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Have you ever had regret that you didn’t use a particularly volatile emotion? I don’t even believe in regret. But someday I’m going to look back on this part of my life and think “What was I doing?”

I guess it was Stephen King who said, “You’ve have to get busy living, or get busy dying.” (In the Shawshank Redemption.) All my intense emotions lately have been the result of really great movies. Last night Laura and I watched American Splendor. Then afterward I played video games instead of tapping into the intense emotion I was left with. But that was living, so writing must be dying. Writing must be the business of dying.

Today I’m helping someone move.

Is it natural to worry about whether you’re living life to its fullest?

Last night I wore myself out playing unicycle hockey long past the point of being too exhausted to play (I was pushing myself because I feel that I need the exercise). Then I stayed up and played video games for hours, drinking Baileys Irish Cream with ice.

I am just sipping at these thoughts of death and regret, nursing a near-empty glass.

Just now, as I was about to fall asleep, and as I was contemplating my unwritten poem titled “Phantom Memory of a Hair in the Back of My Throat”, I asked myself a question out of the blue–if I could only write four poems in my lifetime, what would they be about? Don’t ask me how my near-unconscious mind came up with the number four. My answers came from the depths of my subconscious almost immediately. Love, loss, memory and poetry; these would be the subjects of my four opuses.

I started to wonder if memory and loss were too similar of subjects. I decided they were not, as loss would almost certainly have more to do with love, and memory would have more to do with the nature of reality. I refined my last subject, poetry, to include the nature of beauty. In my mind they are concepts intrinsically entwined.

Somewhere in these moments, I realized that I could remember a particular writing session (sometime in college) when I was most aware of my own poetic style and devices. I think that my writing now is pretty devoid of intention. I write when I feel like it, and there’s almost never a “point” unless it’s one that’s been “discovered” on the spot so to speak. Anyway, on this particular night, it was very dark, and either I could see a full moon, or it was one of those nights where the moon was nowhere to be seen. I don’t remember that part exactly. I do remember that I was writing about some mundane thing. A tree, I think, and I thought then that it was some of my best work. I often think that what I’m writing is some of my best work. (I have to, or it refuses to come out sometimes.)

Poetry has not been forthcoming the last month or so, and whenever I force it out (mindblurbs mostly) it’s been somewhere between drivel and doggerel. I’m not really complaining, just stating. I had planned to get some writing done tonight, but got as far as turning off the video game before I was distracted by some other thing. (emails, I think.)

Tonight marked the second day of my subscription to the Blockbuster games freedom pass; and my second game rented–two games in as many days. Fun stuff. I’m aiming for more than 30 games in a month. If they were all x-box games, I’d have 30 new games to play. (Thank you modded x-box!) But I seriously doubt there are that many games that I want to “keep” for that system. I can think of another five, and that might stretch to ten if we include games I’m not excited about, but might find fun to play every once in awhile.

Tonight we rented Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. So far it’s pretty fun. I like the way they implemented profiles, and there’s a lot of stuff to unlock. Having three stances or fighting types for each character is pretty cool too. Some of the combos are really hard. I’ve never really been all that good at those fighting types of games.

Now if only I could somehow keep myself from staying up till 3am playing…

I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind last night, and it was amazing. We discussed Jim Carrey’s performance (probably his best to date) in the car on the way home, and the visual effects in the movie were just really fun to watch. One thing that really struck me was that it was really well written. I think I remember noticing that with Being John Malkovitch too, so now I want to check out all of Charlie Kaufman’s other films. I guess, now that I check IMDB, that I’ve already seen all of them but Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. I’ll have to watch that one soon. It was just this last Tuesday that we saw Human Nature, which has been rattling around in my brain ever since.

I don’t know for sure who did this first, but I think the Blare Witch Project popularized the concept of making fake websites for movies before they come out. Googling for eternal sunshine reveals the website for Lacuna Inc. the company in the movie that removes your memories for you. Funny stuff, and probably not all that far off in terms of technology. I wonder about some legal ramifications though.

Oh yeah, back to the writing… the name of the movie comes from this Alexander Pope poem called Eloisa to Abelard (line 209). I’ve only read a little bit of Pope when it was required for one of my “reading the classics” classes in college. I didn’t like him much then, and my opinion hasn’t really changed, (but I wonder what Dr Bombay thinks of him). Those are some kick ass lines quoted in the movie though.

    How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;

Anyway, the movie was really fucking good. I started to get a little teary at the end of it, but it wasn’t a sad movie! I think that, as weird as it sounds, I almost started crying from happiness. Does that make me a sap?

UPDATE: It’s Charlie Kaufman, not Andy Kaufman (as I’d originally written). Poor Andy’s dead, or anyway he wants us to think he is. I also forgot or didn’t bother to mention previously the interview with Kaufman and Gondry over at The Onion AV Club that I read a few days ago. Also, I wrote this entry before I knew that of the four of us who went to see the movie who have blogs, the other three already had. Nate, Dr. Bombay and Laura all beat me to it.

Flex-i-tarian — I pronounce it as if it were from the song “sanitarium” by metalica. But it accurately desribes my eating habbits. I am not alone! (Props go out to xomina for the link.)

