe I should have been spending that time writing… or at least reading a good book. I’m about a fourth of the way into Broken Angels, by Richard Morgan, and it’s pretty damn good so far. He does a great job with action and violence. Some of the more cinematic prose I’ve read lately, that’s for sure.

Just now I found myself thinking back to the beginning of this year, when I decided I wanted to challenge myself to read more. Time seems to have just slid by so fast since then. Does perception of time change as we get older? I’ve had dozens of conversations about this over the years, and most people seem to think it does. I think we just keep doing the same things over and over again our entire lives (more so as we “grow up” or anyway leave school) and after awhile, we stop noticing ourselves doing those things as we do them. So that a day’s work seems like nothing when you look back on it, even though at the time it was just as real as any other moment.

Time is one subjective motherfucker. It makes mincemeat of us all.