So I don’t think I’ve ever linked this great vegetarian/vegan restaurant resource, VegGuide.org. A friend of mine helped set it up, and while I don’t use it all the time, I still consider it a valuable resource, and have looked to its pages at least once or twice to find a place to eat. (And more often to decide whether a specific place is worth spending my time and money.)

Anyway, this evening I’ve discovered another interesting food guide, The World-Wide Sushi Restaurant Reference. Once you’ve drilled down to the Minneapolis/St. Paul listings it’s almost mind boggling just how many sushi restaurants exist in the twin cities area. Dr Bombay recently said he could eat sushi every day of the week… and looking at this list… he’d only have to return to the same place every two weeks! (almost.) Anyway, it’s crazy. I can even think of a little place that’s not listed yet. That Taiko Sushi Bar up in New Brighton.

OK, time to sleep. I don’t know why I’m so hungry! With any luck I’ll dream myself a full belly.

Thor is creeping up the bed toward my face. He likes to sneak up and rub his wet nose on your chin. It’s kissing, I suppose. But he’s really sneaky about it. He knows we don’t like it, but he does it anyway.

I like cats better than dogs because they don’t lick everything. They don’t slobber on everything, or rub their wet noses on everything. But Thor does. He’s a dog-cat, and when he gets excited he’ll knead his claws into whatever they’re on top of at the time.

He purrs like a pigeon.

I push him over onto his side to stop his slow plodding toward my face, and he just purrs louder.

Ah yes, it’s time for another exciting entry about everyone’s favorite blogging topic–web stats and referrer logs!

I’ll be your host for this wild romp through search-result wonderland, as we coast down a magical molehill of wacky and unusual traffic that’s driven right here by absolutely crazy catch phrases! That’s right; phrases like “wordsex” (12.22% of all search strings!), “mancoon” (2.93%), “trivial questions”, “snow plow pictures”, “thoughts”, “meghan ryan”, and ultimately, “crack cocane”!

I wrote an entry back in the day about how I misspelled cocaine and was generating traffic from it. Well, today I got another comment to that entry, someone who wants to know how to freebase! Since my entry had NOTHING AT ALL to do with cocaine other than including the word itself, I can only assume that this lovely fellow didn’t even read it!

So those interesting referrer logs that everyone loves to post… WORTHLESS!

BTW, I still come up first for a search on the phrase “sexsweat”, but it’s not even listed in the top 20 on my logs. C’mon people, lets search for more of that lovely perfumed liquid in the future, alright?

All… right.

I’m blogging from bed right now, wearing only the lint from my flannel bedsheets.

This morning I woke in one of those slow dramatic thinking modes. Every lazy twist and turn my brain-tunnels took was some exaggerated incredible idea. After awhile, I stopped daydreaming (I’m sure the thought process was very close to dreaming while awake) and focused on one thought in particular: I’m never going to be one of the crazy-prolific writers. The writers you read about because they wrote over a hundred books during their lifetimes. Asimov and Silverberg come to mind in the science fiction realm, but it seems like about one author a week in the writer’s almanac talks about another one. Someone who was driven to write–possessed by their passion for it. I am a slow writer, and as a result should really focus on quality, not the crappy quantity nanowrimo stuff (although that was good because it forced me to write something). Anyways, I haven’t been writing. One of the biggest reasons for taking the new job was so I’d have some time to write on the weekdays. But so far it’s just been party every night. Board games and video games, inviting people over at every opportunity. It doesn’t help any that laura doesn’t work, so when I get home she’s starving for attention almost as badly as the cats do when everyone has been out all day. I don’t mind that, but sometimes I’m exactly the opposite, and I want to hibernate for a while when I get home.

Anyway, point is, write more, game less. (yeah, write.)

Peet is pretty much nearly my favorite writer. I spent twenty minutes looking at hard drive enclosures and MMC cards on ebay before I decided I’d better get on with it and update this shithole. A few minutes on Peet’s blog for inspiration, and I was back at it, wanting to do something with my life… Or anyways, update this fucker.

I played Crystal Chronicles tonight with Delobi.us, D, and G, and man… I admit I was sucked in, but I’m kinda glad I didn’t plunk down my fifty. I’d maybe buy it for $30 used or something.

Before that, I stopped at the fetus and signed over a lung and two kidneys for the four aforementioned desired CDs. I was in the store for an hour, and (as my co-worker put it) it was payday today… (well, yesterday now). I’d picked up six or seven CDs that weren’t the ones on my list and for various reasons put them all back again. By the time I was ready to check out, I riffed through the ones still in my hands, and low and behold, it was exactly the four CDs I’d come into the store with the intention of purchasing. I’m honestly not sure how that worked.

So yeah, latest craze, ripping my CD collection to mp3. I’m not sure how big this puppy’s gonna get, but I’m aiming for ALL the CDs, so I imagine it’ll be upwards of 50gigs.

There is this weird phenomenon I want to write about involving coding and reading poetry (and how the two don’t seem all that compatible), but after writing these last few paragraphs, I’m not feeling particularly articulate. Maybe I’ve said enough on the subject already. I’m awash with nothingness and less-than-sweet nothings.

“Let the day take you.”